Bryan Zepp Jamieson
September 18th 2024
The small group of voters known as “undecideds” break down into two categories. First, there’s the “What? There’s a election?” crowd. They tend to have an exaggerated impact in polls because they rarely actually vote. They need to know to register, and when, where and how to vote.
The others are the Olive Oyls. They’re the ones who are like the old Popeye cartoons character, the weak-willed and ever-vacillating female who can never decide between her two suitors, no matter how stark and obvious the difference between the two might be.
The reasoning might go something like this: “OK, Trump hates Taylor Swift, but Vance tells me Harris eats live kittens!” They can’t tell truth from falsehood, and aren’t ethically equipped to distinguish between normal and abhorrent behavior.
In a nation split almost exactly evenly by the power of propaganda, it’s horrifying to realize that these morons were likely to be the tipping point.
But the good news is that there is a new tipping point, and it lies with a group large enough to send the undecideds to the obscurity they deserve: this group is the Responsible Republicans.
They are a lot larger than most people realize. I started getting an inkling of their presence when I noticed that even in primaries where Nikki Haley wasn’t on the ballot, between 10 and 30 percent of Republican voters were NOT voting for Trump.
I looked at this, and I reasoned that as long as Biden held it together and didn’t do something utterly senile like declare hatred for Taylor Swift or childless cat ladies, and Trump went right on being Trump, these disaffected voters would become a significant factor in the election.
Biden’s withdrawal and the subsequent rise of Kamala Harris put Trump’s deficiencies in a glaring light. People immediately saw it as the Prosecutor vs. the Felon. Not Kennedy vs. Nixon, but more like Perry Mason vs. Tony Soprano. Only this “Tony” has stripped his mental gears and confuses Mason with Ironsides and mocks him for being in a wheelchair.
The exodus of Republicans choosing country over party didn’t begin with Liz Cheney and her father Dick endorsing Harris, but changed from a trickle to a landslide since. The latest round was announced by the Harris/Walz campaign today, when “more than 100 Republican former national security and foreign policy officials who served in senior roles in multiple presidential administrations and in Congress are endorsing Vice President Harris for President.” This is in addition to the hundreds of ranking Republicans—former Presidents and Vice-Presidents, former Congressionals, former members of the Trump administration, hundreds more from both Bush and Reagan administrations, who have either endorsed Harris or refused to endorse Trump.
And now we are starting to see the polls shift. And it isn’t a big increase for Harris (1 percentage point) but a significant decrease for Trump (3 percentage points). He’s bleeding support.
For Responsible Republicans, the message is clear: if you can’t bring yourself to vote for Harris, at least don’t vote for Trump. The country can survive Harris; it won’t survive Trump. They may believe the propaganda on Fox News that Biden has ruined the economy and turned the country into a Taco Stand run by the cartels, but they can see that things are actually pretty good in their town. And because things ARE actually pretty good all around the country, a lot of Republicans are noticing that.
We’re just about at the point in the campaign where Bluto has pulled a dirty trick so egregious that Olive is starting to look even more confused, and Popeye is muttering “That’s alls I can stands, I can’t stands no more” and you know the loud music is about to start.
This week’s “assassination attempt” at the golf course shows just how desperate the Trump campaign has become. The previous attempt in Bethel, Pennsylvania, which was very real, didn’t result in a boost in the polls, but it did earn Trump a certain amount of good will and he might have enjoyed a ‘honeymoon’ period after that, had he not started immediately grifting from it.
This one’s credibility didn’t even last overnight. Trump himself blew the believability of it out of the water by saying that his decision to go golfing that day was a “last minute decision” which, combined with police claims the guy with the gun was parked outside the golf course for twelve hours, added to a huge “this doesn’t add up” from everyone. Not only did the grifting begin almost immediately, but JD Vance and others instantly demanded that Democrats—commies, pet-eaters and baby-killers all—immediately tone down the “inflammatory rhetoric.” If Ashli Babbitt was the MAGA movement’s Horst Wessel, then Ryan Routh, the golf course guy, was Marinus van der Lubbe, the half-wit executed for supposedly starting the Reichstag fire.
This won’t be lost on the remaining responsible Republicans who hadn’t quite decided to break the bond with Trump. What was a trickle of Republicans abandoning him will become a flood.
It doesn’t translate to down-ticket votes necessarily, although candidates firmly aligned with Trump will suffer from it. If you’re a sane Republican in North Carolina, you not only won’t vote for Trump, but you won’t vote for that nutball Mark Robinson, either.
Republicans in the House especially may find themselves vulnerable.
But a lot of those Republicans who see the dangers of Trump may decide Harris is nearly as bad, and vote Republican down ticket to keep the country paralyzed. This could still happen.
Less than seven weeks to go, now. Stay focused.
