With a little less than six months to go until “the most important election” in, take your pick — history/decades/years/this decade — the number of variables that will determine the outcome are almost too many to list. But before I put that list together, I want to suggest the blocks of voting-age Americans, as I currently see it.
There are largely five groups that make up today’s potential voting public.
First are the roughly one-third of adults who don’t vote. They’ve checked out. Some are cynical, some are busy, some just don’t care. But their absence isn’t neutral. By not voting, they hand power to those who do. Every election is determined by people who show up and vote, not the ones who could have but didn’t. It’s often easy to look back on an election and say, if only 10% of those people who stayed home came out to vote instead, there would have been a different result.
Then you have the voters whose politics begin and end with Donald Trump. Not policy. Not outcomes. Just Trump. They oppose him reflexively, completely, and permanently, and in many of those cases, it is hatred for him and anyone who supports him. If he supported something tomorrow that they’d backed for years, they’d find a reason to oppose it. Call it what you want, Trump Derangement Syndrome, moral superiority, but it’s not a serious way to evaluate the direction of a country. It’s personal, not analytical, and it dominates one entire side of the political spectrum.
Next is the group few care to admit exists: Democrats who know, on some level, that their party is out of step with common sense and mainstream values on several major issues. They see what happened at our southern border, with over 20 million largely unvetted people coming into this country in Joe Biden’s four years alone. Some are considered to be here legally because they were stamped as asylum seekers and given a date years in the future to show up in court. Others were flown into the country to obscure airports in the middle of the night at U.S. taxpayer expense, and others were given an app to set up an appointment at the border to be allowed in. And the rest of us were assured by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Border Czar Kamala Harris that our border was absolutely secure.
Add to that list, sanctuary cities and states, soft-on-crime prosecutors, mayors and governors, the victims of the same, massive fraud in government programs and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that are corrupt and enriched by taxpayer dollars. Hard earned taxpayer dollars.
This group also understands the fairness concerns around men in girl’s and women’s sports and how insane the indoctrination of children about transgender ideology is, while making sure that the kids’ parents don’t know what’s happening. This group feels the weight of overregulation and high taxes in their own lives. They understand that free healthcare, free groceries, free transportation, free childcare, free education, while sounding humane and progressive, don’t work in the real world. Or that homeless encampments in our major cities, in front of small businesses and near schools, is a disaster for the people living in them, or near them. It sounds nice, but it doesn’t work, as New Yorkers and Los Angelenos, among others, are in the process of finding out.
But they won’t say it because saying it comes with consequences. Social, professional, reputational. So they stay quiet, vote the way they’re expected to, and hope no one asks too many questions. It’s not conviction; it’s pressure.
On the other side, you’ve got the MAGA base, people who are all-in on Trump, no matter what. And to be clear, I get it. He’s delivered on a lot of the issues they care about. He fights. He doesn’t back down. He has the most transparent administration in memory, including allowing his cabinet members and top employees to interact freely with the media, the mostly hostile media. He says things other politicians wouldn’t dare say. But let’s not pretend there’s much daylight left for internal criticism there. For a lot of his most loyal supporters, there is no line he could cross that would fundamentally change their support. That kind of loyalty is powerful, but it also means there’s very little accountability.
And there’s the fifth group, people who support Trump and his policies, and who will definitely be voting Republican this November, knowing what the next two years would be like if Republicans lose the House or Senate. That would be endless hearings, subpoenas and impeachment. But they are also the group who are uncomfortable with some of Trump’s rhetoric, his insults, his weighing in on matters that could be self-defeating, such as publicly calling for James Comey, and others, to be indicted, shortly before he is indicted.
Not that Comey shouldn’t be indicted, but it should be for his role in the weaponization and attempted coup against President Trump, not for something like the phony picture of seashells he claimed to have stumbled upon while walking on the beach, saying “86-47” and turning that into an indictable threat to assassinate Trump, for which there is almost no chance of getting a jury to unanimously find him guilty.
But laying out the conspiracy to manufacture the Russia collusion hoax, and to attempt to criminalize Trump’s attempts to challenge obvious election fraud, and the overall weaponization of the Justice Department and the Intelligence Community against Trump, that is a case that should be prosecuted and shown live on television for all to see. Hopefully that is coming soon from a grand jury currently empaneled in Florida with Joe diGenova, who was sworn in as Counselor to the Attorney General last month, leading the investigation.
Other concerns are that Trump actually might believe that Iran “wants a deal” that is anything close to the deal the U.S. should want. That deal should be the Libya model, when Moammar Gadhafi decided to give up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and any nuclear ambitions after seeing Saddam Hussein’s fate.
Yes, Iran wants a deal. There’s no middle ground. They want an end to the war, reparations from the U.S. and control of the Strait of Hormuz. Of course they will agree to no nukes, because they always have. It is all the proof you need that you can never trust them. That’s why I recently referred to the Obama Iran deal, the JCPOA, as a catastrophic hoax. They will have to agree to be dismantled, and to get to that point, they will have to suffer a lot more than they currently are. Yes, we severely degraded their army, navy and air force, but that’s not enough. The goal should be regime change, hopefully on the cheap. Hopefully by its own people rising up, armed and ready. Leaving this regime in power, no matter how weakened they may be, cannot be the right move.
They think they control the world’s price of oil, and that Trump needs to wrap this up soon if he doesn’t want to face impeachment, round the clock hearings, with CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the usual suspects beating the drums to put Trump in prison or continue to lead an insurrection against the government that could lead to yet another assassination attempt. After all, if he really is the Nazi or fascist that he is so often referred to as…
Between now and the November 3rd election will be the continuous bellowing about Jim Crow 2 because the Supreme Court said you can no longer use race as the basis to redistrict. The notion is, black people all think alike, just like white folks. So how do you explain a white Jew, Steve Cohen, as the representative from Memphis, a majority Black district, for two decades. In six of those races, he defeated a Black Republican woman. He announced Friday that he is not running again. Not everyone fits the stereotype.
Both sides have their deep concerns that the election is being stolen from their side. The left, by redistricting, even though Illinois, California, and New England are all gerrymandered far out of proportion to the number of Trump and Republican voters. Unlike the claims of much of the commentary, it didn’t start with Texas.
The hatred and resentment coming this summer will be something to behold. As ICE keeps deporting people here illegally, as the law and their job requires, and as the World Cup comes to the US, along with all the celebrations of the 250th birthday of the country that Trump will oversee, tensions will build.
With mail-in ballots pouring in, with hundreds of thousands of dead people still on the voter rolls, No Kings rallies, endless legal challenges and both parties starting to have candidates for the White House in 2028 throwing hats in the ring, like Kamala, Newsom and Mayor Pete, plus potential surprises like Hillary or Michelle, Colbert, Don Lemon, and more, this will be quite a ride to see which party ends up with the majority in the House and the Senate. There’s a lot at stake. Buckle up.
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
