The picture assumes that you’re a left-leaning voter who begrudgingly votes for whatever moderate conservative the Democrats roll out as their candidate because while he doesn’t generally support any of the things you support, at least he doesn’t oppose them like the Republican candidate.
To throw my own opinion into this, I think the Republican party has passed a tipping point. I think your second question is right on the money. If not Trump, then some other crazed bigot. I think moving forward, you’ll have conservatives and Republicans, and they won’t be the same thing.
They’ve been moving progressively further towards the extremist end of the spectrum since I started paying attention in middle school (right after 9/11), and according to older folk I’ve talked to over the years, it’s been going on far longer than that, even before Nixon and Reagan. Democrats today hold the same positions on things that Republicans held during the 90s, and are called socialists and communists for it. Democrats have also been quietly funding extremist candidates for years now so that they can get an easy win against them by simply being the lesser evil. On top of that, Republicans have created a core group of zealots who care little for the policies that their candidate supports, so long as they have that R next to their name on the ballot. The kind of people like my boss when I was a teenager who would answer the question of who he was voting for with “I’m a Republican, I vote for the nominee” and an incredulous look like it was stupidest question in the world, exactly like my grandfather would answer my dad when he was younger, in the 60s and 70s. I’ve seen this backfire on Republicans when left-leaning candidates have gotten onto ballots under the Republican party, like a trans woman in New Hampshire or Vermont who ran for county sheriff on a policy of defunding the police, and was overwhelmingly elected by the pro-police conservative populace because she had run as the Republican candidate and none of them bothered to actually look at what her stance was, only if the D or the R was next to her name. I think this core group has backfired on the Republicans nationally, because they’ve been co-opted by Trump, who has opened the door for all the bigots to openly spread their hate and give these people a target to blame for the miseries inflicted upon them by the policies of the same people that they voted for. They tell them that it’s the minorities fault, and these people gobble it up.
The mask is off and open bigotry is the new face of the Republican party. There’s always been undercurrents of it, but it’s mostly been kept in line to some extent by the more moderate side of the party. Now that side of the party is labelled as being just as “woke” and full of socialists/communists as the Democrats supposedly are, and it’s the bigots like Trump and DeSantis running the show. So while the Republicans could field an actually sane candidate at any time, I don’t think it’s likely as the sane are being purged from the ranks at an alarming pace.
The picture assumes that you’re a left-leaning voter who begrudgingly votes for whatever moderate conservative the Democrats roll out as their candidate because while he doesn’t generally support any of the things you support, at least he doesn’t oppose them like the Republican candidate.
To throw my own opinion into this, I think the Republican party has passed a tipping point. I think your second question is right on the money. If not Trump, then some other crazed bigot. I think moving forward, you’ll have conservatives and Republicans, and they won’t be the same thing.
They’ve been moving progressively further towards the extremist end of the spectrum since I started paying attention in middle school (right after 9/11), and according to older folk I’ve talked to over the years, it’s been going on far longer than that, even before Nixon and Reagan. Democrats today hold the same positions on things that Republicans held during the 90s, and are called socialists and communists for it. Democrats have also been quietly funding extremist candidates for years now so that they can get an easy win against them by simply being the lesser evil. On top of that, Republicans have created a core group of zealots who care little for the policies that their candidate supports, so long as they have that R next to their name on the ballot. The kind of people like my boss when I was a teenager who would answer the question of who he was voting for with “I’m a Republican, I vote for the nominee” and an incredulous look like it was stupidest question in the world, exactly like my grandfather would answer my dad when he was younger, in the 60s and 70s. I’ve seen this backfire on Republicans when left-leaning candidates have gotten onto ballots under the Republican party, like a trans woman in New Hampshire or Vermont who ran for county sheriff on a policy of defunding the police, and was overwhelmingly elected by the pro-police conservative populace because she had run as the Republican candidate and none of them bothered to actually look at what her stance was, only if the D or the R was next to her name. I think this core group has backfired on the Republicans nationally, because they’ve been co-opted by Trump, who has opened the door for all the bigots to openly spread their hate and give these people a target to blame for the miseries inflicted upon them by the policies of the same people that they voted for. They tell them that it’s the minorities fault, and these people gobble it up.
The mask is off and open bigotry is the new face of the Republican party. There’s always been undercurrents of it, but it’s mostly been kept in line to some extent by the more moderate side of the party. Now that side of the party is labelled as being just as “woke” and full of socialists/communists as the Democrats supposedly are, and it’s the bigots like Trump and DeSantis running the show. So while the Republicans could field an actually sane candidate at any time, I don’t think it’s likely as the sane are being purged from the ranks at an alarming pace.