The Perfect GOP candidate and The Compromise Candidate

Joe Biden is the perfect politician, but not the perfect candidate. People are trying to find fault with him. Too old, etc. But the main difference between the two candidates is the supporting group of voters.

Trump is a perfect candidate. But only for keeping the GOP going. He is also a faulty candidate, and is stained by all his autocratic maneuvering and speeches. He cannot really be Trump 2016 anymore. He is muddied. (And yes, there is some erosion of support for Trump getting to the end of 2023. The primaries will do something to his number, I predict.)

Trump does not have to be everything for everyone. Only to his base. This populist movement has picked up enthusiasm. Before Trump, from the grass roots level you could not get excited about Republicans. Only a weak bond as "our kind of people" for most of those voters. They basically had been Republicans for generations.

Trump, unable to make real friendships, needs his fans and they adore him. He simply needs to be himself, working with fear, hate and crude jokes. And he is ideal for them. They would not show up for DeSantis.

Biden is none of that. He was the 2020 compromise. He may be popular among those involved in the actual politics.  Few Democrats dislike him, merely wishing he made way for a follower. But he lacks charisma even for us Democrats. He is not as bad as Nixon was appearing in public (he really had to work at it), but he is simply a politician. He can work solutions with others. None of that really matters, since he is not given any credit for what he has done, and Trump (with little to claim other than a tax cut) runs the conversation. He is the media man. He has some skill as a performer. It does not not make any difference to his supporters what he achieved or what he promises. It just has to sound different from anyone before. And the supporters do not even need anything from a president. They only want to prevent "some people" getting anything from the government.

The GOP does not need the Trump base or Trump for politics, they need them for turnout. This group of voters is not affected by much of politics. Banning abortion did not lose the Trump base. The Trump base sees things as black and white. Things are good or bad. I do not know if these conclusions come from the peer group or a leader. In any case "the issue is decided" and any individual Trump voter is no more responsible for what banning abortion does. As for the turnout part, the logic goes something like this. The people that were not interested in politics before Trump, they will vote for the Republican as long as he or she never criticizes Trump. Other more traditionl Republicans will also vote for that Republican candidate. But it is the combined total of them that gets the win. As goofy and inconsistent as Kevin McCarthy was, he seemed to be doing these kind of calculations. He cold guess the support for various races by the campaign contributions. Whene he was even a little critical of Trump the money stopped coming in.

Trump voters are a rather homogeneous group of white working class Christians. Democrats are always a group of educated whites and minorities.

What will happen the next year is that we will use the same fear tactics that Trump does. We need to get him ridiculed and punished in court. We also need to lecture on the end democracy with Trump.

Then comes the big job: get turnout at the election.

The polling at this point is rather poor at reflecting anything more than a general feeling of not being quite as comfortable as before the pandemic. Prices went up, wages did not. On top of that there are things Biden has to do as president (Israel) that the public just has a gut feeling about. Meanwhile Trump...between rants about an unjust legal battle...has nothing else to do so he is promoting simple ideas that seem to ring true with sonservative voters. "Close the border" and so on. The exaggerated arguments do not amount to much more than strawmen arguments. Trump never closed the border for four years. Millions of cars drive in and out of Mexico each month.

SIDENOTE ON POLLING

Biden seems to be "too old" and incompetent to run the US in polls. But the voters that are polled do not actually follow news. It is still a year to election and this is not a part of the life of 90% of voters. So what is the basis of their decision? The polls, of course! The more negative polls they hear, the more they believe the polls. The current polls are just the result of a string of polls in the news.

Early Polling...and Independents

I respect independents enough that I don't think they are all politically naive. A lot of it is hatred of politics and politicians. These are people that decide things for you. You can send your congressman an email and a staff member will read it. But nothing happens. You form an opinion of that party (your congressman) based on being ignored. The independents then get to the election and with little information vote for one or the other, mainly by what items are in the  news for both that week.

Independents are a big part of polling looking strange. I believe they are not actually answering the question asked but just reflecting a general dislike of politics. Politics does run in the background and makes sure we have no catastrophes generated by bad planning. But those kinds of politics are not known to them. They do not want to hear politics in the news. Yet Trump is there in your face everyday. Trump knows he can make the news and the media just use that to make income. The independents ignore most of it. But the stuff they do hear, if they have any memory of it, is all negative.

One other problem with the polls is that they may not ask the right things. "Is there something else that makes you decide on Trump or Biden that we did not ask you about?" That sort of thing never gets asked. 

When so called independents are asked about Trump and Biden and the economy, I was a little confused. How is Trump running an economy? How did he run anything? Poorly. Perhaps these independents are simply libertarians and Biden running the economy would be ruining capitalism? It does not need to be run.

Or maybe I am reading too much into it? Independents do not care too much for the government, so Biden "running" it is just Biden wasting my tax dollars.

I have never been polled in a nonpartisan poll. I have voted for some 40 years.

Normally the voters are asked polling questions during the spring primaries. With Trump we are always pushing ahead of that. The independents (over 40%) are confused. Independents are still shopping for someone other than Trump of Biden. Too late. For the rest of us the question already came up in 2020. Who do you think can beat Trump? When you voted for Biden, you could reliably expect him to run again if Trump was running again. The not running issue would only have come up if the Republicans were past Trump. They are not. That, too, was predictable.

2016

 

We had had politicians that preached hatred of the government continuously from Reagan on. But we were done with most of the 2000s versions. We got to 2016. You could not imagine two candidates more different. One was focused on the little guy in ways that the government could support you. The other was focused on the little guy too. But his little guys did not want anything from the government. Or whatever it was, they distrusted it. The hatred candidate cleverly wanted to stop the government from giving stuff " to all those other people." And foreigners. The little guy was to survive purely by capitalism. I guess by being an Amazon seasonal worker. Or "entrepreneur." Which for the little guy was lawn care etc.