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.