By Matt Underwood Democrats always lose when they second guess what Republican voters want and then pander to that.
I’ll never understand this… the answer to what Republican voters want is… Republican politicians. There’s no way to appease that. They want to see and R and 95%+ of them don’t care about anything else.
ACA proved that. Obama went with a full appeasement strat: 1:1 introduce healthcare approach by top Repiblican candidate.
But because it was now a Democrat plan, states chose this hill to, in many cases literally, die on – rather than allow a black Democrat install republican policy on national level.
Meanwhile, NY elitist RINO says to take peoples guns away beforr trial, but he had the R next to his name so they cheered.
The “fiscal conservatives” messiah got his hands on budget while having oramge idiot to rubberstamp whatever he wanted and exploded debt to unseen levels.
Cops started snatching protesters off the streets in unmarked vans and did drive-by shootings of people just minding own business – and that was no biggie either.
Republicans do not have convictions past tribalism. You can’t make them vote for non-R “just” by giving them what they say, or even do want.
Modern Republican politics have devolved to a purely reactionary response to Democratic policy goals. Which is doubly frustrating, because the center Dems keep trying to shift their goals rightward to try to grab “independents,” which is in turn even more frustrating because it has become so glaringly apparent that people who still claim to be Is are clearly just Republicans who are either lying to themselves or the pollsters. This is ironically enough not actually a function of Republican policy, but of two decades worth of right wing propaganda media like Fox. The ACA and vaccine responses have been so goddamn obvious I literally cant fathom how it seems that none of the viewers or viters have realized. When Trump was promising to have the vaccine out prior to the election, Tucker Carlson was declaring that Americans had a patriotic duty to get vaccinated, and that the largest share of the credit for its development should go to the Trump administration. Tbf, a number of voices on the left at the time were voicing concern about its rapid development, but were still advising people to get it as soon as it was available. Literally the day enough votes were counted for Biden to be declared the victor, literally that evening, Fox completely flipped the script, and they GOP followed suit. I’ve already written and essay, so Ill keep the ACA example brief, but firstly it needs to be notes that ACA is a lightly modified form of the GOP proposal they had called “Romneycare,” which he had run on in ’08. Whats really jarring and telling is the role of branding on Republicans’ position on the bill (at least according to polling from 2016). Republican polls in most parts of the country, particularly in the midwest, on the ACA shift by ad many as 20 points depending on whether it is referred to as ACA or Obamacare, with a majority nearly everywhere actually supporting the ACA. Fox News and other right wing sources have spent so much time demonizing and “othering” Dems as a part of their larger campaign to redefine “American Values” to mean “conservative” ones in order to weaponize patriotism into single-party nationalism that a significant majority of Rs will support ideas entirely on party grounds, with a complete lack of regard for actual philosophical considerations.