I tend to think that momentum comes in waves of sentiment. There are longer and shorter waves (wavelets, I guess). They interact in complex waves that I can’t begin to ferret out—but, sometimes you can see evidence of trends.
MAGA, like Nazism, is obviously a long wave built upon pent up anger, discontent, fear of a dark(er) planet (and having to compete with those “scary” people for a chunk of it, with Dems putting their lib thumbs on the scales), plus an unspecified fear of a mythical Jewish-space-laser fueled “Deep State” (blame always plays a big role in these movements).
Get the limbic system (primitive “emotional” part of the brain) involved and it will give you a nice long run. Myth and fantasy play a role here; they’re stronger than reality cuz we almost always can imagine something scarier in our dreams than what we actually experience in our lives. Whether it’s a fear of failing to be “pure enough” before God to get on his “nice” list by baking a wedding cake for a gay couple or believing that Hillary Clinton is a child-eating cannibal who extracts longevity ingredients in their blood in the basements of pizza parlors in DC.
Abortion (Dobbs) addresses immediate needs and concerns of many women, and has a long term component too (Handmaiden-fueled totally rational fear of centralized control of our bodies). As long as a real, fairly imminent threat is perceived to be there, it will drive a certain segment of voters to the polls and to vote against fanatic dominionist candidates.
It’s hard to harness the fear and anger for too long without fresh outrages to drive it. Timing is important too; had Dobbs come down 2 months later than it did and had it not been leaked, actually, I think we’d have easily won the House and picked up WI and possibly NC.
There’s a point where pretty much all of these waves must top out and subside, at least for a while. That point occurs when the wave becomes less relevant, less of a threat, less a source of visceral anger, less of a topic of conversation, more attenuated...whatever. All these things are impermanent/cyclical, that’s why they’re called waves.
So back to MAGA...
At that point, the wave loses its ability to drive the kind of visceral knee-jerk reaction that a Trump knows how to play like a violin and turn into votes. American carnage—yeah, it worked once upon a time, but you can’t just keep saying “carnage, carnage, carnage...scary dark sinned folk invading us, killing us, and taking your jobs, with lib help” for 7 years and always expect to get a powerful response.
And it’s especially hard to stand there and say it when the really YUUGE carnage is the one occurring to your own party because, in part, the MAGA wave is (my belief) on the wane, and, perhaps as proof, voters were only too happy to shit on most of the marquee MAGA candidates, especially for those offices that have anything to do with voting.
I think that the American public knows the stakes by now and simply aren’t as fascist-curious as Trump hopes. Whatever his message about a dark, dangerous America that “you’ll see I’m right one day real soon and only I can fix”, the greater fear is a putch-driven ‘Merica with 24/7 brownshirt access to voting machines and ballots to “Truth” the vote. Damn it was real close though, we just missed going down that road in AZ, for example.
With some of the deep-seated economic fears lightening up a bit, perhaps (inflation was down last month, for example, and expected to be just over half what it is today by the end of next year) and, more importantly, for all but dyed in the blood of the lamb MAGAs, the deep state, Q-curious aspects of MAGA aren’t resonating like they did just a short year ago. The fraud claims are really getting tired and low energy, like Trump’s announcement.
Also, most Republican candidates grudgingly conceded their races this cycle, Jan 6th rioters aren’t being touted as heroes quite so much, and, generally, people have moved on from idolizing teens with guns who go “game hunting” for protesters. I could be wrong and we’re really sitting on a powder keg waiting to explode, led by thousands of preppers from Idaho, but, I really, REALLY wanna believe that attenuation to extremist anything is a trending thing at this point of the game.
So, this is a really long-winded way of saying that I think the structure for the wave of MAGA-built sentiment is subsiding, generally. Fortunately, for us, it’s still strong enough among the only people who really matter—Repub primary voters--to cause trauma-fueled panic among the Kevin McCarthys, Lindsay Grahms, and Rick Scotts of the world, who don’t dare to cross America’s Biggest Maggot.
