OK, I don’t get it.
I responded earlier in a comment to a thread offering more anecdotal evidence of GOPers changing their minds. I thought I would pose my question as a diary. Please, offer your thoughts concerning a puzzle that makes no sense to me.
We have seen scores of posts here and articles in various sources about Republicans who have either softened their support for Trump or are going further and have declared for the Good Side. So, OK, those stories are anecdotal. But there sure are a lot of them.
And then there is polling showing him losing key sectors of the base: suburban women, senior citizens, etc. And we have the many stories about Republicans out of office who are advocating for revolution. The Lincoln Project is only the most well known.
There APPEARS to be some significant percentage of Reps out there who are changing course.
So why doesn’t it appear in the polls? How come the idiot’s support is where it always has been, low 40s?
I mean, that’s where he was at the time of his astonishing win, the height, one would think, of his popularity. It’s where he was during the last race. And after 4 years of chaos … it’s where he is now. His basic number doesn’t change!
Of course, the GOP is based on obedience of the Big Daddy figure. But we have all of these other indicators of people shifting their perspective. How can both be true? For example, how can suburbanites, women, and senior citizens turn on him without his support dropping? I don’t understand how that is possible.
Is the evidence of eroded support somehow false? Is it so small as to not register statistically? I guess we can say they form part of the independent/undecided group shifting to Biden, but I mean, really? The base number doesn’t change at all? Is he replacing folks with new zealots found under some rock? Are more “shy” Trumpists answering poll questions this time?
Or perhaps the GE and approval numbers are misleading? Are GOPers publicly flying their flags to piss off the libs while quietly resolving to shift? Are there shy apostates?
Look. With 220K Americans dead and all the other horrors, my sense of social reality is that the less extreme segments of the spectrum have GOT to be softening if not abandoning him. I just don’t understand a reality in which that isn’t happening.
But the polls consistently show the vast majority of the party doggedly refusing to shift. I don’t get it. Like, at all!