As we careen toward Tuesday, one of the biggest mysteries is whether Mussolini’s Mini Me will recruit enough brand new cultists to offset the sane Republicans who are backing Joe Biden, putting country over party.
It has been heartening, these last few traumatic months, to track the GOP defectors who’ve joined the Lincoln Project, the Republican Voters Against Trump, the 43 Alumni for Biden (ex-George W. Bush aides), and the Republicans and Independents for Biden.
They say all the right things. The 43 Alumni group laments that “over the past four years we, as a nation, have struggled with truth. Conspiracy theories have been legitimized and facts have been dismissed. The expertise of world-renowned scientists and physicians have been sidelined…Meanwhile, more than 170,000 Americans (at the time of this statement) are dead due to this mismanaged crisis. As a nation, we have lost our moral compass…We need to get back to basics: facts matter, there is right and wrong. We can do that with Joe Biden.”
Yet another group, Former Republican National Security Officials for Biden – at last check, it has 130 members – is saying all the right things: “Trump’s corrupt behavior renders him unfit to serve as president.” One noteworthy member – Elizabeth Neumann, Trump’s former assistant secretary for threat prevention in the Department of Homeland Security – highlights one particular issue: “(Trump) has an inability to clearly condemn white supremacists. He either likes the ambiguity or he’s intentionally endorsing these people. He’s unfit, and I think he’s extremely dangerous.”
The list of defectors seems endless: former Pennsylvania governor and Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge (who says that Trump “lacks the empathy, integrity, intellect and maturity to lead”); former coronavirus task force member Olivia Troye (who assails Trump’s “flat-out disregard for human life”); veteran Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, who defended George W. Bush in the Florida 2000 overtime (“My party is destroying itself on the Altar of Trump…My fellow Republicans, look what we’ve become”); five former Reagan White House counsels (who say that Trump’s “ugly sentiments are the very antithesis of American ideals and echo the authoritarian tyrants that every previous president would have challenged”); former House Republican Joe Walsh (who calls Trump “a horrible human being”), and at least 30 of his ex-House colleagues; four former Republican senators; and prominent retired military leaders, including William McRaven, former leader of U.S. Special Operations Command, who warns in The Wall Street Journal that we Americans “will pay the highest price for our neglect and shortsightedness” unless we dump Trump for Biden. And many more too numerous to mention.
Biden recently remarked, “All these Republicans – I don’t even know half of ’em. Have you ever seen more Republicans endorse a Democratic challenger? Of their stature?” The answer is nope. What’s happened this year is unprecedented.
But.
You knew that was coming.
But what we don’t know is whether these prominent vocal defectors – including Republican strategists Stuart Stevens, Rick Wilson, John Weaver, Bill Kristol, and Rick Tyler; Kellyanne hubby George Conway; the list goes on – are the tip of an iceberg poised to topple Trump’s Titanic, thus cementing a Biden coalition that stretches from the Democratic left to the Republican center-right. Or perhaps they’re mostly speaking for themselves. Perhaps they’re merely “establishment elitists” (in the words of Trump flack Hogan Gidley) who have no feel for the rank and file. Perhaps the grassroots Republican revolt is actually quite small – and destined to be trumped by a massive influx of newly recruited cultists who’ve been coaxed out of the woodwork by MAGA organizers.
That’s precisely their strategy in the closing days – to comb the factory towns and rural communities for the supposedly hidden trove of disaffected folks who skipped 2016 but are ripe pickings for the red-cap campaign. And, predictably, Pennsylvania is ground zero for that outreach. Perhaps an expanded base of Trumpers won’t be enough to offset the defecting Republicans in the populous Philadelphia suburbs, but Republican pollster Robert Cahaly – who correctly predicted in 2016 that Trump would edge out Hillary in Pennsylvania and four other key states – insists that the polls favoring Biden are overrated.
Cahaly says: “We live in a country where people will lie to their accountant, they’ll lie to their doctor, they’ll lie to their priest. And we’re supposed to believe they shed all of that when they get on the telephone with a (polling) stranger?…A lot of people are going to vote this year who have been dormant or low-propensity voters. I think it’s going to be at an all-time high.”
His ultimate message: “People are going to be shocked.”
I have a question. Do we even have the capacity to be shocked by anything anymore? Is it even shocking at this point to know that a twisted grifter who travels the nation infecting and killing his own supporters actually has a realistic chance to win? A guy who goes around smearing the doctors who are trying to save lives? This is the America we live in – unless we decisively reject it. Those sane Republican defectors can’t do it without us.
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