We are Screwed Either Way

On punching the passive voters.

People chose Trump in a free election. Some did this actively by voting for him with their ballots, dollars, and feet. Others chose him passively by casting no vote at all.

The active choosers include comitted MAGA voters and also a large body of normies. People who just assumed it was all a bluff, or that “Trump will calm down”, or people who “just wanted to cut red tape” but never actually believed Trump would impose tariffs on everyone, gut science, bomb Iran, or send the military into American cities as he promised to do. As I have argued elsewhere we get the most mileage by focusing on the normies.

But we also need to deal with the passive voters. We need to deal with the voters who saw no difference in the parties, saw no need to act, or expected nothing to change either way. It is nice, easy, even comforting to assume these people are all lazy idiots who smoke weed, sit on the couch and who need a good talking to, like lazy teenagers who are fixed by a swift kick in the pants during an after school special. But that isn’t true, and acting like it is, is stupid. Punching down only drives people away.

People who passively chose Trump did so for a reason, there is some issue they care about and they got no traction on, or they didn’t see a plan. And they are not wrong.

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The Harris campaign did everything it could to keep Palestinians at arm’s length, offered no plan for peace, and excused Israel’s actions at every turn, and now they are shocked, shocked! that people didn’t show up for them. The Democrats have embraced big money donors with open arms and done everything they could to silence anyone who calls it out yet they expect people who oppose Wall Street to come running. They are detatched, consultant driven, and they are not fighers.

Indeed when faced with a patently unconstitutional attack on a foreign nation the minority leader made clear he has not even thought about reigning Trump in. The passivity is so obvious it is demeaning.

So if we who are engaged want people to take part, we need to do more to reach them, not with better mailers or zippy ads. You can never really sell centrism since it means nothing at all. You need to find people who run on issues, or do it yourself, and then back them with all you have, because the tried and true method of demeaning voters then spitting on them when you lose is long past its’ date.