- Joined
- Jan 16, 2020
Real talk, we seven months away, how many states can Trump flip?
We can write off New York, California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Virginia.
I think you'll find that we're at T minus nine months.
And who the fuck knows. The changes to tax policy, especially the changes to the amount of state taxes that can be written off against federal taxes have forced a whole lot of people to move. Disproportionately, people in rich, liberal coastal areas are moving to purple states. That is probably going to make some purple states a lot more blue.
On the other hand, how many red voters stayed home in 2016 because they bought the media line that Trump didn't have a chance and was crazy? Those people will have had a full four years to see media partisanship become ever more shrill, duplicitous and surreal. Also, Trump was courting rust belt union worker votes in 2016. In 2020 they get to weigh in on how they think this new alliance is going. I get the impression that they, along with big agriculture and some other key industrial interests aren't starry-eyed over Trump, but generally prefer him over alternatives.
Then there's the issue of voter fraud and cheating. Trump has been consistently insistent that there's a lot of it, which runs counter to expert opinion and conventional wisdom. That is distressing to me, because when Trump flouts conventional wisdom he's very often correct.
Again, Trump is the candidate of chaos and non-linearity. Nine months is a long time with Trump. The lines are unclear now, and they'll have shifted significantly by election day. I think that bringing up the concept of the OODA loop is very 1980s MBA pseudo-intellectual, right up there with quoting Sun Tzu, but there's something to be said for the idea that Trump moves so quickly and aggressively that his opponents simply lack the peace of mind to concoct effective counter-strategies.
Edit: This is also why anyone hoping that reality snaps back to itself after Trump is gone is just taking a big ole swig of the COPE dumbass juice. Trump has changed the battle lines, and shown a new level of sophistication at which the game must now be played. The early Obama years are not coming back, no matter how hard you ball your fists, squeeze your eyes shut and scream.
With that said, I wouldn't mind Cat Power bangs coming back as a look for hipster chicks.
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