Voter id, not voter ID
by Tom Sullivan
Flickr photo by whizchickenonabun via Creative Commons.
All this time and money Republicans spent trying to game elections in this country seems wasted. They erected hurdles to voting in state after state, from evil-genius gerrymandering to voter IDs to slashing early voting and same-day registration to shorting voting machines in minority precincts. They could have just asked Trump. Voter id, not voter ID may determine this election.
New York magazine surveyed 100 Republican primary voters. They were all over the ideological map. The one phrase that seemed to encapsulate the voters’ mood in choosing a candidate is “testicular fortitude”:
The phrase seemed telling. If there was anything almost all of the respondents sought in a candidate, it was that testicular fortitude — or, in less colorful terms, strength. It’s why Trump has steamrolled his rivals despite his ideological inconsistencies as a Republican. And it’s why Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have failed to connect: Being labeled a nerd in this GOP primary is the kiss of death; being cast as a sissy is even worse. Machismo even seems to be Carly Fiorina’s best selling point.
This attraction to strength seems to be connected to an inchoate sense that the world is falling apart. The voters we spoke to were concerned about a lot of potential threats — terrorist, economic, and cultural — and hoped that a strong president would protect them from dangers within as well as from abroad. Voters said they no longer felt free to be themselves in their own country — policed in their speech, unable to pray publicly or even say “God bless you” when someone sneezes. “Everything’s so p.c.,” said Priscilla Mills, a 33-year-old hospital coordinator from Manchester. “And then the second you do say something, you’re a racist.” Trump, who had 21 percent of the vote in our small sample, has capitalized the most on the political-correctness grievance, which is likely to surface in the general election no matter who becomes the nominee.
It’s classic Lakoff. If Democrats are the mommy party, Republicans are the daddy party. They want a tough, big daddy capable of protecting them from this season’s “Big Bad.” Seemingly, the bad is everywhere — immigrants, economic insecurities, terrorists.
The conservative movement is both outdone and undone by Trump. They have sold candidates based on deep, sometimes subliminal fears for decades, the way Madison Avenue sells mouthwash and dandruff shampoo. Except movement conservatives are amateur “Professor Marvels” living on wingnut welfare. They sell tax cuts and a return to the gold standard out of their wagons, or whatever snake oil brings billionaire dollars into conservative think tanks. Trump is a professional with truck balls on his luxury wagon. He really does know the crowned heads of Europe (or they know him). The GOP is seriously outclassed when it comes to Trump. Of course, that is not meant in the Fred Astaire sense.
Trump’s voters prefer his lack of a filter to their own pretense that what really matters to them is family values or Christian values or all the small-government twaddle they’ve been spoon fed by movement conservatives for decades. As Digby pointed out yesterday at Salon, those simply function as tribal shibboleths or team colors. They grew up in a dominant, white America with moxie and confidence. Back when neocons could boast, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Movement conservatism has failed them. Sarah Posner wrote at Rolling Stone, even evangelicals want to even the score. They want to get back the eye of the tiger. They want Rocky III. Trump promises to give it to them.
What will they do when they find out that like a high school jock’s locker room bragging, Trump is all talk and no show?