Is anyone else as frightened as I am?

[gitchel]

88. Relax

Trump's method is to gather a particular type of Republican. He is capitalizing on what used to be know as the Silent Majority. When Falwell and Viguerie brought them out of the silence and created the Moral Majority, they became the easily-roused reactionary rabble that could be brought out to steal any election with some connection to anything that could be painted with a racial, pseudo-religious, or nationalistic brush. The GOP eventually came to depend on this group, gerrymandered to include them, and developed techniques to shepherd them - for example, placing pro-abortion referenda on some key ballots to attract large numbers of loonies.

Well, Donald has stolen them. Which means he's stolen 40% of the Republican Party. And probably 60% of the active republican vote. This has made it difficult for the rest of the candidates, since they planned on campaigning to those loonies, and hadn't put together anything substantive that might appeal to the mainstream republicans. Since the loonies vote at a higher rate than the mainstream, this made sense. It's worked that way for decades. But now Donald has them. That's why the other candidates are so quiet right now. They can't create reasonable platforms to attract the mainstream, because they are still hoping to grab the loonies - perhaps Donald will screw the pooch. So we wait. Everyone waits to see what happens to Donald and his crop of brain stems.

If Donald makes it to the convention, and enough other candidates have dropped off the horizon, he may get the nomination, unless the GOP finds a clever workaround - and they will try hard. If Donald gets nominated, it'll be the lowest republican turnout for the general election in decades. Not because of Bernie or Hillary, but because most republicans don't like Donald any more than the rest of us. There's likely to be a massive number of republicans who simply avoid the embarrassment by staying home.

If Donald, or someone else, doesn't get nominated in the first round at the convention, then it's a brokered convention. Then the dealing starts. And we get to see the battle between Money (Donald) and Power (GOP). Should be fascinating.

The scariest outcome of this battle would be if Donald LOST. Then we get Cruz, someone who appeals to most of the mainstream and most of the loonies. If they manage to bring us any of the other viable candidates, it'll be very close. If they bring Cruz, or even Rubio, we are likely to lose big. We might even have to force 20-30% of Democrats to get off their asses and VOTE!

So, you are more reasonable to be afraid of Cruz and Rubio than Donald. But it would be much more sensible to start beating your Democratic (and reasonable Republican) friends over the head about voting, starting right now and continuing right up to after dark on Election Day.

I'm fairly sure we've never lost an election that we couldn't have won with just a few percent more voters.