A Question Too Ugly For Most Of Us To Contemplate-- Why Are Almost 40% Of American Voters Supporting This Orange Blot On Humanity?

 

Minnesota is a state Trump nearly won in 2016. Hillary took the usually dependably blue state, which had the highest percentage of voter participation in the country, by a very narrow 1.5%-- 1,367,716 (46.44%) to 1,322,951 (44.92%). The Democrats won two suburban congressional districts that had been held by Republicans-- and the Republicans won 2 rural congressional districts that had been held by the Democrats. Trump declared it a battleground state early last year and has been working the state heavily-- although to little avail. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows him losing Minnesota to Biden in a 9 point rout. A Langer poll for ABC News and the Washington Post has just 41% of likely voters casting their ballots for Trump (57% for Biden).

The 2016 electoral map by county looks very attractive to Trump and he isn't giving up in Minnesota yet-- but his efforts there could make the outcome even more lopsided against him. On Tuesday, the state reported 1,135 new COVID cases, bringing the state's badly spiking total to 114,574-- 20,316 cases per million residents. Over 2,200 Minnesotans have died from the disease-- and Trump super-spreader rallies in the state are making matters worse. At least two dozen of the new infections came directly out of Trump events. "Facing a steep surge in coronavirus cases," reported the NY Times, "health officials in Minnesota have connected two dozen virus cases to people who attended presidential campaign events in the past month, most of them attendees at airport rallies hosted by President Trump."

It would be hard to imagine Trump doing as well as he did in 2016-- or Biden doing as badly as Hillary did. But in small, rural counties like Morrison, Todd, Pipestone, McLeod, Clearwater, Sibley, Roseau, Isanti, Wadena, Ramsey, Lake of the Woods, Jackson, Pennington, Meeker, Redwood, Martin and Marshall Trump scored over 65% of the vote-- and many of those people are sticking with him, some with great enthusiasm and every expectation in the world that we're about to get another 4 years of his rule.

Reporting yesterday from another Upper Midwest state, Michigan, Politico's Tim Alberta noted that Michigan is looking less competitive by the day, and there’s a growing likelihood that Trump will be buried statewide November 3. In 2016, Trump narrowly won the state's 16 electoral votes by beating Hillary 2,279,543 (47.50%) to 2,268,839 (47.27%), one of the closest calls in the nation. Right now, it doesn't look so close. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows Trump down 7.2%. The most recent poll was released last week by Ipsos for Reuters showed Trump with just 43% to Biden's 51% (and with 22% of ballots already cast).

Alberta pointed out that although all 3 Rust Belt states that Trump improbably won in 2016 "are problematic," Señor T this year, Michigan looks bleakest of all. "His support has diminished among the white working-class. Black turnout appears certain to rebound after a dismal showing in 2016. New laws that allow for early voting and no-excuse-absentee balloting are expected to push voter participation to historic levels, with Democrats the expected beneficiary of low-propensity Michiganders flooding the ballot box. But the simplest explanation for the president’s trouble here is that he’s continuing to hemorrhage support from white, college-educated women in the suburbs of Detroit. It’s hard to overstate just how badly Trump is performing with this crucial demographic. Over the past several weeks, a raft of internal polls have produced numbers that political professionals here are struggling to comprehend. In Oakland County, the second-biggest voting area in the state, Gongwer reported that Democratic polling shows Biden leading Trump by 27 points; Republicans pushed back with a survey showing Trump down only 18 points. (For reference, Trump lost Oakland County by 8 points in 2016.)"

Yep, suburban women are over this goon, but in Michigan-- like in Minnesota-- there were counties where Trump did better than 65% in 2016 and those people are not abandoning him-- small rural counties like Missaukee, Kalkaska, Ogemaw, Hillsdale, Montmorency, Dickinson, Tuscola, Oscoda, Alcona, Lapeer, Newaygo, Gladwin, Otsego, Sanilac, Branch, Wexford, Luce, Huron and Osceola. Why? What the hell is wrong with the people in these places?

Yesterday, conservative columnist Max Boot-- long a right-wing Republican-- asked the same question in his Washington Post column, How can 42 percent of Americans still support the worst president in our history? Boot has an endless list of indictments against Trump that we've all internalized already: "Trump is on track to be the first president since World War II to see a net loss of jobs during his term. Even worse, he has presided over the loss of 214,000 lives 221,000 lives and counting from covid-19. That’s already nearly four times the U.S. fatalities in the Vietnam War, previously the nadir of presidential bungling. Even now, after having contracted covid-19 himself, Trump refuses to take the pandemic seriously. He keeps promising it will magically disappear of its own accord while holding rallies practically guaranteed to spread the disease. As if that weren’t reason enough to vote for Biden, there is also the fact that Trump has abused his power; he was even impeached for doing so. He has trafficked in racism and xenophobia. He has incited violence. He has kowtowed to dictators and trashed our alliances. He has welcomed Russian attacks on our elections. He has locked children in cages. He has called for his opponents to be locked up. In sum, Trump has made a strong case that he is the worst president in our history."

And then the nub: "Yet tens of millions of voters still support him. What are they thinking? I get that there are single-issue voters to whom Trump has a strong appeal-- people who feel passionately about tax cuts, judges, abortion or Israel. There are also people for whom Trump’s boorishness, racism and xenophobia are not a turnoff but a selling point... There are also, of course, many Trump voters who are convinced that he is the lesser evil, because Biden is supposedly plotting to turn the United States into a 'large scale version of Venezuela,' even while suffering from 'dementia.' They claim Biden is a 'puppet' of the far left, even though he opposes Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, a ban on fracking, defunding the police, expanding the Supreme Court and other progressive ideas."

Here's what's painful to think about our fellow Americans in places like Tuscola and Oscoda counties in Michigan, Pipestone and McLeod counties in Minnesota-- as well as Modoc County in California (71.8% Trump), Allegany County in New York (68.4% Trump) and even Wocester, Bristol, Plymouth and Barnstable counties in Massachusetts where Trump lost in 2016 but still managed to get over 40% of the vote in each. Boot blames Fox News:

A Pew Research Center survey makes clear the extent of the problem. Among those who get their election news primarily from Fox “News,” 86 percent say Trump is delivering the “completely right” or “mostly right” message about the pandemic, 78 percent that “the U.S. has controlled the outbreak as much as it could have” and 61 percent that Trump and his administration get the facts right about the coronavirus “almost all” or “most of the time.” Perhaps the most disturbing finding of all: 39 percent of Fox News viewers say that QAnon-- an insane conspiracy theory that posits that Trump’s opponents are satanic child-molesters-- is “somewhat good” or “very good” for the country.

 

I’m sorry, these are not issues on which rational people can legitimately disagree. Trump’s covid-19 message-- that, as he said Saturday, “it is disappearing”-- is objectively false. In the past week, daily confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States have increased by 13.3 percent and hospitalizations by 9.8 percent. Trump’s claims to the contrary, we have done far worse during the pandemic than most wealthy countries. If we had the same death rate as Canada, 132,000 victims of covid-19 would still be alive. And it should go without saying that QAnon, whose adherents have been linked to numerous acts of violence, is a bane, not a boon.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) used to say: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” That’s no longer true.

...[T]he rise of Fox News and Facebook allows “fake news” to spread much more readily-- and Trump gives it the imprimatur of the Oval Office. It’s bad enough that the president lies so much; what’s worse is that so many think he is telling the truth.

Unfortunately, even if Trump is defeated, a large portion of the country will continue to believe a lot of things that simply are not so-- and a small but significant number could be led into violence by their lunatic beliefs. The disturbing plot by members of a right-wing militia to kidnap the governor of Michigan may be a taste of what is to come. As Francisco Goya warned, “the sleep of reason produces monsters.”