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I don’t see thins as a great political strategy. Yes, you do need to fall in behind a coalition. But paying more attention, this is no way to get people to actually do that. There are no agendas on offer. They aren’t even play acting like they have a serious agenda. The6 certainly don’t have a candidate of note. What they have is what failed them before— orange man bad. They’ve added Musk on the top, but it’s still “vote for us, we aren’t those people.”
The problem is that Trump isn’t bad enough for this to work. Whether you agree or not, the worst things you can say about him are things that are positive. He’s doing exactly what he said he would do, and he’s taking a sledgehammer to the federal government and cleaning up redundant positions. It just doesn’t work to make an entire political party be the anti-Trump when you can’t actually make a case that he’s doing something wrong.
Perhaps you can say that many of the "bad" qualities of Trump are actually considered good-to-neutral by many of the group of people who aren't rabidly anti-Trump. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the eating hasn't taken place in his second term yet. We'll see how the various issues play out, but I'm personally pessimistic about the economy, and that is likely to be a major factor in swinging voters if he makes things worse like many economists are predicting or even if he doesn't make things better by enough.
In terms of the strategy in 2024 and leading up to it, I'd mostly agree. Even before the election, the electorate's dissatisfaction with the status quo was a major talking point (though I'm not sure that that many people saw it as the major factor), and so without a clear vision for how the current sitting Vice President would change things other than just being the First Black Woman POTUS and Not Being Trump, complaining about how extreme Trump was not a good move. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, though, and I won't claim that it was obviously a losing move, at least not to me.
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How does the calculus change in your opinion if he does actually doof everything up by 2028?
I mean it’s possible he does. On the other hand, for the left, I don’t see them putting anything new forward. They don’t have anything to put up against him. The best offer they have is “do you hate Trump? How would you like to go back to the good old days of … Joe Biden?” I think you’d have to break quite a lot of things for Joe Biden to look good by comparison.
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