The only antidote to Trump is a huge Blue Tsunami
And not just for the obvious reason of needing to wrest control of Congress away form Republicans so that there can be actual oversight of all the crimes True has committed with real accountability for them, including but not limited to Impeachment and removal from office.
Republicans need to suffer humiliating unprecedented defeats in districts that they had come to believe God gave them dominion over. Trumpism must be crushed as the throwback to racist xenophobic No Nothingism of the 19th century that it literally is. Republicans need to learn that they will never rule in this country with just a third of the public behind them, no matter how fanatical that third may be. Right now less than bat shit crazy Republican politicians are more afraid of losing a Republican primary to Trump's core supporters than they are of being exposed as fully complicit in an attack on America during a general election campaign. We have to show them why they made the wrong political calculations.
A Republican with some degree of honor can emerge from a primary defeat with some respect intact if they run as a "Never Trumper". Who knows, eight years hence they might even get a new lease on a political future after America emerges from this national nightmare. But those who took part in a Vichy government selling out America should never be allowed to recover, or rewrite the history of what they have done. Regardless, as many Republicans as possible of all conceivable political stripes must lose their seats this November. And like a basketball game blowout, we need to run the numbers up on them.
That to me means an "all of the above" electoral strategy. What do I mean by "all of the above"? I mean, for one, that we have to give every means of logistical support possible to Democratic Party core voters, starting with but not limited to People of Color, particularly Women of Color but all women too. We need to support them running for office, and we need to go on the offensive against each and every means of targeted minority voter suppression tactics that Republicans use to disenfranchise minorities. Long live Eric Hodder.
It also means changing the attitudes of those who were all too likely not to bother to vote in the past. Younger voters come to mind, and I am very enthusiastic and optimistic about that demographic moving forward. They have taken the lead in movements as diverse as "Me Too", "Black Lives Matter" and "March for Our Lives". Anything that can be done to help them must be done now.
And finally it means flipping as many votes that went to Trump in 2016 to Democratic as possible. Just to state the obvious, this doesn't involve wasting any time on Trump's core supporters even though most of Trump's 2016 votes were likely from his rabid core who can only be appealed to through overt racist xenophobic and sexist dog whistles. I agree; Fuck 'em. The rest of his voters, a smaller subset than his core, are a mixed bag many of whom harbor some prejudices and other less than desirable traits. Yes I still want their votes in 2018, in a way like FDR wanted Stalin's troops in 1943. We are in a war for the survival of our Democracy now. The difference between a Blue Wave in November and a Blue Tsunami involves flipping a lot of Districts Democratic that ordinarily we would be out of our minds to fantasize wining.
We can retake the House if we pick up 30 seats. That's not good enough to totally crush Trumpism. We need to pick up 60. I have a hunch that if we do swing as many solid red seats to blue as a Blue Tsunami entails that I will be less than thrilled with some of the Democrats who we will thereby put in office. We can sort that out later, though primaries in some cases if need be, but Trump and the Republican Party that stands behind him must be crushed now.
I have no doubt that Colin Lamb won his seat in Congress using an all of the above vote getting strategy. The district went to Trump by 20 points and Lamb won by less than a thousand votes total. We need to take districts like that now in order to drive a stake through the heart of the current Republican Party. It is a fallacy to say that we can't use an "all of the above" strategy in 2008, because in different places it makes sense to target our resources appropriately, and that is not always in the same way. In Nebraska we probably have to target ways to peel off some Trump voters, in Austin Texas we may need to prioritize millennials. In Georgia we have to do massive voter registration drives in African American communities. These efforts of course are not mutually exclusive, they can go on everywhere simultaneously. My point is simply that where the relative motherland of new Democratic votes can be harvested will vary some from district to district, and we need to be surgical in our thinking.
November 2018 is when we can finally politically destroy Donald Trump and all who stand behind him. We have no choice but to get the job done.
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