Rasmussen released a poll at the end of June showing two-thirds of Americans believe the 2024 election will be negatively impacted by cheating. Cheating in elections, of course, varies in magnitude from simple voter fraud, in which a voter may attempt to impersonate someone else or vote twice, to election fraud, in which government agencies or conspirators engineer electoral outcomes on a grand scale.
Other polling from the same organization, released in May, shows roughly 80 percent of self-identified Republicans believe the 2020 election result was impacted by cheating, along with a large majority of independents (64%), and an astonishingly high number of Democrats (45%).
It does not take staying in a Holiday Inn Express last night to deduce that fixing the issue that resulted in the wrong guy becoming President lives in the forefront of the minds of the most committed Republican voters - the ones that vote in primaries. While I consider this to be an extremely simple observation, it is apparently not such an easy read for the political consultant class, which has by my own personal observation instructed small-office candidates in swing areas to avoid the election elephant altogether, and by what is obvious in the press, guided the prominent GOP presidential candidates not named Trump to the odious position of soft-handing the issue that has upended trust in the very system in which American self-government operates.
My first instinct is to interpret Republican candidates who won’t address the electoral crisis as pawns of the political establishment who have been promised parachutes and landing zones for carrying status quo water and kicking the can down the road, or perhaps even worse, to implicate them for waiting with anticipation for the Department of Justice to sideline President Trump and his persistent plea to the public that he was cheated out of reelection in 2020. I can think of no other reasons to ignore a lay-up issue with 80% minimum party support, or at least not any more than I can think of a reason for them to fail to support lowering taxes, keeping men out of girls’ bathrooms, or basic Second Amendment protections. The failure of Republicans to rally around a major winning issue for the GOP base like election integrity would be like Democrat candidates failing to embrace entitlement expansion or the myriad victim groups that make up their dubious coalition.
The world revolves around the issue of supply and demand, and not just in terms of the simple economics we learned in school. The bases of the political parties have their demands, and those demands evolve. The Republican voters of the 1980s wanted strength against the Soviet Union, and were wooed by supply-side economics; they nominated, elected, re-nominated, and re-elected Ronald Reagan, the supply, for the job of meeting their demand.
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