Brand Coherence

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Over at Steve's they're talking about these darn mild-mannered Democrats who never say anything mean and those terrific Republican rat bastards Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt and Dr. Bill Kristol who tell it like it is with their Lincoln Project and show us how the pros do it and why can't we have some more of that inside the party and I just don't know.

You know where.

I do know I specifically don't want Joe Biden to go around pretending to be a mean person, if only because—duh—he's not going to do it very well. And we're stuck with him, if you want to look at it that way, so there's not much point. But he has his virtues too, and they aren't doing too badly, if you've been looking at the polls. He's consistently ahead, 9.2 percentage points today, with an absolute majority (51.8% to Trump's 43.1%), meaning that even if the election were held today and Trump got all the undecided votes Biden would still have a majority (as we know that doesn't mean winning the presidency, but Samuel Tilden in 1876 was the only candidate who ever lost that way, with an edge of 50.9%, and it wasn't the Electoral College but his party literally selling him out), but that's not happening:

And in Red Wave news

Red Wave. Photo by Cadouri Si Perle, via Wide Open Spaces. Roger Stone used the same shot at his blog a month ago, not about politics but, oddly enough, a standard Republican propaganda account of how Florida's red tides are perfectly natural and nothing to be concerned about, cropped so as to cut out the shore, presumably to make it look less malignant.

This guy caught in Springfield, Missouri, by NPR's Don Gonyea:

GONYEA: Though Trump's prediction of a big red wave is an unusual way to ward off the kind of complacency many GOP leaders are worried about this year as they try to avoid the kind of midterm losses Democrats suffered during the Obama administration. Twenty-three-year-old Ben Lewis stops by the booth in search of buttons and a new Trump flag. At first, his enthusiasm also appears to be through the roof.

BEN LEWIS: I'm definitely a hundred percent more fired up now because I am really excited to have someone that's going to piss a bunch of people off because it's the truth and that's what they need to hear.

GONYEA: But when I ask him about November, he has little to say. He's not even sure who's running. Turns out he's fired up about Trump and re-electing him in 2020, but he has no plans to vote this year. He's just not interested.

But the 2018 election - don't really care?

LEWIS: It's not really my thing. I'm sorry. I just don't really care.

He's not a sample, just one guy, and not even demographically typical, being so young, but to me he's key, bringing together what we know most about the Trump voter, that owning the libs, pissing a specific bunch of people off, is the overwhelming central issue, with what I've been sure of, that they're really not voters.

And nonvoters (yes, I'm riding on my same hobby-horse here of denying the significant existence of Obama-to-Trump voters) were a key part of the Obama electorate too, but not the same ones: less homogeneous ethnically, of course, and skewing younger and poorer, but in particular inspired by hope, not spite.