Firstly, @squareRoot, do you have a mind of your own? Just write what you want to say and finished. These Copy/paste excerpts from writers is frankly annoying. And none of us care about the attribution, especially since 90% of the time you preface it the way you do here: “Jonathan Tobin said” etc.
Here is the big problem the GOP has. Trump barely won in 2016 because he was running against the most hated politician ever. People DESPISED Hillary, even dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. Come 2020, even though he was a decent (in my book, I know a lot of you have a different metric and that’s ok) President, people were in my opinion so sick of the constant circus, whether legitimate or blown out of proportion, that they voted for Biden, simply because they wanted someone that represented “normal” which Joe Biden was. Thus, the aberration that was 2016, in which centrists and the few remaining Blue Dog Democrats voted for Trump, was “corrected”, and they voted for the person they most likely would’ve voted for anyway.
2022 showed that. The Democrats managed to gin up enough anger about the Roe V. Wade repeal to stave off the promised GOP Blue Wave that never materialized, and regained the votes of whit working-class suburban women, which is a key demographic for them if they want to win.
Now we get to 2024. The media restarts the Trump is Hitler train, begins protecting Biden as in 2020, and the Democrats get cocky. Biden challenges Trump to a debate, thinking that Trump will say no and look weak, or accept and look like a maniac so that they would have campaign rhetoric about how unhinged “Orange Man” is. Unfortunately, just as in 2016 when the Democrats believed their own hype that Hillary would beat Trump soundly because he was so terrible and took their foot off the gas, they believed their own rhetoric that the GOP claims that Biden was deteriorating mentally was just classic right-wing misinformation. Biden walks in and gets his doors blown off. The cat is out of the bag, and the emperors lack of clothes is there for all to see. Now all those voters who voted for the left in ’20 and ’22 started telling internal Democrat pollsters “Yeah, I know he was the normal guy but….oh my god did you see that!?”. They panicked, especially once they realized that he was so far gone that he was convinced (or Jill was, same thing) that he would stay. What I believe happened is that they didn’t give him a choice. told Jill and Joe that if he didn’t voluntarily step down they would “25th amendment” him.
Now the question is how many of those in-between voters, naturally more inclined to vote Dems as in ’20 and ’22, were in the Trump camp long enough to resist the next few months of “Trump is crazy and Kamala is “NORMAL”.