Wicked Game: When Losers Run Against Each Other, Everybody Loses
by Tara Carreon
11/28/20
@sethmeyers I greatly enjoyed your joyful declaration of Trump’s defeat:
You said, “More people came out to vote against Donald Trump than have ever come out to vote against any presidential candidate in the history of the United States.” But I also hope you will soon address “the great darkness we cannot fully handle,” and give nuance to your statement that “millions of people did vote for Donald Trump.” After all, you could have equally said that, “after Donald Trump, more people voted against Joe Biden than ever voted against any presidential candidate in the history of the United States.” That’s because loyal Democrats always get to vote for the lesser evil, ever since the Democrats ran Humphrey against Nixon, Carter against Reagan, Clinton against Bush, and Clinton II against Trump, after crushing Bernie’s bid with DNC’s power politics. It's a Wicked Game. That’s why poll numbers on various populist issues outran Biden in many states. Arizona, Montana, and South Dakota legalized marijuana, Oregon decriminalized personal-use drug possession and established a path to psilocybin as medicine for depression & other mental problems, Florida adopted the $15/hr minimum wage, nearly a dozen cities and counties in California, Texas, Oregon and Ohio established or strengthened police oversight boards, and Michigan activists ditched gerrymandering for an Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. People show the policies they favor when voting on issues, voting across forbidden lines that bind them to candidates they do not love. Obviously, many Trump voters in Arizona, Montana & S.Dakota voted to legalize marijuana, & the same for all these other “liberal populist” initiative results. So, wherefore are all those who voted in Florida to raise the minimum wage all “pro-corporate, anti-labor Trumpers?”
The two-party political duopoly, driven by campaigns powered by fear and anger, traps us into voting for the candidate we hate, rather than the one promising the policies we want. That’s why little attention is given to party platforms – The GOP abandoned all effort to frame coherent policy, subject as it was to instantaneous abrogation by Presidential tweet. Yet Trump’s platform-free campaign succeeded so well his followers, believing Biden to be the anti-Christ, cannot fathom how anyone voted for him. Trump needed no platform, because he motivated voters with fear and loathing.