Time to Update My Stereotypes About Democrats and Republicans

The parties, they are a-changin'

Image courtesy of The Washington Post via Getty.

You may have heard this adage: “In primaries, Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line.” That’s what people used to say, and it used to be true. I, a Democrat, used to spend primary season praying for Republicans to nominate one of the walking freak shows from their Traveling Circus O’ Conservative Loons. I pined for a Steve Forbes or a Herman Cain to be handed the party mantle so that he could get his ass historically kicked in the general election. But it never happened; Republicans always nominated some highly credentialed stiff like John McCain or Mitt Romney. Even George W. Bush had political game in his quirky, Sam Elliott-esque pretending-to-be-a-cowboy way (Sam Elliott is from Portland, Oregon via Northern California, not traditionally cowboy country).

That ended when Republicans nominated Trump. When Trump won the nomination, some felt that he was an accidental nominee, the beneficiary of a failure by the other candidates to take him seriously. This time, there’s no ambiguity: Republicans had a clear choice, and they overwhelmingly chose Trump. Trump is leading the delegate count 995 to 89, which is the type of margin usually reported in state-run press under the headline “DEAR LEADER ACHIEVES ENTHUSIASTIC SUPPORT OF GRATEFUL, NON-THREATENED CITIZENS”.

Republicans also chose Trump even though Haley seems far more likely to beat Biden. Polls this early are spotty — I suspect that “leave me the fuck alone, it’s March” would be leading if that were an option — but Haley usually does far better against Biden than Trump. Those numbers are consistent with my political instincts, which tell me that a 77 year-old two-time popular vote loser currently facing more criminal charges than all of Death Row Records faced in the ‘90s is probably not the strongest candidate. But Trump will be the nominee unless something unexpected happens, such as the heart attack that is now about 30 years overdue.

Meanwhile, “How Do We Replace Joe Biden?” has become a popular Democratic parlor game. We’re getting creative: Maybe something can be done at the convention. Maybe someone can make Biden see that he’s losing. My idea: Lure Biden onto an Amtrak train (easy so far), the train travels up the East Coast, and — whoops! — it gets stuck in the Hudson River Tunnel for nine months. Anyone who’s taken Amtrak to Penn Station knows that this is plausible. And if you’re thinking “couldn’t Biden campaign from the stuck train?”, you have clearly never tried to use Amtrak WiFi. Democrats would have to pick someone else, and not Kamala Harris, whom I would have floating in a rogue hot air balloon over the South Pacific.

Democrats are being strategic and cold. Almost everyone trying to nudge Biden out the door agrees that he’s been a good president. But sentimentality is not in vogue on the left: People are also openly calling for Sonia Sotomayor to retire. You can call this “harsh”, you can call it “Machiavellian”, but I’d call it “being in touch with reality”. Politics is not a summer camp ice-breaker: The goal is not to make people feel happy and good about themselves. Consequential decisions a are being made, and in my opinion, handing the government to a deranged despot and whatever cranks he may appoint is not “nice”.

It seems, then, that Republicans and Democrats have switched roles. Republicans are now picking the candidate that feels right, even if other choices would have a better chance of winning. And Democrats are yearning for the shrewd, strategic choice that would maximize their odds of success (though Biden is blocking them). Republicans have become the ideologues, and Democrats are the heartless automatons. I will be sure to note these changes in my Mental Stereotype Database.

This switch is probably yet another symptom of the GOP becoming a populist party and the Democrats becoming the party of college degree holders. Though I’ve seen no data on this, I’d guess that 70-80 percent of people who have the word “analyst” in their job title vote Democrat. And we know that Trump does well with “low-information” voters, i.e. people who are low on information about how Trump might be damn near the only Republican who could lose. The staid nerds that Republicans used to nominate — Romney, McCain, the Bushes — are now heretics in Trump’s GOP. Times have changed. We should all probably update our knee-jerk assumptions accordingly.

---