Stupor Tuesday

Back in 2008, when I lived in Connecticut, I spent six days as a registered Republican solely so I could vote for Ron Paul in the primary. (And as soon as I cast my vote that Tuesday, I made haste to the registrar's office to change my party affiliation back to "independent," because I wasn't going to be a Republican one freaking nanosecond longer than I had to.)

This year I'm in Virginia, which lets people vote in primaries without registering as an official party member first. I was going to cast a Republican vote for not-Trump, but realized I could not in good conscience vote for any of his rivals, since all seek to use the power of the state to force pregnant women to remain so against their will. So I voted for a Democrat.

[Sings] ♫♩ I feel dirty, oh so dirty, I feel filthy, and slimy, and groooosss....♪ ♫ [/Sings]

For all that I'm horrified by the thought of what a President Trump would do to America, I highly doubt he'll have a chance of winning a general election, unless some left-wing/Democratic type runs a third-party campaign to split the not-Republican vote. I base this not on any faith in the alleged intelligence of the American electorate, but on simple demographics: back during the 2012 election, when Romney & Co. were convinced they'd win and win handily against Obama, I remember reading that a Romney adviser admitted Romney's campaign strategy was to focus exclusively on winning a supermajority of white voters whilst ignoring everyone else. However, the same adviser admitted that, due to demographic trends, 2012 would be the last year that the white vote alone would be enough to win the presidency (though in retrospect it clearly wasn't). But Romney merely ignored white voters, whereas Trump has actively insulted or threatened most of them.

With luck, a Trump candidacy (and subsequent electoral drubbing) will force the national GOP to rethink the extreme social conservative strategy it's pursued these past many years, and finally realize "Gay people and friends thereof, scientists, secularists, non-whites, and sexually active women [willing or otherwise] who don't want to be mommies yet" are voters to court, not threats to campaign against. 

EDIT: Oh, yeah, I forgot to identify which Democrat I actually voted for! I can't quite bring myself to do so; I'll say only that it's somebody who shares a name with a certain internationally famous seller of fried chicken. (Yes, I know, the bulk of his economic ideas are not merely bad, but downright hallucinatory. But every major-party candidate stinks regarding economic matters, albeit in different ways, and at least the not-Colonel admits that American police brutality is a serious problem, and doesn't share Clinton's foreign-policy hawkishness. Plus, Congress would block his worst economic proposals anyway.)