Remember when the Beltway's Very Serious People were so fu*king giddy over a Republican rebranding scam called the "Tea Party"? It was self-evident at the time to anyone who was not a Beltway hack and was (much, much later) confirmed by conservatives that the "Tea Party" was not
a spontaneous uprising of just good ol' fashion Ordinary Murricans who had never been involved in politics at all but had finally been moved to action by the Corrupt Duopoly (tm Ron Fournier)
but was instead a transparent fraud... designed to get the Bush Regime dead-enders off the hook... for the eight years they had just spent... cheering on the catastrophes... they were now angrily blaming... on the Kenyan Usurper who had stolen their country.
And this is why Very Serious People have been willing to go along with Donald Trump's okey-doke that he was bringing millions (billions? trillions?) of Brand New People into the Republican Party. Y'know, just good ol' fashion Ordinary Murricans who had never been involved in politics at all but had finally been moved to action by the Corrupt blah blah blah...
Except, uh, not so much. From Politico, emphasis added:
Donald Trump Is Not Expanding the GOP
A POLITICO analysis of early-voting data shows little evidence for one of the Republican nominee’s core claims.
By Shane Goldmacher, May 17, 2016
Donald Trump likes to say he has created a political movement that has drawn “millions and millions” of new voters into the Republican Party. “It’s the biggest thing happening in politics,” Trump has said. “All over the world, they’re talking about it,” he's bragged.
But a Politico analysis of the early 2016 voting data show that, so far, it’s just not true.While Trump’s insurgent candidacy has spurred record-setting Republican primary turnout in state after state, the early statistics show that the vast majority of those voters aren’t actually new to voting or to the Republican Party, but rather they are reliable past voters in general elections. They are only casting ballots in a Republican primary for the first time...
Nothing more to see here than the same bigots and meatheads who were gonna vote for the Party of Jefferson Davis in the Fall anyway, prying themselves out of their double-wides a few months early so they could tell their grand-kids that, in the last year of the Reign of the Kenyan Tyrant, they saved Murrica by voting for the fascist of their dreams twice!
excerpted from Driftglass.
