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Writer's pictureHowie Klein

Is There More To The GOP Than Just A Home For Cranks, Crackpots, Conspiracy-Mongers And Grifters?

Over A Third Of Nikki Haley Voters Have Decided To Vote For Kamala



According to new polling results from Blueprint 45% of Nikki Haley voters plant vote for Trump and 36% plan to vote for Kamala. “Trump’s level of support from Haley voters in the poll,” wrote Sam Stein and Marc Caputo, “represents a significant drop in support for Trump, who won those same voters against Joe Biden by 59-28 percent. That 22 percentage point change in preference (from plus 31 percent for Trump in 2020 to plus 9 percent in this survey) could represent a swing of millions of votes… [The survey] shows slippage for Trump among both Haley voters who identified as Republicans and those who identified as independents. Only 49 percent of Republican Haley voters plan to vote for Trump in 2024, compared to 64 percent who voted for him in 2020. Among independent Haley voters, only 38 percent said they were voting for Trump, compared with 48 percent who backed him in 2020.”


Kamala, who doesn’t seem to be doing as well with working class voters as Biden did, might beat Trump in the battleground states with those Haley voters.


Arizona

  • Trump- 492,299 (78.8%)

  • Haley- 110,966 (17.8%)

Georgia

  • Trump- 497,594 (84.5%)

  • Haley- 77,902 (13.2%)

Michigan

  • Trump- 758,612 (68.1%)

  • Haley- 296,200 (26.6%)

Nevada

  • Trump (name wasn’t on ballot but his backers voted for “none of these candidates”)- 50,763 (63.3%)

  • Haley- 24,583 (30.6%)

North Carolina

  • Trump-793,978 (73.8%)

  • Haley- 250,838 (23.3%)

Pennsylvania

  • Trump- 792,692 (83.4%)

  • Haley- 158,178 (16.6%)

Wisconsin

  • Trump- 477,103 (79.2%)

  • Haley- 76,841 (12.8%)


Earlier we talked about how the MAGA-fied GOP has allowed itself to sink into swamp of conspiracy theories, specifically in regard to anti-semitism and hurricanes. They’re turning off sane voters— even as they attract poorly educated voters who see elections as some kind of reality TV show. Yesterday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg looked at the dangerous way Republicans now see public health, again, something sure to lose them some voters. The new GOP perspective is no longer relegated to the bizarre fringe of the party. It’s front and center now. “Around the country,” wrote Stolberg, “nearly 1,000 candidates, nearly all Republican, are seeking office with the backing of Stand for Health Freedom, a Florida nonprofit… [T]he remnants of [RFK Jr]’s campaign apparatus are organizing their efforts around Trump’s presidential bid. On Monday, former Kennedy campaign officials unveiled a new super PAC, The MAHA Alliance, led by Del Bigtree, Kennedy’s former communications director, and Brigid Rasmussen, his former chief of staff.”


More than just rebranded anti-vaccination activism, the medical freedom movement marries fierce resistance to public health measures like vaccine mandates; deep suspicion of pharmaceutical companies and federal regulatory agencies; and an embrace of alternative medicine and natural foods. Those foods include “raw,” or unpasteurized, milk, which is being promoted by right-wing commentators and which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deems dangerous. Kennedy has said he drinks it.
Many in the movement, including Kennedy, heavily emphasize freedom of speech. They feel they have been “canceled” by government agencies and social media platforms trying to tamp down Covid misinformation.
At its extremes, the movement brings together what Bigtree called “the crunchy granola moms” on the left and the libertarian right. But it has found a political home in Republican-led states and with Republican candidates.
Florida [of course] is the movement’s epicenter. When Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed legislation banning Covid vaccine mandates last year, he bragged that he “positioned Florida as the national leader for medical freedom.” The state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has repeatedly contradicted C.D.C. guidance.
During a measles outbreak earlier this year, Dr. Ladapo left it up to parents to decide whether to send their children to school, even if the children were unvaccinated. Last month, Dr. Ladapo advised Floridians to avoid mRNA vaccines, claiming— without evidence— that they posed an “unknown risk of potential adverse impacts.”
In Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, recently signed legislation that requires parents to be informed of their right to opt out of school vaccination requirements. In Mississippi, health officials were forced to begin offering religious exemptions to school vaccination requirements last year after losing a lawsuit brought with financial backing from Bigtree’s group.
… As the movement grows in influence, the C.D.C. is recording a dip in vaccination rates and a resurgence of measles, the most contagious of the common childhood diseases. There have been 13 measles outbreaks so far in 2024, compared with four in 2023, endangering those with immune disorders and those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.
“Immunization is not an individual decision; it’s a community decision,” said Dr. Alan R. Hinman, who ran immunization programs for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980s. The medical freedom movement’s emphasis on individual choice, he said, is “a very selfish approach.”
The idea of a political movement that rejects expertise and prioritizes personal choice in an epidemic is deeply troubling to public health experts, who worry that public health powers will be curtailed if Trump wins in November. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, would bar the C.D.C. from making vaccine recommendations, which are based on the advice of experts.
“What does doing your own research mean?” asked Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Doing your own research means looking on the internet and getting other people’s opinions. It doesn’t really mean doing your research because if you wanted to do your research, you would have read the roughly 300 pages that described the vaccine.”
The concept of “medical freedom” has deep roots in the United States. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, alternative medicine practitioners, describing themselves as “fighters for health freedom” or “medical libertarians,” got involved in state politics, to “force recognition of their own way of doing medicine,” said Elena Conis, a medical historian at University of California, Berkeley and the author of “Vaccine Nation.”
The current crop of candidates suggests the nation might be “returning to a time when the medical freedom movement was robust enough and popular enough in this country that it could support political candidates,” she said. “What’s new is that in the present there is a stronger alignment between the medical freedom movement and the right.”
…So far, candidates [which includes Dennis Kucinich, now a full-fledged crackpot running for Congress in Ohio as a spoiler] advocating “medical freedom” have had mixed success. A slate of candidates running for a hospital board in Sarasota, Fla., lost in a primary in August. The group included Mary Flynn O’Neill, who runs America’s Future, a conservative nonprofit, and is the sister of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.


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3 Kommentare


ptoomey
11. Okt.

I hope that Ethel K was not informed of 1 of her sons' doings in her final months. She had enough trauma in her lifetime.


RFK has always been my 1 of my heroes. Ethel being there when he was shot and then having to raise 11 kids on her own had to be extraordinarily difficult, even with the large house and estate and the family $.


I spent an afternoon with her son Joe II when he was campaigning for Uncle Ted at Notre Dame during the 1980 IN primary. He clearly had the gift in retail politicking skills. Alas, societal norms about extracurricular activities by married pols had changed by his time.


An era ended with her passing…


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Gast
10. Okt.

The summ total of nazi voters yearn for a reich where no other ideas are allowed. They don't want a spirited debate about anything. They want their way and to forcibly suppress everything else.


Fortunately for the nazis, nobody has stopped this since the powell memo in 1971. And nobody is stopping it today. Piecemeal erosion of voting rights, focused mostly on nonwhite democrap voters, has gone unchallenged by anyone for over 50 years. Fraudulent vote counting has become practiced and pretty open since 2000. The supreme court has been stacked by nazis since SDOC's bush v. gore atrocity. And nobody has done anything.


And while the nazis have been subtracting millions from the voter rolls and stacking all federal…


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Gast
10. Okt.

A third of those Haley voters might be helpful... IF they show up. Many won't.

And many of the democrap voters won't show up too... over genocide, among other things.


Will the trump anti-red compensate for the kamala anti-blue? But then what happens when you have to factor in the further nazi weighted electoral college. Won't know for another month or so.


And all this may be moot. The nazis will puke up slates of fake electors that YOUR corrupt pussies will have to suppress. AND the nazis will likely deploy their legions of brownshirts to attempt another coup... and your corrupt pussies will have to put THAT down.


But what do pussies always do? Why, nothing at all. That…

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