The Reasonable Majority Is No Longer Silent

I will always believe that in both 2016 and 2024 many voters who cast ballots for the Felon were attracted by his granting a license to be overtly racist and to a lesser extent a desire to "own the libs", if you will. Yes, in both elections concerns a false narrative about economic security were grasp by much of the main stream media as the principal reason for votes cast for the Felon, but one cannot underestimate the racial animus and grievance towards those deemed "other" that motivated many voters to discard morality and decency and cast their vote for the Felon.  Now, that these voters - and those who were too lazy to vote - are seeming the fruits of their ill cast votes/laziness and are not liking what they are seeing.  Inflation and consumer prices are high and increasing while the Felon - someone who has likely never grocery shopped or paid his own utility bills during his lifetime - claims "affordability" is a Democrat hoax. Meanwhile, the brutality and deliberate cruelty by masked ICE thugs on daily display (and the fact that citizens are being threatened and/or abused) has generated revulsion among all but perhaps the most racist of the MAGA base.  Moreover, the obscene grifting and corruption of the Felon and his minions combined with the travesties done by ICE and Felon/GOP jihad against government programs that benefit millions is causing many who have heretofore remained silent to speak out in condemnation of what is happening. Indeed, I have been surprised by friends and acquaintances who I perceived as "conservative" that approvingly read this blog and/or have begun to speak out themselves.  A column in the New York Times looks at the so-called reasonable majority that is signaling that is increasingly unhappy with the Felon and his regime. Here are excerpts:

Believing in democracy does not require faith that majorities are always right. It does mean having confidence that most of your fellow citizens will, over time, approach public questions with a basic reasonableness. Abraham Lincoln, tradition has it, said it more pithily: “You cannot fool all the people all the time.”

A corollary to Lincoln, that you can’t fool all the people who voted for you all the time, explains the sharp decline in President Trump’s approval ratings.

A significant share of the voters who backed Mr. Trump have decided that he has largely ignored the primary issue that pushed them his way, the cost of living. A billionaire regularly mocking concern about affordability only makes matters worse. They see him as distracted by personal obsessions and guilty of overreach . . . . Many of his former supporters see him breaking promises he made, notably on not messing with their access to health care.

Some abuses are too blatant to be ignored. A recent The Economist/You Gov poll found that 56 percent of Americans said Mr. Trump was using his office for personal gain; only 32 percent didn’t. A similar 56 percent saw Mr. Trump as directing the Justice Department to go after people he saw as his political enemies; just 24 percent didn’t. . . . . They may not be glued to every chaotic twist of this presidency, but they do pay attention and have concluded, reasonably, that this is not what they voted for.

How many? Let’s take Mr. Trump’s 49.8 percent of the 2024 popular vote as a base line and compare it with his approval ratings. . . . This suggests that 15 to 25 percent of his voters have changed their minds.

All this is obviously good news for Democrats, who extended their 2025 hot streak by winning the mayoralty in Miami on Tuesday. But it’s more than that. It dispels myths about Mr. Trump’s having magical powers to distract and deceive. It shows that for all the legitimate concerns about the breakdown of our media and information systems, reality can still get through.

The decay of Mr. Trump’s standing is a rebuke to widespread claims a year ago that his victory represented a fundamental realignment in American politics, akin to those led by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s or Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The case for a Trump realignment was built in large part on Republican wishcasting and Democratic despondency, married to a few facts, including substantial Trump gains among Latinos and young men. True, the Republicans secured majorities in the Senate and the House. But the G.O.P. won two fewer seats in the House in 2024 than it did two years earlier — far from the sweeping gains typically yielded by realigning elections.

But a nationwide trend in a single election is not the same as a realignment, and the president’s mercurial extremism squandered whatever opportunity the G.O.P. might have had to expand its map. My hunch is that Republicans will regret what they allowed him to throw away.

The Times again produced those fine county maps for the 2025 governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia and the recent special House election in Tennessee. But this time, nearly all the arrows were blue, pointing toward the Democrats, and G.O.P. gains among Latinos and young men were largely wiped out. Genuine realignments don’t collapse so quickly.

Another response to 2024 was a backlash against Trump voters. Mr. Trump does better with voters who lack college degrees, and he once declared, “I love the poorly educated.” Some who were aghast at his victory blamed the outcome on the irrationality of low-information voters.

But to view some large share of the electorate as irrational is wrong and ought to be anathema to anyone who claims to hold a democratic worldview. Far more persuasive is the analysis that . . . . voters “actually do reason about parties, candidates and issues.” They draw on “information shortcuts” to “think about who and what political parties stand for” and “what government can and should do.” They engage in “low-information rationality.”

That so many swing voters used a Trump vote to express their dissatisfaction with the 2024 status quo has certainly had calamitous consequences. What should hearten friends of democracy is how many voters have weighed what Mr. Trump has done and found him acting, well, unreasonably.

Especially striking are the findings of a Public Religion Research Institute poll this fall that asked whether Mr. Trump had gone “too far” in a variety of his actions. Among respondents, 54 percent said he had gone too far on tariffs, as did 55 percent on cuts to grants to universities and 60 percent on cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Trump and the G.O.P. are especially vulnerable on cuts to enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies: A KFF survey last month found that 74 percent of Americans said they should be extended, not eliminated.

Even on immigration, Mr. Trump’s signature issue, his radical approach was unpopular: In the Public Religion Research Institute poll, 65 percent of respondents opposed deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons, 63 percent opposed arresting undocumented immigrants who have resided in the United States with no criminal records, and 58 percent said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should not conceal their identities with masks or use unmarked vehicles.

Poll numbers are fickle. But in 2025, Trumpian flimflam hit its limits — even in the G.O.P. when a majority of Republicans in the Indiana State Senate defied the president’s demand for a midterm congressional redistricting. His power to intimidate is ebbing. A reasonable majority exists. It’s searching for alternatives to a leader and a movement it has found wanting.