UPDATED: The Meaning Of Left Gangsta Theater
Gary Gindler has an insightful article at American Thinker this morning: The Gangsterization of the Democrat Party . In a way it complements what we were discussing yesterday in Trends In Voter Thinking . In that post and the comments that followed we noted:
1. The intentionally flawed structuring of mainstream polling at this juncture.
2. Troubling signs for the Dems in polling results, nevertheless.
3. Further ominous signs arising from harder data, especially voter registration trends and the thinking behind those trends.
In the comments, readers also raised two additional positive factors for Trump:
4. Trump's record setting fund raising has only accelerated as Antifa and BLM have taken to the streets in Blue cities and the Establishment has embraced a radical eradication of American history and a war on Whites. Meanwhile, Trump has put his fund raising to good use by building a GOTV operation that dwarf's that of Biden.
5. Trump has enjoyed massive turnout, running unopposed in primaries--a sure sign of massive voter enthusiasm--while Biden has struggled even though all other candidates have long since dropped out.
Gindler's thesis, in a sense, plays of these clear signs of a coming Trump victory. Indeed, that is his basic proposition:
... it looks as if the Democrats know that Trump has already won the 2020 election.
The point of the Gangsta Theater, then, is simply to attempt to induce Trump to expend the massive political capital he has built up in responding to the astro-turfed "protests:
Democrats are pushing Trump to waste his political and monetary capital on the fight against the Democrat rioters in the Democrat states and squander all the political ammunition before the official start of the presidential race.
You will hear GOPe voices calling on Trump to "do something," to appease, to repress. Trump isn't falling for any of it so far, just as he refused to invest his political capital in shutting down the country--leaving that to Blue state and local politicians, who now own that issue:
[Trump's] team focuses on election issues. So while riots concentrate in heavily Democratic states, nobody should expect any reckless movement from the White House. Stopping vandalism in the states that traditionally vote for Democrats will not offer Trump a single electoral vote. In a simple Machiavellian way, Trump forces the electorate in such states to enjoy the preview of socialism they dream of.
However, by putting the onus on Blue state politicians for the craziness of the Left, we may see a few states (Minnesota?) flip red where the Dems were able in 2016 to eke out narrow victories. At the very least, Dems will be forced to expend resources defending states they were previously able to take for granted, while Trump's base of support will remain largely unchallenged.
The Gangsta Theater strategy is a strategy born of desperation. But so far the Dems appear to be once again underestimating just how canny a politician Trump is.
UPDATE: A significant update via Breitbart: Americans Defund Democrats in Statehouse Elections as Democrats Seek to Defund Police .
Desperate strategies, as outlined above, can backfire significantly--and in unexpected ways. Dems and the Left, deeply afflicted with TDS, with Trump living rent free in their heads, may not have factored local politics into their strategy--even though it was their own Tip O'Neill who famously propounded that "All politics is local." But that was a different Dem party.
Americans significantly decreased contributions to Democrats running for state legislature seats in the second quarter as the Democrat Party has turned hard left, fundraising information announced this week shows.
The lackluster performance by Democrats at the state level could have broader national implications. First off, state-level political trends sometimes forecast later looming national trends —”from the State House to the White House,” the saying goes.
But more importantly, the state legislatures elected this year will handle redistricting next year heading into the 2022 cycle—influencing the direction of and perhaps control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.
The drop-off in Democrat Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) fundraising—which has Democrats $20 million shy of their stated cycle-long goal of $50 million total—comes as their Republican counterparts nearly doubled the total raised by Democrats in the second quarter.
...
“Placating the woke Left’s tirade against America may play well on Twitter and cable news, but it looks like anarchy is too tough a sell for liberal enablers like the DLCC to persuade donors to keep contributing to their radical mission,” Lenze Morris, the national press secretary for the RSLC, told Breitbart News. “Defunding the police, overreaching economic shutdowns, and shaming those who are proud of their country – it’s all a bridge too far for Americans, and state Democrats right now own every bit of this ludicrous agenda.”