"If only the republicans dialed back X and adopted the liberal views on it more people would vote for them"
STFU, this is literally what every lib said about everything from illegals to trannies, and what Jeb Bush ran on. If you want Jeb Bush as president so much just admit it instead of beating around the bush faggot
Allow me to play devil's advocate here.
The Republican Party has, historically, been the champion of globohomo insofar as free trade, deindustrialisation, global interventionism, and corporatism is concerned. It wasn't until Bill Clinton's tenure when Democrats began to adopt similar policies, but without the neocon flair to it all (i.e. they were just plain old neoliberals). It really can't be stressed enough how
awful the Republican Party actually was between the advent of Reagan, Dubya tanking neocon's popular perception with the Iraq war, and McCain's grip on power before his death.
You mock him for voting Democrat because the unions told him to, but honestly? That's not necessarily a bad reason to vote Democrat in general, at least historically. Democrats, much like UK Labour, were the party of unions and historically left-of-centre economics like protectionism, higher taxes, social safety nets, and so on. The Democrat party
I grew up with (i.e. between the late 90s through the present day) is definitely
not the Democrat party of FDR, JFK, or Carter. Nevertheless, you have decades of institutionalised support within these voting blocs that
only Democrats had access to (despite going full-tilt into the neoliberal globohomo world order).
2024 being the first election cycle where
Democrats failed to retain their unionised support base is a huge step forward, but it wasn't because of any policy successes that the neocon-era Republican Party have under their belt, much less being friendlier toward labourers and blue collar workers. That's a trend that only began when Trump shook up the Republicans in 2016, and properly manifested itself in 2024 when 4 years of Biden's gangrenous corpse made it clear that Democrats no longer gave a single iota about the unions or the workers they represent.
I'm not affiliated with any political party, but it must be said: I didn't vote Republican for 3 election cycles in a row because I'm a staunch advocate for the GOP and its historically distasteful party line; I voted for
Trump 3 election cycles in a row because he's actually putting left-of-centre economic policies in effect that I actually
do agree with (i.e. gutting the entrenched federal bureaucracy, shutting down wasteful government aid programmes that fund the NGO industrial complex, aggressively using tariffs to correct decades old trade imbalances, nearshoring or outright repatriating manufacturing back to the USA, etc).
If the Republicans fail to understand
why their party has the popular mandate now, they absolutely
will lose their narrow margins and fail to make inroads with potentially new voting blocs they've attracted
extremely recently.
