the rats fleeing the sinking ship

Trump’s loser stench is getting stronger and stronger, and it’s not just Republicans distancing themselves anymore, like you’ve been seeing in the federal Senate – Harris just picked up a popular Georgia Republican’s endorsement.

Try not to hold it against her.

It’s for the obvious reasons, of course; they’re starting to think he’s going to go down hard, and he’s going to drag a lot of them down with him. If they’re hedging this hard with three months left in the campaign, they either have some incredibly strong sinking feelings in their stomachs, or some really remarkable numbers from polls they trust.

So this isn’t really about the Presidential race, this time. Everything I’ve said before is still critical; get to your Trumpy family and friends. Use Vance as a lever to open their eyes; he’s just as venial and bizarre as Trump is, but with no charisma and more importantly no celebrity, so lacks the shielding it brings. Talk about climate change (real), talk about the threat to the Republic (very fucking real), talk about just how goddamn weird it is that they want to demand genetic tests to make sure women who were assigned female at birth and grew up as girls and then women are actually women by some racist misogynist standard they just made up. Talk about all of it, chip away at them one day after another, tick tick tick tick.

Do all of that, but also, this is about voting downballot, which is to say, all the way down to not just Senate and not just House, but state and local races.

Lower level Republicans are starting to taste their own fear, and that’s good. This can’t be just about the fascist on top, but all the chibi cheeto mussolinis who bought into this nightmare.

The Republican Party has to fucking hurt for putting us all, and this country, and the entire world, through this hell. And it has to hurt for a while.

Tuesday is the last day of voting here in Washington State. It’s a primary election; we’re picking the final two candidates on the November ballot. Because of our history and reasons, we don’t have guaranteed partisan elections in November; some of our ballots then will be between two Democrats, or two Republicans, or one of each, or one of a major party and a minor party or an independent. It’s not the ranked choice voting system I think we need, but it’s better than the usual way.

Have you voted yet? If not, get it done.

Many of you may have primary elections soon as well. Get that done, because this is where you do vote your absolute conscience, should you so choose.

But then in November, remember – the Republican Party must pay for this, and not just Trump. It has to hurt all the way down. So get familiar with your Federal representatives, get familiar with your state and local elections, figure out what popular initiatives you might have on your ballot, because all of it matters, and all of it will keep mattering for years to come.

Not that it didn’t matter before, of course. But local elections are how you get cops browsing for books to ban, how you get libraries declared “18 and over only”, how you get women charged with murder for taking an abortion pill. The Federal is where this evil shit has been unleashed, but it’s at the state and local where it gets enforced.

(E.g., this year, the rightists are trying to undo our efforts to fight climate change in order to boost and gas companies, via Initiative 2117; they’re trying to wipe out the capital gains tax and give the wealthy a huge tax break, via Initiative 2109; they want to throttle long-term health care, via Initiative 2124; a very predictable “parent’s bill of rights” which is substantially about raising the same sorts of racist and anti-LGBT hell they’ve been raising elsewhere, via Initiative 2081. All these will be on our ballot in November.)

So keep your eye on the big prize, of course. The number one job is driving “day one dictator” Trump into the dumpster fire of history. But the number two job, and only slightly less important, is the repudiation all the way down to school board and – if you have such an elected position – dogcatcher.

Every elected Republican has to take the hit. Every single one of them. Even if it’s just by winning by meaningfully less than they’re used to winning. Whatever you can do, this is the year to do it.

92 days remain.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.