A Trump voter in Millersburg, Pennsylvania has a drastic change of mind about him.
Jonathan Allen (NBC senior national politics reporter): If you could say something to President Trump, he was going to hear you right now, what would it be?
Amanda Robbins (Pennsylvania resident): You are a worthless pile of shit.
Jonathan Allen: And you voted for him how many times?
Amanda Robbins: THREE times. That was my bad. Apparently I'm an idiot.
Source: NBC Meet the Press NOW...
Allen did speak with several other Trump voters who gave Fox News type of responses. But it doesn't take much erosion of the MAGA base for Trump's support to fall below a critical level.
Trump's popular vote margin over Kamala Harris in 2024 was under 1%. Republicans have a small majority in the Senate and a minuscule one in the House.
If just 5% of Trump voters cross over or just stay home on Election Day this November then Republicans are in HYŪGE trouble. Democrats are already far more fired up and enthusiastic about voting than Republicans. A blue wave is nice, but a blue tsunami would be better.
As of Friday, there are just 228 Days until Election Day. Try to do something every day to boost Democratic turnout. Even doing stuff like referring to "Trump gas prices" or "Trump's Iran war" when around low information voters can help.
BTW: Millersburg, Pennsylvania is in PA-10 which is a swing district. The incumbent US Representative is Republican Scott Perry. Perry won PA-10 in 2024 by a margin of just 1.26%. Replacing Trump supporters like Perry with Democrats in Congress is the only way to curb Trump during his last two years in office.
A new book by Jonathan Allen of NBC News and Amie Parnes of The Hill has details about the Harris campaign's botched attempt to schedule an
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes for NBC News:
Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t performing well in softball interviews as her sugar high faded in September and early October.
But if she wanted to expand her support — and she needed to — she would have to expose herself to tough questioning. That was particularly important with men—specifically young men—who were not buying what she was selling.
The obvious answer: Joe Rogan. A late-1990s sitcom star turned bro-with-a-brain podcaster, Rogan boasted a subscriber base that amounted to a total eclipse of the genre’s universe, with nearly 15 million signed up just on Spotify. His 2018 interview with Elon Musk, during which the Tesla and SpaceX founder smoked pot and sipped whiskey, garnered tens of millions of views on YouTube and crashed the next-generation car company’s stock.
The vast majority of Rogan’s guests and listeners were white men, presenting Harris with a potentially golden opportunity to prove her mettle by walking into the lion’s den.
On October 11, Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, the aide in charge of digital strategy, made the first Zoom call to start negotiating with Rogan’s reps. He did not know what to expect. These might be juiced-up, UFC-looking supplement people, he thought. He was surprised—perhaps a tad disappointed—to find out that Rogan’s associates were more like Hollywood agents. In that vein, they outlined the podcaster’s conditions for an interview: no staff in the studio, no topic restrictions, and Harris would have to sign a waiver.
There was one more item in the small print: Harris would have to come to Austin, Texas. Rogan’s reps said that might be negotiable, but he had only once done an interview with an out-of-studio guest. That was leaker Edward Snowden, who was wanted in the United States at the time.
Along with fellow Harris campaign advisers Stephanie Cutter and Brian Fallon, Flaherty offered up that Harris would be happy to talk about social media censorship, weed, and other issues they thought would be of most interest to his listeners. From their perspective, it was a suggestion of possible topics, not an exhaustive or exclusive list. That’s not what Rogan wanted to talk about. “Joe just wants to talk about the economy, the border, and abortion,” one of his reps said, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
[...]
For all of former President Donald Trump’s work to reach apolitical voters through podcasts, YouTube, and other outlets, Harris positioned herself to score a coup by grabbing the biggest megaphone of them all. If she did, she would be exploiting a rift between Rogan and Trump.
Rogan had called Trump a “man baby” and a “threat to democracy” in 2022, vowing not to interview the former president. At the time, the beef was just one more sign of the social stigma attached to Trump after the January 6 assault on the Capitol, said one longtime Trump adviser. But when Rogan appeared to endorse independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in August, Trump fired back on the Truth Social media platform: “It will be interesting to see how loudly Joe Rogan gets BOOED the next time he enters the UFC Ring??? MAGA2024.,” Trump wrote.
At the same time, Rogan was hardly Mr. Popular inside Harris’s camp. Her brother in law, Tony West, longtime adviser Minyon Moore and others argued against putting Harris on the podcast, especially after her first venture into politically tough terrain—an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier in the middle of the Rogan negotiations—bombed.
There was no telling what Rogan might ask her or how he would treat her. Plus, his “antiwoke” crusade had made him a pariah on the hard left. They were overruled by O’Malley Dillon’s crew, but not because the concerns were considered invalid. “Even for those of us who were in favor of it, it was a close call,” said one of the Harris advisers involved in the back-and-forth.
[...]
For many Democratic operatives outside the campaign, the October 22 announcement that Harris would hold a Houston rally felt like a palm-to-face moment. She was going to lose Texas, by a lot, and a visit would not force Trump to spend his limited campaign money there.
Her aides scheduled the rally for a Friday night in the fall — October 25 — in Texas! It was as if no one on her team knew that the night reserved for high school football was more sacred than Easter in the state. Campaign adviser David Plouffe responded to the criticism publicly, explaining that Harris wanted to shine a spotlight on a place where she believed Trump’s anti-abortion policies had done the most damage to women’s health.
Only a few people knew the real reason: the whole Houston rally was built to put her in proximity to Rogan. The ongoing negotiations on that were touch-and-go.
Flaherty had called his Rogan contacts on October 18, before the rally was set.
“We could do Friday, the 25th,” Flaherty said.
[...]
In this wild hand of Texas Hold ’Em, Harris aides thought they had one more ace to play. Beyoncé was in Houston and willing to perform at the rally. “The plan changed like 20 times that day, and they landed on her singing ‘Freedom’ a cappella before Harris walked on stage,” said one person familiar with the back-and-forth between the campaign and Beyoncé’s team.
As consolation prizes go, a Beyoncé performance ranked pretty high. She was a bigger star than Rogan — a bona fide global diva — and “Freedom” was the campaign’s theme song. But Beyoncé would not give Harris the potential benefits of a Rogan interview: demonstration of her willingness to go outside her comfort zone and connection to a new audience.
Worse for Harris, Beyoncé didn't perform. She would speak. But she would not sing.
No Rogan. No “Freedom.” The campaign kept its poker face, but it had played out a losing hand. Trump spent three hours with Rogan in an interview that instantly went viral. The contrast amounted to a “traumatic event,” said one Harris aide, “that I will never forget.” But it wasn’t quite over. Rogan would later blame the missed connection on Harris and accuse her of refusing to talk about marijuana, even though her platform included legalization.
According to the FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes set to come out April 1st, Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris attempted to schedule an interview with Trump endorser Joe Rogan in order to stem the tide of young men defecting to either the couch or to Donald Trump. Alas, Harris didn’t get to be interviewed by Rogan, and thus she lost the election on November 6th in a heartbreaker that will reverberate.
Atomica and Johnny Quick have a son they don't tell you about named Roy Allen. Once, when Roy was upset that he didn't hit the ball at baseball practice, Atomica tried to reassure him that there were "plenty of other balls in the sea," and that he had no hand-eye coordination, proving she is for one a bad parent.
While you were hyper-focused on the latest @AOC tempest in a teapot, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the Trump tax cut will add more than $1.6 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
