Blame is a tricky thing to assign in an election, and most of the substantial reasons for the difficulties of this election, I went over in a previous post. But there's no doubt that one key reason for why Cruz lost this one, was the inability of his supporters to convert those who weren't inclined towards him, to him. And one of the key reasons I've seen for that, and tried to warn against from early last summer on, was the ineffective and counterproductive obsession that many of his supporters had, to either begin their every comment with, or give prominent place to, an insult to those that they should have been trying to persuade.
So come on all of you out there (many of you Rubio supporters too, you know who you are) who've so enthusiastically enjoyed your memeing and shouting of 'Drumpf!', 'Stupid!', 'Cultist!', take a look at Cruz's loss and withdrawal from the race, and take the bow for it that you so richly deserve.
I'll do my best not to be bitter about it.
No promises.
As a Cruz supporter, I saw, heard and read the most bizarre behavior. Most of it was from Trump supporters bashing Cruz. I'm somewhat of a political junkie and members of my family are usually interested in what I have to say (especially the night before an election). I'm not saying I'm the smartest person at the family reunion - just the one that has read "everything political" and from sources, both left and right - as I feel the truth is somewhere in the middle. But, this election was different - not only did we (family) disagree, they didn't want to hear what I had to say and they didn't like me asking policy questions about their pick.
ReplyDeleteI could tell (early on) from the comments left after internet articles, that many of the Trump supporters were not typical Republican base supporters or conservatives. Many of the comments were typical of Huffpo commenters - one line, no punctuation, name calling and childish. Just MY observations.
Anonymous said "...Most of it was from Trump supporters bashing Cruz..."
ReplyDeleteCruz supporter here too, and while I've certainly seen some vile stuff, from my position watching it from the start, the ones who kicked the vicious cycle off with charges of "You're not a Real Conservative!", and the 'Stupid!''s started (in lower volume) with the Rubio, and then Cruz people, towards the Trump people... who took it and ran. And the Cruz/Rubio folks in the NeverTrump bunch are dug in deep with continuing the same.
It won't end well. But the main reason for the problems, is that no one, on any of the sides, agree on what they even mean by 'conservative', 'constitutional', 'Primary' and on and on it goes, as I said in a previous post, it's like a
Weaponized version of Abbot & Costello's 'Who's on 1st?!'