Cook Political: Trump was only 65,009 votes away from winning -- despite Biden's 7 million vote lead

[BumRushDaShow]

53. These same people thought it was "Armageddon" when Obama won

TWICE.

Remember the "FEMA Camps" and the "He's gonna take away ma guns" crowd?

I think trying to tie the suggestion from the OP to narrow things like "defund the police" and "socialism" or other slogans is silly. Similar nonsense was spewed in 2008 (to include Obama attending a "radical Muslim madrassa", etc.), but he won anyway.

The bigger issue is that it also depends on the personality and dynamics of the candidate and certainly the reality show candidate, who was primed to play to the television audience, was forced to actually plumb to further depths then just sloganeering to get voters. And this was done by literally and overtly embracing the most fringe of some of the previously non-voting electorate - the white supremacists and anti-government conspiracy theorists, who are the fruit of the domestic terrorists that orgs like the SPLC and even the FBI, have warned about.

And do keep this in mind - although these factions have been out there for a long time (some iteration since the end of the Civil War) and have been courted by the GOP since Goldwater, they were subsequently thrown on the back burner by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Poppy Bush, & Shrub. However for the first time, they were given free reign after the 2016 election - literally after 50 years of being suppressed during their modern existence.

Whether the demons can be shoved back into the bottle is another story given the "voice" (social media) that has been gifted to them that until recently, was completely unregulated by the creators of that "voice", and is a challenge. But their last appearances in the '90s eventually resulted in them being neutered when their funders were prosecuted and bankrupted. The same needs to happen today.