...and with voter suppression of minorities, it might actually go up, the rethuglican playbook will continue to win. What's the playbook?
Demonize anything other than white christian nationalism.
Plenty of ink has been spilled over whether the Biden administration’s Israel policy cost it the 2024 election, but the data suggests that there has been a clear shift. Exit polling conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights group, found in 2020 that Biden earned 69 percent of the Muslim vote, compared to Trump’s 17 percent. Four years later in 2024, Harris earned only 20 percent, while Trump received 21 percent and third-party candidate Jill Stein notched 53 percent. That is a lot of voters ripe for the taking.The shift in Muslim voters’ politics is comparable to that of America’s Hispanic electorate, which was considered solidly Democratic until Trump arrived. In 2024, he captured 42 percent of the Latino vote as discourse around immigration doomed the Biden and Harris campaigns. Ironically, Latinos now may swing back to Democrats in 2026, thanks to Trump’s deeply unpopular mass-deportation agenda. The current vitriolic rhetoric being spewed in Texas by Republicans could similarly push Muslims right into Democratic hands.
This doesn’t surprise Hussein, who senses that Texas Republicans’ true loyalty always goes back to white Christian nationalist voters. “I think it probably appeals to a portion of the base. I think it’s also a distraction from other things that matter to Texans,” he told me. “It’s a reliable boogeyman to blame Muslims.”
Given what a terrible job the rethuglicans have done in this two year window (and every other two year window going back the last 20 or 30 years), they should be run out of town on a rail. A rational electorate would only elect 20% of rethuglicans to office. But we're not a rational electorate. We believe in stuff that isn't there. So we vote for the kooks way more than we should.
Alienating Muslims, Latinos, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, etc. is fine. The rethuglicans will still probably retain control of the Senate just based on their white christian nationalist power bloc. And on those cycles of INCREDIBLE stupidity, like 2024, then the rethugs can run the table and as a results can completely dismantle anything that is good that is keeping America unpolluted and trying to help the middle class keep their head above water.