Most people don't really care about politics, and they don't pay attention, so they just go with the flow. And yet the future of the country lies in their hands. It's the people in the mushy middle who cast the deciding vote.
You can usually tell what the political strength of a particular political candidate is by whoever is speaking the loudest about him or her in the local coffee shop. There will be a mix of opinions, but those who know their views are in the majority speak out with confidence while those in the minority tend to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. But because most people don't care that much or know anything, their opinions, to the degree that they have any, are shaped by whoever is speaking loudest. It's the path of least resistance.
So you could imagine who was speaking the loudest in 2016 in towns in Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and other states that Trump won in 2016. But now those states are polling double digits in favor of Biden. Where is this double-digit switchover happening? It has to be in the purplish towns where the Trump supporters spoke loudest in 2016. Now that the coffee shops are opening up again in those states, I wonder if that shift would be reflected in their coffee-shop chatter.
Have the Trump blowhards shut up? Have the anti-Trump folks begun to speak up? Or is everybody just keeping their own counsel? Or maybe there are just coffee shops now where the Liberal loudmouth is more willing to push back against the Conservative one, and the mushy middle is finding that the path of least resistance has shifted, and it's ok to be anti-Trump now. I don't know.
But something has changed. Maybe it's just that people are staying away from the coffee shops and are spending more time at home and they have more time to pay attention form their own opinions? I don't know.
While most people don't care about politics, the events over the last six months have forced them to. The impeachment started things off, and while it seemed an exercise in futility at the time, it made a dent in the mushy middle's awareness about what kind of man Trump is.
The Republican toadying to Trump during the impeachment was a blatant exercise in gaslighting and bad faith. If you don't care about politics and you were paying any attention at all to that, you couldn't help but be disgusted by its cravenness and cynicism. And everything that has happened since then has reinforced what anybody paying attention has known since the beginning, which is that Trump is utterly unfit to govern, as is the party that has submitted to him with such pusillanimity.
We'll see how this plays out, but it would appear that the mushy middle has finally come to understand who this man is, and it's hard to imagine how that can be undone.
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