The NYT explains why this time is different and GOP office holders are abandoning Trump

Link to article

We will see if the voters agree in sufficient numbers to end this nightmare of a candidacy.

Of course, we will still be dealing with the likes of Ted Cruz and the Freedom caucus so I will not expect a return to the rational politics of compromise.

The far bigger question is how this party that claims to represent family values ever nominated this unfit boorish individual.

There are so many reasons to vote against Donald Trump that it really makes me wonder if Democrats remain believers in the rights of individuals (AS THEY SHOULD AND MUST) that they can ever get the 30% to 35% of the electorate that supports Trump to vote for them.  I think that segment of society is so caught up in their circularity of argument that they are permanently lost and dangerous to society.

On the other hand, as a book reviewer writes into today's NYT review of books about African American GOP members, the GOP was the preferred party of African American's as it was Southern Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Bills and Northern Republican's who supported it.  But Johnson got the Civil Rights bill passed, Nixon & Reagan pursued their southern strategy of converting those southern Democrat's to Republican and moderate GOP people lost elections to either more conservative GOP people in primaries or Democrat's in general

But the real reason I am writing about this is the following truism that is written in the review.

"and they agreed that black Americans would do best when both parties were competing for their votes"

That truth is critical for all voters and politicians to remember.  It is hard when the country is so partisan, the primaries more important to many than the general election because of gerrymandering, and the issues (guns, abortion, immigration, trade, Global Warming, Supreme Court) so black and white in different directions; that for politicians to appeal to the other side or voters who believe in the other side voting to make their voice heard and represented by those politicians difficult to imagine.

That is not a situation that I think will be overcome easily without ending gerrymandering and increasing the importance of general elections over primaries.