The animating concept behind the Trump campaign will be chaos. This is what history shows us fascists do when given the chance to participate in democratic political campaigns: They create chaos. They do it because chaos works to their advantage. They revel in it, because they can see how profoundly chaos unnerves democratic-republicans—everyone, that is, whether liberal or conservative, who believes in the basic idea of a representative government that is built around neutral rules. Fascism exists to pulverize neutral rules.
So they campaign with explicit intention to instill a sense of chaos. And then comes the topper: They have the audacity to insist that the only solution to the chaos—that they themselves have either grossly exaggerated or in some cases created!—is to vote for them: “You see, there is nothing but chaos afoot, and only we can restore order!”
America is the most propagandized nation in the world and all it takes is the words ‘lesser evil’ and someones gonna come in with an essay parroting what they ‘learned’ in a grade school history book that was picked by a few old white politicians in texas for use in schools around the country.
Even if they know some history they’ll get swept up in the bipartisan political spectacle and operate as if Republicans and Democrats provide meaningful alternatives to the same economic arrangement.
The amount of “normal” Americans who aren’t even that political and just vote based on some “I like how he talks” quality is always understated for highly online political types too. They think Trump voters are all insane MAGAs but so many are just like “well we need something different and I didn’t personally experience what the media was freaking out over” which is actually valid for many. The Democrats are trying to instill these people with fear with feelings/affect they don’t share, and they wonder why it’s having no effect and why Biden’s polling is lackluster at best. The policy-first Obama strategy of coming up with “reasonable policy” then convincing voters it’s right is completely backwards, and requires someone who can speak like Obama, and even then… well look what happened after Obama and 13% of his voters went Trump, and arguably that swing is what won it for Trump. You can’t win by coming up with policy and inventing a politics around it after the fact, you have to appeal to the politics first which is what they aren’t doing. They’re both still stuck and forced to work within the same economic system though so the amount that can really be done is pretty much contingent on that.