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The Herbert Hoover 39 [1]

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Date: 2024-10-30  

(My first entry; please be kind.)

Like most of you, I constantly ask myself this question: How is this race so damn close?

Well, obviously, there are numerous reasons, but there’s one that doesn’t seem to come up very often. I call it the Herbert Hoover 39.

Let’s set the WABAC Machine for 1932. It’s the depth of the Great Depression. Unemployment is at 25%. Millions of people are homeless. Banks are shuttered; stores are closed. Soup kitchens and flophouses on almost every block. The worst economic catastrophe in American history. Sure, the wealthy were still doing fine, but everyone else? Not quite.

And it’s also an election year. On the ballot are the Governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a progressive despite being a rich guy himself, and incumbent Hoover, the principal architect of this fiasco, running for re-election.

History records, of course, that FDR properly won in a landslide. But generally overlooked is that Hoover still got 39.6% of the vote. Yes, you read that right: Two out of every five voters looked around at all the devastation and said, “Yeah, gimme four more years of this!” What the hell were they thinking? That it couldn’t get even worse? Thank God we never found out.

And that figure hasn’t really changed much. During Trump’s first (and hopefully only) term, his approval rating was usually in the mid-40s, but it was never lower than—that’s right—39. With one exception: Right after the insurrection, it briefly dropped to 34, but then soon recovered and is now back in the mid-40s. Which could be enough to win in this benighted era we’re trapped in.

The conclusion is incontrovertible: 39% of the American electorate will always vote Republican. No. Matter. What. Even if he’s a dementia-addled, convicted felon/adjudicated rapist & tax cheat/pedophile/Russian asset. Heck, if Jesus himself did come back to Earth and announced he was running for Congress as a Democrat against Marjorie Taylor Greene, he’d still lose by 40 points. That’s how horrendous and deep-seated this brainwashing is.

So the lesson is clear: Democrats always step up to the plate with at least one strike against them. Thus it’s incumbent upon us to make 100% sure we vote (downballot as well), because as I always say, Republicans don’t win elections—Democrats lose them…when they don’t vote (or cast “protest” votes for indie candidates like Johnson or Stein).

Don’t let the disciples of Herbert Hoover dictate who will run the country.

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