Republican policies are extremely unpopular, which is bad for winning elections, even in America

Arizona is getting an abortion rights referendum on November’s ballot:

Arizona voters will decide in November whether to establish a right to abortion in the state constitution, a measure that could strongly influence turnout in a battleground state that is critical to the presidential election as well as control of the Senate.

The Secretary of State’s office said it had certified 577,971 signatures that abortion rights groups had collected over the last months, 50 percent more than were required to put the constitutional amendment on the ballot in November and the highest number of certified signatures for any ballot measure in state history.

In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had established a right to abortion in the United States Constitution, abortion rights groups have prevailed in all seven states where the question of abortion has been put directly before voters. Anti-abortion groups, which had sponsored almost all abortion-related ballot measures before Roe was overturned, have been pushed onto defense, running “decline to sign” campaigns and filing lawsuits trying to prevent signatures from being certified.

Similar measures on abortion rights are already on the November ballot in six other states, but only two are battleground states — Arizona and Nevada. (The others are Florida, South Dakota, Colorado, New York and Maryland.) And Democrats are hoping that support for abortion rights will drive higher turnout in their favor.

The Republican positions on abortion, ranging from JD Vance’s support for national prohibition, to Donald Trump’s incoherent invocation of “states’ rights,” are all very unpopular with the American public.

This is the typical situation when it comes to Republican policies and public opinion. Most people don’t want cuts to Social Security and Medicare, or yet more tax cuts for the rich. Everybody likes markedly declining violent crime and inflation rates, which is what we have now. The only major domestic issue regarding which Republican positions are popular is immigration — at least until people begin to figure out what those positions would actually mean for their pocket books — but even here the actual difference between Republican and Democratic policy is, unfortunately, minimal. This will change if Pee Wee German gets his wish to implement a final solution to the immigration question, as I doubt anything close to a majority of Americans have the stomach for what deporting 12 to 20 million people would actually involve.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz gets all this exactly backwards:

Republican pollster Frank Luntz suggested that while former President Trump has the issues on his side, his “persona” is contributing to the drop in the polls in the race against Vice President Harris.

“If it’s about issues, Trump is much more likely to be successful. If it’s about attributes, Harris is much more likely to be successful, because quite frankly, people like her more than they like him. It’s something that, if he’s watching this right now, his head is exploding — and that’s part of the problem,” Luntz said over the weekend in a CNN interview.

In fact the reason people vote for Trump is because they love his outrageous persona, and all the owning of the libs, and all the anti-PC, anti-wokeness, anti-DEI or whatever it will be called next week (white supremacy would do nicely). They don’t vote for his policy positions, which consist of whatever a gerrymandered Republican Congress would put in front of him, and what they would put in front of him, thanks to The Wisdom of the Framers, is quite unpopular (see above).

But being a reality TV star masquerading as a statesman is a dangerous game, given the wayward fickleness of the mob, and there are more and more signs every day that the audience for Trump’s schtick is getting bored with it.

I think Harris is going to win by a lot because:

(1) The Ariana Grande voters are going to break for her by a solid margin; and

(2) Democratic enthusiasm for actually voting is going to be more intense than Republican enthusiasm, which is going to be dampened by Trump’s ongoing decompensation, along with the general boredom that has set in regarding this absurd and increasingly off-putting even to the marginal members of his cult creation of Mark Burnett, Vince McMahon, and the postmodern simulacra.

And by a lot I mean something like nine percentage points/14 million votes nationally, and 100 or so Wisdom of the Framers votes in the EC.