When The Facts Are Not To Your Liking

@DougJBalloon https://t.co/qnmyF9OFdr

— Twitadventurer (@twitadventurer) July 18, 2023

Here’s the original tweet:

And yet the person who is leading the GOP polls by a wide mile has a pretty robust policy page and a lot of policy to point to in office. https://t.co/5HwvQfrBTl

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 17, 2023

She’s not wrong. Which is not the same thing as saying she’s flacking for Trump. This, in fact, is her point:

Voters actually do care about policy. But newer candidates worry voters will be more animated to hate certain policies than like them, ie part of why Trump now hates his criminal justice reform policy, because his voters do.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 17, 2023

GOP wannabes don’t want to do anything that costs them votes. And Trump is running on his record of his travel ban and border wall and imaginary bullshit. I wouldn’t expect a reporter from the New York Times to call that anything but “policy,” if only because I don’t want her opinions on Biden’s policies.

Or maybe it’s because she wants to believe voters make electoral decisions based in rational concerns about how government is run and what it is used for. Although in my experience most people vote on a knee-jerk and clannish basis. Most voters in Texas don’t give a shit what Ted Cruz, or the Lege for six months every two years, is not doing. They’re just glad they aren’t all Democrats. Whenever something political pops up in my NextDoor feed, that’s the prevailing sentiment. The complainers have no idea how local government operates (or mostly fails to; this is Texas): they just know the problem is Democrats. That’s all the policy they know, and all they need (or care, more accurately) to know.

Not unlike most of the responses to Ms. Haberman’s tweet, who demand only that one look down at the ground and spit every time Trump’s name gets mentioned. He does have policies. He does have a record of policies. That fact does distinguish him from the other GOP candidates. It doesn’t mean he’s distinguished.

It’s sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.