No Donald, Michael Moore is not a fan
by digby
If you listen to Trump these days, you'd think he was running with Bernie Sanders as his running mate he mentions him so often. (In fact, he never mentions his actual running mate, Mike ... who?) And yesterday, he extolled Michael Moore after Moore said that the votes for Trump were going to be the biggest "fuck you" ever recorded.
That's a misunderstanding of what Moore meant, to say the least. Michael Tomasky wrote about Moore on Hardball last night making a full-throated affirmative case for Hillary Clinton:
I was driving somewhere and listening to the show in my car, and I about had to pull over to the side of the road. On and on he gushed and re-gushed: “I am serious. In 1993, this woman decided to risk everything and put it all out there so that we could all have universal health care. And she went for it. And she was attacked and humiliated...she was the first one out there trying to do that...I have felt for a long time that she was a force for good, that what she believed in and the things and people she cared about...” He did note that he’s had his disagreements with Clinton and backed Bernie Sanders in the primary, but he wouldn’t even say when Chris Matthews asked that he’d prefer that Bernie be the candidate. “No,” Moore shot back. “He lost!”
Well. What’s going on here? I don’t know exactly, but I have a guess. It’s called sanity. And a proper sense of historical responsibility.
This happens to be the case with pretty much the entire center-left coalition of voters in the country. The third party vote is either genuine Libertarian party voters and disaffected Republicans voting for Johnson or genuine Greens voting for Stein as they would have in any case. In other words, the bitterness of the primary has largely dissipated among the electorate (if not on social media) and the center left has coalesced around Clinton, whether out of genuine admiration as Moore shows or a simple recognition that allowing a fascist demagogue to win is unwise.
And Moore also mentioned something on Matthews that is beginning to bubble up a little more in the media narrative as being a salient point within the electorate:
“First of all, on a macro level, it isn’t being said enough that we’re going to elect our first woman president. This is huge. For the country, for the world, for the future, for our daughters, our granddaughters.”
Just a little data point buried at the very end of this New York Times article about Clinton finally managing to attract millennial voters:
At this stage, it appears that she is reshaping the youth electorate: Specifically, more young women appear more likely to vote today than they did four years ago,” Mr. Della Volpe said. “That’s significant because she has the biggest advantage among young women.”
It's also just significant that she's exciting new voters. I realize they are just "young women" who apparently aren't worthy of more than an afterthought, but they are a loyal Democratic voting bloc and bring more of them out is very good news for the Democratic party. I would guess that at least a few of them are excited about the prospect of a woman president and are equally appalled that the GOP has put up a misogynist fascist to oppose her.
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