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Larry Wilkerson
Well, the minority that is 40 and under. You know, they will be 50 in another decade.
Paul Jay
There are a lot of young, enthusiastic Trump people out there.
Larry Wilkerson
Oh, yeah, there are, but they're not as many as we think. Even with this spectacular election we just had with something like 66%-67% voting, there's still a 30% plus that didn't vote. There are still people that aren't even interested in going to the ballot box when provoked to the extent that they were in this last election, they're not even interested in going to the box. Some of those people have given up.
The Republican Party needs to be a bigger tent. It needs to attract these younger people. It needs to build for the future. That might mean it can't win another White House election for another 10 or 15 or 20 years even, but it's got to be for the future and the bill for that future. It's got to have a much bigger tent and it's got to accept the demographic change that's coming to this country. I think that's one of the biggest motivations for Trump's base. They do not want to surrender the lily-white, mostly male with females following along behind and dutiful obedience, country that they perceive to have been in existence since 1775. They don't want to lose that. And so they'll take anybody, even a narcissistic, lying, cheating, womanizing a**hole as their president to get that. They'll do anything. They'll make a bargain with that devil to get that. And a lot of it has to do with the Evangelicals, too. Who now, I was shocked when I saw this, the new census, preliminary results, one hundred million, that's one-third of this country, is involved in the third Great Awakening.
And there are people like Pence whom I think would sacrifice his soul to get the rapture to come. He would sacrifice Israel, certainly, to get the rapture to come. Remember Tom DeLay when Max Blumenthal interviewed him and said, "What's going to happen to all those Jews when Christ kills all the unbelievers?". And he said, "Oh", after a moment of thought, "they'll convert the last minute, right, Tom?" Yeah, that's the conundrum these people were presented with, but it's not a conundrum for them because God is in charge.
Paul Jay
See, I think the danger is that these younger voices, the way you're describing them, more rational voices in the Republican Party, one, are much in the minority, they're not in that 80 million group. And they're still voting at the state level for these state legislatures, whose policies are every bit as bad or worse than what Trump did.
But what I'm concerned about is that the Biden administration is going to be, the way it's shaping up, a repeat of Obama to a large extent and use the Republicans as the excuse again for not having a real serious transformation of the economy, dealing with climate inequality and so on, which sets the table in 2024 for a less crazy Evangelical-supported Republican Party that can win again.
Larry Wilkerson
That's going to be a real stretch and it'll be a stretch that's made only if the Democrats fall all over themselves. And I don't say that that can't be, it could be easily. For example, I don't see anybody out there right now, including Kamala Harris, who is a real contender in 2024 from the Democratic Party. Don't see anybody, zero. That's a real problem for them, in my mind, a real problem, getting that kind of name recognition, visibility, and so forth in a short period of time is extremely difficult.
Now, Obama showed it could be done, as you and I were talking about before we went on air, but it takes a really dedicated team and a very sophisticated program to do that. I don't see that being put together right now. What I see is a Democratic Party that has some young people and some extraordinarily old people and nobody in between. That's a problem for them. And so you might be right that the Republicans come back, but I'll make a prediction here that the Republicans who come back are not going to look like the "Trumpers". They look very different.
Paul Jay
Well, then you might have a third party.
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