Video (channel) of the day -- a change of heart, if not of mind

Most of us are familiar with The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump Republican PAC whose go-for-the-throat ads against Trump and his enablers exemplify the kind of ruthless attack tactics we Democrats should be using.  Another approach is favored by Republican Voters against Trump (RVAT), whose videos tell the stories of individual voters, decidedly more personal than professional.  They've now posted over 200 of these, most only a couple of minutes long.

These people definitely do come across as Republicans, expressing generally right-wing views, often being infuriated at things like Trump's disrespect for the military after having apparently accepted his many other outrages with little qualm.  (There's a disproportionate number of older white guys from rural areas, but that does reflect the party's base.)  Some on our side may tend to scorn them for their earlier voting habits and dismiss their opposition to Trump as too little, too late.  There may well be some justice in this reaction, but still it should be avoided, for two reasons.

First:  They have, at least, managed a change of heart to some degree, which is never easy.  Liberals are often frustrated at how immovable the hard-core Trumpanzees' support for their man seems to be, but it doesn't surprise me at all.  Admitting that you were wrong and your opponents were right is always highly unpleasant.  All the more so when you’ve invested a lot of emotional energy in demonizing those opponents as not merely wrong, but evil.  The more extreme a position you’ve staked out, the more humiliating is the retreat implicit in abandoning it.  For Trumpanzees caught up in the current frenzy of madness, the prospect of letting the fever finally break -- of falling back into cold, mundane reality -- of needing to recognize that the ones they despised, the liberals, the educated, the experts, were right all along -- is unthinkable.  The people in these videos are not the hard-core ones.  If they were wrong before, they've at least shown a capacity to recognize reality and be swayed by it.

Second:  A vote is a vote.  These people probably represent only a small proportion of Republicans, but in almost every election, several states are decided by very thin margins, and a few percentage points could change the outcome this time.  My overriding concern is to get Trump and his enablers and toadies out of power.  So long as someone votes for Biden and for Democratic candidates for the House, the Senate, and state-level offices, in practical terms it doesn't matter why they do it, only that they do it.  And while the size of the popular-vote margin will not affect the legal outcome, its psychological importance will be enormous.  Trump and Trumpism must be repudiated by the largest possible proportion of Americans, both for the sake of our standing as a people in the eyes of other democracies, and to discourage shenanigans by sore losers.

Here's an example I liked.  He uses some rather rough language, but can you blame him?  And we can count on his vote in November -- which is more than one can say for some of the ideological-purist fringe types on our own side.