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Every primary season this place degrades... reality is sadly FR has been slowly degrading as a whole for a long long time, but Primary season always turns into chaos around here.

This season I don’t think is any further from the baseline than ever before, just the baseline is lower to begin with.

There is no doubt that this primary season there are candidates that are tapping some very real emotions, Cruz supporters feel, for the first time in a long time, they have what they consider a “real conservative” in the hunt, and lets be honest, regardless of who you support, that’s not an outrageous assumption. Even in previous primaries, that wing of the party has been woefully represented in the primary race and anyone that could make a claim to it, if anyone, was rapidly out.

Trump Supporters feel they finally have someone who at least hears them, they are the ones harmed by decades of neglect and very bad economic policy, and yes folks, free trade as it has been implemented is horrifically bad economic policy for a free nation. Sure there are those who have won, and huge swaths of people who have lost. If you’ve watched your manufacturing job, or job supporting it, be lost to offshoring, and seen them replaced with low paying service industry jobs, your pensions whiped out, and generally the fundamental promise that if you work hard and honestly you should have a reasonable expectation to not be dirt poor, you have every damned reason to be angry. The political class are modern day stalwarts, they are interesting in protecting a small number of folks who have been successful and wish for the good times for them to keep rolling, regardless of who and how many get hurt.

Lets not kid ourselves, an able bodied hard working person, who shows up for work every day, is trying to raise their family shouldn’t be earning 20k a year or less because the only jobs they can find pay $10 an hour or less driving a local delivery truck around town and be 50 years old, have to have watched their pensions cut, and the system basically screw them over... while in the meantime you have the CEO of Countrywide flagrantly pumping and dumping, and the worst punishment he gets is to cut a check that is less than the amount he stole from everyone else, and at the same time that same government is writing checks to bail out millionaires.... A healthy middle class is ESSENTIAL to a free republic, and the fact is, like it or not, parts of the republican economic policies, as well as the democratic economic policies are destroying this segment of the population.

Trump isn’t arguing a message of ideological conservatism, for that, the Cruz backers hate him, because A) he’s not a “conservative” as they would want, and B) frankly his message of patriotism and putting america first is resonating and stealing voters they feel Cruz could win... so yes they hate him, and the vitriol thrown by some of them is insane.

Trump supporters are emboldened by Trump non PC nonsense as well, so some of them are far more willing to just be flat out tactless and spiteful and mean toward the Cruz backers as well.

The reality is, at the end of the day, when a candidate is chosen, regardless of who it is, most of those tossing around the hate will either come to Jesus or sit it out.

Personally, and this is just me personally, If the nominee is Rubio or Bush or Kasich or some other clear establishment candidate, I will sit it out. I’m tired of pulling the lever and watching them just sell out this nation anyway regardless of who wins.

Cruz, I honestly am on the fence on whether I will show up for him, he’s backed by the same money players as the others, which means regardless of what he says, he’ll do the same things as the rest, because they own him. I do think and have said for a long time, I think he’s tactically running a failed strategy to win, arguing you are the most conservative in and of itself has never won a primary or a national election. I do like Cruz, but his stands on H1B and other things show he just doesn’t get how destructive some of the economic policies of the Republican Party have been and won’t break the cord from the stalwarts when it comes to policy and influence.

Trump, he’s a wildcard, he clearly isn’t beholden directly to anyone else’s money, and he seems genuine in his desire to put America first. Will that happen once in the WH should he win? Who knows, but after Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama, its kid of a hard argument for either wing of the ideological aisle to make any argument that he’s going to be any worse then they have been for the last nearly 30 years.