One Indicator of the GOP Preferiti

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The Epoch Times is a right-wing trashcan liner posing as a newspaper that shows up free in my mailbox two or three times a year.   It is sent out free to entice people to subscribe, and the company probably assumes that since I am a septuagenarian living on a country road in the sixth reddest congressional district in America, I am not too bright and a Republican.  Well, they are wrong - at least about the Republican part!

I also receive three or four vocabulary builders in my email in-box each day, services that I enjoy and to which I subscribe.   This morning one of those vocabulary builders - Synonym of the Day by Thesarus.com - started off with a small ad from The Epoch Times.  The ad was an interactive poll listing four GOP extremists and asking "Who do you want the Republican nominee to be in 2024?"  The four choices were (in this order):  Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, and Ted Cruz.

It was obviously a lure to obtain email addresses and try to peddle their product - the newspaper, but I clicked on a name anyway just to observe the full scam.  I chose Glenn Youngkin out of pity because they had misspelled the governor of Virginia's name in the come-on as "Gleen" Youngkin.  Checking that name immediately took me to The Epoch Times website and the current on-line edition of the newspaper.  Then, a moment later, a nicer version of the poll appeared, this time with color photos of each of the candidates - including a clean-shaven Cruz.  Now, in order to vote and to receive a look at the poll results so far, participants had to include their email addresses.  Imagine that!  

I stopped at that point.

There are plenty of Republican hate-fueled politicians who would love to be president.   I suspect that The Epoch Times just provided the insider's view of the party's preferiti, not only in who they chose to include in this quick survey, but also in the order of placement.    

The message was:   here are four men who are acceptable as GOP presidential candidates to the people who finance and put out our newspaper -  please rank them for us.  The project automatically excluded Pence, Haley, Hawley, Sununu, Christie, and a host of others.  If the goal had actually been to learn what the people were thinking, they would have included more than four candidates - or a blank for writing in voter preferences, but the poll had at least as much to do with influencing voters as it did with actually learning their preferences.

After getting as far as seeing the actual ballot, I stopped.  I dislike The Epoch Times occasionally stuffing their clutter in my mailbox, and I damned sure don't want them taking advantage of free email and trashing up my email in-box as well.  Perhaps if their survey had included a blank line for my actual preference, I would have entered "Jon Stewart"or maybe even "Wanda Sykes," and then sat back and awaited divine intervention from one of their prayer circles. 

Or maybe even one of their crop circles!