543
Thomas Matthew Crooks: The registered Republican and gun lover who shot Trump
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
543 points (95.8% liked)
politics
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This isn't as easy as it seems. Apparently it's not uncommon to register to vote in a closed primary like PA for the opposite party you prefer in order to dilute the vote for the candidate you don't like by voting for the person running against them in the party. So he may be a "registered republican voter", but that may be as a minor act of sabotage rather than his real politics.
E: what’s up with the rebuttals? “Yeah it happens but not really”? So it happens, but it couldn’t with this guy? If I’m wrong and he’s actually a Republican, great! But downvoting the possibility he registered the opposite of his beliefs isn’t gonna make it disappear.
You know what's incredibly more common? Being an actual Republican and voting in a Republican Primary.
Everyone loves a harmless conspiracy theory, but this theory is anything but. Unless the shooter specifically admitted to this conspiracy theory, peddling this bullshit is reckless. About as stupid as child molesters in pizza place basements that don't exist.
Is it even more common to being a republican and assassinating the leader of the party? He “said” he was republican, but the shooting at republicans say otherwise. And i trust actions more than words. And the actions don’t get any more louder than that. Besides it does not matter one iota what Party he is affiliated with. The only thing that matters is the disappointment that he missed
The dislike for Trump crosses party affiliation and traditional right/left dichotomies. That is to say that there are A LOT of Republicans that dislike Trump and don't see him as an ally, or see him as quite the opposite, in fact.
Possibly. But no one knows anything really, so this whole “he’s not with us! Our side would never do such a thing!” Is ridiculous. I have said it somewhere else, but i was thinking about changing my registration so i could vote for some other challenger in the republicans primary, but keeping Joe Biden from being the democrat nominee was too important to risk doing that.
I'd point you to the assassin of John Lennon - he is/was a big Beatles fan but murdered John anyway because of who John became. That still doesn't have anything to do with the parallel argument, in this case, of the likelihood that Mark was pretending to be a Beatles fan or not.
Actions do speak louder than words - this would-be assassin registered as a Republican. The conspiracy theory that he was trying to affect a Primary makes no sense based on timing alone, let alone there not being an iota of evidence indicating he wasn't a Republican. Republicans created the environment for this kid to do what he attempted to do and they should own up to their culpability rather than rely on bots and useful idiots to blame everyone but themselves for this problem.
Why is EVERYONE blaming someone else. jfc, both sides without any real information is jumping in trying to blame the other with weak sauce evidence. You are doing the exact same just like a redditor. Why would you care if it turned out he was democrat ? You afraid that the republicans would blame the left? Big whoop.
Bro, you inserted yourself into a conversation where someone claimed that the shooter was cosplaying a Republican and, inexplicably, defended them. The only person you should be getting butthurt with is yourself instead of dropping the inevitable "both sides" shit 🤣
I would agree with the theory (as I've personally witnessed people registering for opposing party to wreck havoc there internally), BUT: I rarely came across hardcore gun-loving Democrat, watching NRA-related content.
The last two points are very valid. It’s definitely something I considered, but this is such an F’d up timeline that I can’t help but be very pessimistic.
This definitely happens, though it's not remotely as common as just voting for your preferred party in the primary.
A friend and I both voted Republican in a primary a couple years ago. The Democratic lineup wasn't interesting and it was obvious who was going to win on it. Quite frankly our votes didn't matter much there. But the GOP contenders were a mixed bag of semi-moderates and MAGA bootlickers. We felt it was most important to keep the Trumpy psychos out of the general election, so we voted against them.
In a way I think it was the right call at the time. On the other hand, I get a lot of SMS spam to my number now from scammy pro-Trump sources. Of course I report those to the FTC every time, but it's still gross.
Indeed. Party affiliation only indicates which party’s primary you wanted to participate in.
"When people tell you who they are, believe them."
Also, Occam's razor.
Just letting people know what a PA resident told me. Too bad people don’t want to hear it. If the guy was left leaning and registered as a Republican downvotes aren’t going to make it better.
He would have had to think to do that 3 years ahead of time.
Can you not change party affiliation at any time?
You can but he didn't. He set his affiliation 3 years ago.
That is almost entirely a myth. Yes, there are 'cross over votes' in states that don't have open primaries but facilitate party enrollment, but those cross over voters are almost always 'independent' voters who enroll and then unenroll and are not doing anything other than voting for the candidate of their choice in the primary that candidate is running in. So called 'strategic voting', as far as I know, has never made any difference in any presidential primary, but go ahead and bring up the bodies.
It's not for presidential races.
Its for state level races where you're in one of the 40+ states where it's a forgone conclusion what party wins the general.
So some people give up their presidential primary vote, to vote in the state level primaries for the party virtually guaranteed to win their state, then vote for their preferred party in the general even if their candidate won the primary for the other party
You might not think it's common, but it's the only way a lot of people's votes have any actual effect, so lots of people do it