The “unreachables.”

That was the term a friend used recently when he and I were talking politics and where MAGA fit into the scheme of things.

Unreachables.

Not Hillary Clinton’s deplorables, or other ways of describing Donald Trump’s followers. There are no minds to be changed there.

Being unreachable fits the current America, according to Peter Baker in The New York Times.

In an analysis last week, Baker noted how far Blue and Red America have drifted apart.

“Yet the general election matchup that seems likely after this week’s New Hampshire primary represents more than the first-in-a-century contest between two men who have both lived in the White House. It represents the clash of two presidents of profoundly different countries, the president of Blue America versus the president of Red America.

“The looming showdown between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, assuming Nikki Haley cannot pull off a hail-mary surprise, goes beyond the binary liberal-conservative split of two political parties familiar to generations of Americans. It is at least partly about ideology, yes, but also fundamentally about race and religion and culture and economics and democracy and retribution and most of all, perhaps, about identity.

“It is about two vastly disparate visions of America led by two presidents who, other than their age and the most recent entry on their résumés, could hardly be more dissimilar. Mr. Biden leads an America that, as he sees it, embraces diversity, democratic institutions and traditional norms, that considers government at its best to be a force for good in society. Mr. Trump leads an America where, in his view, the system has been corrupted by dark conspiracies and the undeserving are favored over hard-working everyday people.”

My friend grew up in Topeka, Kansas, and had relatives on the farm. Their worlds were entirely different — the farm being the land of work from sunup to sundown, of church on Sunday and communal potlucks.

Those dynamics still exist, with the lesser-educated rural areas vs. the higher-educated big cities when it comes to voters.

The differences are sharp — think liberal Ann Arbor vs. the rest of the state, Austin vs. Texas, Tucson vs. Arizona — you get the picture.

The MAGA crowd is totally unreachable, willing to overlook any and all of Trump’s worst attributes and praising him for being their tough guy.

Baker notes, “Americans do not just disagree with each other, they live in different realities, each with its own self-reinforcing Internet-and-media ecosphere. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was either an outrageous insurrection in service of an unconstitutional power grab by a proto-fascist or a legitimate protest that may have gotten out of hand but has been exploited by the other side and turned patriots into hostages.

“The two lands have radically different laws on access to abortion and guns. The partisan breakdown is so cemented in 44 states that they effectively already sit in one America or the other when it comes to the fall election. That means they will barely see one of the candidates, who will focus mainly on six battleground states that will decide the presidency.”

Michigan has been a little schizophrenic — going red for Trump in 2016 and blue for Biden in 2020. How will be fall in 2024? Michigan is one of six swing states Baker writes about, the other five being Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Those states, he suggests will get the bulk of the attention of the campaigns as the electioneering goes on through this fall.

That is if they need to — the Republican National Committee was floating a resolution that would find Trump the presumptive nominee and would move the RNC into full general election mode.

Trump did say he would not be in favor, rather gaining the nominee the old-fashioned way. Nikki Haley was silent on the matter when this was written.

There are no party rules that would preclude the national committee from approving the resolution and there is precedent for the committee declaring a candidate the presumptive nominee before winning the 1,215 requisite delegates to clinch the nomination. In May 2016, then-RNC Chairman Reince Priebus declared Trump the presumptive nominee before he had the appropriate share of delegates wrapped up.

What the heck, why don’t we hold the election in six months and eliminate all this time, money and effort and just break out the crown.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Kendall Stanley: The big split