State politics don't have anything to do with summer crowds who have booked many months ago.
What's happening at Disney is that the bubble is finally breaking. That's why they are rolling back some of the planning ridiculousness, because they know what is coming. It will likely help slow the loss a bit, but isn't going to reverse what has happened because it doesn't address the core issues leading to where they find themselves today.
Galactic Starcruiser wasn't an anomaly - it was the great big flapping screaming mynock in the coal mine.
It is just the most egregious example of why the parks are finally losing their audiences. The amazement we have had over the past few years at just how they manage to stay so packed at such prices, with such a lower level of - practically everything measurable when it comes to the park experience - is finally coming to a head. Those limitless people are indeed proving limited, it just took them a few years to work through them all.
The magic has all but gone. Yes, (some) of the classic, timeless attractions remain, but everything else - has just gone to heck in a handbasket. Anyone that remembers the mostly care-free days where you explored the parks, there was something going on around every corner, where at most you planned a dining reservation and picked up a fast pass or two as you went about your day. Before everyone spent 1/2 their vacations stuck on their phones, either out of need (all the FP+ nonsense) or because they are addicted and bored because the streets are no longer filled with entertainment and fun.
And then you have the prices. Disney has done everything they can for the past two decades since MYW to convince everyone that the only way to spend a week at Disney is on-site, or you miss out. The prices have skyrocketed so high that it just isn't the reach of the average family any more. They have depended on the upper-middle clients who were willing to spend the money Disney now demands - but given the state of the "magic" and their own preferences - it's not a place they feel like they need to continue going year after year. You can go countless destinations around the world for the price of a WDW vacation - and those people are doing just that instead of returning to WDW just to ride Pirates again.
The well of people who are well-off enough to go to Disney and just came for their Instagram-kicks and to say "yup we took our kids" is drying up, and those "lifers" like myself are just so disillusioned with the state of everything and put off (or unable to afford) what it costs to go now, the "base" - are not going in the nearly numbers that we used to be.
