Hell, who wasn’t! I sure didn’t think otherwise, and I pretty much have to go on trusting my own opinion, or lose the challenge of brushing my teeth.
Goes to show that just because something is impossible, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
This is what scares me. Common sense tells me that Trump can’t win the general. But that same common sense told me that he’d never win the primaries!
There’s a big difference between putting your faith in the Republican primary electorate (the majority of which did not vote for Drumpf until he had vanquished nearly all his rivals) and putting it in the broader electorate that has not voted for a non-incumbent Republican for president since the '80s.
That was a great read. Highly recommended. One of the most important points made there is that he’s not “wrong” if he says something has a 90% chance of happening and it doesn’t happen, as long as those “missed” calls happen about one out of ten times.
Am I misunderstanding you? Dubya was elected in 2000.
Well, he was selected, anyway. Florida shenanigans aside, he got 47.9% of the electorate to vote for him, vs. Gore’s 48.4%. So I stand behind my statement.
Yeah, I wasn’t thinking. I read your post and thought you meant that there were none in office since the 80s but that’s obviously not what you said.
Exactly. What happened was Trump beat the odds.
I don’t understand what you are saying in the underlined part. Could you explain what you mean? How does putting up a fight = lose to Republicans?
Funny, what I recall is that Perot drew from the Republicans and helped ensure the Democratic win for Mr. Clinton. But wikipedia says that Perot drew 20% of his support from Clinton and 27% of his support from H.W. Bush. The results from that election:
candidate # votes
Clinton 44,909,806
Bush 39,104,550
Perot 19,743,821
The difference between Clinton and Bush defectors was 7% of Perot’s support, which works out to 1,382,067. The difference in votes between Clinton and Bush was 5,805,256. Which means that Perot actually took more votes from Clinton than Bush, which flips my understanding on its head. It also means that Perot did not actually affect the outcome of the vote. Without Perot, Clinton would have had a higher margin of victory. Well, assuming the independents split evenly or bowed out.
Very interesting.
Actually, Scott Adams (of Dilbert) was calling Trump the likely winner back in August of 2015. Not based on preference or politics or historical record, but purely based upon his assessment of Donald Trump’s skills as a persuader and negotiator. He called him variously a Wizard and a Hypnotist, but he has spent a large amount of his blog since then dissecting Trump’s techniques and analyzing why they are working. And he’s made his own predictions along the way, indicating when each of the Republican candidates would start losing support based upon Trump’s attacks.
None of those methods seem to be working on me, but apparently I’m an outlier. Or maybe a large segment of the population is turned off by the content of those methods, and thus are polarized against Trump. Then the question becomes if the pro effect is larger or smaller than the con effect. But Scott’s thesis is that Trump will modify his methods to adjust to the changed demographics, and thus pull more of the cons over to pros.
But yeah, nobody else took Trump seriously then.
FTR only, snopes IDed the original author of the piece. It wasn’t Barney Frank; it was a guy on Facebook. http://www.snopes.com/barney-frank-bernie-sanders/
UL debunked and even traced to the original source in 10 days. Not bad, internet.
I also wanted to comment, the current Congress is the most obstructionist in history. They are deliberately trying to obstruct Obama’s Presidency. It’s not just the Supreme Court nomination, it is all federal judges.
Not only judge appointments, but just about all legislation. That links to a report with an itemized list.
And consider that Congress has not approved an actual annual budget since 1997. There was an omnibus spending bill in 2009, but that wasn’t an actual budget per normal process.
So, in order for a Democratic President to have any ability to do better than Obama, they will need to dramatically affect the makeup of Congress, either gaining an outright majority, or affecting enough of the Republican candidates to get enough moderates willing to cooperate.
Bernie Sanders is just not posed to do that, and the Democratic Party under a Sander’s candidacy that seeks an extreme Progressive agenda will not be able to do that. Clinton might be able to do it - it depends on how unhappy the electorate is with our disfunctional Congress and the role of Republican (especially Tea Party) obstructionism.
So you Bernie supporters and strong Progressives that want a better agenda than Clinton is offering, your best means to that end is affecting the Congressional races, especially in the House of Representatives. The more cooperative Congress is to the Presidency, the more Clinton will be able to slide to the left.
Scott Adams says Drumof will win in a landslide, but he also said Romney would beat Obama.
Yeah. I think Adams is overestimating Trump’s abilities; he seems to be attributing to Trump more intelligence and more instinctive persuasive proficiency than Trump actually possesses.
Take Trump’s ‘Linguistic Kill Shots’ (according to Adams) for Elizabeth Warren: neither “Pocahontas” nor “goofy” seem particularly apt, and certainly not as devastating as a Linguistic Kill Shot should be. “Pocahontas” has to be explained each time it’s used, and “goofy” just doesn’t seem to connect up with anything in Warren’s physicality or manner.
Adams has fallen in love with his own theory, I suspect, and isn’t subjecting it to ongoing reality checks.
His theory also includes the idea that Trump A/B tests killshots. Trial balloon, it doesn’t take, find a new one.
To me, it feels like he’s overselling it. But I have to admit he has called all of the events of the campaign so far.
Adams says that Trump is the better persuader, and he thinks the better persuader always wins. But he’s missing something, IMO – some people can’t be persuaded by certain ideas. People opposed to racism aren’t going to be persuaded by racism, no matter how good the persuader is. There are some ideas that no persuader can get through to a majority.
The other aspect is that Trump loses his discipline when he goes up against a woman. Fiorina was the only GOP contestant that successfully got under his skin.
Admittedly I’m not sure why. It’s possible that bullying doesn’t work against female candidates. It’s possible that dominance games can work, but you need to work off a different playbook. It’s hard to say because Trump operates so differently. I might note that his shtick wouldn’t play so well if he had a record to defend. You can brag about your alleged business successes, but running on your political accomplishments requires a modicum more subtlety.
I wonder whether a successful entrepreneur like Alan Grayson could rip Trump a new one with regards to Trump’s many business failures. Grayson will probably lose in the primary otherwise: a public feud with Trump could give his polling a lift.
I’d like to see Grayson go up against Trump. As you say, he does have the business experience to be able to expose Trump’s failures credibly.
As for Trump’s less-effective attacks (including ‘linguistic kill shots’) against female opponents: I would suspect that he is more effective against male opponents because he feels the thrill of the fight, when engaging with them. With female opponents, he may feel that it’s like arguing with a fleshlight–no sport in it. (Of course I’m assuming that Trump sees women as being, essentially, fleshlights.)
I think it’s simply that most people don’t like to see a man bully a woman.
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And what I like about Silver is he explains why–and he doesn’t even present it as “himself” being right. He presents it as “polls can be measured in aggregate and modeled.” He’s very specifically not trying to be a guy who guesses sporting events when he (actually the team that works for him, with him as their leader) develops and writes about the outcome of their model. He’s instead basically making the argument that anyone who aggregates polls and uses them with a reasonably rigorous model can get a good idea of what’s going to happen in an election. He was on NPR awhile ago and he contrasted it quite a bit with what he calls “qualitative” journalism, where writers go around visiting campaign stops with the candidate and then write an article that is half-conjecture, half-anecdote, and use that to try and explain the trends of the election season and what’s likely to happen. (FWIW he doesn’t think that type of journalism is worthless, he just points out that it doesn’t produce any real measurable predictions that you can use in a meaningful way.)
But for regular followers of FiveThirtyEight, one thing you’ll note is they’ve very consistently said that the margin of error in primary polls historically and in 2016 has always been really high, so the predictive value of any model using those polls is going to be way less than general election polls. We’ve learned over about 70 years that general election polls tend to be much more reliable.
His biggest mistake with Trump was he was making “best guesses” and that just didn’t work for this scenario. Based on the actual polling–one of his long running predictions about Trump made a lot of sense. Throughout the first half of the primaries, no matter how many other Republicans were in the race, and regardless of anything else, Trump tended to stay at around 1/3rd support nationally and usually around there (sometimes +/- 5) per state. Silver concluded that since Trump wasn’t getting any noticeable big bumps as other guys dropped out, he was working with about a 1/3rd ceiling.
But instead when it got down to just Cruz and Kasich running against Trump something else happened–Trump didn’t have a ceiling. He started gaining 10-15pts more of the votes in subsequent primaries and that dramatically changed things.
Personally I think part of it is the establishment GOP basically was trying to “rig” the election. They were following the rules but not in a way ordinary Americans would like, and in a way that was very undemocratic. It started with Colorado, where Trump polled very well, but where 100% of the delegates were given to Ted Cruz. I think the nail in the coffin was when Kasich and Cruz publicly agreed to coordinate and not challenge each other in certain states where one would be more effective than the other. This “corrupt bargain” done in public, ended up being really politically very stupid, and I think caused a lot of mainstream Republicans who weren’t really pro-Trump to get on board because they didn’t want to see Cruz and Kasich basically collude to produce a contested convention.
What’s interesting is Bernie has been making the “rigged” argument for a long time too (ever since he realized he could never win), but the Democratic primary process is really pretty damn fair. It’s straight proportional, and then there are 15% of the delegates who are superdelegates. It’s a higher percentage than the unbound delegates in the GOP (I think they’re around 5% this year), but the problem is that by and large the election wasn’t decided by supers. It was decided by straight votes and Hillary won, in fact generally Hillary did better in elections and Bernie did better in non-elections (caucuses) which themselves are intrinsically less fair. So Trump had a legitimate argument he was dealing with a rigged process, Bernie really didn’t.
The supers might have become part of a legitimate rigged process argument if Bernie had won a majority of pledged delegates, or popular vote, and lost due to the superdelegates, but that never happened. [Oddly Hillary did win the popular vote in 2008, but not the pledged delegate count, although she came way closer than Bernie. And almost no one really felt Obama had won due to a corrupt process. On top of that Clinton won most of the big swing states that held primaries, and Obama’s margin of delegate victory was essentially entirely because he worked caucuses way better–the far less democratic primary process. I think at the end of the day the popular vote doesn’t seem to matter that much in accepting a nominee, it’s all about the pledged delegate winner in terms of public perception.]
One thing that the massacre at Orlando did was pretty much silence the news on Bernie Sanders. Today is the last primary and I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of you reading this post (relatively soon after it goes up) completely forgot about it.
Judging by the threads dedicated to Bernie, the last post made in any of them was this one, 11:49 Eastern Time, Saturday night. I can’t recall the last time I saw him on the news - Sunday?
Sorry, Bernie.
He’ll get some press Thursday when he video-messages his supporters and either a) endorses Clinton; b) continues to talk about “taking the fight to the convention”; or c) some ungainly combination of a and b.