The problem with this hypothesis is, nobody else actually got elected – and it’s not like there weren’t other candidates to choose from. In the real world, about 20-25 million conservatives voted, and a strong plurality of them selected Donald Trump over 15 or 16 other candidates. All of the other candidates had flaws of their own.
Jeb Bush? He’s an establishment candidate too, and bears a now-tarnished name.
John Kasich? Okay, but he never really turned anyone on among conservatives, did he? He’s a 1990s re-tread, establishment in the eyes of many, and he was politically active when the republican congress wasn’t too popular either. I know what people predict, but again, there were actual races. He didn’t do very well.
Rubio? He earned the moniker Marcobot for reasons we now know all too well.
Ted Cruz? Like Trump he’d have many in his own party avoid him like the plague.
The problem with the Republicans’ deep bench theory is that they’ve completely ignored the negatives of their own party, which will likely continue to grow this year and beyond until the party finally splits into open civil war. Or they could actually embrace ideas like ‘the autopsy’ in which they seemed to understand the need to stop being hostile to immigrants and so anti-science.
That does not comport with recent history. The last few GOP candidates have had positive ratings heading into the last months of the election, or at least close to even. We’ve never had two candidates this unpopular.
I’d agree with this, but only if you roll the clock back to 2008 or 2012 and take Trump out of the picture entirely.
A more centrist Repub, like Romney (ex-47% fiasco) or Kasich or Jeb Bush I think would beat her. In 2008 or 2012.
But you can’t undo the Repub schism. Romney or Kasich or Bush if they had somehow managed to win the nomination, couldn’t beat her in 2016 because of that.
Yeah. Trump and Cruz are in their own category near -30. I’m pretty sure anal warts are more popular than that.
Clinton and Rubio are about even in the -11 range. This is not great, but it certainly doesn’t suggest that Rubio would wiping the floor with Clinton if he had somehow won the primary.
Kasich is about even but he’s so little known his favorable number is behind Clinton’s. I also suspect that if he said the kind of things on on the campaign trail that would have allowed him to win more than just his home state, he would be as underwater in favorable minus unfavorable as the rest of them.
Rubio, Kasich, and even Cruz would have the opportunity to define themselves better with their conventions. If Clinton can get a bump in favorability(and even Trump did, a little bit), then certainly these lesser known Republicans would have been able to do so with a better convention. Opinions about those three men are not nearly as fixed as they are about the more famous Clinton and Trump.
THat’s true of any candidate. No one has ever been defeated by an after-convention discovery though. The primary process is long enough to vet a candidate.
Trump and Clinton were nominated by their parties despite historically low approval ratings. Neither candidate seems to have much of a chance to get into positive territory. Both saw convention bumps in favorability(Trump’s small, Clinton’s large), but they are still far away from being popular. Which is why the third parties will do better this year than in the past. Or turnout will be historically low.
What happens to the disgruntled Trump voters in this fantasy version of reality? What happens to Trump himself? Does he endorse the nominee, or run this party?
The same thing that happens to disgruntled Republicans now, they are just different disgruntled Republicans. Despite those disgruntled Republicans, Trump came out of the convention with a slight lead. A better candidate would not have immediately started shooting himself in the foot. And then the knee, and then the gut…
I know it’s tempting to view this process as an aberration and that if Cruz and Trump had not run, then Rubio or Kasich would have saved the Republican party from itself. However, I think that’s a flawed way to look at it. Cruz and Trump exist because there’s a real market for them in the republican party. In the eyes of conservatives who voted in these elections, Rubio and Kasich are weak and Romneylike. They don’t want another Romney – they made that perfectly clear. What would happen is that you’d still see two equally unpopular candidates but one of those other hypothetical GOP nominees would be unpopular for different reasons than Trump or Cruz. Nobody would be filling the enthusiasm gap among angry white voters, who are actually highly motivated to vote.
Kasich is probably the one candidate that could appeal to moderate cross-over voters, but again, we’re living in a time of enormous anti-establishment sentiment, particularly among conservatives and conservative-leaning independents. People are saying “Well if the conservatives hadn’t somehow voted for crazy” — but they did. And they did so with eyes wide open. Moderates like John Kasich are appealing to centrists. The conservatives in America can no longer be described as centrists. They are ideologically extreme. It is important to remember that.
Some writer speculated the other day about a hypothetical scenario in which Trump quits and the GOP rallies around to support Paul Ryan. I could almost see that having a snowball’s chance of working if Trump were to quit and quit early. Ryan’s likeable. Ryan has solid tax-cutting credentials, too. He’s not going to get all of the rage vote, but he might get enough of the tax cut vote, the religious vote, the country club vote, and other conservative constituencies while actually appealing to sane independents and even some minorities. Of course, that’s a pipe dream at this point.
Yes and no. Downballot, it’s all traditional Republicans, and Trump’s ego is so big that he probably won’t have a successor in mind. Plus he picked a fairly normal VP, although at the most conservative end of the scale.
Of course, the forces that nominated Trump are very real, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll be united enough in the future without a very famous and loud demagogue to lead them. Tom Tancredo already tried to win with that same base and couldn’t even come close.
There’s definitely some huge problems in the GOP, but Trump represented a perfect storm. According to Nate Silver, he wasn’t just winning the nativist voters, but also moderates. Conservatives were going for Cruz. Apparently moderates thought Trump was “really” one of them going by his past statements, and in fairness he probably is an Eisenhower Republican, transplanted into 2016. Complete with Operation Wetback.
So yeah, if Trump hadn’t won, those voters would still be there, but they wouldn’t have had such a famous figure to rally around. As I mentioned before, nativist candidates are not new to the GOP. Tom Tancredo ran in 2012. But the media wouldn’t cover Tancredo and he couldn’t raise money, since the donor class is all pro-immigration.
If Trump was actually the future of the party, the nativists would be winning downballot. But they aren’t. Heck, even the Tea Party isn’t winning downballot anymore. The establishment has reestablished a near stranglehold on Senate and House recruiting. I’m not sure how long they can keep it up, since pretty much no one making under $100K likes the GOP establishment. But I’m not sure Trump’s brand of Republican is the future either.
Sure, but that’s not what you said. You said “Clinton wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance against any other opponent” which is a lot stronger than the top 3 losers “would have the opportunity to define themselves better”. They all had same or lower favourable numbers and only Kasich had a better differential on favourable/unfavorable.
That’s because I actually think they would have done a good job defining themselves and it would be very easy to be viewed as more trustworthy and likeable than Clinton. She would lose. Maybe not against Cruz, Cruz is pretty unlikeable and probably too far right, but anyone else.
Even as a liberal, I’ve held this same view from the start. Hillary has the second-highest “unfavorable” score of any presidential candidate since such questions started being asked in polls (going back to the 1970s, probably). She’s in the lead, in part, because she’s running against the one candidate whose score is even worse.
Had the GOP managed to nominate a candidate who wasn’t a dumpster fire, I strongly believe that they could have trounced Hillary.