The firebombing of the GOP was the biggest surprise to me. Things were getting nasty but I never expected this and I hope they find the evil little bastard(s) that did this. :mad:
From my local Trumpeteer, Obama is going to declare martial law and refuse to cede power.
The absolute biggest surprise would be boffo starting a thread that is not inane and making more than two posts in said thread.
I was very tempted to answer the Access Hollywood tapes, as I see most people already did. However, this really didn’t surprise me at all. The release itself was a little surprising, but the content was just confirmation. I already knew he was a scumbag who did things like this. It’s not so much worse than hours of his Howard Stern appearances that are already public record.
I voted Gary Johnson’s gaffes. Even for someone who doesn’t keep up on foreign affairs and doesn’t intend it to be the core of his policy, I’m still left scratching my head. I was almost willing to forgive him on Aleppo - we’ve all had the occasional brain failure - but even after the clarification he had no real answer about what to do. Then struggling to come up with any foreign leader… read a newspaper, man! 2016 was the best chance the Libertarians are likely to have in a hundred years, but their own candidate doesn’t take it seriously enough to bone up on foreign policy.
Nah, it’s not Johnson. He was irrelevant before the gaffes, and he’s still irrelevant now.
So far , the biggest effect seems to have been from the Access Hollywood tape, but it’s too early to say. The Trump Foundation stuff has the potential to be even bigger, but we have to wait an unknown amount of time before his extended deadline to find out.
That’s enough, right there. Any more such and it could be warning city.
It’s a reasonable thought experiment, but they came forward mainly because of the tape (and media and perhaps Democratic operatives beating the bushes, but those efforts as well and if so influenced by the tape release). And particularly because Trump then said he’d never acted as he implied on the tape, but that also was ‘inevitable discovery’ basically from the tape, some media person would force him to try to deny it.
Anyway I guess ‘biggest surprise’ could be interpreted as most unexpected but I took it as most influential in the outcome where it’s obviously the tape. Justified or not, it completely dominated revelations about Clinton in October (Wikileaks, FBI releases) for media attention in a head to head contest.
And I’ve had trouble all along figuring out why Gary Johnson gets even as much attention here as he does. Not only since he’s never had any real chance to win himself, but he seems to pull fairly close to equally from the two major candidates. Jill Stein is (or would be if the race seemed likely to end up closer) more important than Johnson, given the lack of any real breakthrough by either, because it’s reasonable to assume she pulls the lion’s share of her small % from Clinton.
The Access Hollywood tape is the biggest so far, but I wonder if there’s another bombshell coming.
He was irrelevant but Johnson showing that he was clueless helped push almost all of the remaining Bernie Bros over to Clinton and may convince some Republicans to stay home in states where there aren’t other big down ballot raes.