Or aliens from his hairpiece’s home planet could land and coronate Trump as King of All 'Merkins, using their secret mind-control rays. Indeed, Trump has multiple paths to victory, all of them about equally plausible.
It would be $1450 to earn $100. That’s pretty much it, although assuming you think Trump is going to burn out in a few months, yoiu could then cash out at a much better price without waiting to the end.
I think 538’s stages of doom are well defined, but the notion that he’s got a 50-50 chance of getting through each one seems way oversimplified. It may have been good enough for the first week of August, when he’d only been leading the polls for a few weeks, and hadn’t yet been in a debate.
Now he’s led in the polls for over three months, he’s been in two debates, taken some hits and had some ups and downs, and we’ve learned a bit about his supporters.
So we can make some educated guesses.
- Heightened scrutiny: he’s going to lose some support at this stage, certainly. But relative to everyone other than Ben Carson, he’s got quite a cushion. A 30% level of support among Republicans and people who vote that way might translate into only a 20% level of support among likely primary voters.
So he’ll survive this step, but will look like less of a juggernaut. 100% chance of survival, but it’ll make a difference in the next step.
- Iowa and New Hampshire: first of all, the expectations game: it’s still going to be a Big Deal if he wins one or the other of these. Particularly if Ben Carson wins Iowa and Trump wins New Hampshire (where can I get some money down on this particular outcome? :)), it’s gonna look like the Twilight of the Establishment, and Trump’s still gonna look like a winner.
But I think he has to win one of these to survive this step. Two silver medals, and it’ll be all downhill from there.
I’m gonna say this one’s 50-50. If the ‘heightened scrutiny’ step wasn’t likely to reduce his support, IMHO his chances would be considerably better at this step, more like 80%.
- The winnowing: I think this is going to take awhile, for all practical purposes. In all likelihood, the field will be down to 5 or less pretty quickly, with the five being Trump, Carson, Bush, Rubio, and Cruz. Barring a breakthrough by one of the others in Iowa or NH, the others are effectively gone after NH. Whether or not they actually fold their campaigns, they’ll be in the white noise.
But all of these five could hang in there awhile. And the longer the vote gets split 4-5 ways, the better it is for Trump, and the worse it is for the survivor of the implicit Bush/Rubio competition.
538 says the next step, delegate accumulation, starts in mid-March, so I’m going to consider the winnowing step to have ended by the vernal equinox, March 21. Basically, enough time for candidates to have absorbed the results of the March 15 primaries, and to decide whether to keep going or fold.
I’m giving Trump a 70% chance of surviving this step.
- Delegate accumulation: this is where he dies. He may get enough delegates to have an impact on the convention, but won’t get enough delegates to come close to winning outright. 538 characterizes the threats to him here as “Poor organization in caucus states, poor understanding of delegate rules, no support from superdelegates.” These will kill him. 0% chance of surviving this step.
Also, at some point, the game is going to get old, both for him and for his current fans. Heightened scrutiny will continue throughout the primary season, and it’ll be clear even to low-information Republican voters (but I repeat myself ;)) that his answers to everything basically come down to, “since I’m Donald Trump, I’ll have an awesome solution to this problem, but I have no idea what it is yet.”
- Convention/Aftermath:
And so, somewhere along the line, his campaign will die a natural death. The only question will be, will he and Carson stay alive long enough and pull in enough delegates to deny anyone else a win as well?
Could happen. I’d say the odds of someone winning on the first ballot are still >80%, despite the fact that I’d love to see a chaotic GOP convention where they really didn’t know who would win.
The big risk to the GOP is if the party visibly gangs up to kill his campaign. If so, he would have a ready-made excuse to ditch the party and run as an independent. Which I would also love to see.
So to paraphrase Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis, “do it, Club for Growth, throw rocks at him! Damn it, big rocks! Hit 'im hard!”
I’m having trouble believing that if Trump wins the majority of delegates chosen in primaries and conventions that the party would deny him the nomination, even though they very likely could do so. Would they really want to tell their voters, “yeah we know you want this guy but we know better than you so suck itup and vote for Jeb”? To me it sounds like a recipe to suppress your own turnout.
Needs a little werewolf and vampire.
IF he won a majority of primary/caucus delegates, they’d really need to give him the nomination, or face a major revolt. Certainly he could run as an independent - and if he’d been strong enough throughout primary season to win a majority of the primary/caucus delegates, such a run would absolutely devastate the GOP.
But I can’t see him winning a majority of primary/caucus delegates. A plurality, perhaps, if the winnowing among the current top 5 candidates takes long enough. But I think even that’s a bit of a long shot.
Except he wouldn’t get on the ballot in the majority of states. Between sore loser laws and states that have a single filing date for both the primary and general elections he’d mostly be a write in candidate. That likely marginalizes his effectiveness to pull votes. He might be able to screw up some key states but that would take a state by state walk
Without actually winning a primary, I am not prepared to say he has more than the proverbial snowball’s chance.
Have the laws changed that much since 1980? Or is the period between the last week of April and the first week of June crucial? Because John Anderson campaigned for the GOP nomination, dropped out on April 24, 1980 to run as an independent, and got on the ballot in 50 states plus DC.
Nope. Not a chance in hell.
And as far as these damn polls show-- I’m 44, lived in popular urban areas and I’ve never been polled. I’ve never been one of the lucky 200 people surveyed. :rolleyes:
Now Trump wants to destroy mosques. When told we have freedom of religion in the USA, he says he’ll look into it. The man is a fucking joke. I wouldn’t even consider him being a decent entrepreneur.
A fun app that **Adaher **linked to in another thread to play with. Based on estimated 2016 voting eligible population demographics it allows you to dial up and down each demographics share and turn-out from 2012 numbers and see what states flip when with what popular vote and Electoral College results.
Dial down Hispanic GOP share from 27.6 to 13 and marginally increase turn-out from 48 to 50 (smoked). Assume an unprecedented share of the Black vote, up from 6.1 to 15%, and turn out back to 59% (6 points below White instead of higher than like it was, which includes a marginal increase of White turn-out from 64.1 to 65%). Move White share from the 60.2 Romney got to 63 … and Trump loses both. Get to 64% of the White vote and it flips to a victory.
Trump not getting at least 38% of Whites to vote against him? I don’t think so.
People have been using heightened scrutiny to mean Trump’s political statements.
What will really happen, and be much more fun, is that reporters will dredge up every scandal Trump has ever had, find new financial shenanigans, dig up the time in college he had sex with a dead dog, and run pictures of Melenia in a threesome with Justin Trudeau and Justin Bieber. Trump thinks he’s been investigated but he’s never seen anything like what happens to a presidential candidate.
And he’s still never answered the question of what happens to his huge, really huge, bigger than you can think, money empire when he has to resign everything and put his money into a blind trust that’s really blind. That’s the ultimate stopper for him.
I think a lot of states have recently added “sore loser” laws that prevent anyone who appears on the ballot in a primary election can only appear on the general election ballot as the nominee from the party that they were on the primary ballot for. It was spurred by a fairly high profile case of someone managing to win an election as a 3rd party despite losing his party’s nomination, but I don’t remember who it was or where.
While I think it would be a hoot if he won the nomination, and his sound trouncing at the polls would give me all sorts of warm feelings, I prefer not to tempt fate. It would be just my luck that now we’re planning a return move to the US, he would be president. 
I assume you’re talking about Lieberman in 2006. I seem to recall that Connecticut fixed its problem, and I’m not discounting the possibility that one or two other states might’ve been inspired to follow suit. But I don’t remember any big wave of states instituting sore-loser laws in the wake of that race. I could be wrong, but I’d certainly like to see some evidence.
Also, there would be the question of whether those laws just applied to in-state races, or whether they applied to Presidential candidates as well. I’m sure sore-loser laws existed in at least some states prior to 1980, yet they didn’t stop Anderson from getting on the ballot everywhere.
Out of those five, one showed him ahead, another tied, for an average of 2.5 behind Clinton.
Given that Republicans gain a little once polls switch to likely voters(yes, registered voter polls are skewed against Republicans, look it up). Trump could certainly win if the election were held today. Probably not, but could.
General election polls this early in the cycle tell us nothing, which is why Nate Silver doesn’t track them and compile them this early. At the same point in '11 and '07, the general election polls also were way off. There’s no point worrying about general election polls before we’ve had any primaries.
The sad thing is, I bet a great majority of Republicans agree with this. How many times have you seen your whacky Facebook friends post shit like “Everything I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11”? In their view, 9/11 grants the US perpetual victimhood and the moral high ground in perpetuity no matter what it does.
It’s not accurate that they tell us nothing. Truly unelectable candidates will appear unelectable no matter when you do the polling. And Trump has looked very unelectable. At least until Clinton started having her own problems.
It’s not so much that Trump is electable as SOMEONE has to win the election, and anyone can compete with Clinton.