There is a not insignificant number of people that just about now are beginning to put attention. And when I look at the polls, there is also still a lot of undecideds out there.
I see it a lot like the candidates trying to avoid the bear in that old joke, Hillary only has to use her running shoes and be just slightly faster than the other guy.
RickJay: Something I don’t think anyone’s mentioned (given my cursory read of the thread) is that other Republicans couldn’t attack Trump on the issues.
Trump’s positions are just not that different from the normal GOP talking points. Tough on immigration? The only innovation there is the border wall, which is just a more florid display of the usual pathology. Insane anti-abortion positions? He backed down from the only thing which differentiated him from the pack. Idiotic economic policy? The Republicans take “cut taxes to reduce deficit” as a point of dogma.
The upshot is that Clinton can go hard on substantive questions, which is a great way to get under Trump’s skin and cause him to flounder. Trump flounders like a third-grader who didn’t do the homework. He lets his guard down and says either utter nonsense or offensive shit.
More to the point, Clinton isn’t pandering to the people who share Trump’s bigotry. Republican primary candidates had to walk a fine line between saying Trump is wrong and saying that their party’s core constituency is wrong. Clinton can afford to attack the hatred underlying Trump’s ideas because the people who share that hatred will never vote for any female President anyway. It’s freeing to know who your enemies are.
Where Trump differs from GOP positions, he’s incoherent anyway. In foreign policy terms he’s careened from “isolationist” to “Galactic Empire” within the span of the next speech. People hear from Trump what they want to hear.
The ability of people to see what they want to see - to completely perceive the world in a way people in this thread do not - is limitless. I don’t think folks here appreciate how different others’ worldview can be. If you read the various articles about Trump supporters that have been published, the ones where someone gets right in there and talks to them, one of the things that jumps out at you is that a lot of people - usually men, working class men - say “Mr. Trump is going to build that wall with Mexico, and I then I can get a job building it.”
That is, to me, a statement roughly on par with saying “Mr. Trump is going to grant me the power to shoot laser beams out of my eyes,” and yet it is something people really, truly believe. The fact that it pops up more than once suggests it’s a widespread article of faith. People are literally banking their future on Donald Trump build a giant wall that they can get a good paying job helping to build. You can laugh at those people if you want; given that a lot of them really need a job, I find it heartbreaking. A person who thinks that is not just going to vote Trump, he’s going to volunteer for the campaign.
This sort of thing is not limited to Trump, or his supporters; everyone has their illusions and things they refuse to let go of or refuse to believe. It is just more extreme in Trumpists, because, frankly, that’s who he was going for in the first place. What’s Donald Trump good at? Spotting the sucker. Trump’s whole career has been built on fooling people into believe there is a pot of gold at the end of his rainbow. He’s damn good at it. He has fooled many people who should have known better.
Clearly Clinton has to try to lead the bear into a bear trap, and one has to think she’ll at least try this particular route. Trump’s challenge will be to avoid answering the question and staying on message. To most voters it really does not matter if the candidate answers the question. Lest you think I am insulting American voters, rest assured it’s just as true here in Canada; the candidates in televised debates can cheerfully answer questions they weren’t asked and win debates. Trump has to memorize twelve, maybe fifteen answers and just go with whichever one fits. Clinton has to try to get him away from that. The format of the debate may be what determines whether or not it happens.
Pretend you’re Hilary Clinton and throw ANY challenge at me, pretending to be Donald Trump, and I bet I can come up with a Trumpism that’ll satisfy most voters. With some coaching and practice he might not even sound like an asshole.
If anyone cares, Ann Coulter’s head is exploding over Pence as VP
Is he too liberal for her?
She doesn’t have to “lead him into a bear trap”, he has no other choice. His whole campaign depends on the news cycle, staying in the news, being talked about every day. The more he does it, the more the odds increase that he will step on his dick. He must increase the impact of his statements and broaden the stupidity and step up the temperature.
Why? Because he already has all the voters he’s going to get from his previous nonsense, and it isn’t enough. Sooner or later, he has to solidly pander to each and every knuckle walking constituency, loudly, openly. Touting himself as the “law and order” candidate is one such step. But when is he going to put on his “pro-life” extremist costume? Soon. Bet on it. “Pro-life” single issue voters are sitting there, waiting to be sucked up to. He will brand Planned Parenthood as monstrous ghouls, he will sorta kinda endorse extra-legal tactics against abortion providers.
Bet me. Gotta have 'em all. Or he can’t win.
The ACLU has released a 27-page document on Trump’s unconstitutional ideas.
Warning: pdf file
https://action.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pages/trumpmemos.pdf
Coulter said Pence flip flopped on gay marriage. But even worse for her, she says he is OK with illegal immigrants.
Thiel is probably pretty damn sure that there’s nothing those platform committee members will be able to actually DO to make him live as a second class citizen; and the delegates will cheer his speech because in Trump’s GOP he’s a first class citizen by virtue of being “a winner” financially.
Which takes us back to the thread about the platforms and the plain and simple fact that the platforms are seen even by those close to the candidate as pointless and useless. The platforms are extensive wish lists made so that the people showing up at the work meetings the week before the media circus can crow back at their constituents at home that dagnabbit they made sure they had a plank standing up for the values of the people of Flathill County and for renewing the subsidies for their main employer. Especially with the GOP this year, the platform meetings were just thrown to the Movement Conservatives and Tea Partiers to go ahead and fill with visions of christian rainbow dust and star spangled AR-15-toting ponies, so they’ll feel they are being heard.
This is a wonderful document–thanks for linking it.
But as RickJay (and possibly others) have said, it doesn’t really matter to his fans if what he says is nonsense. And it may not matter to the elusive Undecided Voters, either, if his bluster (while spouting the nonsense) impresses them favorably.
Everything will depend on the moderator(s). A moderator who calls him on his shit–who says ‘you haven’t answered the question, Mr. Trump’—could create conditions in which undecided viewers would falter in their admiration for Trump’s “I’m never wrong” manner.
But of course Trump won’t agree to debate without veto power over the moderators. He won’t agree to anyone who would be inclined to point out that he’s speaking meaningless twaddle instead of answering the questions posed.
Many on the right are just as convinced as you, but that Trump will wipe up the floor with Clinton in the debates. I don’t see a big win by either as likely.
Trump has a bigger challenge in a general election debate than primary simply because he has fill close to half the time, not 15 or 20%, and he has very little knowledge of policy details. OTOH very few people expect him to by now. If he can appear credible as occupant of the WH temperamentally, he gains.
And it wasn’t particularly true in the primaries that opponents could get under his skin and make him boil over and damage himself. In some cases he boiled over but said things a lot of people (even beyond the GOP) agree with, like his attack on Bush’s foreign policy at the Charleston debate. Constantly calling Trump a bigot is probably an effective political strategy for mobilizing the Democratic base, but among independents it really depends on what. Some statements the Dem base would call bigoted close to a majority of independents support, like the Muslim ban, and that’s asking them to actually admit they back the policy themselves, not just vote for somebody who has ‘suggested’ it. In other cases Trump has said stuff almost anyone outside his core base thinks is bigoted, eg. the ‘Mexican’ judge thing, but how much of a theme of the debate can Clinton make that if Trump won’t play along?
And that’s the basic problem with your thesis IMO. Clinton is smart, but very cautious and canned in front of large audiences. She’s among the least likely people to play Tom Cruise to anybody else’s Jack Nicholson and get them to make self-damning statements they didn’t plan to.
And he has stuff to throw at her (personal fortune built on influence peddling, ‘very careless’ with classified info per career FBI people’s assessment, etc). I don’t expect her responses to those to be self damning either. They’ll probably just both bloody each other up and leave most persuadable voters as now: two terrible choices.
If either one of them needs a big debate victory, they’ll be in trouble IMO.
Thiel has far too much money to be relegated to second class status. I am curious as to how he might react to Pence being the VP pick - while Thiel is a Libertarian, whose views apparently align with many of Trump’s beliefs, Pence has a horrible LGBT record. I’m not sure it’ll be enough to cause an issue- but wouldn’t it be funny if Thiel cancelled his appearance at the convention?
At Betfair.com you can lay about £2500 against Donald Trump right now and get 2-5 odds. If you’re certain Trump’s chance is less than 20%, that’s a far better gamble than anything on the stock market.
I’m not taking the bet. I don’t think I’m smarter than the prediction markets and am watching this election with grave trepidation.
And so, it is the TRUMP ≠ worth a PENCE ticket!
:smack: You’ve got to be shitting me. This is a real quote?
Mmhmmm. I suppose we’re not allowed to wager money here, or I’d offer one (and give you odds). But I guaran-fucking-tee you, he’s not coming within sniffing distance of this win.
Pence is a real gem. :smack:
From Wikipedia:
Yep, them gays is almost as bad as them Mexicans.
Trump Pence - A Return to Stupidity
For the first time I am becoming genuinely worried that Trump could become President. A lot of it has to do with his uptick in the polls and 538 but beyond that a few points:
His campaign appears to be getting less terrible. Pence is a half-decent pick given his other options and they seem to be managing the runup to the convention pretty well.
Hillary is a dud candidate. I have been saying that for a long time but she is even worse than I thought . She has faced a really incompetent campaign especially in June and most things have gone her way yet she struggles to lead by more than 3-4 points. Her approval ratings are at near toxic levels especially in swing states and I don’t think there is anything that she can do about it.
The string of atrocities is psychologically unsettling and could easily lead to voters lurching towards a perceived strongman in November. The Orlando attacks didn’t seem to affect the race but if there are another two or three attacks especially on US soil it could get very unpredictable.
I still think Hillary will pull out a win but it’s going to a lot closer than I thought a few weeks back when my subjective probability of a Trump win was around 10%. Right now, it would be more like 35%.
Worrisome but not as much. You need to remember that Obama was constantly just 2 or 3 points ahead of Romney, and close to the end it was just about 1 point ahead in the polls.
Trump is a **far **worse candidate than Romney though and his campaign was a model of incompetence all through June. Any decent opponent would have been up by 7-8 points or more. If Obama could run I suspect he would be 50-40.
Romney did not had the support of many of the reprehensible groups that are supporting Trump now. The point stands though, Hillary was at times at rates much higher than Obama was in 2012 against the Republican. BTW this is a time were more people than ever should get involved to spread the word about what a Trump presidency will mean to the USA and the world. I’m volunteering this time to help make sure that Trump will not win.