Trump continues to amaze. Not only did Megyn Kelly come around a few weeks ago, presenting herself as a supplicant and asking for a meeting with Trump in his office, after which both sides had nothing but good things to say about each other, but now no less than Vicente Fox, Mexico’s former president, has apologized to Trump for his remarks about the wall and invited Trump to come to Mexico.
Actually Fox still points out that Trump is still wrong about the wall, he was sorry to insult him and that a more conciliatory tone could convince Trump to change his mind.
Of course I do think that Fox is in danger of falling into a trap as I noted in another thread:
William Kristol and Michael Graham point how, specially for Republicans in Purple states, it will be political suicide to support Trump in this pod cast from the conservative Weekly Standard.
Paraphrasing: “Can you imagine the trap most republican politicians will get into when Trump will say or do reckless things during the campaign and the media rushes to ask them “do you support what the Republican candidate (the face of the party) is saying here?”” They point out that many will not be able to tap dance around the trap they will get into if they come out as enthusiastic supporters of Trump instead of putting some distance, so:
Not much of a danger to Fox as he is a retired politician, but I would not be surprised that many Mexicans will miss that he is getting conciliatory in an attempt to change Trump’s mind and to also get an apology from him to the Mexican people for his past remarks. (that last bit BTW I got from the Hispanic media report of that interview also. The Breitbart article “forgot” to report that)
I really really hate to say this but I think Trump is going to win. Why? Because his message as incoherent as it is, is one of hope. He’s going to “make america great again” and bring back the jobs. It doesn’t matter that he has no realistic plan to do that, thats what people want to hear. The American middle class has been decimated by globalization and outsourcing, he is tapping into that and giving them a scapegoat and an easy answer.
Hope is why Obama beat Clinton in 2008 and it’s why Trump is going to beat Clinton in 2016, unless she can also come up with some compelling vision of a better future. Her track record doesn’t make me very optimistic that she can do that.
Yeah, if Trump does win, we’ll see it coming in polls, and I don’t think it’ll be on the backs of this swell of middle class voters who wouldn’t otherwise have voted or voted Republican anyway. I just don’t see it.
I disagree. The horse-race coverage of elections tends to focus on relatively transitory ups and downs in polling, but most recent Presidential races have been pretty static. Stuff comes up that causes one candidate to jump a few points for a week (like McCain choosing Palin or Romney beating Obama in their first debate), and then they drop back to where they were, with the final election results being within a point or two of where polling was in the Spring.
And this is even more true of candidates who were well known before election season. The public image of both Hillary and Trump is pretty well settled. For better or worse, I think the electorate pretty much already knows what they think of them, so their ability to change the current polling by making themselves look better or the other look worse is going to be limited.
How would he rehab his image? I’m not saying it’s impossible by any means, but I cannot imagine how. I have a hard time seeing how he could rehab his image in order to gain back any immigrants, Latinos, Muslims, or women that he’s lost. If he says he was joking about stuff before, many people against him wouldn’t believe him, but some of his supporters might and then their votes would be lost. It’s possible he could modify his tone to sound a bit more presidential in order to win back some conservatives who are worried about his temper, but I don’t know how long that would last since he is so thin-skinned.
It isn’t going to be Chris Christie because he is too brash. An all brash, all northeast ticket won’t work. I think Trump will pick someone like Kasich, who has political experience and a mellow personality to balance out the ticket.
The pundits have been assuring me for months that Trump was going to crash and burn. And they have been wrong every step of the way. Now they are assuring me that Trump can’t possibly beat Hilary. I am clinging to hope that they are right this time and your post is wrong. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
What about first time voters, or people that tend to not vote but would make an exception to vote for Trump? Could there be enough of that to make typical Red State/Blue State predictions unreliable?
@Sam Lowry:
Well he doesn’t have to win back Muslims, they are an almost insignificant demographic everywhere except maybe Michigan. Maybe 1% of the population.
He could maybe win back women by mostly shutting up and let his daughter be his women’s ambassador. Never say “playing the woman’s card” again and highlight his soft stance on Planned Parenthood.
Latinos is obviously the tough nut but it would be for any Republican given the party’s hard stance on immigration reform of late. I guess he just has to play up that he is all for legal immigration but we have to crack down on the parasitic Coyotes.
Muslims aren’t a huge number, but I would think that there are at least some non-bigoted voters who even if they don’t love Muslims think that it’s insane to ban them.
He doesn’t attack on policy, his default attacks are crass insults. So since he’ll be running against a woman, a lot of his attacks will default to sexist attacks. Even some of his attacks on his male competition has been sexist remarks about their wives. I would be extremely surprised if he goes after Clinton in totally non-sexist ways. But even if he’s totally good for the next six months and says nothing with even a hint of misogyny, what he’s said in the past has been bad enough I don’t know how many female voters will be won over.
With Latino voters, I can imagine him winning back some Latino voters by softening his rhetoric, and then some of those voters getting scared away again by racist Trump supporters. Not all of his supporters are racists, but Trump has been getting a lot of support from white supremacists. Your support for a candidate shouldn’t be 100% based on who his other supporters are, but when Trump is so popular amongst white supremacists, that does give a lot of non-white and non-racist white people pause. And it’s not just the out and out white supremacists, but plenty of regular racist white people who are at his rallies and are his loudest supporters.
If you mean there’s lots of room for improvement then I agree. He can only go up from here! If you mean there’s some specific aspect of his campaign, platform or personality that has lots of potential to win women over please spell it out for us.
