Let’s be careful there. I still don’t believe he can ever be POTUS – but, then, I never believed he’d get this far in the primaries, either.
I see a lot of unwarranted fear of him as some kind of unstoppable bogeyman. In equating his impressive results in GOP primaries with potential in the general election, you are implicitly crediting Republican primary voters with reasonableness. And you of all people should know better than to do that. 
Gaze upon this “big, beautiful” graph, and be not afraid. It’s yooge! 
Seriously, nothing is a sure thing: but this looks to me like the kind of soft, fat pitch right across the plate we are lucky to get once in a lifetime. We still might screw up and hit a pop fly, but is that a reason to let it pass and wait for a better pitch that never comes?
To retreat from the sports metaphor (though I think it’s a good one): what is the decision/logic tree here? Do we really think there’s a scenario in which our nominee beats Cruz or Rubio but loses to Trump? I can’t see that at all. So if Trump were to win in the general, it says to me that Democrats just didn’t have a chance for some reason. In which case, going to vote in the primaries for Trump just helps him be the president instead of Cruz or Rubio. And do you really think President Trump is worse than President Cruz or even President Rubio? I don’t.
Yes: the anti-establishment rage in this election is, in my experieence, unprecedented. Even Perot didn’t tap into it as effectively as Trump is doing. I find it totally bizarre that anyone looks to a billionaire to be a populist, but there it is.
A Trump/Clinton contest will have as one of its dynamics an outsider/establishment decision. (It’s also got a lot of other dynamics, e.g., competence/incompetence). If the rage against the establishment is sufficiently strong, it could propel Trump into office. A Rubio/Clinton campaign would be decided without that dynamic.
I didn’t think he stood a chance several months ago, but his bizarre success in the primaries is making me hedge my bets.
Did you look at that graph though? He is unpopular with the general public on an unprecedented level. And talk about someone whose image is “baked in”!
I swear to god, if I never hear “baked in” again…
That graph is nice on its own. How would a similar graph involving favorability ratings of candidates who won their primaries look?
Like I said, I think a fair amount going on this campaign season is significantly different from previous campaigns, and we need to be careful about relying too much on past campaigns to predict events in this one.
I don’t know if that graph is accurate as to the prior races, but it certainly omits the favorability ratings of the other potential nominees for 2016. It seems that in the current political environment, everyone has lower favorables than you would expect.
Favorables also seem to have less predictive value this cycle. After all, Trump’s favorables even within the GOP are poor–well below Rubio, Cruz, and Carson. But he’s kicking their asses.
I’m not sure what you mean by “candidates who won their primaries”. The graph includes all party nominees since 1992, plus Trump. Those who went on to win the general are in a different color than those who lost.
Anecdotally, a friend whose father is a lifelong “Main Street Republican” says his dad vows not to vote for Trump under any circumstances. He won’t vote for Hillary (or Bernie) either, but he’ll just leave that spot blank if Trump is the nominee. That’s only a “half vote” they lose, but those add up.
ETA: I don’t see anyone making the argument that President Trump is worse than President Rubio or President Cruz. That’s a key point in evaluating whether it’s “playing with fire” to vote strategically as I plan to.
I agree with this.
I would also add that Trump is far more able to shift his political image than Cruz or Rubio. He isn’t beholden to the Party. And he really has no policy positions. And to the extent he has them, they aren’t critical to his appeal among his base of low-information, mostly white nationalist voters. So he has a lot more freedom to adapt himself for the general election. Cruz could never credibly support Planned Parenthood. Trump can (and already did). There are a dozen issues like that where he can chameleon his way into a more effective general election candidate.
It isn’t clear to me that Trump has the political skill to pull off that transition. But I’m not convinced he doesn’t.
I don’t think that is much of an argument for Bernie, for a whole host of reasons. But I agree with the premise.
:smack: Sorry, misread the graph, thought it was only of winning nominees.
Ah, that makes more sense. So now you see why Trump is in a class all his own!
Hey, are you the same SlackerInc who has argued that the fact that Sanders currently has much higher favorability ratings than Clinton (or anyone else) is meaningless this far ahead of the election? After all, her rating is only a couple points better than Trump’s.
I do think that Trump would be a much worse President than Rubio, who would probably just be another GWB (not that that isn’t terrifying enough). I’m not sure he would be worse than Cruz, but I do agree with Richard Parker that, despite current polling data, he would be in a much better position to move toward the center in the general election than Cruz, who is pretty much committed to his own particular brand of crazy.
So I think this plan is playing with fire.
Wait. There is an important point here. I just have a bad headache and am tired and am having trouble teasing it out.
How does Trump compare to others who have lost the nomination, as well?
His ratings look much lower than any other candidate who’s ever won the nomination, yet he looks on track to win the nomination. He’s already bucking one trend. If he can win the nomination despite having lower favorability than any other nomination winner, does this graph really help us predict how he’ll do in the general election?
Also, this.
Sorry to hear about your headache.
I’m sure there must be people who lost the nomination who are that low. Although who knows: that’s pretty low, and requires the public know who he is and really dislike him, consistently. I am not sure who would fit that role in past nominating contests. Ron Paul, maybe?
Nothing is for sure, and yes: this is a weird year. But look at what Nate Silver (the guy with the awesome predictive track record) has to say on the topic:
And to your point, Thing Fish, Hillary’s numbers are not “just a couple points better than Trump’s”:
Look, we’re not going to get the GOP to run a ticket of Martin Shkreli and Walter Palmer. We’ve got a limited universe of options. My contention is that (a) Trump is unusually vulnerable in the general election and (b) no worse than the other conceivable alternatives if he were to actually become president. I don’t think these are wildly controversial claims; in fact, I’d call them pretty near common sense.
Worse how? He’s committed to the notion that poor people must get medical coverage from the government. He’s willing to annihilate the sacred cow of “Bush kept us safe”. He speaks positively about Planned Parenthood, and says a president has to make deals.
I think in fact that he is pretty well the ideal candidate to cross over for: he’s pissed off a ton of people who will never *ever *warm to him, but he’d actually turn out to be pretty moderate if he somehow got in the Oval Office.
Ah. I had thought Hillary’s negatives were a bit higher (I know I linked to a 52% cite somewhere), but I had overlooked that her positives are also considerably higher, so I concede that point.
I just frankly don’t trust the guy enough to posit any correlation at all between what he says now and what he’d do if were actually elected, and looking at his history doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in his judgment.
He’s a wild card, but how is that worse than a more predictably right wing Rubio or Cruz? That’s what I’m failing to get.
Let’s turn this around: If Sanders gets the nomination, all Clintonites here will vote for him – right?
I certainly will.
ETA: But I’ll add that I was fuming after a friend called me up on NH election night and used this fact as a sort of extortive cudgel against me. He said that Clinton partisans will still dutifully go vote for any Democratic nominee, but young Bernheads will be disillusioned and check out of the process if he’s not the nominee, so if we on the Clinton side know what’s good for us, we’d better just nominate Bernie to be safe. I take that as pretty close to being threatened, and I didn’t like it one bit.
A lot of Republicans that would vote Hillary over Trump might not. I’m sure most true blue Dems would vote for Sanders.
Unless he was actually threatening to encourage people not to vote, I wouldn’t take it as a threat. It’s just an acknowledgement of the fact that young people don’t vote as reliably as old people do. Mind you, if I thought Clinton were the better candidate, I wouldn’t be persuaded by the “but we’ll lose the may-or-may-not-vote-anyway vote!” argument, but it’s not a threat.