Heh. That guy voted for Trump.

The BBQ Pit
1

Win or lose, Trump will will be testifying in a fraud and elder abuse case after the November election. He won’t fare well. If he loses, he will thrash around desperately trying to cash his mailing lists, launching an fusillade of shifty offers. His supporters will look badly, especially in a couple of years. Demagogues typically lose, but they leave a trail of damage behind. Huey Long, George Wallace, McCarthyism. Trump’s supporters might be recalled from time to time.

Registered Republican Bill McBride of Calculated Risk sees this election as a litmus test moment. I see it as a test of character and judgement, especially for conservatives. A majority will fail, proving that their complaints about Obama were never about small government. (James Fallows has assembled a Trump Time Capsule, letting future historians know what we knew when we decided whether to choose him as President).

Anyway I endorse Bill McBride’s take: [indent][indent]My advice for politicians and American citizens who supported Trump: If you haven’t abandoned Trump yet, do it now. If your family, friends and co-workers know you supported Trump - tell them you’ve had enough. They will respect you for changing your mind (if not now, in the near future). If you have a Trump sign in your yard, take it down. If you have a Trump bumper sticker on your car, take it off.

I’m voting for Hillary Clinton, but if you can’t stomach voting for her - still vote! - but vote for a 3rd party candidate or write-in another candidate. If you can’t stand Hillary (I think she will be fine), maybe you can console yourself that she won without 50% of the vote.

But it is important for our future that Trump loses and loses badly. This vote will be a message to the future that people like Trump are not acceptable. And I guarantee you that you will feel better about yourself in a few years when you can honestly say you didn’t vote for Trump.
Read more at Calculated Risk: Off-Topic: Update on Litmus Test Moments [/indent][/indent] Others think voting for a third party is a cop-out. Duly noted.

So why is this in the Pit? Because I’m going to make this personal. It’s easy for a liberal like me to oppose Trump. What takes character is to be an ordinary Republican voter and understand the risk he imposes on the republic. Bricker and Shodan have passed this character test. adaher plans to vote for Gary Johnson unless the race is close in his state. Under that scenario he will vote for Hillary. Another defensible move. Starving Artist, who likes Trump, agrees that he is not suited for the Presidency. Kudos.

If the situation were reversed, I’m guessing that many liberals on this board might fail the test. I would hope but not guarantee that I would do well. Imagine that the Dems nominate an anti-vax or vax-pander bear Jill Stein for President and a Vice President who thinks Bernie Sanders is less concerned about actual political reform and more interested in a tacit “commitment to Eurocentrism and normalized white supremacy.”". Bernie Sanders. Huh! Also Assad of Syria is apparantly a swell guy. Say Jill Stein isn’t sure if we should keep our NATO obligations, or thinks alleged fascists attending her rallies should be beaten up. Hypothetically. Nah, too unrealistic.

Continuing, the Greens under this scenario just nominated Tim Kaine for President and Rush Holt for VP. Mitt Romney is the choice of the GOP; Condi Rice is the VP.

Would I wimp out and vote for Kaine/Holt in the hypothetical Green Party? Or would I bite the bullet and vote for Mitt Romney? If Howard Baker (R) were Majority Leader in the Senate and Dick Cheney (!) was Majority Leader in the House, it would be so simple: I’d vote for Romney. But with McConnell and Ryan with the reins, I’m not sure.

No way I’d vote for a hypothetical Trump-like Jill Stein. No way, or so I hope. At any rate I predict conservative opponents of Trump will have solid bragging rights, especially in 2 years and maybe in 20. Grandpa never shuts up about it!

2

I think that’s a very logical post.

Unfortunately I also think that the vast majority of Trump supporters are angry, disillusioned and not interested in any analysis.
They feel something is wrong and that Trump can magically solve everything. He will immediately:

  • build a wall
  • cut crime
  • help white folks
  • make America great

As a European, I can only hope that Hilary wins big.

3

If people viewed the Presidency in terms of character and competence and actual accomplishments, then most Presidential races wouldn’t even be close. They are close because most people view the Presidency in terms of ideology. Which candidate is saying what you want to hear? Smarter people try to rationalize placing ideology on a pedestal because of Supreme Court justices and such, but what it really comes down to with a President, is can we trust him? Is he competent to run the federal government? If he has good ideas, can he even implement them? How good is he at diplomacy, not just with foreign countries, but with the opposition party as well? Does he lie too much, to the point where you simply can’t trust him?

With Hillary Clinton, she only fails the last test. She just cannot be trusted and I don’t think any Clinton voter can honestly say what she’ll do as President policy-wise. What tilts the balance in her favor is her record, which while not nearly as remarkable as Clinton boosters and Clinton herself claim, demonstrate that she is cautious without being indecisive, which is pretty much the perfect sweet spot for a President to be in. She knows a lot about policy. She sweats the details. So the fact she’s a habitual liar bugs me, but much like Richard Nixon before he went mad with paranoia, she’ll be a steady hand at the wheel. We just can’t be completely sure what she’ll do, and much like Nixon, she’s very likely to disappoint her supporters by doing what’s best instead of what she told them she would do.

All in all, Gary Johnson for me is the best candidate. He doesn’t know as much as Clinton, but he has a stable record, as does his VP nominee. We can trust those two to be a great team in the unlikely event they are elected. So fingers still crossed that the public wakes up to the fact that we don’t have to settle between nutty and dishonest. But if not, I won’t have much trouble reconciling myself to a Clinton Presidency. Those of us who have learned the details of the first Clinton Presidency know what to expect in the second, and it should be more than fine.

4

If someone well to the left of what I’d feel comfortable with were nominated as a Dem, I’d still vote for them today in the principle of divided government. There’s no way that they’d be able to enact much of their agenda without the cooperation of Congress, with one chamber way far to their right, and the other either way far to their right or firmly to their right depending on the Senate results.

Same goes for nominations to the courts: the Dems in the Senate would moderate any far-left nominations.

So what’s left is their executive power. It could hugely affect other people but not so much myself. Let’s call foreign policy a wash because what’s most important to me is competence of the individual rather than hypothetical dogma.

Anti-vax would be a wash too because if they are active enough to use their executive power in this manner, I’d assume they’d be active enough to push for more research using dead babby parts which might benefit me.
Continuing relaxation of the war on drugs would be a positive.
I’m not sure how much the executive should crack down on big banks so I guess it depends on how far they go.
I wouldn’t want to relax deportation of illegal immigrants but it wouldn’t really affect me.

All in all, even at its worst within the bounds of democracy, a leftie executive would be a much better alternative today than any Republican I can think of considering they GOP, no matter how “moderate”, would work with Congress to enact the red agenda.

5

Any arguments based on what you think people would do in a hypothetical situation are just dead in the water.

No, I would not vote for a Trump on the Democratic side. Yes, I might vote for an anti-vaxxer, same as those guys above might vote for a global-warming denier. But that would be because there were other factors that make up for that problem, combined with the fact that the President by themselves doesn’t really have a lot of power to deal with these issues.

None of that is why Trump fails the basic competency test. It’s because he is remarkably unknowledgeable and has no desire to learn. It’s because he has a huge temperament problem. It’s because he has a personality disorder that makes him act irrationally.

And, yeah. I normally don’t consider competency, because it’s normally not an issue. Sure, maybe one person is more experienced than the other. But most Presidents learn on the job. Most often, issues are far more important.

This just happens to be a case where this is not so. The primary process failed, and we didn’t filter those people out at the gate. So now we have to do it later in the process.

Even if they were a Democrat, I don’t see any egotistical celebrity with no desire to learn and poorly controlled anger issues, I can’t see myself ever voting for them. Hopefully, they wouldn’t even win the nomination in the first place. That would mean our party was in ruins.

6

Nate Silver should do a study on whether Republicans or Democrats are more likely to abandon their nominees. We don’t just have to look at the Presidential level, but Congressional too, since that’s a bigger sample and Democrats have been as likely as Republicans to nominate someone who was unfit or was found late in the process to be unfit. I’d be interested in how likely Democrats were to abandon such candidates vs. Republicans. We could define “unfit” as a corruption scandal or some other damaging scandal that called into the question the qualifications of the candidate.

Or, we could just look at the Democratic race in Florida. Patrick Murphy got bitchslapped hard by the Miami Herald for basically making up his resume out of whole cloth. Grayson was already pretty close to him in the primary race and could very well end up being the nominee. Senate Leader Harry Reid has said that Grayson has serious ethical problems.

So if it’s Grayson vs. Rubio, who would Democrats support in that not all that unlikely hypothetical? I know that few liberals like Rubio, but there just isn’t any comparison between Rubio and Grayson in terms of temperament or honesty. So Florida Democrats, if I’m supporting Clinton, you guys need to return the favor and vote for Rubio.

7

If the situation were reversed, and the Republican candidate were the sane one, I would like to think that I could vote in the best interests of the country over party affiliation. I would like to think that I could. Kudos to Bricker etc. Respect.

8

You’re going to have to give us a little more detail than “Harry Reid has said that Grayson has serious ethical problems”. Clinton has “ethical problems”. Trump is a dangerous lunatic. Does Grayson pose any sort of actual peril?

9

I was having a similar thought last week, but Jill Stein is nowhere near vile enough to be a Trump equivalent. Honestly, I have about as many problems with Clinton as I have with Stein.

Switch your hypothetical around so that we have a truly narcissistic, violent sociopath running as a Democrat. Louis Farrakhan is our nominee.

Against him? I’d hold my nose and vote for Romney.

10

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/us/politics/harry-reid-says-alan-grayson-should-drop-senate-bid.html?_r=0

And the NY TImes article it refers to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/us/politics/alan-graysons-double-life-congressman-and-hedge-fund-manager.html

Plus if you know Alan Grayson and have followed his career, he’s just not the kind of guy who should be in elected office. But a lot of lefties have affection for him because he’s a staunch liberal and is really hardcore in his rhetoric towards Republicans.

11

Stein isn’t as odious as Trump but is probably even less qualified in terms of ability and intelligence. It would be very hard to justify a vote for her if a reasonable Republican in the Romney/McCain mold is her opponent.

Farrakhan is a pretty extreme case, but how about Al Sharpton? Sharpton has quite a bit in common with Trump in terms of saying really stupid things and never apologizing. Plus unlike Trump, he’s made a career of actually hurting people with his false accusations.

12

I would like to say that increased internet presence in mobile devices and so forth makes voters more aware of Trump’s failings, but then I thought the same would apply to Brexit and it didn’t.

Trumps’ backers are the everymans who are disillusioned with politics in general and see him as a Buford Pusser type who’ll wreck the DC establishment with a baseball bat. They see him as a way to get back at all the complacent bureaucrats who make all the spaghetti strand laws that tie up their lives. Jesse Helms was the same way and he got re-elected numerous times, despite his staggering number of haters.

I think I’m just going to start laughing every time Trump makes an asinine comment, start drinking again, and break out my fiddle while American burns.

13

I think your analogy is a much better one. Trump isn’t particularly “far right” (or if he is, that’s not the biggest problem with him), but he is uninformed, unscrupulous, and down right dangerous to society. There is no way I’d vote for Farrakhan, if the choice was Romney. Romney is much too right-wing for me, but I think he’s deliberative enough that he’d be an OK president.

How about we make it a choice between Trump and Farrakhan? :slight_smile:

14

I don’t think I agree with this.

Personally I think Trump is the scum of the earth, his winning the nomination was a disaster, and what it says about the US electorate is not pretty. I am not going vote for him.

All that said, in some hypothetical scenario in which I knew that my vote was the deciding vote which would make either Trump or Clinton president, I would vote for Trump. Because as despicable and unqualified as Trump is on a personal level, as a practical matter, if he won the election, the government would be run by more normal and experienced people, and he would not be pursuing a left-wing agenda as Clinton would be.

As to your first point above, I don’t think Trump having an epic loss will teach many people much. The people who are going to learn lessons from this are people who never supported Trump to begin with. And the people who supported Trump are not the type of people who take lessons of this sort.

Fact is that everything Trump has done has been completely predictable. It’s not like he started out normal and suddenly had some sort of melt-down. What you see now is what you’ve been seeing from the start. If Trump loses by some epic proportion it’s not going to be a wake-up call for his supporters, because these people supported him when he was thought to have no chance to begin with. They either don’t care or don’t know enough to appreciate the point.

And no two situations are ever identical. Suppose Trump gets blown out. Now another candidate shows up who is equally unqualified from the perspective of a lot of people, but he is not a clone of Trump. Perhaps he says things that are not PC, but he doesn’t get so caught up in petty squabbles and insult-fests as Trump does. Or maybe he’s not as ignorant about politics and policy. Maybe he’s not such a blowhard phony. And so on. Trump’s failing are so many and so great that you’re unlikely to have someone with all of them. So even Trump supporters who do learn some sort of lesson from the Trump debacle, there will always be something to pin that loss on that don’t apply in the new case.

15

I’m centrist liberal I suppose. If Kasich was up there instead of Trump, I would be following this a bit closer. I like him. And am not thrilled about Hillary. But she should be fine.

As it stands, with Trump the alternative, it’s a lock for Hillary for me. No choice.

16

That’s a pretty easy one for me. I’d vote for Romney in that case. In local elections, when Rod Blagojevich went up against Judy Barr Topinka in our (Illinois’) gubernatorial race, I casted the only vote I remember ever casting for a Republican. Despite the tight Senate race, I may very well (probably will) vote for Mark Kirk for my second Republican vote of my lifetime, but he’s got the whole RINO label slapped on him, so he may not count. I think it’s somewhat important to have reasonable Republicans in office that can at least help bridge the gap.

17

Nitpick-- “cast” does not change spelling from present to past tense.

18

Sharpton hasn’t “made a career” of false accusations, so let’s not get hyperbolic. He’s slick, self-aggrandizing and pompous but despite some of his more dubious actions he’s also actively worked to improve things for poor blacks, up to and including moving to Chicago to work on black-on-black violence (you know - the stuff right-wing talking heads say never gets considered). So unlike Trump, he at least has something in the “positives” column.

I still wouldn’t want to vote for him, of course, and Farrakhan is far worse. So in the following pairings I’d probably go:

Sharpton-Romney: Maybe Romney, depending on whether he’s tacking left or right in his platform and choice of running mate.

Farrakhan-Romney: Definitely Romney.

Sharpton-Trump: Sharpton without question.

Farrakhan-Trump: Consider renouncing my US citizenship because the whole country is fucked if this is who the parties have nominated.

19

That was my though, too. I would literally move to Canada (if I could). Well, maybe not Canada, unless it was Vancouver. The south of France might be a bit more suitable.

20

I think there’s a hidden hypothetical in McBride’s analysis, but it’s rather subtle.

In one of his blog posts, he describes a few other litmus test moments; predicting the housing bubble (among economists), and the Iraq War vote (among politicians). The thing is, you have to compare that moment with what actually happens in its aftermath. Trump seems likely to lose. With any luck we’ll never find out how bad his presidency would be. If McBride thinks this litmus test will be judged on how bad a president Trump would have been, he’s wrong. That’s the hypothetical.

If he wants to compare this to other litmus tests, I suggest the 1972 and 1988 presidential elections. In 1972, McGovern lost in a landslide to Nixon. We judge that vote not on what a McGovern presidency would have been, but on what Nixon’s was. In '88, Dukakis lost big to Bush the Elder. Democratic candidates for president have shifted somewhat more centrist since then, but it’s hardly a watershed moment in U.S. history.

If Trump loses, as seems likely, I don’t think this is a big litmus test moment for Republicans to abandon Trump. If Clinton’s presidency is a failure, his stock will go up (“Don’t blame me, I voted for Trump!”). If it isn’t, Trump will be seen as just another failed candidate.