There really is a malaise of sort related to Trump being invincible despite evidence, such as the 2020 election, that he can be beaten. For many years now, Trump has continued to be successful despite actions which would have ended any other candidates political career. Despite his many flaws, he was elected president and since his electoral defeat has managed a complete takeover of the Republican party. Sometimes he seems unbeatable and that can be very depressing. It can lead to fatalistic thoughts.
It has little to do with Trump; it has to do with the irrationality and fanaticism of the Right. Trump is just the focus of their fanaticism. Trump himself is lazy and incompetent, if it wasn’t for the lunacy of the Republican base he’d never even have been elected, much less been taken over the party and been a serious candidate for a second time.
He’s basically the political equivalent of a chunk of driftwood caught in a flood; the flood is what moves, he’s just being carried along.
Ding ding ding ding ding!
It’s just like Hitler. The purpose of anti-Semitism is not to solve a problem; it is to create a problem that can serve as the focus for action. Trump does an equivalent thing with immigrants.
I guess this article got it wrong. Maybe I confused him with the guy at the Convention.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/03/kamala-harris-luther-campbell-2020-1479890
The fact that you support a Marxist that wants to destroy our country and kill babies makes you evil.
You say those are lies, they say your claims are lies.
I think this seriously underestimates Trump’s role in triggering and guiding and focusing the irrationality and fanatacism. He did beat out a whole slew of Republican candidates in 2015/2016 to take the nomination. He still has the Republican leadership licking his boots to be able to hold their political power.
Trump isn’t completely stupid, no matter how he sounds. He does have a talent for connecting with a section of the public. He is lazy and not inquisitive and doesn’t particularly care about facts or truth. But he has a certain talent for failing upward.
As for whether all the crazy and being the negative center of attention is helping Trump, I think the opposite is the case now.
Trump offered the masses the more disciplined, mastermind-style version of this in 2016. Now he’s offering the crazy, demented, spittle-flecked, out-of-control version. Yes, he’s the center of attention, but his numbers aren’t improving.
Instead, Harris’s poll numbers are rising, and she keeps collecting endorsements that can help her win. Personally, I am not worried about her chances, but of course it will be a close election.
(Oh, and it’s still insane that Trump is doing as well as he is. Fascism dies hard.)
He was IMHO invincible against Biden because swing voters had made their minds up early. Biden had lost support since taking office, while Trump was basically same as always.
Harris has now opened up swing voters to reconsidering which ticket to vote to. The post-debate polling is good for Harris.
A fluid race can go both ways. Maybe it will be back to tied after the latest apparent attempt on Trump’s life. But I do not see serious claims, since the ticket changed, that Trump is invincible.
And reality says the Trumpists are wrong. But denial of reality is a virtue for them.
EDIT: Also, I don’t think it was because of Trump’s own efforts that he won the 2016 election or took over the Republicans. It was because the Republican leadership spent decades carving a Trump-shaped hole in the party that he stepped into. They spent a great deal of effort turning their base into people who would irrationally adore and follow a Trump-shaped stimulus, then he showed up and fit better than anyone else they had. A “superstimulus”.
Yes, per the sociology that posters were aptly discussing above, they take a perverse delight in denying reality. Doing so is a token of loyalty to the Leader, and plus, it owns the Libs.
OK, process this, guys:
A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows that Trump leads Vice President Harris 47% to 43% among likely Iowa voters — a far slimmer margin than the 18-point lead the former Republican president enjoyed over Democratic President Biden in late spring.
That’s within the margin of error–in Iowa!
But to me the big data point is that while she is down 4 points, Biden was down 18 points!
So I plug this into my Right Brain Model, and the question pops out: “Is she really going to lose in battleground states while shrinking a Trump lead in a red state by 14 points?” My Right Brain Model also answers the question it posed: “No.”
Agreed, especially given the sterling reputation of the Iowa Poll.
However, the final Iowa Poll may have quite different results from mid-September figures.
Wow, that’s bizarre, I hadn’t heard about Campbell and Harris. It was Hughley at the convention, and he spoke eloquently about having misjudged Harris until she made a personal overture to him. So apparently there are a few of those stories around.
OOF! Harris up 3% in PA poll, which includes polling of the entire state and two bellwether counties:
Or to put it a bit more simply: they don’t care about facts, what they really care about is finding whatever excuse helps them validate their hatred.
Take the Haitian pet-eating story for instance: no matter how preposterous it all sounds, no matter how shaky the sources are, if it’s something that justifies being hateful to immigrants/brown people, they’ll roll with it hook, line and sinker.
For those of us (like me) who prefer to have the data without having to view a podcast, here is the actual Suffolk poll.
Not the biggest n but still the first decent quality data post debate out of PA. I’ll allow myself some guarded optimism!
Thanks for adding that, sir!
This suggests Trump can win — but NOT because Trump is slightly ahead:
Pennsylvania Survey: Trump Leads 50%-48; Casey Ahead of McCormick by Four Points
The disturbing-to-Democrats thing here is how Trump is running six points ahead of Dave McCormick in the same sample. That cannot be explained by a margin of error. How can it be that Casey is more popular than Harris? They are similar on the issues. You could speculate about voters preferring someone of their own gender and race, but I think they cancel out. So, of the implausible possibilities, it looks to me that voters prefer the nastiest nativist in U.S. political history to a normie (albeit Trump-endorsed) Republican.
P.S. Poll conducted September 14-15 by InsiderAdvantage, which has an average (2.0) pollster rating at 538.
P.P.S. Casey calls his opponent Connecticut Dave, since he also lives there. If the reason Casey is ahead is just that Pennsylvanians like Pennsylvanians, the problem is with Shapiro not getting the veep nod. Hopefully the October 1 debate will do some good in getting Pennsylvanians over the snub.
… no matter how you slice it, whichever side wins the Keystone state has around a 90 percent chance of winning the White House.
That’s why election analysts held their collective breath yesterday as they awaited the first big nonpartisan, post-debate poll covering Pennsylvania. The Suffolk University survey of 500 likely voters came out last night, and to the relief of many Democrats, it found Harris with a three point lead in the state, 49 to 46.
A Republican leaning polling outfit, InsiderAdvantage, tried to rain on the parade by releasing its own partisan poll last night showing Trump ahead by two, but we shouldn’t give much oxygen to any poll these days paid for by the GOP. It’s chum in the water designed to demoralize Democrats and, in the case of Trump, give him some basis to challenge the election results later.
For what it’s worth, according to VoteHub publisher Garrett Herrin, in 2022, InsiderAdvantage had an average bias toward the GOP of +3.8. Suffolk had a smaller GOP bias of +0.7 bias and the smallest average error of any pollster for the midterms …
FYI, this has no relationship to my last post. Casey has pretty consistently run ahead of Harris. The reason I didn’t mention that before was because the Casey and Harris polls I had seen before where with different groups of surveyed voters. Today I saw a survey where the same people were asked about both Harris and Casey, so that it wouldn’t be a question of some margin of error.
Nate Silver may no longer be popular name here, but for what it is worth his pollster rating for Insider Advantage gives them a B with a bias of D +0.2. Are they Republican-funded? I believe so. But polling is not a partisan exercise.
Historically, state level polling in Pennsylvania is maybe six points off. But, also, historically, pollsters are not trying to get it wrong on some theory that people want to vote for winners, or for any other reason.
Pennsylvania is a hard to poll state. I would look at polls there for trends and relationships, as in my last post, not to say who will win.
My, what an antiquated notion.
At this point Trump needs to stop talking about pets being eaten and concentrate on the giant faucet the Canadians have turned off which is keeping California from having water.