Most Americans support access to safe and legal abortions. Trump had the opportunity to criticize the Court when it overturned Roe v. Wade. If he did, I missed it. In the race with Biden that’s a push.
Besides which, Trump is not even competing with Biden, yet. If Biden did miss an opportunity to side with “most Americans”, that doesn’t explain why Trump is polling ahead of DeSantis, Haley, Christie, et al.
Allowing the great majority of abortions is certainly more popular than disallowing the great majority of abortions. So this is a very good issue for the Democrats in the unlikely event that six-weeks DeSantis is nominated. However, if Trump is nominated, it is only a moderately good issue for the Democrats. Trump has been mentioning fifteen weeks, which would allow the great majority of abortions. This is not an unpopular position.
Biden can then point out that Trump Supreme Court nominees are more against abortion than Donald is. I’m not sure how unknown this is with swing voters presently.
I’m confused by this sentence. They are both declared candidates with it being a reasonable assumption they will get the nomination. There are indeed events that could conceivably come along and shake up the race, Trump going to prison the most obvious (although, before election day, unlikely). That’s why Trump is a viable candidate, and I believe the favorite, but no shoo-in.
Like here? Biden-Trump polls, in 2023, are meaningful in a way that Biden-Anyone Else polls are not due to a combination of name recognition and voters actually having already made up their minds. There has never been a challenger, to a sitting President, as well known to voters in the year before the election, as is Donald Trump.
The question for this thread is “how is Trump still a viable candidate for president?” You made a post about how Joe Biden missed a chance to curry popularity by criticizing the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling.
The fact is, Trump does not have the Republican nomination, yet. He is running against Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, and others; all of whom (I assume) support this ruling as much as Trump does. Trump is a viable candidate against all of them, too. How?
Biden’s criticism of the Court is a non sequitur in this thread. It’s as if you’re saying “Trump is a viable candidate for president because he’s not Joe Biden.” Well, lots of people aren’t Joe Biden. The Republicans could nominate one of them, without Trump’s baggage, but it doesn’t look like they will.
My much earlier point about nativism being Trump’s biggest issue, and a popular one (especially, but not only, with GOP primary voters), remains. But additionally:
– Although DeSantis is greatly disliked by Democrats, Trump is off the charts in this regard. In our current tribal politics, being disliked by the opposition is a plus among primary voters.
– Although he narrowly lost once, Trump is a proven nationwide vote-getter who is highly electable for polling-focused reasons given previously. Most negatives that might cause him to drop in future general election polls, including being criminally convicted, are already widely anticipated or known among even low information voters, and so (hope I’m wrong!) probably will not matter. Other GOP primary candidates have not been as well tested to show they have Trump’s teflon qualities. Republicans primary voters are not low information, know much of what I just wrote, and want to nominate a likely winner based on data, not speculation. That’s Trump.
– At the risk of being captain obvious here, Trump is viable because, in the U.S., accused and convicted citizens are allowed to run for, and become, president. There is a theoretical possibility of barring someone from running, in the U.S., due to treason or insurrection, but it is legally too difficult to be practical. I’m mentioning this because of yesterday’s news that the rather Trump-like former President of Brazil has been barred from running:
This will not happen in the U.S., so Trump is viable, and will remain so.
I thought “viable” in the context of this thread meant more “how and why do so many people support such a terrible person?”
That’s what I thought, too.
As I understand it, the question is not whether he’s legally eligible. The question is, why do people still consider him a reasonable choice?
America has a virulent thread of fascism running through it and Trump is their leader. That’s why he is viable, because a lot of Americans are fascists.
Prior to some faithless electors, Trump’s victory in 2016 was by the same count as his loss in 2020, and he lost the popular vote both times. If Trump’s loss was narrow, his lone victory was even narrower.
Plus, candidates he has supported for other offices have fared poorly, and Republicans have fallen short of expectations in the House and Senate since Trump has been leader of the party. His track record shows more losses than wins.
I think that’s it in a nutshell. We all understand why Trump is eligible to run for office, but a lot of us don’t really understand why he’s a viable candidate in that many people will vote for him. I don’t understand quite understand why he’s a viable candidate myself.
As an undergraduate, I saw a few of my fellow straight A students shut down when the coursework turned to evolution. These weren’t stupid people, but for whatever reason, they would not engage with the material and when we took the next test that covered evolution these A students were making C’s and F’s. It was absolutely amazing, and a little disconcerting, to see intelligent people just shut down like that.
Many Trump supporters are the same. They simply shut down when confronted with any evidence of wrong doing on Trump’s part. They might deflect (Hunter’s laptop!), but they can’t engage. Then there are others who are fully aware Trump does something illegal but they simply don’t care. I can’t quite explain why, but I simply accept their existence now and don’t ever expect to reason with them.
I think for the R primary voters, it’s no longer about winning. It’s about who can piss off the Liberals more. Trump fits the bill. Desantis is going to have to up his game to attract attention.
This is exactly correct. Owning the libs = crack cocaine to the primary voters, and Trump (in their eyes) delivers bricks of the stuff all day, every day. So he, naturally, will be at the top of the heap among candidates. No one owns the libs like him at this point. Issues dont matter. Policy doesn’t matter. Alleged crimes and wrongdoing dont matter. He who owns the libs best, wins.
Three home runs. The thread is over.
That is why Trump remains viable as a primary candidate. In fact as the running away leading primary candidate.
Given the depth of built-in RW advantages in the actual EC voting, not the meaningless popular voting, there are more than enough fascists and lib-pwners out there to put him back in the White House in 2024.
The Ds can win; in fact they must win. But that won’t come from complacency or business as usual. They need record turnout in the correct districts and they need to be full court fighting about the gamesmanship over voting rolls, polling places, vote-counting, etc., from the very git-go. Nov 5th 2024 is way too late to be seeking emergency injunctions against fascist efforts to steal the election.
Indeed. Especially since the fascist wing is openly, clearly, unequivocably letting us know what their plans are to disregard the will of the voters.
Dems do know this. If you’re not familiar with Marc Elias and his Democracy Docket efforts, now is a good time to learn about them.
He and his organization fought most of the Trump election fraud cases that were brought by Republicans in 2021 and won all but one. (The one the Republicans won was so trivially unimportant as to not count.)
He continues to fight anti-democratic legislation around the country. And wins.
You’re correct that Dems and independents cannot be complacent and must turn out like never before. But I think more of them are aware of this than we give them credit for.
I do hope so, anyway.
Thanks for the cite. Good to know. The rah-rah enthusiasm on the other side makes it easy to mistakenly conclude there’s not much happening on our side.
I think this is more relevant, regarding the thread topic, than the level of enthusiasm among those who always vote on the same side of the fence:
Trump Could Win Another Lesser-of-Two-Evils Election
I’m not sure why “I hate ‘em both” voters prefer Trump, but they do, and there being lots more than last time makes Trump viable.
If you hate Biden, you’re the kind of person who could go for Trump.
Sen. Lindsey Graham on Joe Biden: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person then probably you’ve got a problem, you need to do some self-evaluation…He is as good a man as God ever created.”
Well, yes, but, isn’t your comment more an implication of my question than a suggested answer?
I haven’t searched out the polling data to be completely sure about this, but an implication of my New York magazine quotation is that maybe 41 percent of hate ‘em both voters go for Biden, and about 58 percent go for Trump (doesn’t add up to 100 as I’m guessing maybe 1 percent, in swing states, vote for someone else).
Of course, I’m just discussing how Trump is still viable for a general election. I think we’ve thoroughly covered how he is viable in primaries.
I’m not sure if the “I hate 'em both” crowd really hates them both. My mother will certainly tell you that all politicians are crooks and both parties are terrible, but she nontheless supports Trump without criticism and absolutely hate Biden.
This phrase “hate 'em both,” that Ed Kilgore used in New York, grabs the reader, but, checking, it’s not an actual phrase pollsters used. So I’m not sure if your mother qualifies there.
My mother story is that she voted for Biden because he’s the nice one, but yesterday she tried to tell my wife and I how Biden is too nice to China and she loves how Nikki Haley talked on TV about China (which, I gather, was statistics-packed scare-talk). Mom doesn’t vote in primaries, and is not going to vote Trump, but I wonder if she will refuse to vote for president.
P.S. I did point out to her that Biden just called Xi Jinping a dictator.
P.P.S. I also wonder about how my son-in-law will vote. In 2016 he saw Biden as, uniquely among Democrats, someone a GOP-leaning anti-Trumper could stomach. Now Biden is, to him, a regular Democrat (as to me he always was). This is a real example of the once-again-substantial lesser-of-two-evils group Kilgore wrote about.