@Sam_Stone summarizes slightly saddening, somewhat scandalous, social situations succinctly. Simply saying (should someone suggest some stereotypical societal skew) specific supplicants simply suck.
Simultaneously, subcultural surroundings seemingly similarly solely stimulate sociopaths, scammers, spiteful swindlers, sellouts, shiftless sponges, self-promoting swollen-headed scumbags since sinister schemers shun simpler service.
Respectfully, I have no idea what you are smoking, but I’d like to buy some from you. I’ll pay a hefty premium.
It’s Haley, Scott, and DeSantis who are not viable. The current R party is rejecting them with both feet. They lurves them some Trump.
Biden is viable because the incumbent President is always viable unless he (so far he) chooses not to run.
In some wildly counterfactual world where Trump is not the R candidate, Biden will destroy any of the so-called RINOs / mainstream Rs. Not on his merits, but on the abject lack of their merits as seen by the R electorate.
Which is why the only way Trump is not the R candidate is if he is dead or in prison. And it is too late for the court system to get to imprisonment in the time remaining. They blew that opportunity by not being in a hurry in 2021. So in Nov 2024 Trump’s either in the ground or on the ballot.
If the things Trump has done so far haven’t turned Republicans against him, what makes you think that being dead or incarcerated (or both) would keep him from getting the nomination?
I gotta ask-how long did that take you to create?
Supposedly, six seconds.
The word viable is so soft in its meaning that I have to agree with you – even though it may contradict my last post. If the GOP nominates a candidate I consider very strong, like Haley or Scott, Biden certainly shouldn’t just give up. But it would be rational for him to be depressed.
This I really doubt based on the House race research (too few presidentials to be statistically significant) showing the advantage of being perceived as moderate. It’s true that moderates lose some extremist votes, but they get more on the other side.
If Haley got the nomination, sure, they would frequently call her a RINO.
At the same time, Biden would be trying to paint her as an extremist, partly because his handlers read the same research. And maybe Biden would be correct about her extremism! But the low info swing voters wouldn’t hear or believe that, because of the vocal crowd of GOP extremists calling her a RINO. The reason I think Biden would have a reasonable shot at defeating DeSantis is that Ron wouldn’t so often be called a RINO.
Seventeen sets; separate sixty second sums??
The Republicans know that if Trump is the candidate, all the other candidates and their more moderate supporters will rally around Trump, but if someone else is the candidate, Trump and his followers will destroy the entire party and burn it to the ground.
We all know Trump doesn’t like losing, can you imagine what he’ll unleash on his party if they elect a different candidate?
If Trump is the candidate, the 2024 election will really come down to an up/down vote on government, with Trump being the anti-government candidate. That’s why the “Deep State” bullshit is so insidiously effective, if the Trump administration did things that displeased his base, he could always blame it on the Democrats.
Sounds suspiciously short.
The conservative “movement” has turned into a bunch of aggrieved rubes who see an anti-liberal insult comic, and think “that’s the guy we need for President.”
They no longer see any promise in the project of intellectual conservatism. That part of the establishment has proven to be worth nothing more than laundering for the right’s worst instincts into something like a philosophy. With a few exceptional Never-Trumpers, the “intellectuals” are still doing that faithfully and enthusiastically, but everyone now understands that this is all they were ever really good for.
Seriously? Suppose some speculation supervenes. Surmising. Scheduling sans stopwatch.
True. Every candidate we’re talking about could be out of the running by then…
(My guess? Wanting to retire, multiple heart attacks, committed to mental health or drug rehab, and that freak “It’s a Small World” malfunction…)
Could be true of current Republicans.
I neither know it, nor think it, but I haven’t been a Republican since early 2016.
Now, a GOP that doesn’t nominate Trump is a different one than we have today.
If you mean burn down in the sense of Trump running 3rd party, we are back to the insurmountable problem of gaining ballot access without a few years of work.
Superb!
(Surely, some sentences seem superfluous, so somebody should stop. C’est la vie!)
I think Trump is a VERY viable candidate for president. Currently I would guess Biden will be the next president, but not by anywhere near a margin of 10%. Considering it takes (I think) about 3% to overcome the built-in Republican advantages in the Electoral College, gerrymandering, et cetera, it is not at all hard to imagine Trump being the next president. I think there are two main reasons:
This is a hateful and ugly country. We might like to imagine the global view is that we won WW2 and walked on the moon, but it might be closer to the truth that we are “that slavery country”.
Trump is completely and totally unelectable. But he was even more completely and totally unelectable the last time he got elected.
I agree with your post except for the last part. His awful and pathetic record when he had the job, plus that whole J6 thing he did after losing to Joe Biden, makes him an order of magnitude worse than when he initially took office. Yet, as this thread points out, a lot of people think he did a swell job thanks to firmly attached MAGA goggles.
Agree. Now that more of his crimes are bubbling to the surface, I can’t imagine how he could even get a used car loan.
The above is the core of the paradox here. I keep reading, here and elsewhere, about former conservatives who have totally bailed off of the Trump Train (as best-or worst-exemplfied by the Lincoln Project folks). They would thus seem like a pretty sizable group, right? [note this presumes, as discussed up thread, they aren’t holding their nose and still voting GOP, but either abstain or vote Dem, at least partially] IOW, we should have been seeing a steady falling away of GOP voters who have hit their limit when he says or does something dumb or corrupt. Even if it is just 1% of the total electorate per year bailing from the GOP Clown Show (and other Repos like DeSantis would likely speed up the bleeding, right), that would mean Trump’s vote ceiling would now stand at around 40% max. Also note that a good chunk of this support would come from indies, not registered Goopers.
Yet that apparently hasn’t been happening on any significant scale, aside from the indicated lone voices in the wilderness. THAT is what I don’t get. Note this is the soft edge, not the extreme hardcore one; these people should be amenable to having their minds changed. But instead we get shite like how Trump gets MORE voters in 2020 than he did in 2016.
I don’t get it, I don’t understand it, I simply cannot grasp why his approval isn’t around or even below 25-30% by now. [Note that it has fallen to around 35%]
A few months ago we moved to Kennett Square Pennsylvania. Coincidentally, the mayor switched parties, R to D, about the same time as me. So did a local-Democratic-Party-endorsed school board incumbent I just voted for in the primary. I have no reason to believe they are insincere — they switched to stay with the more immigrant-friendly party — but local Republicans who didn’t switch are now out of office.
So — a lot more than 1 percent. However, for every small Pennsylvania exurban town that switched from R to D, there is a small Pennsylvania rural town that switched from mildly R to overwhelmingly R. It’s the Big Sort getting bigger.
The mushroom capital of the world!
I don’t think so. If you just imagine that individual party affiliation is a lot weaker and more fluid than you think it is, these kinds of trends aren’t so baffling.
I sort of think of it as the same as sports teams. Year to year, different teams win the championship and different teams get better or get worse, and usually there’s some obvious thing for people to point to and say “this team didn’t have this player anymore, this team had a new coach, this player came back from injury” to explain the difference. But in reality it’s not that simple, and what’s really going on is like 35% normal random fluctuations in performance and luck, maybe 25% difference from the obvious thing, and then a bunch of 5% differences from various sources.
That’s all I think “approval rating” is. For somebody who was “turned off” by Trump in 2019 and “wasn’t a Republican anymore,” nobody is checking back in with that person in 2021 and asking them if it stuck. People are coming off the Trump train and getting back on. People who weren’t on before are getting on. People who used to be complete abstainers who didn’t pay attention are now paying attention because they’re mad about something, and they’ll support Trump if it comes to it. They might not even remember why or when they changed, and they might not even feel like they did.
If you don’t think about everyone’s party affiliation as this major fundamental aspect of their identity, but as a very conditional and temporal product of a lot of factors, this kind of stuff makes a lot more sense. It’s just that for most people whose party affiliation is a core part of their self, most of the people they know seem the same way.