This just in: I actually had two identifiably pro-Trump posts on my Facebook feed this morning; one each from the two (male) most rabid right-wingers among my FB ‘friends’. So that’s two for sure out of about 90 (although admittedly a significant number are non-Americans). Seems like Mr. Trump still has some convincing to do out there in the electorate.
For those keeping score these groups represent about 65% of the electorate.
This articlesuggests that in order to win Trump needs to get 62% of the white woman vote and 70% of the white male vote. I don’t see this happening.
Not really. Unlike my more liberal brethren who are always happy to reject any family member, friend or acquaintance whose views they don’t agree with, I’m more tolerant and accepting of viewpoints from all over the spectrum and therefore likely have a more realistic range of opinions and beliefs popping up on my page than you do on yours, where I suspect the Pauline Kael effect is likely in full bloom.
But be that as it may, the primary point was that Trump has considerable support among women. As further evidence I present his rally yesterday in West Virginia. (Trump appears about 48 minutes in.) The male to female ratio appears close to 50%, and most of the men would hardly qualify as old. So the idea that Trump’s support comes almost exclusively from angry old white guys appears to be full of beans.
I have tons of friends from my time in the Navy, and many are conservative. Very, very few like Trump.
It’s bullshit that liberals reject conservative friends. Some do, but it should be obvious to you that many or most do not, since your liberal friends have not rejected you.
Trump caught ‘establishment’ conservatives by surprise too. This is the Pauline Kael phenomenon, who famously said, “I don’t know how Nixon got elected: No one I know voted for him.”
It looks to me like there is a huge amount of dissatisfaction out there that was flying under the radar. If you had asked me six months ago how many Republicans were nativist blowhards who might support a guy like Trump, I would have said somewhere around 10%. Now it appears it’s closer to 30-40%, with another 10% willing to go along for the ride. That was quite shocking to everyone - including Nate Silver and the others at 538.com, who are having a terrible year predicting what’s going to happen - just like everyone else. The old rules do not seem to apply any more.
The Democrats have just as many low-information, blue collar voters as do the Republicans. Union workers, laborers, farmers in blue states… A lot of these people are supporting Bernie Sanders, but it may not be because of his politics - he might be the beneficiary of the same “Throw the bums out!” temper tantrum that we saw among Republicans. The same temper tantrum that caused conservative Alberta to elect an NDP government in a spasm of incumbent hatred. NO ONE predicted that.
This is a strange election year. If Trump comes out of the Republican nomination and moves left, what makes you think he won’t pick up a lot of Bernie voters, plus a lot of independents and apathetic people who rarely vote but might come out to support the guy from the Apprentice who is promising to turn Washington upside down?
That’s what I expect him to do, by the way - move to the left. He might even try to outflank Hillary on the left. Have you noticed he’s been saying nice things about Bernie Sanders? And many of his positions aren’t that far from Bernie’s. He wants single payer health care, he says he wants America to come home and get out of foreign entanglements, he claims that he’s the only one who can beat the crony capitalists back, yada yada. Right now, he’s all about the border and immigrants, because he’s playing to the Republicans. Once he has the nomination, he doesn’t really need Republicans any more. He’s free to turn his back on the party platform and promise whatever he wants. And since he’s a man with no principles and no philosophy other than power and ‘deals’, there’s nothing stopping him from shifting hard left if he thinks that’s what it will take to win over enough Democrats to take the White House. He’s looking to channel the anger in the populace, and he doesn’t care if it comes from the right or the left.
Congress has been skating by for years with approval ratings in the teens. Our last two Presidents have spent a lot of their time with popularity ratings below 50%. That’s sixteen years of unpopular people running the show, and for blue collar workers that period has been one of stagnant or even decreasing income. Maybe this is the year it all comes to a boil.
That’s a frightening prospect, because those are the kinds of conditions that lead to populists and fascists. Not to Godwinize the discussion, but it’s always been a mystery how a modern advanced country like Germany could turn crazy and put a man like Hitler in power. We may be about to find out. That doesn’t mean Trump is a Hitler - it just means that he’s someone that should be completely unelectable, but whose popularity inexplicably keeps growing even as he gets more outrageous.
Well, lets check on that with actual numbers, the most recent numbers probably come out of the Indiana exit polls.
First off there is an obvious gender bias Democrat vs Republican, with Democrat primary voters being 59% women vs Republican Primary voters being 47%.
Then we note that within Republicans, Trump won 59% of the male vote vs 47%.
This gives results in the proportion of Men voting for Trump being about 1.5 times as large as the proportion of Women voting for Trump. So while there are no doubt some women supporters, the Gender gap is real, and very large.
Not very large in my opinion. If 50 women are supporting Trump for every 75 men that’s still a lot of female support. And in case you missed it, the reason the subject came up in the first place was to refute the claim that Trump’s support consists almost exclusively of “angry old white guys”, a claim that certain posters here seem strongly wedded to. The fact is that much of Trump’s support comes from a younger demographic than the term “old white guys” suggests, and much of it comes from women.
Trump voters = denial denial denial + thinly veiled racism + total disconnect from reality
I can’t wait to cast my vote!
Germany wasn’t a modern, advanced country then. It was in existential economic crisis, primarily because of the draconian results of the peace negotiations from WWI, and the Weimar Republic was widely seen as incapable of turning things around. Germans then had a lot greater reason for change, and Hitler offered it in spades.
As bad as Trump’s supporters think the economy is (which is nowhere near as bad as they paint it), it’s as nothing compared to pre-Hitler Germany.
…and the Depression had something to do with it too.
Again, it depends which Bernie voters you’re talking about, and who you think comprise the majority of that bloc. My limited personal experience tells me that the Bernie voters I know of are heavily invested in Bernie’s progressive principles. To me, it’s absurd that any of them would ever support Trump, who’s the living breathing embodiment of all the 1% shenanigans they spend their political lives fighting.
The only way I can see “Bernie voters” going for Trump in any significant numbers is if you believe that the majority of his supporters don’t care as much about his principles as a vague notion that he’ll “shake things up.”
Germany was not politically advanced. At the beginning of WWI, Germany was fewer than 50 years as a unified nation, and all of those years were as a nation in which real power was exercised by the Emperor. The Weimar Republic was constantly under threat from private armies, coups, and revolutions. For over half its life, the Republic had as President an imperialistic Junker who opposed democracy.
What the hell? Dude, notions don’t magically become facts just because they happened to pop up in your no doubt completely functional brain.
Sam Stone, you apparently think left wingers are as foolish and gullible as right wing nativists are. Even with their tendency toward going overboard with political correctness, and their lack of fiscal prudence (as hilariously lampooned on last night’s Daily Show), I don’t think they will suddenly forget everything Drumpf said in the primary season and buy that such a transparent, habitual liar is suddenly sincere when he says he’s on their side. Let’s give them a little more credit than that.
If Trump wins, I’m moving to Antarctica. Farthest place away from the nuclear blast zones.
There’s been some discussion in the Clinton vs. Sanders about how sexism works against Clinton, largely due to people’s unexamined biases. She’s still winning, of course, but not by nearly as much as she was expected to have been. I think Americans are a little bit more used to being aware of racial biases than of sexism, since a lot of the gender stuff is just “normal” for us. I think Trump can and will keep acting in an aggressively masculine way—in mannerisms, in speech, in gesture—and I suspect that, to a degree, it will work. If they keep hammering away at his leadership and her scandals, I really think that a lot of people deep down will choose the confident man over the capable woman.
My cite is women in the American workforce, 2016: their promotion, their pay, their experience.
I’m only voicing my fears, not making a strong statement of what I think will happen. I would be delighted to be wrong.
My sample did include my often mentioned crazy Hispanic cousin from Florida (he had other issues besides politics and I want to believe his condition was the reason that made him support appalling white supremacist Republican groups that would had expelled his father if they were in power.); he had already posted a few Trump posts in his favor recently; but sadly, and I say this sincerely, he passed away thanks to complications after an operation.
My feed is more friendly now, but I really did appreciate his appalling FB shares as they were interesting to investigate their sources and how the extreme right does think.
Anyhow, I wanted to point one amazing bit of news related to the terrible electoral map that Trump is getting.
Locally I was surprised to see an early poll that showed Trump and Clinton tied in Arizona! But I got severe whiplash from a double take when I noted that in April an A rated pollster at 538 came with this:
Clinton ahead of Trump by 7 points in Arizona. from Behavior Research Center.
A nonrelated question to lighten the mood: Was ‘Hardin’ taken? 
New Zealand has a nicer climate and they’re neutral enough that probably no one is going to bother nuking them. Here you go:
I thought Trump was merely an amusing sideshow in the elections about last August. I am a long time reader of fivethirtyeight.com and assumed Nate Silvers 2% chance of Trump winning the nomination was correct. However I happened upon Scott Adams blog http://blog.dilbert.com/ and within a week of Silver’s estimate Adam’s blogged Clown Genius:
Within days he had changed that to, “My updated prediction is that Trump will win the general election by a large margin. (Prior prediction was a small margin.)”
I like the fact that he explains how he thinks all the events of the campaign will pan out and bases it on his understanding of persuasion. He has invariably been proved correct. He often refers to what he calls the 2D world of logic and reason and the 3D world of persuasion and explains why he feels persuasion wins. Now having read his pieces for months many of his recent criticisms are obvious to me. And it is interesting how all of Clinton’s recent moves seem like errors.
I still can’t convince myself Trump will win but it is really hard to doubt Adam’s view of what is happening and I’ll follow along with interest.