Sanders isn’t going anywhere. But if he sweeps Super Tuesday (and Mars collides with Jupiter - bear with me: I’m on a roll), Bloomberg enters the race, splits the ballot and TRUMP WINS OVER YOU LOSERS!
Or the US enters recession (with maybe ~<20% probability) and Trump wins over Hillary.
Or Hillary implodes (>2% probability).
Also if/when Trump is nominated, look forward to Brooks et al explaining why he actually has better character than H. Clinton. Just like they argued that GWBush the draft dodger had more character than war hero John Kerry. Heck, check out the attacks on Hillary’s character on this board usually without substantiation when they are not describing almost invariably unexceptional behavior.
Or there’s a major terrorist attack committed by Muslims somewhere in the world shortly before the election. Or some illegal immigrant goes on a shooting spree. Either way Trump says “See? I’ve been saying this all along!” and a couple million nervous swing voters jump on his platform just long enough to give him the election.
Brutal attack ad. And yes, a harbinger of things to come.
Note though that Trump is such a wild card, that it’s not clear whether the old electoral models will apply. If Trump is nominated, this could be a once every 50 year watershed event. And we don’t have a lot of data on such re-alignments. (So my “Economy drives the election” result must be deweighted for example. Just like “The Party Decides” has to be re-adjusted.)
So the odds of a Trump victory are probably higher than you think, but the odds of a Republican electoral collapse are also unusually high.
Again, I say vote for Cruz and maintain the intra-party Republican fratricide. I concede though that followers of Eris, goddess of chaos and random numbers, have a difficult choice in front of them.
I kept saying that the people getting paranoid about Drumpf’s chances were overlooking the “woman” factor, but (assuming some of the above-mentioned are male) they are also overlooking how many “Main Street Republicans” are appalled by Drumpf. (And yes, I have the Chrome extension, so it looks like everyone else is writing “Drumpf” too. <snicker>)
Here’s a John Oliver video I think people should watch. He makes the point that I’ve been trying to make: Donald Trump is not just another bad politician.
I don’t understand why you guys keep posting this stuff as if there’s anything surprising about it. Everyone already knows that the Republican establishment is against Trump and would prefer to see someone else nominated. It’s all very well for Republican hacks to come out and declare “I am never supporting Trump”, but, like Measure for Measure pointed out, it is a far cry from actually saying the words “I would rather vote for Hillary Clinton.” Not many of them would be willing to say that out loud. They know that it is pretty much a political death sentence with many ‘middle America’ working class conservatives. In Christine Witman’s case, it’s sort of okay because she is a woman.
How much effect these declarations will have depends, imo, on how much populist conservatives are willing to accept the pretexts that are given, such as the jaw-dropping hypocrisy of “He says things about people…that are so obnoxious that calling them obnoxious doesn’t come close to how awful they are. He constantly lies about things that can be checked” from a dirtbag like Charles Murray, and how much they tend to cynically dismiss them as merely a display of members of the establishment supporting each other regardless of party.
In that light, I agree with the people who say that the best strategy is to simply make sure the process is delayed for as long as possible and even hopefully have a torn Republican party with the nomination ‘stolen’ from Trump (it would still be torn even with him nominated but not nearly as much). While Rubio obviously has an advantage with minorities, I find it hard to see him beating Hillary Clinton (unless, of course, she ends up not running). With Trump, it isn’t so hard to see that happening. There are just too many hidden factors and wild cards (unless he’s not really serious about wanting to be president). All those political antics by the GOP establishment listed in the OP are not really something to base your hopes on, especially when no one has yet been actually nominated.
I’ve seen plans like that backfire in the past. And McConnell has floated one about GOP Senators running negative ads against Drumpf to get themselves re-elected and avoid embarrassment at the same time.
If the GOP wants to self-destruct, fine, it’s their sandbox. Don’t try to “help”.
Actually if you are trying to manipulate the outcome you want is to keep this alive for as long as possible. The longer, the bitterer, the more divisive the process is for them the weaker they are going into the general, whoever it ends up as. Given that it is very likely to be a romp for Trump from here you want to vote for the path that slows him down the most.
America was supposed to be built on the Authority of Ideas, not Authoritarianism. Voting for Trump only gives racism momentum. The Primary is the perfect time to reject bigotry and a bullying personality who makes Nixon and his dirty tricks look like a boy scout. By voting for a blowhard who will do anything, including tying his wagon to domestic terrorists does nothing to make America worthy of greatness, instead it will go a long way to flushing what made the country respected in the first place .
Going down that dark road will certainly make Americans even more fearful of each other, and the rest of the world will reset accordingly on how they will regard America in the future.
Agreed. Trump is bad for the country because he is a plausible candidate. He will be bad for the country if he gets the nomination. His candidacy gives racism legitimacy and a voice. He makes it more okay to say racist things.
Sorry dude, but the effect John Oliver was going for, and which I signed on for, was not to just use it as a jibe for a couple days but to have it completely sink in as a replacement.
After reading Molly Ivins’s book Shrub, I consistently referred to Bush 43 by that moniker for years, until pretty much the end of his presidency I think.
