Ratings aren’t endorsements.
Plenty of people will watch shit TV the same way we can’t pull our eyes away from a trainwreck, but that’s a far cry from actually liking or approving of the characters.
why not?
I don’t feel better when people say things like this
because the woman I saw wearing a tRump T shirt yesterday was Hispanic. 
Well, don’t worry about it, do something about it. Register people to vote. Do GOTV on election day(s). Be more vocal on FB and Twitter and whatever social media platform you like (assumes you aren’t, which may or may not be so).
Ever seen a grizzly casually swipe a fat, orange salmon out of a river and effortlessly disembowel it on the bank? What HRC is going to do to Trump if he’s foolish enough to show up to debate is going to be “f**king disgusting”.
Why do you think this? Sure she is going to be the more rational one making statements and describing policies that have basis in reality. But that is boring people want interesting TV. Trump will be entertaining to some people and will therefore win the debate among his followers no minds will be changed.
Exactly. The narcissist is getting what he craves. He won’t quit because he can’t quit. As long as he can stand in front of a crowd of morons cheering him on he’ll continue feeding his very hungry ego.
I’m afraid you are correct. Debates do very little to shift people’s preconceived notions. If Trump calls Hilary a shrill lying bitch, and answers questions with insults about the “biased media”, then Trump supporters will LOVE this, and declare him the winner.
I saw an interview with a Trump supporter, who said that no woman is qualified to be President, because even hot flashes would cause her to go to war with someone, and admitted to voting against her own interests. People are stupid, and there’s a lot of them.
Anyone running with (R) behind their name is guaranteed 30% nationally from straight ticket voters. The rest of Trump’s supporters are those that believe “Hillary is the devil!”
That analysis is cultural, not political. Just because we like some lowest common denominator entertainment doesn’t mean that’s what we want from our government. The vast majority of politicians in office and running now are not reality show celebrities.
At heart, the argument of this piece is simply that voters are lying to the pollsters, and will reveal their true intent on election day. It’s an argument that we heard about Obama in 2008 (people are only saying that they’ll vote for a black guy, but on election day, they’ll pull the lever for the white candidate). As in 2008, we have no reason to believe that a large number of people being polled are not telling the truth. In fact, I think that people who support Trump and the celebrity culture are the ones who would be most excited about sharing their support for him. If you see people wearing Trump T-shirts, they’re not afraid to admit they’re voting for Trump.
So unless I have some other reason to believe that the polls are getting it wrong, I’ll continue to believe that while Americans enjoy watching the Kardashians, Snookis and Trumps on T.V., most of them don’t want them running the country.
And that anecdote somehow represents the majority of women or Hispanics?
Clinton knows policy but is a wooden debater and hasn’t seemed fully comfortable defending herself on points like email, foundation etc in the infrequent cases she’s opened herself to media Q&A. And Sanders made a point of not going after her about it. OTOH Trump didn’t prove a particularly quick on his feet zinger master in the GOP debates either. He sometimes seems genuinely comfortable in public, which Clinton almost never does IMO, but mainly when riffing with a friendly crowd.
IOW I don’t see a big advantage for either of them in the debates. But Trump has stuff he wants to throw at her. I don’t think his whining about NFL schedule conflict was him trying to dodge the debates. I think he thinks he’ll ‘gut’ her. She by her nature is the one more likely to have trepidation. But I don’t see either as scoring a big victory to persuadable people. Each of their fans will think they won a smashing victory of course.
Besides that, the RCP avg now is Clinton +4, around the same margin Obama won by last time (though avg of final polls said it was a couple of points closer and apparently Romney’s internal pollsters really thought he had a slight edge). Unless Trump has much less self confidence than he appears to (maybe he does, but how we know that?) I don’t see why he’d be thinking of dropping out. Maybe if his prior fall in the polls had just gotten worse and worse, but lately things seem to be tightening back up a bit.
Both McCain in '08 and Romney in '12 were very encouraged by the increased size and enthusiasm of their crowds in the final days of their races, but that has nothing to do with election outcomes.
The polls are tightening. Trump is going to narrow the gap and after the debates they will be virtually tied.
Clinton has had opportunities to blow Trump’s campaign out of the water, but her repeated bungling of the email controversy allowed Trump to survive. Everyone here is already predicting his collapse, but I’m telling you: this will go down to the wire. Hillary is a flawed candidate and Trump has a solid base of support.
I think Trump wants to have at least one debate and he wants it to be the super bowl of debates. I think he might bail on the next one if he does well in the first.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this answers my question. If Trump has a “solid base of support,” how can you also claim that Clinton could have had this election won three months out? How did the “email scandal” specifically prevent her from doing so? The only way I could see it is her somehow forcing Trump to bow out, and I don’t see how, nor do I see how the “scandal” has kept her from doing so, given that if Trump were forced out, the pressure would have to come from Republicans who hate her anyway.
Just out of curiosity … how many of your predictions have not been way way wrong this cycle?
Let’s see, you called Clinton v Bush, then Clinton v Cruz with maybe Trump third party (with a massive Trump collapse), Chris Christie as Trump’s VP, that Sanders would end the season on a tear and would lead a revolt demanding he be given the nomination, and on and on … okay, you got Sanders winning WI right, but seriously dude, your record makes adaher look like Nate Silver! 
The polls have, other than brief turbulence around the GOP convention, been remarkable stable. By August 3rd the national polls RCP rolling average was Clinton +5.7, and since it had peaked at Clinton +7.9, hit the lowest of Clinton +5.3, and is now Clinton +5.4. Pretty much the range it was in for most of June and July. 538’s “PollsOnly” has Trump in a narrow range within a few of a 13% chance pretty consistently since August 8th (and currently predicts a 7.1% Clinton popular vote margin. Moreover swing state polls have trended farther and farther out of his reach.
Trump has a solid base of support … who may or may not come out to the polls this time (they traditionally do not to very large amounts). Clinton has a solid base of support, of demographics that are traditionally highly likely voters. Hers is larger and more reliable.
Debates have rarely made any significant impact on an election outcome. Mostly supporters perceive their candidate as “winning” the things.
I predict no “collapse” - I continue to predict, as I did before the conventions, that there would be some volatility in the period immediately during and after the conventions and that within two weeks the poll aggregates would settle back into Clinton +5 to 7ish. They have and likely they will stay not too far off that range and when they stray out will bounce back in quickly. The actual margin will depend on who actually votes and pollster accuracy will depend on how well their likely voter screens perform predicting ho votes this very odd time. My guess is that Clinton will outperform the polls.
The next post has an even more interesting statement:
I’ll admit I like that conclusion because it matches what I was saying last year about this time, but Wang has actual data and reasoning behind his statements, so I’ll link to his posts and forego patting myself on the back overmuch. 
My point is, pretending there’s a horse race is either ignorant or dishonest, as DSeid has alluded to already, and I further agree with DSeid that fundamentals such as GOTV efforts and the fact that Clinton has an actual, competent campaign as opposed to Trump’s farrago of scammers and idiocy will lead to Clinton outperforming the polls on election day.
Trust me, I’ve got very smart people - very smart people - working for me and they tell me crooked Hillary is going to collapse.
Trust me, folks, Donald Trump is not going to quit the race; Crooked Hillary is going to quit the race for health reasons.
Well, you might want to deny press credentials to the Washington Post if you haven’t already, because they say Trump’s lack of a campaign organization is looking to cost him big-time:
I think their methodology is rather clever, myself, and I don’t doubt that it will have an impact. However, I think it will come down to Clinton’s win being bigger than predicted, not Clinton turning a potential loss into a win. Trump’s failure is over-determined at this point; so much of his campaign, and so much of the GOP itself, is going wrong that this failure will have a whole list of causes going back decades.
I am, however, excited about potential down-ticket effects.
That I could see. He basically shut down the GOP debates by refusing to participate further, because he felt himself already at an advantage. Or maybe the (somewhat wishful at this point, IMHO) thinking common here that Trump will see things as hopeless might kick in if he does really terribly in the first couple of debates (doing terribly in the first it would seem would bring on a go for broke obnoxious approach in the second but maybe that would fail also).
But I really don’t think he’s afraid to meet Clinton in a debate, as of now, whether or not he should be.