They can’t change the rules of voting at the convention until the convention actually starts. If they can actually get enough support for an option to allow delegates to not be bound on the first ballot, Trump could lose the nomination. Then we have riots in Cleveland.
of course he will! Now that Rubio is seeking re-elected and cannot be drafted, who do the Republicans have that would honestly be stronger than Trump for the GE? Jeb, who would depress GOP turnout even bigger, who showed his extremely rusty campaigning chops? and BTW, he left the campaign with higher unfavorables than Hillary has.
Cruz, maybe, but it looks like the GOP establishment dislikes him even more than Trump, hence how he got TRUMPED in the first place, by having zero counterbalance to Trump’s strength.
Kasich? Or whoever, the GOP voters chose Trump; more chose him than any other candidate, and by a very wide margin. The GOP has to learn to go down with the ship.
But Trump’s are the most heavily armed and crazy.
Trump will win the nomination, but I would lay better than even odds that at some point in the convention the proceedings will be interrupted by some from of protest or arcane challenge to the rules, that will prevent the convention from being the usual scripted advertisement that it usually is.
Roethlisberger has said he won’t be participating in any political events and Brady has been carefully non-committal.
Indeed. Players are being cautioned by their agents to keep from being openly involved in this election, with both candidates having such high negatives.
Trump apparently name-dropped those two as he talked about the convention the other day, because he knows them both (and has golfed with them).
I would make a major distinction between the near-certainty of Trump winning the nomination and the belief that there will be “no noticeable challenge”. Kendal Unruh’s 400-plus (and growing) anti-Trump delegates aren’t enough to block his nomination but nor are they likely to go quietly into the night. Trump’s unfavorable numbers have never been worse. And while it’s unlikely that the “vote your conscience” proposal will get past the rules committee, that alone is unprecedented, and if it comes to a full floor vote, it will be total pandemonium. There is potential for high comedy all over the place, much as the primary season itself has been. Trump is so ineffably stupid that he’s bound to create some of the comedy himself.
He’s the nominee; the GOP has to accept it. Either GOP politicians disavow him even has he runs with an (R) next to his name, or they go along with it, but those are their choices. There are no superdelegates to save them. They let Trump hijack the party into a business venture and now they’re boned.
There is no intelligent way out of Trump’s nomination because the rules are what they are. He’s got the delegates, by a wide margin.
A motion to release delegates before the first ballot would turn the convention into a literal riot, the kind where people are injured and quite possibly die, and a fiasco that would rival, if not surpass, the Trump candidacy itself as a GOP-destroying shittastrophe. It would be better for the party to let the worthless cretin get the nomination, and then let him within and die on the vine, being annihilated in the general election while pouring resources into vulnerable Congressional races, the candidates in them being instructed to clearly distance themselves from Trump.
Trump will make it through the convention and most likely lose in the general. To replace him at this point will destruct the party.
If you look at it a certain way, the Republicans are not in that bad a shape this year. If I were a Republican party elite, I would focus on the senate and house, stay somewhat neutral on Trump (definitely would not go all in), and hope that not too many seats are lost in the Democratic wave this election (oh yes, it will be a wave). I would then focus on 2020 and make sure that Hillary is a one term president and that she loses big that year. With her current disapproval ratings, this should not be too hard. If the Republican wave is big enough in 2020, it will make it easier to pick up a bunch of state houses and governorships and further deepen the gerrymandering that they already have in their favor. For example, take a look at Pennsylvania in 2012; even though Obama beat Romney in the keystone state 52% to 46.6% and more people in the state voted for Democrats for the house of representatives than Republicans (49.7% to 49.4%), they sent 14 Republicans to the house and only 4 Democrats that year. This is all due to the gerrymandering done after the Republican wave election in 2010. Ohio had similar results. The Republicans did a masterful job all but guaranteeing that they will hold the house of representatives for a generation.
I was really sad when Trump clinched the nomination. I thought Hillary could probably beat anybody who ran against her from the most recent crop of Republicans, but Cruz and Rubio both had a good chance to beat her. If Cruz got the nomination and won, his extreme agenda could have easily made a pretty big Democratic wave in 2020 and might have given the Dems a chance to undo some of the 2010 changes. Now we will have a Republican house for another 15 years and a Senate and Presidency that flips back and forth.
I think he didn’t need as much money in the primaries because he got free publicity. He said crazy shit, and it ended up on every news program. But, if he’s going to try to pivot into being a sane human being in the general, he loses that. So, either he says crazy shit and hurts his chances in the general election, or he has to raise some money and say sane shit.
I agree with the sentiment that Trump is going to make it through the convention. I believe there will be some interesting theatrics in the beginning, but he will make it through on the first ballot. He may end up with a more establishment VP as part of the deal.
{Trigger warning - concern trolling ahead} However, I would be curious to see how he proceeds from there. Word is that he doesn’t have anywhere near the necessary ground organization, or fund raising, in place to mount a legitimate modern nationwide presidential campaign. Sure, Republican voters will show up in November and pull the R level, because that is what one does. But, is it possible, due to the lack of money and organization, Trump will be seriously limping through the finish line? Is it possible that we would see something unprecedented - that he will fail to make it to November at all? That the Republicans will have to scramble and dust off Romney for a late run?
Romney couldn’t pull off a ground campaign or the campaign finances needed to win at such a late date. Hell, give him [del]three[/del] six extra months and he couldn’t pull it off.
Indeed, there is no reason to believe such a scenario would be successful to whoever ended up on the ticket. Just that the Republican party would have to field somebody ANYBODY to literally stay in the race.
If not Trump, then Romney. Because not as many people hate Romney. Which likely won’t save the WH, but downticket? With Trump at the top, lot of Pubbies just won’t go. Lots of everybody else will, which makes a loss into a catastrophe. Right now, still betting Romney, with the proviso that I’m reasoning about a situation wherein reason does not apply.
Enough with the Trump threads boffking. From this point on open no more than one per week. Failure to comply may earn you warnings.
Trump’s got some positive reinforcement for his scripted attack on Clinton this week. That his speech consisted mostly of hyperbole, non-sequitors and outright lies is beside the point; Republican voters were accustomed to being lied to well before Trump came on the scene. The point is it demonstrated that Trump is capable of somewhat moderating his overwhelming Trumpiness and presenting a reasonable facsimile of a Republican presidential candidate. If he can stick more or less to this template, it will be enough to get the media to stop writing stories of how doomed he is, which will be enough to get him through the convention (where a typical pol gets a poll bounce) and then to the debates.
I think the debates are the last opportunity for a truly thermonuclear foot-in-mouth from Trump. He may do well; he certainly thinks he’s good at debating and his cockiness will go a long way with some voters. Clinton will have a delicate job of answering his insults and lies without allowing him to drag her down to his level. But it’s all to easy for Trump to get carried away and insult some other constituency or demonstrate his gaping ignorance of global politics, and then there’s precious little time left for damage control.
But as I’ve said before, it’s not Trump’s off-the-cuff craziness that will sink him, it’s his utter failure to put together an effective ground game. He thinks he can tweet and Facebook his way to victory, evidently not at all realizing what a formidable logistical challenge it is to get even your own side to turn out in force on Election Day, let alone last-minute undecideds. I think the big lesson from the 2016 election will be that a social media following does not equate a movement, something Bernie Sanders is already proving from the other end of the spectrum.
No way, no how does Romney enter this race, even if John Smith hisself came down from the Bosom of Abraham wearing extra-super-magical underpants and whispered sweet nothings into his ear. Being on the top of the ballot for Romney means he’d be on the wrong end of an absolute, soul-crushing blow-out in November. There’s no way he would subject himself to that. The 2012 shellacking (that he and his campaign apparently never saw coming) was bad enough. To be whooped in '08, '12 AND '16? That’s too much for even a pious man of Moroni like Mittens to endure.
Agreed. Of course Trump is a disaster for the Republicans. But a Cincinnati Screwjob isn’t going to make things better, even if they could make it stick. They’d be stuck with Candidate X at the top of the ticket. Who is this mysterious Candidate X? Cruz? Kasich? Rubio? Romney? Ryan? Jeb Bush? It doesn’t matter who Candidate X is, this person hasn’t earned the nomination. And the disorder at the convention will make 1968 Chicago look like a fairy princess tea party. How’s that going to affect the down-ticket races? Even if the pro-Trump Republican diehards are a minority of the Republican party–and they are–they still can’t win without them.
They’re boned either way, but letting Trump have his disastrous nomination is the least bad outcome. The time to organize to dump Trump was back in 2015, and they’ve missed their chance.
The Republican National Convention is in Cleveland; I’m guessing you just forgot which of the 3 major Ohio cities starting with a C was which.
I think that with an hour plus, one on one against someone as experienced and knowledgeable as Clinton there’s a decent chance that Trump will completely “lose it” - either descending into childish insults or actually going on a fully fledged spittle flecked angry personal attack of screaming at Clinton