Some Republicans have backed away from The Donald, despite his obvious shortcomings; many haven’t. My friend Paul thinks Democrats would be even more loyal than Republicans to a crappy nominee of their own party. I disagree - all things being equal, and as a gross overgeneralization, I think Democrats are more critical/nitpicky of individual candidates and would be more likely to abandon a nominee who was comparably awful.
What do you think?
It’s very difficult to think of someone on the left who’s this bad. The best I’ve been able to come up with is Louis Farrakhan, but I don’t know (genuinely don’t, feel free to educate me) whether he’s sexually assaulted a lot of women in the way Trump appears to have done.
Farrakhan notably has little mass appeal on the left.
Edit: aw crap, I voted the wrong way, voted “less” to mean “less likely to back an asshole.” Lesson: read more carefully.
It would be easier to answer if you gave an example of an actual Democrat, and the Republican she/he would be opposing.
I did the same.:smack:
Anyway, Will Rogers said “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” I think Democrats in general are less likely to show party loyalty and would be more likely not to support a nominee they really didn’t like.
Czarcasm, flip it around. Trump could as easily have run on a Democratic ticket, given his past. Imagine somehow he won the primary (a giant absurd thing to imagine) and was running against Ted Cruz.
Who?
Hillary? No.
A Democratic version of Trump - say, Rosie O’Donnell, Al Sharpton, or Michael Moore? Sure.
A bunch of Dems were willing to turn away from a good presidential candidate because of passion for Bernie. Dems aren’t generally ruled by rage like the RW is. They’re ruled by a sense of injustice. Rage gets you to the voting booth, and a sense of injustice makes you throw up your hands and walk away in disgust.
I’d think that if there were a LW version of Trump, a lot of Dems would sit the election out. You’d probably get mid-term level turnout in a presidential year.
Those are not Democratic versions of Trump. Trump’s despicable not just because he’s a fat blowhard (that’s what you were going for with those examples, right?), but because he encourages hatred of vast swaths of people and winks at violence and brags about having committed crimes.
How many democrats still support Anthony Weiner?
Would have voted Republican in an instant…if they didn’t go full-stupid also on their side of the aisle too, of course.
Good point. And Weiner actually has cogent policy views. And what he did is orders of magnitude less serious than what Trump did.
If say, the Republican Hillary equivalent was Olympia Snowe, and the Democratic equivalent of Donald Trump was an oversexed Mark Cuban (for the hypothetical), I would probably vote Snowe.
I thought about that example, but it’s still not as bad. Unwanted sexting is on a continuum with sexual assault, but it’s not nearly as bad as actual physical assault. And Weiner didn’t encourage violence and mass hate in the same way Trump does, either.
I’m going to say more likely. Because all the hypothetical “terrible candidates” would have run to the far left of Clinton and, well, she beat Sanders (who is a pretty benign leftist) so it stands to reason that she’d have beaten Sean Penn or Michael Moore or whatever plug-in you want to run for Democratic Trump.
And I think that’s an important distinction as I keep hearing the “But what if Trump was the only way to save Obamacare and keep Roe v Wade and…” but it never would have gotten that far – It’s only a binary choice because Trump won out of sixteen GOP candidates. Democrats picked a moderate-left policy wonk and the Republicans picked… Trump.
So, yeah, I’m going to guess that Democratic voters would be more likely to back off from the crazy.
I think the critical piece of the hypothetical is whether the nominee is merely a hate-filled ignoramus, or whether the nominee is legitimately unbalanced and cannot be trusted not to nuke the first country who criticizes him.
I think a Farrakhan type would likely be met on the Left much the way Trump has been on the right, even if you added a bunch of things to make him more Trumpian–so long as you didn’t add the piece where he is an emotionally-unstable man-child who would happily break every custom of our Democracy to get back at a cable news show that criticized him.
I have two attack headlines for that paring: “You know nothing, Olympia Snowe” and for a sex scandal, “Cuban’s Missile Crisis”.
In the really broad view, conservatives are all about sticking with the plan and following authority, while liberals are about shaking things up and making changes. I think Democrats would be less likely to feel that they needed to follow through on supporting someone who had gained the nomination out of any sense of loyalty to the process.
That said, as far as I’m concerned, Bill Clinton is on the same level as Donald Trump in his treatment of women, and Democrats don’t seem to have backed away from him (separate from Hillary) at all. The way that people seem to feel about Trump now is exactly the way I have felt about Bill Clinton ever since the Monica story came out. If it were Bill vs. Donald, I would not be voting for either candidate.
Probably more likely. Dems in general like to complain about our presidential nominee anyway, even when it’s a perfectly presentable candidate, and a lot of Dems are very antagonistic to “lesser evil” rationales.
If, as LHoD suggested, Trump were running as the Democratic nominee on a superficial skim of social liberalism and a content-free platform, with his same appalling lack of knowledge, qualifications, principles, gravitas and basic human decency, I don’t see how I personally could possibly vote for him.
But the hypothetical Trump vs. Cruz race isn’t really analogous to the Trump vs. Clinton one, because Clinton’s positions are actually much more in line with the (heavily shrunken) moderate wing of the other party than Cruz’s are. You’d have to have a Republican nominee like George Pataki or possibly Carly Fiorina to get someone whose actual views (as opposed to irrationally-detested straw image) would be comparably palatable to the voters across the aisle.
You mean, the Anthony Weiner who resigned from a solidly Democratic Congressional seat in 2011 because of his sexting scandals, and in 2013 lost the NYC mayoral Democratic primary with less than 5% of the vote?
I’d guess, very very few.
About the same - I’d like to think that Democrats are better people, but if the Republican’s put up Ted Cruz, many Dems would think that most anything would be preferable (much like a certain segment of the R’s looks at Hillary). And, frankly, the D’s would have to put up quite a stinker to get me to vote for Cruz.
And the D’s wouldn’t have to put a serial sex abuser (we did that once already 
) - someone could be objectionable for other reasons (none of which spring to mind - but I didn’t imagine all of Trump’s issues prior to him running, either).
Or Elliot Spitzer? Or Gary Hart? Or John Edwards?
Trump could not have won the Democratic primaries, because Democrats don’t have a problem turning against one of their own when they go bad.