Reagan was able to win the votes of millions of Democrats in 1984, and there’s a good chance Hillary will be able to peel off a sizable chunk of Republican voters in 2016 should the GOP fail to get its act together, either now or in 2018-2020.
Hillary is already reviled as a right-winger within the Democratic Party, and if she pursues policies such as TPP (which she says she kind-of opposes) and a hawkish foreign-policy stance and military, there’s a good chance that the neo-con, interventionist, anti-China, anti-Russia, pro-NATO wing of the Republican Party may reluctantly begin to support her.
In the same way that Reagan Democrats returned to blue fold in 1992, the Hillary Republicans may return to the GOP in 2020 or 2024, but for now President Hillary has a chance to win over a sizable segment of the GOP by being a moderate.
The big difference is that Reagan Democrats liked Reagan and voted for him, while Hillary Republicans hate Trump and hold their nose to vote for Hillary against Trump.
Another big difference is there was a lot more bipartisanship back in the eighties. Republicans could set out a policy like cutting taxes or increasing military spending and work with Democrats who agreed with them on those issues.
Nowadays the only policy the Republicans seem to have is opposing the Democrats and it’s hard to find support among Democrats for that.
Exactly. This will likely be a closer analogy to the 2002 French presidential election. There, during a two round election (which the second round consists only of the top two with the most votes from the first round), openly racist Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen edged out the Socialist Party candidate, which is France’s main left party, for second place. During the second round election, incumbent Jacques Chirac beat Le Pen in a landslide. It wasn’t because suddenly everyone loved or supported Chirac.
Some of the unofficial slogans used in the second round included “Vote for the crook, not for the fascist” or “Vote with a clothespin on your nose”.
If she can figure out a way to slap Putin down, it’s plausible that Republicans will come around to her.
The one thing I like about Hillary, over Johnson, is that she’ll have a foreign policy. If she can really take the bull by the horns and do something impressive with it, she’ll have bested the last two presidents by a long shot.
I was a Reagan Democrat and I hated his fucking guts. The Dems kept serving us a steady stream of limp-dick schlemiels that couldn’t respond to anything the Republicans said or did. For the record, and in reference to an earlier anti-Clinton thread, I do want Bill Clinton’s dick back in the White House. James Earl Carter was probably the most decent person to ever live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but he got knee-capped by the Iranians. Mondale, eeesh! After Gore, I went all in with Kerry from the beginning because I just knew they couldn’t get to the right of him on Vietnam. How did that work out for me? Hillary is a stone-cold bitch who can stand up to these fuckers.
Yes, Quartz,* really.* Hillary is too hawkish for the anti-war voters who gave the Democrats Congress for four years about ten years ago. That’s one reason she desperately needed the Republicans to nominate someone determined to insult everyone and drive voters away from the Republican Party.
What’s scary about the Republican Party is that when longtime Democrat, Clinton family friend, and totally fake candidate Donald Trump showed up to put her plan into action, the base of voters heard his bloviate about evil Mexicans, and decided that he was their guy. So while he is intentionally sabotaging the party, a plurality of the party’s primary voters either really are that crazy or are willing to go along for some reason. :eek:
on the flip side , might be a whole lotsa unhappy Dems out there , who switch over to become Trump voters. ??
unhappy Repub wonks like Bill Kristol & George Will …prolly have few followers willing to actually vote for Hillary .
those in D.C. that do … have future jobs in mind w/ her in office.
but the 1 primary reason Hillary will prolly get few Repub votes ? = SCOTUS
But who is the leading/well-known/influential Democrat that has publicly come out and endorsed Trump? The only one that I can think of is LTG Flynn, but he’s not really anyone who is well-known as a Democrat and his association with Russia Today (RT) and his even more inexplicable comments suggesting they are no different than CNN seem to take him out of the running.
In 2004, then-Senator Zell Miller was a Democrat who endorsed Bush’s re-election and spoke at the RNC. In 2008, former Democrat Joe Lieberman endorsed McCain. In 2012, Romney scored the much coveted Nicki Minaj endorsement, but no other prominent Democrat seemed to endorse him.
Trump seems to be the first Republican presidential candidate in recent history to have so many prominent, established Republican party members publicly defecting from his candidacy.
I’d say more Republicans won’t vote for any presidential candidate than will vote for Hillary. It’s just as effective for her. There will be some number of Democrats doing the same thing, not voting as opposed to voting for Hillary. Never has an election been so truly about choosing the lesser evil.
Some, yes. The ones realistic enough and result-oriented enough to see through, and be distasteful of, their traditional party’s endless and fruitless personal destruction campaign, no. But quantitative data is lacking.
You were asked for evidence, not just more Bernie Bro talking points.
Interesting thought there, that Trump is actually working for Clinton, somehow as part of her evil conspiracy to subjugate all of humanity or something. Has he let some evidence of that slip somewhere that you haven’t mentioned until now, or is that just more of your schtick?