The oddsmakers now show Cruz slightly ahead of Trump to win the Iowa caucus, followed by Rubio, then Carson. The three worst candidates for President, IMO, along with their better, Donald Trump!
I really want the ***Trump for President ***movement to go forward. I think I’ll send him a small donation.
And a new PPP poll of New Hampshire voters:
On the GOP side, we have: Trump 27, Cruz 13, Rubio 11, Christie 10, Carson 9, Kasich 8, Fiorina 6, Bush 5, Paul 4, everyone else 1% or less.
Trump continues to lead by quite a bit, Christie’s 10% suggests that the Union-Leader endorsement gave him quite a boost, and Cruz is picking up steam in NH. (But I wouldn’t make too much of his 2-point edge over Rubio in a single poll. Sampling error and all that.)
The big thing is that everyone in the not-totally-batshit wing of the GOP (Rubio, Bush, Kasich, Christie, Paul, Fiorina) is fighting hard here, while the totally-batshit wing is down to Trump, Cruz, and a fading Carson.
Since even in NH, the totally-batshit wing seems to have a slight plurality over the semi-sane wing, that six-way split is going to make it tough for Rubio to break through here, as long as his rivals all continue to harbor the belief that they could get lucky and be the ones to break through.
I’m starting to think that Trump could really win the NH primary. It’s far from a certainty (hell, I’d still bet against it at even money), but Thanksgiving’s come and gone, and his support is holding up. Historically, December’s when things have started getting real, when voters in Iowa and NH really start thinking about who they might vote for. Well, December’s here.
Ye gods, this is a conventional poll. It’s not an Internet poll, it’s not a robocall poll, it’s not some bozo outfit like Gravis, it’s a very good pollster with live interviewers calling landlines and cell phones.
And Trump is at 36%. Sonuvabitch, gimme a drink.
Either this is the new gold standard of outliers, or there’s a serious Trump surge going on, just as things are starting to get serious.
Anyhow, the full results: Trump 36, Cruz 16, Carson 14 (that’s 66% for the totally batshit wing), Cruz 12, Christie 4, Jeb 3, Carly 3, Huck 2, Kasich 2, Paul 1.
Yep, that’s Jeb down in the white noise. I know, he’s just setting himself up for that great comeback story, like John McCain. And I can sell you part ownership of Mannatech for a good price.
This whole thing has become surreal. This year’s GOP primary campaign is really one of the most remarkable things I’ve seen in American politics during my lifetime. I’m gonna need more booze.
I think I’m going to jump on the Trump band wagon. He’s not such a bad candidate compared to the rest. :dubious:
Firs of all he’s not a religious nut case. That is like super important I think. If you believe in an invisible sky god that tells you what to do and performs magic, I don’t think you’re qualified to be president. You need to have a higher level of development than that in a civilized country. You can apply to be tribe shaman, but not president.
Second of all he is far more entertaining than the others. The others are either boring, stupid or crazy. He’s definitely not boring, I don’t think he’s dumber than the others, and he’s actually not that crazy. Yes he has some really crazy ideas, like building a huge wall, but other than that his craziness seems to be expressed more as racism and general uncouthness.
All of the candidates are of course painfully and obviously under equipped to actually be president, so what we are looking for is basically just entertainment value combined with the minimal amount of damage in case the joke actually turns into reality. I don’t think anyone can argue against the fact that Trump is the most entertaining candidate, and if by some freak accident he gets elected president, I think he will do a lot less damage than the real crazies, and actually be a lot less corrupt than the “establishment” candidates.
I would have assumed that as Carson’s campaign bled support, that it would have gravitated toward Cruz, but it really looks like Trump is getting the majority of it. I may have underestimated how anti-establishment the GOP base is really feeling this cycle, if they’re just reflexively against any officeholder on principle at the moment.
Of course we’ve still got two months till Iowa, and we’ll see if the Trump supporters actually show up to vote in the early states.
I agree. He’s not beholden to the Armageddon is Nigh, Science is All Fake, or “Government is the Problem – Starve the Beast” pathologies; and he’s his own man, not a puppet of other billionaires.
I’m not sure how much of Trump’s bluster is a show, and how much is the real Trump, but at his worst he won’t do the damage a Cruz or Rubio would.
It’s disconcerting to imagine him with his finger near the nuclear-war button, or negotiating with Putin. But Richard Nixon is considered one of the best Presidents for foreign policy, and he relied on his Madman Theory. A problem with the Madman Theory is that the enemies have to really believe you’re insane. Donald Trump may have this covered.
[QUOTE=Richard M. Nixon]
I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button” and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.
[/QUOTE]
I’m starting to think along the same lines (although the entertainment value piece doesn’t exactly butter my bread). After all, there may be a greater than zero chance that there are two Trumps. The carnival barking, self-promotion wizard, along with a savvy, pragmatic businessman. If he gets swept into office on the self-promotion, but governs like a pragmatist, he might not turn out all bad. And like Stoneburg says, at least he’s not in bed with the fundies.
Granted, I don’t think this is likely, but it might be the best case scenario if Hillary can’t make it to the finish line for whatever reason (which I also think is unlikely). And please, nobody point out that this puts me slightly in league with Starving Artist! :eek:
This article has some good graphs showing why Trump is so popular. He does very well with people that didn’t go to college, not surprisingly.
Calm down, that will be a Republican party disaster, according to 538 the crazy percentage coming from the Republican primary voters is still just about 30% to 40% of the whole electorate if we want to be generous.
I do think that it will be a lot of fun to remind all about the flip flops many Republican party people will do when they will try to polish the turd after they did identify Trump as one.
Oh, I’m calm. And a contest that ultimately boils down to Trump v. Cruz is about as good as it gets, from a Dem perspective.
It’s just that if Trump is at 36% rather than 26%, that’s a whole different ballgame. My world view is still adjusting. If Trump’s support is only 26%, he might win a few primaries, but most of his support will ultimately go elsewhere as it becomes a fight between Cruz and Rubio.
But if his support is really 36%, he’s going to be hard to stop.
Wow, between Cruz and Cruz, they have 28% of the vote!
(I think that second one was supposed to be Rubio)
And I can’t put Cruz in the same category as Trump and Carson. They’re all crazy, but Cruz is at least a crazy senator, and so should at least have already been somewhat vetted. He obviously wasn’t, of course, but it still makes him a slightly more serious candidate than Trump or Carson (or Fiorina, but she seems to have disappeared now).
You left out Rubio at 12%, just to be complete.
But I wouldn’t worry. Some day Trump will say something stupid and his support will wither away. 
The Republican powers that be hate both Trump and Cruz. About a month ago the conservative columnists were all talking about how Rubio was going to be the nominee when Trump melted down.
Now they are all shitting their pants at the thought of Trump being the nominee and trashing Republican Senatorial candidates at least. I don’t know if they think the same about Cruz.
What’s better: A zany guy who may not be very smart, but underneath his bluster is relatively moderate and may sincerely want to serve. Or a very smart lawyer who may have the most right-wing voting record in the history of the U.S. Congress. Name any issue, and Cruz is on the wrong side of it. He doesn’t believe in science, wants to eliminate the IRS, has led every GOP effort to shutdown the Federal government, opposes right to abortion even for rape victims, etc. etc. He’s a darling of the Koch Brothers and all those fooled by their $millions of propaganda.
Between Cruz and Trump the choice should be easy.
Let me clarify that: I don’t think Cruz is actually any better than Trump. I simply find his support less horrifying. If you sat a sane person down in a room and asked him who he’d vote for for President, given the choice between two guys without any prior political experience or an influential sitting senator, and didn’t give him any other information, then I expect that that sane person would choose the senator. And there are at least some potential voters, and poll-responders, who are at that level of information. At this point in the process, before any of the primaries, it might even be reasonable for a person to be at that level of information.
Now, if Cruz has a large amount of support among people who actually do know what he stands for, and who support him because of that, then yes, that’s worrisome, perhaps even more worrisome than Trump’s supporters. But it’s at the very least worrisome for different reasons.
And the weird thing is that as far as I can tell he is the ONLY candidate that holds true for. Cruz for example fits all those things and everyone else fits at least one.
Yeah this one is tricky. I’d like to have a sit down with him in private and go ”Hey Donald, you’re just faking being crazy to get the rednecks to vote for you… right? You can tell me, I’m not gonna spill the beans, just want to make sure you’re not completely over the top raging insane…”.
My best guess is that he does share some of the values of those people, but that most of the stuff he says is basically just bravado. He’s just saying it to get people pumped up and to sell his candidacy. And he’s doing a great job of it. I mean he’s really the only purely ethnocentric candidate. He unashamedly promotes the idea that Americans are better than others, and that it’s OK to push over others in order to further the agenda of America. Which makes sense, because that is how business (and racism…) works.
Hehe. I think reporters need to start asking him ”What are you going to do about Putin?”. That would be a nice little minefield and should be entertaining. I also kind of love how he just gets away with saying things that would KILL other politicians. Mexicans are rapists, Megan kelly is on the rag, Fiorina is ugly… It’s awesome.
I can appreciate that the entertainment value is not as important for someone who will be actively and directly affected by the outcome (I suspect he will leave most of Scandinavia alone so we are safe…), but he really is looking like the best candidate. The ”establishment” candidates are absolutely horrible. You’re basically electing a Koch puppet who will do everything to serve the 0.1% and screw over the rest of the country. I’d frankly go with the non-retarded outsider when forced to pick between crazy (fundies) and crooked (establishment). I think people underestimate how much damage the establishment candidates will do, just look at GWB.
And now I am going to go out on a limb and state this:
**DONALD TRUMP IS GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY
**
Seriously. One of the things he does so well is draw public attention. A debate between Trump and Hillary/Bernie will draw MUCH larger crowds than any other candidate. That means more people are involved, more people get exposed to the arguments, and more people are likely to become engaged in the political process. So… if you love democracy, support Trump! 
Ps. If someone would have told me a year ago that one day I would say “Donald Trump is good for democracy” I would have hit him straight in the face.
Yeah, sorry about the double Cruz earlier. As you’ve all gathered, it’s Trump 36, Cruz 16, Carson 14, Rubio 12, Christie 4, Jeb 3, Carly 3, Huck 2, Kasich 2, Paul 1.
Which raises the question: which way is Rubio’s support going? He’s been polling in the 11-14% range for awhile now. The Q-poll (see post 53) had Rubio jumping to 17%. This CNN/ORC poll has him still in that 11-14% range, at 12%. Is he breaking out of that band, or is he still stuck there?
Another national poll would help, but if Rubio’s support was increasing nationally, you’d expect that to show up in NH. But the PPP poll of NH the other day (see post 62) had him at 11%, which suggests CNN/ORC is more likely to be right.
I certainly hope so. I’d love to see Rubio’s campaign go nowhere, as I’ve already mentioned - and more on that below.
I’m with you all the way here. This is why I hope and pray that Rubio doesn’t get the nomination. He’d be almost as bad as Cruz, but unlike Cruz, he’d have a serious chance of winning.
With the way the media has been fluffing Rubio, and the way they can never give up on turning every little flaw in a Clinton into a scandal, Rubio v. Clinton would feel very much like Bush v. Gore, where Bush’s record and proposals got only the gentlest of overviews, while the press jumped all over Gore over brown suits, inventing the Internet, Love Story, Love Canal, and a bunch of other things I’ve mercifully forgotten.
If Rubio wins the nomination, I’d LOVE to be wrong on this. Because I sure am afraid of it.
Fully agree with this as well. The media has allowed the GOP to play a double game for so long, pretending there is a responsible wing to the GOP when there really isn’t one anymore. Trump has ripped the mask off.
For voters to make good choices, it’s necessary that they can at least see somewhat clearly what their choices are. With Trump, Cruz, and Carson, what you see is what you get. The media may still (falsely, IMHO) insist there’s a responsible wing to the GOP, and they’ll say people like Rubio and Paul Ryan are part of it. But the way this primary season is going, it’s getting less and less possible for the media to pretend that the crazies aren’t really running the party. And that’s good. That serves democracy.
I’d love for there to be another televised debate, but this time between the big four - i.e. a 10% cut-off.
I’ve also been saying that Donald Trump is good for democracy. Albeit extremely unlikely, Sanders -vs- Trump in November would be wonderful: a great culmination for America’s political confusion.
I’m getting very excited about Trump’s candidacy, but one fact brings me down to Earth: I suspect Trump doesn’t want to win the nomination. I think the whole thing started as a publicity stunt, and he’s surprised he’s come this far. I’m afraid he’s going to crank up the crazy just to ensure he doesn’t win the nomination. 
In another thread a long while ago, I posted my suspicion that he really wants the VP slot.