Most of the talking heads are spouting off about how Trump dominated the Iowa caucuses. Right in heart of the overwhelmingly ‘white’ Christian conservative evangelical state of ignorance he could only get 50% of the voters in a caucus. This does not spell success for a former president running with a huge campaign finance advantage over a pair of political lightweights who obviously feared criticizing him.
The real question I have is how much influence press distortion will have as they promote a horse race for ratings.
DeSantis voters are fine with Trump but correctly view Ron as a bit to Donald’s right on the issues. Same with Ramaswamy.
As for Haley voters, a lot of them were Democrats who came to the caucus and (you can do this on caucus day) changed their party, possibly temporarily, to influence the national conversation.
Add it all up, and Trump’s 51 percent, beating his nearest competitor by well more than 2 -1, keeps him on track for victory.
If they were promoting a horse race, wouldn’t they be saying just what you posted? Claiming it is all but over in the opposite of promoting a horse race.
One winner last night was the polls. Even though Republican stalwarts are very reluctant to answer a mainstream pollster, Selzer and Company was within the stated 3.7 percent margin of error for all candidates except for a bare miss with DeSantis. The final poll said that Haley supporters were, per the poll just linked, the least enthusiastic, so it made sense that a small portion of them stayed home on an extremely cold evening.
Maybe you are thinking that Iowa showed a lot of Republicans aren’t in love with Donald Trump. True, but mild supporters get the same one November vote as fanatics.
It depends on how much of that 50% is anti-Trump reds. If it’s all, trump can kiss that state goodby, if it’s none, and the voters would rather have another but would still vote for Trump, then the state is in play (unless trump is rightly disqualified).
In a normal election cycle, whatever normal is at this point, I might agree with you. While I’m not surprised by the results, I still find it alarming that Trump got 50% of the caucus in Iowa given that we know he runs his business by committing fraud, he’s a rapist, he’s tried to use violence and fraud to stay in power, and he’s argued that it’s acceptable for the president to assassinate a political rival. In addition, he’s not been shy about insulting Iowa or its politicians. I don’t know what it is about Trump that he can crap all over people and still retain their loyalty.
You’re right that they’re not promoting much of a horse race for the primaries. Maybe at the moment they’re trying to make the story how good their predictions were. Predictions are IMO the opposite of what journalists should be doing.
Surely by now it goes without saying that many Republican voters either never hear these facts, attribute them to partisan witchhunts, or outright dismiss them as fake news.
And herein lies the problem. In general, the public expects the media not to tell them what did happen, but what will happen.
Yesterday’s weather is not useful info. Tomorrow’s is. Ditto for financial “news”. It’s all prognostication all the time. Sports talk is the same way. The pre-game show lasts longer and says more than the post-game show.
IOW "I don’t care what happened. I want to know what will happen so I can position myself to benefit from it. And enjoy that sweet, sweet feeling of being ‘in the know’. "
I do not see any reason the media would want (for their interests) to treat politics any differently. An absolute prohibition on forward-looking statements and a “just the facts, ma’am” approach to each days’ past events would be very interestingly different from where we are.
About half of the non-Trump vote is anti-Trump. He has a solid 60-65% of the GOP primary voters. Those are the ones in exit polls that say they will vote for him even if he is convicted of a crime. The ones that are sure he actually won in 2020. They will vote for him no matter what, and will definitely show up in November.
The two important questions going forward are what percentage of the 40% that is “anti-Trump” right now will still vote for him in November (I think most if not all) and whether his polling inroads with young and minority voters will stick (I think probably not, once issues become more salient to voters).
Add it all up and he’s the prohibitive favorite for the nomination and a slight favorite in November.
Trump supporters are, at best, willfully ignorant, many are indifferent to Trump’s antics, and then there are those who outright approve of them for whatever reason. At this point, if someone continues to support Trump it’s a character flaw not just a disagreement over politics.
Around 66 percent of Iowa caucusgoers say they believe Biden’s win in the last election was illegitimate, while 29 percent say it was legitimate, according to the polls. Despite the numbers, allegations of voter fraud have lagged been unsubstantiated.
Yup. And it’s 66% in Iowa, but maybe only 40% in New Hampshire. Nationwide I think 60% is about right. Plenty to win the GOP primary.
That’s 60% of GOP primary voters, to be clear.
Typically that wouldn’t be nearly enough to win a general election, but polling as of today shows young liberals and minority voters willing to support Trump or sit out the election rather than have another Biden term. I tend to somewhat discount that part of the polling (I think it’s an artifact of those voting populations wishing there was a better Democratic candidate available to them), but if it’s true then Trump has a very clear path to a slim victory in November.
Trump doesn’t even have to meet the “average” voter. Bus in carefully curated groups for rallies and show it on the news. Clear evidence that he’s “popular.”
I find it a bit puzzling why fundementalists seem to like Trump so much?
I don’t think he explicitly presents himself as such (though of course he is very careful to NOT offend that demographic)…
Trump’s appeal among this group really was a cultural appeal. It was really the “Make America Great Again” mantra. I think most of the power of that slogan was in the last word: again. It was hearkening back to a kind of 1950s America, where white Christians and particularly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were more dominant in the society demographically and culturally. That’s also obviously before Brown v. Board of Education, desegregation and the civil rights movement. And it really had that power. I even started calling them nostalgia voters in the 2016 election cycle, because it was that backward pull that was really the real attraction.
In 2016, the question [about evangelicals] was: How could you vote for someone who’s been divorced and remarried multiple times, who talked about sort of sexually assaulting women, who paid off a porn star? I think the more relevant question for 2020 is: How could white evangelicals continue to support a candidate who has openly refused to call out white supremacist groups, who has said derogatory things around immigrants? Now, we’ve had four years of this: the denial of systemic racism, criticizing protesters and what can only be called really racist rhetoric. And I think the answer to that is that it’s actually part of the worldview that white evangelicals still hold. And so those kinds of appeals actually weren’t repellant; they were actually part of the attraction of Trump to white evangelicals.
TLDR; he says what they want to hear. It doesn’t matter what he does.
And:
“Conservative Christians continue to overwhelmingly support Donald Trump because of his biblical policies, not his personal piety,” Jeffress told The Associated Press via email. “They are smart enough to know the difference between choosing a president and choosing a pastor.”
Even more disgustingly, some evangelicals see Trump as Christ-like due to being so “persecuted”. These are not very sophisticated people.
Robert Franklin, professor of moral leadership at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, said Trump benefits from a perception among some of his followers that he is suffering on their behalf.
“The more he complains of persecution, the more people dig in to support him, and for a few, fight for him and make personal sacrifices (of money and freedom) for his advancement,” Franklin said via email.
Wouldn’t it be great if the media started saying shit like “He is guilty as Hell and will be going to prison before the general election, so if you vote for him in the caucus or primary, you are really wasting your time!”
And let’s note that while there is a large overlap between fundamentalists and evangelicals, they are not the same group. I see some people using in this thread using the terms interchangeably, but that’s not fully accurate.
Fundamentalists are often considered a subset of evangelicals, but on some issues the fundamentalist and non-fundamentalists are on opposite sides.
For Trump’s purposes, the fundamentalists are going to gravitate toward whoever is furthest to the right. These are the really hard core “woman’s role is to only make babies and obey her husband” types. Non-fundamentalist evangelicals will go for that as well but can be a bit more liberal on some issues, and may even be turned off by more extreme positions on the issues.
Yet, that is the world in which we live, with Trump already declaring victory based on what already happened in Iowa. “Stop the counting!”, and urging people to get in his column now, before any more primaries take place. He’s doing exactly what you state by twisting it into “See what happened - I already won!”