Yeah, well…it’s on my ‘watch one day’ list.
But I’ll get to it!
Same!
So what was the line as scripted? (Apologies in advance for the sidebar.)
My take on Iowa is twofold. One, trump fans are really enthusiastic for him, and will brave really bad weather to stand for him. Two, they aren’t that big a group.
Donald got about 50,000 votes, out of about 100,000 cast. That’s only half of those who chose to brave the elements, and a pretty small fraction of the entire electorate. Donald may have enough of the Republican Party to get the nomination, but I just don’t think his appeal has any breadth.
Nice.
I heard one of these gomers going on about how Trump “just keeps going, despite 91 lawsuits pending…” – if people don’t know the difference between a lawsuit and a felony charge, we’re doomed.
I’ve been saying over the last couple of years that our country has been moving towards a theocracy (national, state and local) for the last 20 years. And we see how well that has worked out in the Middle East. Just substitute fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible for Sharia Law.
I think most folks just hear “law stuff” and don’t care about the details.
I’d suggest Dopers need to pass a basic Blazing Saddles quiz before being allowed to participate in threads in this forum. 
I looked into this. The turn-out was the lowest in years, and significantly lower than the last time. They had about 110K turn out, as compared to:
In 2016, Republicans set a new record for turnout at the caucuses, with almost 187,000 GOP voters. Though the total made up only about a third of all registered Republicans, turnout at the 2016 caucuses greatly outnumbered the 2012 contest, which had about 122,000 voters. And in 2008, the turnout was similar, with 120,000 voters, making the 2024 Iowa caucuses turnout the lowest in more than a decade.
So even with the most fanatical followers, with lower turnout, he just barely broke 50%.
I’m still not sure what the relevance of all of this is. Performance in the primary has basically nothing to do with performance in the general.
Have they learned, though? The islamic fundementalists are still in power in Iran, and seem to be gaining ground over large parts of the world.
It’s a measure of his actual popularity when it’s time to actually vote, as opposed to some kind of limited sampling poll. Were he to have captured 90% of the vote with record turnouts, we’d be having a very different, far more panicked conversation.
Despite the fanaticism of his supporters, he didn’t really draw huge crowds, which suggests the fanatical supporters are a smaller block than we might have supposed. That’s good news for the general election.
Nah, those A-rabs are all praying to the wrong god. Once America is 100% dedicated to Jesus, everything will be perfect. /s
Seriously though, I think that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world at the moment (used to be Roman Catholicism at one time, apparently).
Apologies, I don’t have an authoritative cite for this.
And to forestall any moderator complaints: yes, this is going off-topic. If we’re going to keep discussing this, let’s start a new thread. I won’t continue here.
Except it isn’t. In the general election, the votes from “Any Republican over Any Democrat” voters are exactly the same as the votes from the “Trump Or Nobody” voters. And “Any Republican over Any Democrat” voters are who you’re going to see in the primaries.
I saw an interesting slant on things in an op-ed this morning, which opined that Democrats are actually pleased that Trump is beating his opponents, because he is the one that Biden has the best chance of beating in the general election.
I just can’t get on board with the perspective that the Iowa outcome is “good news.” Iowa is notorious for demanding that candidates barnstorm around the state and drink endless cups of coffee at small town diners to earn their fealty. Yet despite barely appearing in the state, Trump ran away to a 30-point margin of victory. My own perspective is that the Iowa caucuses are just too idiosyncratic and non-representative to draw any kind of conclusion regarding the general election.
Which is the real story here. Not only is primary or caucus performance disjointed from the general election, Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t even measures of primary performance. Their ‘first in the nation’ approach is a stunt to get attention for two states that aren’t representative of the country. They have are low population states with no major urban areas, mainly agricultural industry. The media plays along with this charade because it’s a way to get ratings from something very few people actually care about.
Yes, we expect the press to make predictions. They were making predictions about the weather for years when it was just a joke. Of course they will report on the polls, that is news. But reporting on their reporting on the polls in not news. Reporting that their polls are accurate is about as useful as a San Diego weatherman reporting temperatures in the mid 70s with a possibility of a light afternoon shower. But then there are only three important things happening on any day in the world according to the news. Nothing happening in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, or the South China Sea to pay attention to. Nothing in the happening in New York City or Los Angeles that day was very important. Along with wildcard football games how could they find time to report on anything else.
The Iowa caucuses showed that very few Iowan Republicans turned out to caucus, no doubt affected by the weather, but still showing what the polls indicated in the division of the votes because it doesn’t tell us why anybody voted for any candidate, or against another candidate, or any other candidate they’d rather choose because it’s not a choice. And now we’ll see the same in New Hampshire coming up.
They said that in 2016 too. 
There are three reasons, in descending order of obviousness, for a liberal to earnestly and patriotically support a Trump Republican nomination. The first, of course, is that he would almost certainly lose. Trump’s ability to stay atop the polls for months, even as critics predicted his demise, has given him an aura of voodoo magic that frightens some Democrats. But whatever wizardry Trump has used to defy the laws of political gravity has worked only within his party. Among the electorate as a whole, he is massively — indeed, historically — unpopular, with unfavorable ratings now hovering around 60 percent and a public persona almost perfectly designed to repel the Obama coalition: racial minorities, single women, and college-educated whites. It would take a landscape-altering event like a recession for him to win; even that might not be enough.
That aged really well.
If I don’t keep hope alive, all is lost.