Trump could win the election in a nowcast by FiveThirtyEight

This is closer IMO to summarizing what Trump is about as potentially formidable general election candidate than ‘angry white low education racists’. Although I think you too are focusing a bit more in the first paragraph on the older story of why Trump could win the Republican nomination than why he could win the general election.

As hard as I know it is for solidly left leaning people to accept a lot of people are sick of ‘diversity’ as a club they are constantly being hit with, not necessarily actual diversity, though also that in some cases. It’s back to the Trump base of 40% of GOP primary electorate v. Trump support in 40’s or even close to 50 on his upswings in general election polls. The first is only a subset of the second, though a lot of pundits recycle the same pieces about Trump’s success in GOP side to explain why Clinton seems to have so much trouble putting him away, at least up to now.

Also a lot of general themes apply to why people don’t like Clinton, which is just as important or more as why they like Trump, since a whole lot of people don’t like Trump but are still choosing him over Clinton. She’s the epitome of a bipartisan establishment. Again, solidly left people might be very sure there’s no such thing, there’s the good guys and the evil Pubbies (which is where they actually agree with the partisan right except for who is evil). But a lot of people don’t think that way.

Trump can win if he sticks to how fed up people are with the way things have been going (the 70% wrong track), Clinton’s long attachment to the status quo (NAFTA, Iraq War, financial crisis at least in the indirect way of receiving so much money from Wall Street), and stay ideologically ambiguous. Once again, from solid left POV Trump is basically a Republican, Republicans are conservative, and conservatism is just plain wrong. But a lot of Trump’s vibes and noises (hard to call ‘issue positions’ exactly) have been pretty anti-Republican. That goes back to his success in primaries, where a lot of GOP primary voters had more hostility for the ‘GOPe’ than almost anything else. But in the general too, Trump is free to take various positions which aren’t particularly conservative, and sometimes broadly popular and where he has potentially superior credibility to Clinton (anti-free trade, anti-Wall Street, anti foreign intervention) as a practical political matter (forget whether he ‘should’) simply because he hasn’t been a fixture in politics for the last 25 yrs like she has, and it’s not an electorate yearning for the status quo. The 50-ish% favorable approval rating of Obama is often quoted as a counter point to the wrong track number, but Bill Clinton’s approval averaged a little higher through this time of year in 2000 and it was still apparent Gore was not being helped by the general feeling about ‘things’, even if people didn’t hold that against Bill Clinton personally in many cases. I think it’s the same here.

However, Trump doesn’t seem to be able to do this. He allows (or can’t help but actively seek) attention on himself, and he’s a very unattractive figure himself. He loses if the election is a referendum on Trump, as opposed to one on Clinton and the status quo.

Aw, the poor babies don’t like being told that their bigotry is bigotry.

It is, though, and that’s a lot of what this election is about.

People think the us has grown too soft and PC??

From where I sit it’s the opposite. The gop is the party of evil. The Dems are the party of excusing evil. That nationalistic shitshow at the dnc?? “The USA is the greatest country on Earth!!!” “To our enemies we will find you and we will wipe you out!!!”

You’re all nationalistic fear peddlers to me. Soft? Looks to me like you all have embraced perpetual war, nation toppling and bomb the fuck out of everyone.

Perhaps. And a more accurate summary still would include slashes in between the descriptors: Angry/White/Low Education/Racists. More of a mix and match. This one, that one, all of them, some of them. Depends on the particular Trump voter.

Heaven help us.

No, there is bigotry, but he’s talking about something else.

He’s talking about the reasonable people who say “All Lives Matter” and are shouted down as racists. The decent people who have been made to go to year after year of sexual harassment training - and are left afraid of telling a woman she looks nice at work. The one’s who don’t get any financial aid for their kids because they are “middle class.”
The ones that don’t understand global economics, including how many jobs are lost to automation, but believe those jobs have been given away to make rich people richer - but we don’t need people to watch the beer line like Laverne and Shirley (and my grandfather) did anymore - the computer watches it.

The pace of change over the past thirty years has been incredible. And its left people behind. In the meantime, certain people are more visible then they were 30 years ago - brown people in all shades. East Asians - when I started working there were maybe one or two Asians in our IT department - now they are a staple (I do live and work in the Midwest - it was probably different on the coasts longer - but then - many of these people who believe these things aren’t coastal) Gay people - well, we all had a funny uncle - but there seemed to be a lot less gay people. Like autism showing up around the time you vaccinate - there “must” be cause and effect. And to some extent - there is, but its the change that has created the diversity, not the diversity the change.

Ooh, good demotivational poster slogan: “We can’t promise we’ll try to stop evil but we promise we’ll try to try.”

+1

It pains me to read, but I can’t blame you or anyone for reaching that conclusion given the bombastic rhetoric at the conventions. It is said that language and discourse reflect thinking. Our culture and our collective thinking are toxic right now. I live in a country I increasingly don’t even recognize. I would be amused were I not so confused, saddened, and outright horrified. I’ve never subscribed to American exceptionalism, but I’ve never felt embarrassed for my countrymen. But we’re a global embarrassment right now. Leader of the free world my ass.

I don’t disagree with this at all, and I agree that it’s fueling Trump’s ascendant. I say this as someone who’s married to an East Asian immigrant and as someone who owes my career to more and more of it. However, I think this is the aspect that progressives don’t talk about enough. I don’t know if I’d say that all of White America is dying, but much of what was once the old white middle class is, and even those who aren’t feel extremely uncertain about their futures. If I were black, hispanic, or a member of another minority group, sure, I’d probably be thinking “Awww, poor baby.” But that’s not a constructive approach. We can all agree that the racism of the right isn’t the right approach, but condescension doesn’t help either.

I’m sure this has been dealt with in a dozen threads I haven’t read, but any possibility that All Lives Matter isn’t a racist shout of We Don’t Get It and We Don’t Want To has been debunked a million times over.

Your cite of thirty years is the key. (It’s actually been fifty, since the 1960s.) This change is not something that plunked down on people out of the sky. The people fighting the change have seen it happening for their entire adult lives - and have been fighting it fiercely every step of the way. More than that: they’ve been successful in that fight most of those years. It’s only been the past few years that they started losing, and that only happened because their percentage of the population dropped, not that they stopped fighting change.

It’s frankly unbelievable to me that anyone can be sympathetic to people with a life-long legacy of bigotry, intolerance, hate, closedmindedness, chauvinism, and suppression. Ambrose Bierce once wrote, "In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.” Shouting “Make America Great Again” is that perversion of patriotism. It should instead mean not just repudiating Trump but all of his supporters and ensuring that their beliefs are never again allowed public credence.

Exaggerate much? Or did you just watch about 30 seconds worth of sound bites from the DNC convention on Fox News?

Don’t forget women wearing pants! And being allowed to exist outside of their proper spheres!

Besides, if you’re being honest, No Lives Matter, at least not unless humans make them matter.

This is true. A lot of conservatives are not so much voting for Trump as they are voting against Clinton. They see her as representative of high-minded liberal policies that they believe have ultimately screwed over America. And they don’t trust her. They believe the Fox News narrative of Clinton corruption (which I honestly am not sure if I understand what they are supposed to have done).
In my mind, people don’t like Hillary’s policies so they are voting for someone who doesn’t even appear to have a firm grasp on reality.

There are other issues as well. I think it’s easy to look at Trump’s rhetoric and conclude that anyone who votes for that guy must be a KKK supporting xenophobe, which in my view is not necessarily true at all. I know numerous Trump supporters who, aside from some of their political views, I have no problem with at all. One guy’s support for Trump stood out, though. “I’m tired of people beating up on my Christian faith. Trump’s gonna fight back.”

I think that’s what a lot of pundits aren’t quite getting when they predict the demise of Trump in whatever kerfuffle Trump kicks up. The people who support Trump don’t give a fuck who endorses whom. Trump is a guy who is unafraid, and who is fighting against all of the experts, all of the establishment, all of those who hate the little white guy and the Christian from farm country (at least that’s how they perceive it). That’s why, as disastrous a week as he’s had – and there’s no question it’s been disastrous – I think Trump will at least live to fight another day. Trump may seem borderline nuts by continuing to dig in against the Khans but if anything, he is proving his credentials as a political martyr.

Trump’s problem now is that he really needs the support of the republican party machine to put him over the top in some of these battleground states. He needs people to call up old ladies during the day, to knock on doors in suburban neighborhoods, to set up robocalls, and to do the grinding work that wins elections in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Nevada. As long as Trump humiliates the republican party, nobody’s going to lift a finger to do that work. He’ll be dependent on himself, and that’s the real problem he has. But I suspect he will try to somehow move past the controversy, try to talk about something else, and if it really looks like Trump is in danger, I don’t think we’ll have to wait too long before Wikileaks starts dumping more info on the Clinton campaign.

Trump’s method of moving past controversies is actually not that bad: say something even more outrageous, but less politically damaging.

Of course it’s racist to object to “Black Lives Matter.” That slogan doesn’t exclude anyone else, there’s no reason to object to it except racism.

If someone put up a sign that said “2 + 2 = 4”, would there be a backlash from a “3 + 1 = 4” or “0 + 4 = 4” crowd?

What a fucking hardship.

It’s their own damn lazy stupid fault. They voted for politicians who picked their pockets and promised stuff that was never gonna happen. They were happy to give up money in exchange for the expectation that the groups they disliked were gonna get stuffed.

They thought the American Dream simply required showing up.

I’m not so sure. Wikileaks isn’t exactly a conservative group. The release timing before was probably political, but I think it was to support Sanders, not Trump.

I just can’t imagine the people behind Wikileaks supporting what would happen with Trump, since he’s more likely to hide things. And Wikileaks is all about government transparency. Plus, Trump is more likely to go after them as criminals.

The only way Wikileaks makes sense to do that sort of timing is if it’s been taken over by Russia. Or, of course, if they don’t think about timing at all.

I don’t think it’s a given that Wikileaks will put out anything damaging before the election at all. It basically depends on how crazy or Russian you think they actually are.

Chuck Todd exposed Wikileaks in about 30 seconds on MTP on Sunday.

First of all Wikileaks isn’t doing a dump, they dribble stuff out.

Secondly, he pressed Assange about sources, and of course Assange is going to want to protect his sources, but he also asserted that it’s about truth (as opposed to government transparency). And Todd pointed out that knowing the source is part of the truth.

All Assange said was “It’s an interesting question.”

It wasn’t “probably” political, it was political. Julian Assange has specifically stated he timed the release to hurt Clinton.

Assange also hinted that he would prefer a Trump presidency.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/us/politics/assange-timed-wikileaks-release-of-democratic-emails-to-harm-hillary-clinton.html?_r=0

It’s no secret that Assange has no love for Clinton. This isn’t about truth or transparency, it’s about influencing the election and info dumps will be made according to that principle. If it was about some nobler goal, everything would have been dumped on Day One – set the truth free and all that.

While that’s true, it’s not morally wrong either. Politicians play games, and one of their favorite games is to call damaging information that is not recent “old news” as if that’s relevant in some way. So Assange will make it so that it’s new news, at the worst possible times for Clinton. Then he’ll just dump the rest after the election.