Well in order to do that he would have to reduce the percentage not voting for him from 44% to 35%, or in other words convince about one out of every 5 whites who are currently voting against him to vote for him. That is a pretty big shift.
I’m surprised Trump is winning PA in that projection. But states do shift, Indiana shifted 20 points from 2004 to 2008. States like VA & NC shifted pretty heavily from 2004 to 2008 also. PA usually has a 5-10 point dem lead.
Time will tell whether Bernie Bros are going over to Jill Stein, but it’s looking more like a distinct possibility, and if that happens, Hillary will lose the election. It’s possible that Hillary and Donald Trump could both end up losing the race. There’s a wacky scenario in which Hillary wins PA but loses Florida, Ohio, and Nevada (among others), which could result in a 269-269 deadlock. If that happen, then the race would go to Paul Ryan’s House.
No shit. How can you be so incredibly stupid as to lift a giant middle finger to half of your party?
I vowed not to vote for her when I found this out, but had calmed down by morning. I will be making a substantial donation to her (DWS’s) primary opponent, though, in hopes that she will soon be able to devote her full attention to this honorary position. Hopefully she won’t lose too many votes, but what in the world could she possibly have been thinking?? “I think what the voters really want to see at this point is a wholehearted embrace of corruption and cronyism!”
IF it was necessary to make a “deal”; if for some reason she couldn’t have been quickly removed from the DNC without her consent, then I could see the point. I find it hard to believe that’s the case, though.
I am not so sure about that. Yes, if every Bernie supporter went to a 3rd party, it would hurt Hillary. But I think only the most radical and least politically knowledgeable will. In fact i just read a FB page of one of the most radical, who clearly stated he is voting Clinton, because he is voting anti-trump, not pro-Hillary.
If there is a deadlock, of course Trump will win. Then there will be problems.
Trump might win if there’s a deadlock. But that might be where #nevertrump actually has some teeth.
I remember those days very well. McCain got a solid bounce, and the media was swooning over Sarah Palin and her zinger-filled convention speech. The PUMAs were vowing to teach the country a lesson by throwing the election to McCain. Democrats were already starting the circular firing squad, and bloggers like Digby were producing grim “how Obama is blowing it” posts on a daily basis. Dark days indeed.
I’m worried now, but I’m saving my near-panic, off-the-scale worrying for October.
It’s the only way. You have to pace yourself.
Sent from my QTAQZ3 using Tapatalk
It’s said that many Brexit Leave voters were surprised and unhappy to learn that Leave had won — they were just trying to send a message.
By the same token, I’ll guess that many Trump voters(*) haven’t thought about a real Trump Presidency and wouldn’t want it if they did. They’re just sending a message. They can afford to to react irrationally to their misdirected angers because they" know" that their single vote won’t matter.
(* - And Stein and Johnson voters, in effect half-voting for Trump. They are as detestable as the Trump voters — they’re erudite enough to conceive an alternative, yet happy to help Trump victory.)
There are some differences, though. McCain was basically the anointed one in 2008. The powers that be were behind him from day one. He pushed Romney/Huckabee aside without breaking a sweat and was able to build the whole party behind him, had a good convention, the first couple days of Palin as VP looked to be amazing…then Palin started giving interviews and stories about her shit show of a Governorship up in Alaska started circulating on national press. From that point onward I think McCain was always fighting uphill, when the economy tanked, as the representative of the incumbent party, he took a blow he could never come back from.
Big things that hurt McCain additionally was he’s never been a powerful speaker, was not a good fund raiser, was a lethargic debater.
Now let’s look to Trump. Is he a good speaker? Not in the traditional sense, but to the voters that are going for him, he hits the notes perfectly. Is he a good fund raiser? Signs are that he’s not at all. Is he a good debater? Not in the traditional sense, but every time he debated, he went up in the polls.
But here’s the big difference, Trump is a different animal. His interviews are rambling and incoherent, his rallies moreso, his debate performance was atrocious, his fundraising is lethargic and he appears totally disinterested in it, he had no support from anyone in the party…and he kicked the shit out of everyone who stood in his way.
This is because Trump has managed to find a way to curry immense amounts of support when lacking in every quality and every advantage previously presumed necessary to win a nomination, he waded through 5 U.S. Senators, 9 current/former Governors–including the son and brother of a President who started the primaries with a titanic war chest, literally like they were nothing. Some of these guys he knocked out in two weeks time had a lifetime in politics, expectations of major opportunities this year–some had ran before and had decent Presidential campaign experience. Unlike McCain, who was crowned and basically found wanting, Trump just won probably the most heavily contested, most expensive, most brutal Republican primary in the history of the party. He did so with relatively little money and with almost no traditional campaign organization, and while committing gaffe after gaffe that alone would sink any other campaign.
So I guess what I’m getting at, is McCain was a fundamentally weak, traditional Republican candidate who was never more than a glass jaw waiting to get knocked out by Obama, one of the best campaigners of our lifetimes. Trump on the other hand, is essentially a demagogue who with a wide swathe of the electorate appears immune to all forms of political misstep and attack, the 538 projections a month ago showed him at a 19% chance of victory and it’s almost a dead heat now. And this rise started before the convention, suggesting he was rising even without the convention bump.
I see no reason to expect this won’t be close, because frankly if this many Americans are willing to say they support Trump right now, after all that he has done and said, I’d love to know what tool or form of attack Hillary could possibly use that would harm his candidacy.
Excellent post.
I think the thought among most was that the republican primary was somehow going to reveal itself to be different than the general election. What we’re beginning to see is, it might not be that much different after all.
But you’re correct: Trump should have been laughed off the stage by this time last year. He’s not only still here, but he’s getting stronger. At this point, with Hillary’s negatives, I think we’d have to say that the pressure is more on her than on him. She’s the one who can’t make a big mistake. Trump, on the other hand, can win as long as he doesn’t make colossal mistakes.
And that brings me to another point you touched on: What is a ‘mistake’? For most candidates, it’s saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, a ‘gotcha’ moment like Mitt Romney’s 47 percent comment. For Trump, I think the worst thing that can happen is to appear to be completely out of control. Paul Manafort’s fear isn’t one off-handed remark by Trump but a series of events that might give people the impression that he can’t control his impulses. Trump’s worst moments were when his rallies turned violent and when he continued taunting the federal judge over his heritage.
A disastrous series of debate performances might hurt Trump, but all he really needs to do is to look strong and have at least some idea of what he’s talking about. None of what he says has to be true, either. He could simply make up information and as long as he looks confident saying it, people will buy it. I don’t know how you compete with that.
With all that he has done and all that he has said, what exactly would he have to say that would count as a big enough “colossal mistake” to knock him out of the race?
I don’t know, maybe looking awful in the debates. Maybe violent protests at his speeches and rallies.
It won’t be hard for him to exceed expectations during the debates. He would have to look REALLY awful - be goaded into just absolutely losing his shit. And that might not knock him down more than a few points.
The only *single *thing I think likely to hurt him is an October Surprise - say, it comes to light he’s been getting payoffs from Vladimir Putin, or the rape allegation suddenly blows up to Cosbyesque levels.
Hasn’t the latter already happened? And that still hasn’t done much to hurt him.
If I was a Dem black ops guy, I would gin up a fake tax return showing him heavily in bed with Russian oligarch connected banks/businesses. That would both put pressure on him to release his real ones and get people really talking about his Russia connections. Not that I would condone such a thing.
Wow, that’s a really amazing…-ly terrible idea.
So don’t do it, Hillary’s campaign, especially don’t do it secretly without her or her top campaign staff knowing, making sure to eliminate any possible trail. That would be very terrible indeed.
Looking worse than expected in the debates would hurt Trump, pretty much by definition. The rub there is defining ‘looking awful’: to whom? Some people are going to say Trump looked awful pretty much no matter what.
My impression is that leftist activists have dialed back the protests at Trump/Republican events, which weren’t really notable at the RNC, because they (belatedly) realized it helps Trump when things get carried away and there’s violence, even if they believe the violence is Trump’s fault.
The New York Times reported that US intelligence agencies believe the Russians are behind the DNC email hack. I take that to mean that Vladimir Putin would prefer Donald Trump, so I continue to prefer Hillary Clinton.
Good on ya, Tightlips; registering to vote (and voting) may seem like small things, and I guess they are, in a way. But they are positive things, and if enough people do them, that’ll add up.
My own small step this year was finally switching my party registration (registered Green many moons ago as a teenage idealist). I’m planning to do some phone-bank work in swing states this fall. As an introvert who once did telemarketing, that sounds like sheer hell, but I have to do something.
Fist bump to you, Joey.