Ready for some tin-foil hattery? Better double-layer it!
Imagine that Trump comes to an agreement with the Republican Establishment that he will step down after 2 years ‘for medical reasons’. He selects as his VP someone very charismatic. That VP then becomes President and campaign for re-election as sitting President. Twice.
I had a nice long visit over the weekend with my sister and her husband. Both of them have been solid, middle-America, establishment Republicans for decades. They’re voting for Trump and damn proud of it. My BIL says he’s fed up with the failed promises of the Republicans for all these years and is ready for Trump to blow up The Powers That Be, win or lose. My sister isn’t quite as vehement, but she won’t vote for any Democrat, and certainly not Hilary Clinton.
I gotta say, if supposedly perfectly reasonable Republicans are talking like that, Trump has to have more support than I ever thought possible.
I remain stating what I have stated all along: it is far from impossible for Trump to win this. Clinton will need to win the middle and get turnout of those who supported Obama (including some Millennials) to win. If forced to choose the former a bigger deal than the latter but only both assures a win.
That said I believe this represents more of two very predictable items
If both candidates are disliked, and therefore neither Democrats or Republicans are successful getting out the vote, who would prevail? I know that the GOP generally does better when overall turnout is low, but could this election break all turnout records and, like Trump himself, skew trends?
Per this site, the lowest turnout was 48.9% in 1924 (Calvin Coolidge, the Republican defeating John Davis, the Democrat, and Robert Lafollette, the Progressive, who won Wisconsin)
In truth, the polls don’t really mean anything yet. It’s too far out. They won’t start to make sense until after the conventions, the Olympics, and Labor Day. So don’t panic for a few more months, and then only if Sam Wang and Nate Silver tell you to.
That is probably true. But they told us not to worry about the polls that showed Trump was leading the Republicans until after Labor Day, after November, after the New Year, until two weeks before Iowa, … and you see what happened there. It kind of makes you nervous.
Violent crime has been on a long and fairly precipitous decline.
Property crime has also dropped heavily since the 90s.
How, exactly, has liberalism “DRASTICALLY” increased crime in the US? Crime is at a fairly solid low point, actually.
Finland’s prisons are focused on rehabilitation and training. They’re “soft” on crime in a way Americans couldn’t even imagine. They have less than half the recidivism we do. There’s substantial empirical evidence that harsh punishment doesn’t deter crime.
Not sure when this happened, or are you simply referring to sex education being taught earlier and with a focus on giving students the tools they need to get through a sexual encounter without consequence, as opposed to abstinence, which doesn’t work?
…Who, exactly, is telling schoolchildren that they can experiment with drugs? Citation needed.
Again, who is advocating this? Citation needed.
It’s also all dead wrong. You’re damn near fractally wrong about crime, I have no idea where you’re getting your info on what we’re teaching children, and nothing here resembles a coherent argument. I wonder if there’s any connection between your support for Trump and your lack of pretty much any knowledge about, say, crime and punishment.
Big deal. You guys made it skyrocket with the counterculture revolution and it remained high for two decades. Now it’s been slowly declining and for all we know that fact is due to get-tough-on-crime legislation, more stringent parole policies, and more widespread gun ownership. It may also be due to more and more people moving from urban neighborhoods to suburban areas where opportunities for crime are fewer and crime itself is harder to get away with.
They also have nowhere near the social difficulties we have that leads to it.
There’s substantial evidence that once someone finds themselves in Sheriff Joe’s jail they take extraordinary pains not to go back. This includes moving to other counties. My take therefore is that as a nation we’ll first have to have harsh punishment in order to judge its effect on crime. A lot of our country’s bad guys are not only unafraid of prison but view it as a right of passage.
Not sure but I’d imagine he’s referring to the many accounts in the news of elementary school kids engaging in sex on their school grounds. And why wouldn’t they? It’s everywhere on TV, in magazines and movies and the internet, and those who oppose this are mocked as squares. Same as with drugs, really.
The fact is that liberalism has created an anything goes society and this type of thing is but one of the results.
A society that glamorizes it, accepts it, and mocks those who oppose it would be my guess.
In my opinion there’s a huge correlation between all the nonsense currently afoot in this country and support for Donald Trump. In fact I’d wager that he’d have a great deal more support because of this if not for the off-putting nature of some of the things he’s said and the way he’s conducted his campaign.
Uh, that just means that the polls weren’t very predictive until then. They didn’t change, so they became so.
For all “we” know? No. For all you know. We have a pretty good idea of the effect of get-tough-on-crime legislation; it’s not nothing, but it’s extremely little. I’m not aware of any substantial sociology pointing to tough crime laws as a deterrent to crime; indeed, there’s good evidence that it exacerbates crime, and doesn’t help prevent it.
For any of the things you brought up, it would be nice if you provided anything resembling evidence.
That’s right. They don’t have things like a massive stigma against felons that makes it nearly impossible to get a decent job after spending time in prison, for example. Their prisons are explicitly about rehabilitation. If you’d like to make the case that there are large, relevant issues I’m ignoring here, then by all means, make that case. Don’t just hand-wave it away.
Then cite it, and explain why this is relevant. Also, are you referring to Joe Arpaio? As a positive example of how prison should look? What?!
Oh, so basically the argument is, we can ignore the empirical evidence showing that despite the clear differences in harshness between state jail systems there’s not a good correlation between harshness and lack of recidivism… because it only starts to work at a certain point we haven’t reached yet?
I mean, that’s the only thing I can figure out of this that makes any sense at all. Personally, I’d need to see some damn good evidence of that before we start pushing “cruel and unusual” further down the scale.
Cite? And to what degree is this relevant? Given that the US prison system is among the harshest in the western world, what would you propose as a solution to this problem? More brutality? More violence? Maybe bring back some good ol’ medieval torture devices, like what Trump wants for Terrorists?
…Mocked as squares? People who don’t think elementary school kids should be having sex and doing drugs? Really? Does this actually happen anywhere outside the straw dimension?
And at this point it just drifts off into essentially blaming liberalism for all the evils of the world, no matter if it makes sense, or has any actual supporting evidence. When you come back, please bring actual arguments.
Thanks for the laugh. I needed that. It was those damned hippies!
For all we know? You’re going to have to do better than that.
Explain the contradiction between the first and last sentences in that paragraph.
Many accounts? Please. I have literally never seen a single one, and I live in a pretty librul area.
Sheer ideological babble with absolutely no supporting evidence. Your subscription to the Christian Science Monitor has been renewed.
I guess I must not be watching Faux News enough.
Dangit, Player, you stole my thunder! 
I’d google it, but googling “elementary school kids sex” at work would qualify as a very bad idea.
For what it’s worth, 538 just posted an article saying, “Of course Trump can win” plus had a discussion about how the polls are showing a very high number of undecideds, which makes this election unusually unpredictable.
Nate Silver pointed out that at this time in 2012 it was something like Obama 47, Romney 45, and right now it’s like Clinton 43, Trump 38. He does believe that many Sanders voters will come home, but getting Sanders supporters to vote for Clinton is a lot harder than getting Clinton supporters to vote for Obama.
Come November, with a Trump victory perhaps even more conceivable, and with Obama and Bernie stumping for Hillary, I suspect Bernie voters will flock to her in droves.
Here’s a great Atlantic essay on how Trump has broken through every guardrail of American politics. One of the best pieces on the Trump phenomena I’ve read yet: Donald Trump and the Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy - The Atlantic
You’re welcome.
Excellent piece, though I have one big reservation. I don’t think anti-Trumpism is necessarily based on negative partisanship, because the simple and plain fact is that he is the worst serious candidate for the Presidency that I (and obviously many others) have ever seen. He’s the poster child for voting for the lesser of two evils.
A man is his 70s complaining that people opposed to underage sex and drug use are mocked as “squares”. Do you even know anybody born after 1976??
He’s a hep cat, with a zoot suit with a reet pleat and a drape shape! Boodly-acky-sacky, want some seafood, mama!
If you were to go back and read for comprehension you would discover I said people opposed to the fact sex is everywhere in today’s society are mocked as “squares”, not people opposed to underage sex. And yes, people opposed to and critical of drug use are often mocked while drugs and doing drugs continue to be glamorized, joked about and considered hip.
I know this because I associate with lots of people born after 1976.
I’m not in my 70s.
So you’re three for three on the wrongness scale. Care to post something else and bump it higher?