Then there are the people who claim to be undecided because “both candidates are equally bad,” but they’re only saying it to pretend they’re thoughtful.
In my experience “they’re both equally bad” has either meant “I was always going to vote for Trump/3rd party but it’s embarrassing to say out loud” or “I was only going to vote if Bernie Sanders won the primary because I’m a myopic child.”
Quinnipiac poll shows Biden up against Trump in head-to-head. In a 5-way race, Biden is up by 2 points, making that a statistical deadheat:
From your link – these are great examples of poll respondents safely choosing a Brewster’s Millions “None Of The Above!” when stakes are low:
In a five-person hypothetical 2024 general election matchup that includes independent and Green Party candidates, Biden receives 39 percent support, Trump receives 37 percent support, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. receives 14 percent support, independent candidate Cornel West receives 3 percent support, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein receives 2 percent support.
Among independents in the five-person hypothetical 2024 general
election matchup, Biden receives 35 percent support, Trump receives 27 percent support, Kennedy receives 24 percent support, West receives 5 percent support, and Stein receives 5 percent support.
It’s a hammerlock that Kennedy will not get one out of seven votes cast in November. Similarly, Kennedy, West, and Stein together will not get 1/3 of the independent vote.
Sorry, I meant back and forth in the averages of the most recent polls from the ten or so pollsters that regularly run Trump-Biden surveys. Yes, there are outliers. This is statistically inevitable.
Evidence says, Trump will be the nominee and is a bit ahead for November. Doesn’t prove if he will win, just says where we are, and that loyal Republicans have no reason to dump him.
I don’t know if I buy the OP argument that trump won’t be the Repub party nominee, though I definitely hope the OP is correct. And I believe that trump should be barred from running again. I think part 3 of the 14th Amendment definitely should apply to trump.
I do believe, though maybe it’s just denial or wishful thinking, that chances are good of trump not getting reelected. The Biden campaign hasn’t really started running attack ads against trump yet. Not that I generally approve of attack ads, but in trump’s case, they’re a public service. All the ads would really have to do is show any handful of the many, many lowlight clips from trump’s first admin, with a tagline saying something like “Do you really want this guy as President again?” I think the notoriously short-memoried voting public needs a reminder of just how bad and chaotic things were. One trump attack ad that ran a lot in the run-up to the 2020 election, that I thought was really effective, was simply a clip of trump downplaying the Covid epidemic with a superimposed chart showing Covid deaths skyrocketing over time.
So it’s not just me:
Keep in mind that the GOP pushing Trump out for bad behavior, cratering polls, etc., was just one of the potential causes of his not becoming the nominee that I listed. I was doing a bit of game theory on that particular cause.
But I agree that it would be very difficult for the GOP to push him out at this stage “merely” for looking like a sure loser.
When I said “mechanism” I meant some bylaw or similar that would allow the Republican National Committee to remove him from being the candidate. Perhaps a unanimous vote by the Committee or something like that. Otherwise it’s just a matter of persuasion and I don’t see Trump being persuaded no matter what.
I agree that persuasion would be very difficult if the matter was simply about polls and unpopularity. If it seemed as though he would be incarcerated soon after the convention, however, or some such situation, he may be open to some sort of bribery to exit the race.
And yeah, the Republican primary system doesn’t seem to have much in the way of escape hatches for odd situations.
I hope this isn’t a hijack, but what would such an escape hatch look like? Does the Democratic primary system have one?
If he was convicted and awaiting sentencing, he would be announcing plans to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, where Republicans would expect a Republican court to help him out. Some on this board have suggested that he would be held in prison awaiting the outcome of appeals. But I can’t believe many Republicans expect that. And there is no way appeals will be exhausted this year.
Then there is the likelihood of major delays in all the trials except the New York State trial where, if convicted, he might only be sentenced to a few months. I wonder what would happen if he was supposed to start a 90 day sentence on, say, October 1. My guess is that his delegates would be expecting SCOTUS to block it, even though we’d think they wouldn’t interfere with a state.
So — I think his nomination is pretty locked in. But I do have one uncertainty. Who will be his delegates? Are they true believers, or local politicians whose loyalty to Trump is shallow? Informed responses invited.
I don’t know about it in detail, but it has the superdelegates which the GOP does not. It sounds as though the GOP primary comes down to, “If you got the votes, you got the delegates; and if you got the delegates, you get the nomination.”
About 1 in 7 delegates to the Democratic convention are superdelegates - current and previous officeholders, party leaders, and the like. In the event that pledged delegates allocated by primaries and caucuses (P&Cs) have a very close 2-way or multiway split, they could conceivably swing the convention toward one candidate or another. Also, pledged delegates are allocated proportionally from the results of P&Cs, with a minimum of 15% support from any given PorC to be allocated delegates, whereas the Republican primaries are “winner take all” - the winner of a primary, even by plurality, gets all of that state’s delegates. In theory, these features make it more likely that a close 2- or 3-way race will end up being swung by superdelegate support at the convention.
In practice, it doesn’t happen that way. Between “horse race” and “invisible primary” coverage in the media, and the need for lots of donor money to run modern media campaigns across several states at once (c.f. Super Tuesday), those who do not “beat expectations” coming out of the first few primaries will often be forced to suspend their campaigns with only a handful of convention delegates, making a contested convention much less likely. What’s more, post-2016 DNC rules prohibit superdelegates from voting in the first round of balloting, so they will only come into play when a convention is contested. (The new rules were provided as a sop to Bernie Sanders supporters who were unhappy with how Hillary Clinton worked to get superdelegate endorsements before primary season had started, and with the media coverage of those endorsements as if they were equivalent to pledged delegates.)
So the Democratic escape hatch is smaller than it used to be. In practice, a demagogic takeover of the Democratic Party is less likely than of the Republican Party, but that’s less because of structural reasons than it is due to the attitudes of the party rank-and-file.
Here’s my question: Political parties aren’t constitutional entities. Are they required to follow their own rules? Couldn’t they just decide “New rule for 2024: The candidate is whomever Mr. Burns and Rush Birchmore decide it is.”
This varies by state. Only a few Republican primaries are completely “winner take all.”
Mmm, yeah, I got that wrong. Thanks for the correction.
A lot of Republican delegates are allocated using the “hybrid” method, where some delegates are allocated proportionally and some winner-take-all. It would be interesting (though time-consuming) to analyze each state’s rules and determine the number of delegates in those states that are allocated winner-take-all . I’m pretty sure that number will be higher than the Democratic party’s equivalent.
Yes, although there are rules for doing that, and some changes require a supermajority. See:
RNC Rules Committees - 2016 Info but Should Mostly Still Apply
As seen in my link, there is a rules committee that meets the week before the GOP convention. They can make last minute changes to the nomination process, but the delegates get to vote yea or nea on new rules. So if the Trump delegates are truly loyal to Donald, the party leaders who want to dump DJT would be overruled.
Also see:
What if Donald Trump is convicted? The 2024 Republican convention rules don’t address the issue
Past experience is if the delegates are set to nominate a weak ticket, party bosses won’t stop them.
It is interesting to see the different ways that states allocate delegates and how that can impact strategy.
In Texas (which I’m sure Dopers are tired of hearing me talk about), delegates are awarded proportionately unless a candidate clears 50%, in which case all delegates go to that candidate. But delegates are awarded both by performance in individual Congressional districts as well as statewide. That means there are really 39 concurrent elections (38 CDs plus statewide) going on for RNC delegates in Texas on primary day. So, theoretically, even if Trump were to win Texas with more than 50%, it’s possible Haley could keep him under 50% in a few Congressional districts and nab herself some delegates.
And because of the delegate selection process, it’s also entirely possible that her delegates end up being diehard Trumpers who are required to vote for her on the first ballot but will completely abandon her on subsequent ballots.