Nate Silver looks at some polls and concludes – no surprise – that Trump is very popular with his base but deeply disliked by everyone else – and that’s just among Republican voters. Looking at the electorate as a whole, the picture is even worse for him. Larry Sabato now expects Clinton to beat Trump 347 EVs to 191. And the predictions are only slightly better for Cruz if he’s the nominee.
Public dick. Very public, very dick.
Hahahahahahahahahaha
(Laughing and pointing at Tantaros)
I must say I agree with her on one point; of course Hillary wanted him to make himself look like an idiot. As did Cruz, Kasich, and Sanders. Not because of some nebulously-imagined gender war, but because they can gain from it in their bids for nomination.
But the point is, Tantaros actually seems to think, or pretends to think, Clinton had something to do with this – that Chris Matthews is in her pay or something.
It’s the Great Liberal Conspiracy, didn’t you know? 
Wisconsin’s polls, but even more so, California’s polls. He should be dominating Cruz in California, but he isn’t, and I think Trump is so negative, so unpopular now that two things are happening at exactly the wrong time for Trump: one is that Donald Trump’s base of support is eroding and weakening as we speak; and the other is that other republicans are now more motivated to vote to keep the buffoon out of the race, and they’re voting for Cruz.
Trump’s ride to the top was built on the perception of strength. But he’s had a horrible month, beginning with the series of violent protests. I don’t care how strong voters feel Trump is: the violence makes it look to the average person like he has no control over events that he puts together. The scenes are chaotic. We vote for strong leaders who occasionally make outrageous remarks but we don’t vote for chaos. People are beginning to imagine what a Trump convention looks like, what a President Trump gathering could look like, or God forbid, what a Trump gathering in another country might look like. It looks horrible. And he’s not the only tough guy in the race. Ted Cruz also does ‘tough’. And he does it well.
Which brings me to my next point: It is Ted Cruz who has actually been the better counter-puncher as of late. Cruz has been nothing short of brilliant in handling the Trump onslaught. Despite being overtaken and nearly left for dead in the race in February, he consistently has run a disciplined campaign and refused to follow Trump into the mud. Jeb tried to look tough and failed. Rubio went bare knuckles and got nowhere. Cruz has fought Trump on his terms, and it’s finally paying off. Others have tried to go after Trump’s weaknesses, which was their tactical error. Cruz has not taken the bait. He has instead opted to wait patiently to let Trump get himself into trouble before attacking. But the best example of Cruz’s tactical brilliance was in how he responded to the attacks on his wife. Someone in the campaign released those photos of Melania, knowing that they’d bait Donald Trump into a furious response. They knew it was coming. Ted Cruz also knew it was coming. Donald Trump telegraphed his punch. And when Cruz finally responded, he sounded like a big-balled Texan man defending his wife. And now he’s pinning the one label on Trump that will actually stick – and hurt. He’s labeling Trump a coward. Someone so unmanly that he attacks women rather than men. That resonates among conservatives. And now he’s using that label to suggest that this is why Donald Trump won’t debate him one on one – he’s too cowardly to do so. It’s working. That and the fact that Donald has now looked absolutely foolish in interviews the last few days. He just doesn’t look so confident anymore. He doesn’t look strong. Trump’s strengths have been taken away, and he will fall like a rock.
When people looked at Donald Trump a month or two ago, they saw a tough guy who said what he wanted, whenever he wanted, to whomever he wanted. They saw bravado. They saw macho. They saw a guy who was going to stand up to political correctness and bring back the Cold War and 19th Century America. And when they saw Ted Cruz a few months ago, they didn’t really know what to think. They saw one politician among several. They may have seen a calculating and plotting politico at that.
When they look at Donald Trump now, they see a guy who can’t even put a single event together without people getting into fisticuffs. They see a guy who can’t control his crowd. They see a guy who says things now that he actually has to take back a day later. They see a guy who’s not so confident in front of the camera anymore. When they look at Ted Cruz, on the other hand, they see controlled aggression. They see someone who can think three, four, or five moves ahead. They see someone who defends the people who are important to him. They see strength.
You may not see that now, but the election results will show it soon.
Spoiler alert: it’s Chris Christie’s fault
Asahi, you make a cogent argument. I’m not sure if your prediction will be correct–I’m wary of “now Drumpf’s finally about to collapse” arguments for obvious reasons–but I have to credit you for laying out a good case. It will be very interesting to see how the next few primaries play out.
I think asahi’s prediction iis crazily over confident wishful thinking. Yes, Trump had a bad week - not his first. Yes, his polling with Cruz is tight in ~40 delegate Wisconsin but you ignore Trump crushing in ~200 New York. And you gloss over 2/3 of the recent California polls have him “only” double digits over Cruz.
Trump may not win but declaring him done is ridiculous.
He is done. Completely done.
The controversies of the past are significantly different than the ones he’s facing now. It’s one thing to make disparaging comments about minorities, but the fact is that racism has always had a strong appeal to a lot of voters in the republican party. Those outrageous comments would have definitely come into play in the general election, but a candidate gets away with it in the republican primaries.
What’s happening lately, though, is quite different. Scenes of violence have shown voters that he is a candidate who’s not in control of anything. And even some of his comments are now entering no-go territory. Strong positions on abortion are one thing, but throwing women in jail? That’s over the top even by republican standards. Insulting someone’s wife in such an uncouth manner? Definitely a deal breaker in the eyes of many conservatives. As I said, a lot of republican men may have issues with minorities and single women, but they also see themselves as ‘real men’ and ‘real men’ don’t attack women, especially the wives of other conservative men. That’s cowardly. And cowards don’t get votes.
But the other problem that Trump has now, which I didn’t really address in the previous post, is that Trump is now virtually one on one with Cruz. Voters now have a chance to make very clear and stark contrasts in ways they could not before. And that’s been the problem with the RNC’s management of this race all along. Whereas the Democrats limited the field to two or three main players at the beginning, the republicans spent time beating each other up. It has been an ugly brawl. Great for TV ratings but terrible for the party, though I tend to think the party might actually recover from this.
The mistake of those who are bullish on Trump are making is to assume that past success translates to future success. It doesn’t. Trust me, he is going to collapse in epic fashion over the next 60 days. He has to win Wisconsin or his chances of winning the race outright go down significantly. And there’s no way he’s win a brokered convention. Cruz would have serious momentum - so much so that nominating him wouldn’t be that much of a controversy. In fact, he could collapse so hard and so fast that he might not even be that much of a factor in the contested convention. In my mind, that is really the big issue now: will Trump still be a relevant political force to reckon with at the convention, or will he completely disintegrate into political oblivion?
If abortion is murder, why wouldn’t the women be culpable? I don’t get this logic.
I totally believe Trump could get the nom. The one thing uniting the GOP base is that they’re angry over the lies told by RW media. Angry and credulous. That’s a group of mouth-breathers tailor made to follow a strutting wanna-be Alpha like Trump.
The doctor is the murderer. The woman is just the crime scene.
Admittedly, not much of a challenge to be found there.
I think it’s a number of things.
It’s politically dangerous to say the women will be punished.
Some people just haven’t thought it all the way through. The exact scope of who is punished when hasn’t been on the front burner for decades.
There’s some paternalism in there about women making choices.
The time to stop Trump was last summer. Republicans had their chance and squandered it. Trump was great for ratings, he got people to start caring about the race early, he made people watch the debates. So they declined to attack him when they had a chance, they thought surely that saner heads would prevail once 2016 rolled around. By that time all the batshit vote had coalesced into Trump’s column and all the sane vote was split several ways. Now it’s too late, Trump has what may be an insurmountable lead. Republicans can bite the bullet and nominate him and lose big, or they can steal the nomination from him and let the racist base stay home in November. Either way, they’re screwed and it will cost them the White House, the Senate, and possibly even the House.
The first and last points you made are true and useful, but I want to call specific attention to this one: They haven’t had to think it through. They haven’t had to think a lot of things through, like “What is our end-game with our endless series of wars in the browner parts of the world?” and “How are we going to cope with the Boomers all hitting seventy and eighty at around the same time without backpedaling one inch on our utter revulsion of healthcare reform?”
It’s a common disease which I call POOP-Headedness, for Party Out Of Power: The party gets so disconnected from the reality of compromise and negotiation required to run a country that it can disappear entirely up its own asshole in terms of ideological purity. Small, single-issue parties start and end right here, with the neat little closed epistemological systems which are the Socialist (True Socialism, by which I mean not Sanders and not France and not anyone who can abide reform instead of immediate revolution) parties, Anarchist parties, and Libertarian parties being the prime examples. They can know everything and never compromise because nobody’s interested in them in the slightest, so they never have anyone to compromise with.
Needless to say, neither of the two major parties should have POOP-Headedness. However, as has been said many times before, the modern GOP runs on it, with Cruz being the most potent example thus far. Trump really isn’t all that ideological; his (current) policies are mostly moderate for a Republican and he’s actually backpedaled on this piece of idiocy, which means he cares about sticking to some kind of mainstream at least as long as he’s running for nomination.
But, and this is what you noticed, Trump has very few filters between his mouth and his brain, so he can blunder into saying things which show how little the GOP has thought through some of its policies. In a deeper sense, this reflects one simple fact: The GOP, like all major parties, is composed of factions, and some of the factions in the GOP are extremist groups. Extremist groups are made of POOP. They’re defined by being too out there to compromise. The anti-abortion groups within the GOP are pure POOP, to the point “single-issue voters” doesn’t describe them: They have single-issue minds.
Now all those extremist groups have a Rorschach of a candidate, the perfect pugilistic asshole into which they can dump all of their hopes because he, of himself, is nearly completely empty. They can imagine he’ll do all of the things to make their most important issue work out the way they want, because he’s a fighting asshole who plays dirty and takes no prisoners. The GOP has already realized that they’re locked up with him, and it remains to be seen how Trump’s most ardent followers will take the convention or, if Trump gets the nomination, the general election, where Trump has the worst popularity numbers of any major-party candidate in modern times.
Heh…you said “poop”.
I think he’s in trouble if he doesn’t make some attempt to curb the violence, and right now he’s not even pretending to be disturbed by it. So, yeah, if it escalates and he says nothing, he’s dead.
OTOH, if he even pays lip service to tamping down the aggressiveness of his supporters, he’s right back on top.
He is not done. Not even close, as far as the Republican nomination is concerned.