It’s already December and Trump still leads in the polls. I predict that he will still be in the lead the day before the Iowa caucuses. I think that there is a good chance his poll support might not translate into a win in Iowa due to Cruz having a better “ground game” in Iowa. If he looses Iowa to Cruz, I think his numbers will then fall rapidly. If he wins Iowa, I think he can probably win the nomination. He would still be toast in the general election.
The problem is that Trump keeps drawing the other candidates further and further right, but there are dozens of them and the spotlight is still on Trump. So nobody will remember any of the crazy shit they said trying to keep up with him for the batshit vote.
Four years ago exactly, Cain led in the polls; eight years ago it was Giuliani. Republicans are weird, and slow.
Those are terrible analogies at this point. Trump has had a pretty commanding lead since July and its only gotten stronger of late. He’s trending up, not down. He might not win, but he’s no flash in the pan or flavor of the month like there were in past cycles.
I didn’t make an analogy. I stated a fact, and then expressed an opinion, a characterization of the party faithful.
The Times article quoted several Senatorial candidates who expect to get beaten if Trump is the candidate. Some mentioned the Goldwater disaster.
Many people (including Bernie Sanders liberals) believe the Goldwater debacle was good for conservative Republicans in the long run. I don’t buy it, but it’s a definite argument out there.
“Trump – In your heart, you know he’s tremendous.”
Doesn’t matter. Trump cannot win the general election. If he gets nominated it just means a landslide for the Democrats.
I don’t think any Republican can win (absent extraordinary circumstances), but Carson, Cruz, and Trump are all recipes for landslide losses. Yet in the latest CNN poll. those are the top three contenders, combining for 66% of the support! It’s a marvel.
It wasn’t good for the Congressmen who lost their seats, who are the ones who are worried now. Whether this would make the extremists think twice or make them think they were stabbed in the back is another matter.
I’ve been on a lot of forum recently full of Trump followers, since Trump has pointed his finger at all the other Republicans and GOP called them career politicians, too stupid/incompetent to get anything done because of x,y and z, and they have ruined the country, he has really poisoned the Republicans against the other Republicans, Go Trump!
A lot of Republicans, including this one, are really pissed off at the way our guys have done nothing once they’ve taken control. They did nothing worthwhile after being swept into office in '94 and they’ve done nothing worthwhile now. So yeah, a lot of Republicans are pissed off at the Republicans and they want someone in office who’ll finally start to work to…ahem…make the country great again. 
ETA: I have no idea at this point whether Trump is serious or not and whether he’s electable or not, but what I said above is a large part of the reason he’s doing so well.
Let’s hope he’s neither.
A headline on the BBC right now reads: Donald Trump Urges Ban on Muslims Coming to US.
This is the most explicitly racist thing he’s done in a couple of days. I’m so embarrassed by my country: that more than a handful of people admire him shames me deeply.
Well, as I’ve said before, I don’t take most of what he says seriously thanks to having followed him fairly closely over the last few decades and gained what I think is a little more insight than most as to how he operates. But I will say that I have a hard time imagining how he could govern effectively given the way he’s positioned himself at this point. We’ll just have to wait to see how things transpire over the next year.
On the contrary, this is the greatest thing he’s said so far. Go Future President Trump!
(And how can it be “racist,” when Islam is a religion.)
“Racist” can be used to refer to xenophobic discourse against another people who is understood to be unconnected to your own people. It doesn’t have to refer to the American-style colour-coded races; you can find 19th-century examples of English racism against the Irish, who are pretty similar in modern racial discourse.
Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, it’s forgivable to go full Trump.
It isn’t racist in the slightest. He knows we can’t properly vet incoming Muslims (and that the current administration isn’t much inclined to even try) and he knows that ISIS and Al Qaeda intend to infiltrate their ranks so as to slip their operatives into the country. They’ve said this in so many words themselves.
Trump is far more concerned about the safety of Americans than he is racist against a group of people that aren’t a race anyway. If it were up to people who think like you the country would be flooded with these douchebags, all sorts of atrocities would be planned out in mosques that you’re afraid to monitor for fear of ‘racism’, and then once a large terror attack gets pulled off you’ll be blaming us for U.S. policy in the Middle East.
I’m not embarrassed by you but I am wondering why your mind works the way it does. Why is it that liberals are never concerned about the potential victims when it comes to issues like these? They work like hell to disarm law abiding citizens, work like hell to get criminals out of prison or reduce their sentences, believe robbers should be free to escape and possibly murder someone in the next robbery because the money they took isn’t worth a human life, etc., etc., etc. I swear, if there’s a way for innocent people to be victimized by bad guys you people are all over it. Does it never occur to you that your friends and families can wind up victims of these people too?