adaher:
I don’t think it helps Trump. I don’t see too many Clinton voters defecting to Bloomberg. What Bloomberg actually does is give Republicans that can’t stand Trump a reasonable billioniare to vote for. Plus a lot of independents, but Clinton was also going to lose the independent vote anyway.
The end result would probably look a lot like Clinton-Bush-Perot.
Except Perot actually was a bit of a populist-for example opposing NAFTA.
adaher
January 11, 2016, 7:10am
1364
Oh, no question Bloomberg would have a different audience. It’s like Clinton-Bush-Perot, only with Trump in the role of Perot and Bloomberg in the role of Bush.
You misspelled demagogue.
adaher
January 11, 2016, 8:05am
1366
Bloomberg could just say, “See who succeeded me in New York? Should the country repeat that mistake?”
Why not both? And of course, a demagouge is not necessarily a bad thing.
A populist who will be elected nationally won’t be just a prog with some populistic tendencies-De Blasio is basically a more incompetent Bernie Sanders.
Yeah, great. If you do not like Trump, and he gets elected, you best make sure he does not know who you are.
eschereal the seriously twisted:
Yeah, great. If you do not like Trump, and he gets elected, you best make sure he does not know who you are.
This election is just so surreal. Has a solid portion of the country gone completely off the rails?
Seems like a lot of them have pulled up the spikes and hauled the very rails themselves off to the scrapyard to recycle them for $3/lb.
$3/lb? I’ll pull up a few tracks myself for that price. Steel is at about $40-50/ton right now.
De Blasio is actually pretty popular in NYC, AIUI.
A very high energy performance by some of TRUMP’s youngest supporters! Regrettably its not up to the musical par of say the Frei Deutsche Jugend but it’s a start.
Trump’s net fav/unfav among Democrats and independents is by far the worst of any GOP candidate. That it’s the worst doesn’t shock me; the spread between him and Cruz is however eye-popping. (Democrats and independents are kind of dropping the ball there IMO, in terms of not clueing into how bad Cruz is.)
SlackerInc:
Trump’s net fav/unfav among Democrats and independents is by far the worst of any GOP candidate. That it’s the worst doesn’t shock me; the spread between him and Cruz is however eye-popping. (Democrats and independents are kind of dropping the ball there IMO, in terms of not clueing into how bad Cruz is.)
Cruz is still not particularly well known. If he gets the nomination, the Democrats will happily feast on all his insane and dumb statements.
Yep-the same explains why Sanders is polling better Clinton rn.
You beat me to the punch in posting this. Our first look at the Trump Youth.
wonky
January 15, 2016, 12:59pm
1379
I didn’t know where to look. Or where to listen. I knew how to make it stop, but somehow I COULDN’T TURN IT OFF.
Interesting analysis of why Trump is doing so well – an argument that it’s not just personality, but ideology (of a sort). John B. Judis discusses a little-known book, The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation, by Donald Warren (1976).
While conducting extensive surveys of white voters in 1971 and again in 1975, Warren identified a group who defied the usual partisan and ideological divisions. These voters were not college educated; their income fell somewhere in the middle or lower-middle range; and they primarily held skilled and semi-skilled blue-collar jobs or sales and clerical white-collar jobs. At the time, they made up about a quarter of the electorate. What distinguished them was their ideology: It was neither conventionally liberal nor conventionally conservative, but instead revolved around an intense conviction that the middle class was under siege from above and below.
Warren called these voters Middle American Radicals, or MARS. “MARS are distinct in the depth of their feeling that the middle class has been seriously neglected,” Warren wrote. They saw “government as favoring both the rich and the poor simultaneously.” Like many on the left, MARS were deeply suspicious of big business: Compared with the other groups he surveyed—lower-income whites, middle-income whites who went to college, and what Warren called “affluents”—MARS were the most likely to believe that corporations had “too much power,” “don’t pay attention,” and were “too big.” MARS also backed many liberal programs: By a large percentage, they favored government guaranteeing jobs to everyone; and they supported price controls, Medicare, some kind of national health insurance, federal aid to education, and Social Security.
On the other hand, they held very conservative positions on poverty and race. They were the least likely to agree that whites had any responsibility “to make up for wrongs done to blacks in the past,” they were the most critical of welfare agencies, they rejected racial busing, and they wanted to grant police a “heavier hand” to “control crime.” They were also the group most distrustful of the national government. And in a stand that wasn’t really liberal or conservative (and that appeared, at least on the surface, to be in tension with their dislike of the national government), MARS were more likely than any other group to favor strong leadership in Washington—to advocate for a situation “when one person is in charge.”
If these voters are beginning to sound familiar, they should: Warren’s MARS of the 1970s are the Donald Trump supporters of today. Since at least the late 1960s, these voters have periodically coalesced to become a force in presidential politics, just as they did this past summer. In 1968 and 1972, they were at the heart of George Wallace’s presidential campaigns; in 1992 and 1996, many of them backed H. Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan. Over the years, some of their issues have changed—illegal immigration has replaced explicitly racist appeals—and many of these voters now have junior-college degrees and are as likely to hold white-collar as blue-collar jobs. But the basic MARS worldview that Warren outlined has remained surprisingly intact from the 1970s through the present.
Political scientists call the above-described set of views Producerism .
