Yeah, at the end, 538 was giving Trump a 30% chance of winning.
That’s not the sort of risk you mentally round down to zero.
Ah, you mean like the way his base is pissed that, instead of Mexico paying for the wall, he now wants them to pay for it.
Yeah, it’s the betrayal. Fer sher.
Ain’t she just? 
Also, if he’s talking about NRA money, he’s talking about Russian money, so apparently pkbites is like the C-Span lady who called in and thanked Russia for beating Hillary.
Well you know, some things are just so important that even betraying your country to a hostile foreign power pales by comparison. 
Dollars to doughnuts that you vote Republican in 2020 as you likely have your entire life. If gun “rights” are your issue, you vote Republican. What else are you going to do? Vote Democratic? I don’t think so. I don’t care if the Dem nominee campaigns with an AK-47 strapped to his chest, he will not win the gun vote. Russia and the NRA will dump plenty of money and their bots will put up plenty of Facebook posts to make every gun fanatic scared shitless to do anything but vote Republican.
What the GOP does next year is open to speculation. I assume that they will not run a candidate who is in federal prison- a distinct possibility for Donald. Assuming that he is in office next year, he will be the nominee and if it destroys the party, they would rather let that happen than alienate the racist scum that make up the Republican base.
The GOP wet dream would be Warren on the Dem ticket and Bernie on the Independent ticket. If that happens, the GOP would win the election even if their ticket was McConnell/Kavanaugh.
I own a gun store as well.
No they weren’t. Plenty of people bought them prior to that. And the BATFE documented that they were legal.
pkbites, why in the world did your customers spend hundreds of dollars for an item they could have easily made themselves? Are gun owners just that foolish?
And I hate to break it to you, but that organization you belong to, that channeled so much money to Trump’s election? Their goal isn’t gun rights. Their goal is to ensure that Putin will be able to rebuild the old Soviet Union. That’s what they paid for, and that’s what they’re getting.
For the most part, at least in my memory, Democrats just won’t run as a Third Party or mount any kind of splinter campaign. Bernie proved that all too well last time around. It is far more likely that if we see a “also run” it will come from the Republican side from their moderates who accept/feel that our current POTUS never really was part of “their” party as they see it. Their best/secret hope is that we end up with someone as bat-shit-crazy-far-Left as possible and right now I can’t even come up with a name other than -------- well, you gotta admit; Nancy is a little extreme sometimes. But I think you have to go far further and nuttier than even her.
In other words; forget the Democrats spurring a Third Party ------ keep your own side from creating one. Assuming you was the Republicans to keep the Executive Branch.
What does the GOP do about 2020?
They renominate Trump, energize his base and hope the Democrats still can’t get their shit together.
Not recently.
Nancy Pelosi, extreme? She’s considered barely a Democratic in California. She has consistently been quite conservative for her constituency. You’re pulling that Overton window WAY to the right to get Pelosi to “extreme”.
Run town-hall meetings on ‘visitors day’?
How quickly Ralph Nader is forgotten.
I really think you’re reading that data wrong. ‘Cultural Anxiety’ means more than racism. Racism and xenophobia stem from economic anxiety.
Hell, 538 itself - which you cite without citing - disagrees with your thesis…
We need to stop attributing things to racism and start attributing them to the thing that drives racism: fear. Pointing and saying, ‘racism’, is easy and it allows you to place people in a category of ‘other’ whereas assigning motivating to ‘fear’ allows for a more nuanced approach to a problem and one that calls for a starting point of empathy to allow a starting point to address the underlying issues at work.
Honestly, that’s probably their best answer. He’s the bull in their china shop. They have to deal with him as it is. Hell, maybe he ekes out another win.
That’s what really drives me bananas about this sort of discussion. 30%.
Things with a 30% probability happen all the fucking time.
Every time I roll a six-sided die and it comes up 1 it’s a more unlikely outcome than Trump winning in 2016. Every time someone plays Rock-Scissors-Paper and chooses Rock their odds of winning are about the same as Trump’s were.
People need to understand polling and math better.
Sure, which is why I used the term 'pointed to", instead of “a sure thing”.
I don’t buy the 2nd part, at least not as a comprehensive explanation. Slavery and Jim Crow didn’t “stem from economic anxiety”. Neither did the near-genocide of Native Americans.
Okay, perhaps I was a bit too definitive. But it was mostly due to racism and related phenomena: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/703975062500732932
Trump became the Republican front-runner because of racism (for the most part). He rose to political prominence due to birtherism. That gave him a big chunk at the beginning of the primary. He won the Republican primary because of more racism – the wall and denigrating immigrants. It was racism and related bigotries, for the most part.