Clinton is a slight favourite so I picked her.
But it’s very close, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply unwilling to accept reality. The facts are very clear; the election is razor thin. BobLibDem, you can say all you want there “aren’t enough” racists to vote for Trump, but the facts state that right now almopst half of decided voters are voting for him. Millions of people who are not uneducated angry white male bigots are voting Trump. It’s fact.
And these are Republican partisans who would vote for Charles Manson if he had an (R) after his name.
Let’s not forget the 900 pound gorilla- money. Hillary’s war chest dwarfs Trump’s. She can target ads in the states she needs to carry as well as make him defend traditionally red states. Not to mention she has much larger and well organized boots on the ground. Trump thinks he can win by tweeting and holding rallies and getting free media coverage. It worked in the primary but will not work in November.
Looking deeper, I now grasp that some-college-but-did-not-graduate are included among “college whites.” I was thinking “degreed.” :smack:
With this change, there are only 34 million non-college whites who didn’t vote. This may not be cause for celebration — college dropouts also probably support Trump!
Are there any studies for change in polls in response to tragedies like Orlando, Munich, etc.? I’d be cautiously optimistic about the election without the possibility of an October Tragedy.
That’s nice. I keep hearing that. So why do the polls say Trump could win?
People who know how this stuff works say you’re wrong. It absolutely could work come November. Many organizations who know how to do this sort of thing are adding up who’s going to vote for Clinton and who’s going to vote for Trump, and they are damned close to the same number.
To be honest, I take far less stock in polls than I used to. I don’t know if they have a way to get good samples now that most people have abandoned their landlines. It used to be that they could get representative samples by knowing which exchanges to call, it no longer works that way.
Money absolutely talks and bullshit walks. Hillary can carpet bomb the airwaves where she needs to. Her organization is much larger than Trump’s and can do the ground work that it takes to win. Trump has already gotten all the support that he’s going to. I think if you’re going to vote for him, you already know it. When the Sanders fans come home to roost and speeches by Bill Clinton, Sanders, Obama, Warren, Kaine, and Hillary Clinton dominate the evening news all week, Trump can kiss his bounce goodbye.
More and more, I’m afraid Trump is going to win this. His momentum just keeps increasing – there seems to be nothing he can say or do that his voters won’t give him a pass on. Meanwhile, Hillary remains bogged down by one scandal after another, and more and more shootings keep happening, feeding right into Trump’s narrative that everything is going to hell and only he can fix it.
I keep desperately clinging to the hope that the American people really aren’t that stupid and willing to vote against their own best interests, but then I remind myself that these are largely the same people who re-elected Bush. I’m getting more and more convinced that future historians will point to 2016 as the year when America’s decline became irreversible.
That said, anyone who votes for Trump deserves what they get – and if the rest of us can’t stop such an obvious racist, charlatan, and bully from becoming President, then we deserve it, too.
Yes, they have, and they do.
I have to ask, in all honesty, if you are joking here, because I know you’ve been on the SDMB a long time and people said exactly the same thing in 2012, that the polls had to be wrong because they only call landlines (it wasn’t true then, either.) And yet the polls aggregator’s predictions were bang on. And they said exactly the same thing in 2008. And the poll aggregators were bang on. They said the same thing in 2004, to deny that Bush was going to beat Kerry. Bush beat Kerry.
The samples are fine. The analysis is solid.
This is firmly rejecting the part of the OP ‘not who you would like it to be’. The election is tied as of today, Trump up 0.2% in RCP national average. And there is no evidence of a Electoral College v popular vote skew in Clinton’s favor. Results showing Clinton close in Romney states (other than NC) are stale polls from back when she was significantly ahead nationally. Now she isn’t.
Could the race shift back to a big advantage for Clinton? Sure, but there’s no special state/EC specific dimension to this. You can just speculate Clinton will again build a lead in the national polls. I personally don’t know. But for now she no longer has one.
It’s coin toss as of now. I said Trump because the momentum seems in his favor, negative ads by Clinton unanswered by him seem to have had no effect, and likewise the chorus from most media and elites on both sides how Trump is a racist seems to have topped out. Who hasn’t heard that? But the polls are tied. And he seems haltingly and unevenly homing in on an anti-establishment theme that works.
Anti-PC and anti-establishment are broadly appealing, neither of them limited to ‘low education angry white guy bigots’. The electorate generally believes the country is on the wrong track, and unlike the left and right the middle aren’t as likely to think that’s just because the GOP has been obstructing Obama or just because Obama is a nincompoop (at best) as left and right respectively think. The middle thinks the system stinks, and Hillary cannot possibly paint herself as anything but the system. Trump may in fact be just as much part of the system as she, but has cemented his position as ‘outsider’ in changeable minds IMO. ‘Lack of Republican unity’ is another way of saying it’s not so easily to pin unpopular things about the GOP on Trump.
In Hillary’s favor is her better campaign organization. The ads haven’t been effective and from now on Trump will be better able to respond. But voter targeting/GOTV could pull out a close race for her.
I don’t see the debates as likely to greatly favor either of them.
I believe the real litmus test will be when Donald Trump is caught calling Hillary a “cunt” out loud - which I put the odds of at around 85%. He will of course slough it off somehow, certainly no apology. If he can sustain a poll through Cunt-gate, then I’ll get scared.
It’ll be Hillary, but I am by no means confident that it’ll be a walkover. Trump has surprised me again and again this year, always for the worse.
Exactly like the Democrats would vote for anyone with a (D) after their name. Including the current criminal nominee that they will vote for.
This coming from someone who has just committed libel.
This is the year of the crazy,
Brexit won
Duterte in Philippines won ( with already more than 500 extra judicial killings of low level drug dealers in Manila alone, probably by police who didn’t want witnesses alive who could testify that they supplied the dealers with previously seized drugs)
We are in for some good TV folks
I would never have given Trump a chance, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s his race to lose now.
There are several reasons:
National security / global stability will have become a major theme of the campaign by the time the debates roll around. That almost certainly favors Trump. National security will be a liability for the incumbent party the same way that the economy was a liability for the incumbent party in 2008.
Jill Stein will inherit the Bernie or Bust movement, and it is not insignificant. The email scandal has convinced people that the progressive movement got screwed by the Democrats and the number of ignorant voters who would vote Green out of spite, or simply because they are delusional, is bigger than I would have imagined. Stein is on the ballot in key states, including a few swing states like Ohio, Colorado, and Florida. Hillary can still win the electoral college if she keeps PA, but Stein is trying to get on the ballot there as well, and if she does, it would be a nightmare for Clinton. She’s getting closer to achieving ballot status as I understand it. That hurts Hillary.
Most Americans hate the status quo and want change – and for many, any change will do. That favors Trump.
Americans, for all of their grievances, aren’t actually that bad, they just feel like they are. They’re pessimistic. Trump’s entire campaign has fed off of the rotting carcass of what was once American optimism.
I’m resigned to Trump winning and filling the court with Pence clones. As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m getting 2000 Bush v. Gore vibes, except most people didn’t really hate Gore. Everyone was predicting it was the GOP on the edge of the abyss due to demographic collapse, but if Trump wins it’ll be the Dems who will be wholly irrelevant outside of coastal enclaves.
The sad thing is the downfall of the left will be suicide by Hillary. Why? What’s so special about her, specifically? Aren’t there plenty of other Dem apparatchiks who aren’t lightning rods of hate from across the political spectrum? For months I’ve been seeing Hillary supporters trying to rally the troops by saying how important the SCOTUS appointments will be. Of course. Everyone knows they’re important. Everyone knows there could be a lot of them. Did you think of that before voting in the quintessential establishment candidate when the public is viciously anti-establishment?
You can already see the mix of denial and panic across liberal communities. “It’s just a convention bump, bro! R-Right?” Trump shouldn’t be anywhere near Hillary, under any circumstances. This is a disaster.
If Trump is smart, he’ll go to rust belt states and blame Hillary for NAFTA and for wanting TPP and flooding the country with immigrants and her comments on ending coal jobs and how he’ll fight China and Mexico to bring jobs back. They’ll eat it up.
Nope. That’s not the sad thing about the downfall of the left. The really sad thing is that people on the left would rather invest in fantasy candidates that have neither a snowball’s chance in hell of winning any election - even a fucking mayor’s race - nor the competence to actually govern once they get into office. The problem is that and the fact that progressives don’t actually left a fucking finger to support the real-life progressives who actually do get elected. They didn’t support Bill Clinton in 1994 when he tried (and came pretty close to getting) a vote for healthcare reform and when he actually did achieve an assault weapons ban. They didn’t support Al Gore and we ended up with George W Bush. And they didn’t support Barack Obama once he enacted healthcare reform and we ended up with the perpetual gridlock, fiscal cliff diving Tea Party.
And for the useful idiots out there who believe that we can just wait and show the world and get Bernie or Jill Stein or Amy Goodman elected in 2020, tell me: where the fuck is Ralph Nader now? Where the fuck was Nader in 2004? Where was George W Bush, the guy who would surely show us what a disaster he was and ignite a liberal revolution in 2004? Oh that’s right – Bush was kicking liberals’ asses in 2004 and getting re-elected to another term. Like it won’t happen again.
Don’t effing tell me about how it’s the Democrats’ fault for nominating Clinton. She’s by far one of the most qualified candidates in recent memory, even if not the most straightforward or interesting. If you want to a real progressive revolution, maybe the thing to do is populate the democratic party with real progressives – and then keep populating and keep voting. Rather than showing up every 4 years and complaining about how the system is still rigged.
The old saying is that the right falls in line, the left falls in love. I don’t think Obama got record turnout because McCain was uniquely awful.
Look, I don’t mind Clinton, but I’ve noticed this talking point being used on the SDMB before and find it absolutely mystifying, and I’m wondering if it is in fact a talking about that people are picking up from her campaign.
Clinton’s experience is fine, but in fact not especially impressive for a Presidential candidate. Her experience in significant political office is as follows:
Eight years as a senator from New York
Four years as Secretary of State
If you want to give her credit for her time as First Lady, okay, I’ll buy that. I’m not sure how to quantify it; I don’t think it’s legitimately the same as eight years in elected office, but ascribe to it what you will.
Now, is she more qualified than Donald Trump? Sure, but so what, thousands of people are. But is she more qualified than:
Al Gore: Vice President for eight years, Senator from TN for eight years, Representative (TN-4) for eight years - No, clearly Gore has a bit more in his resume.
George H.W. Bush: Vice President for eight years, Representative (TX-4) for four years, Ambassador to the United Nations for two years, Ambassador to the PRC for a year, Director of the CIA for a year… gosh, I think that matches up well with Clinton.
Bill Clinton: Governor of Arkansas for 12 years (not consecutively), Attorney General of Arkansas. You could argue his wife has him beat; he did have executive experience, though. There’s an argument, but she is not BY FAR more qualified.
George W. Bush: Governor of Texas for six years. Okay, I think she beats Bush 2 pretty handily. Bush’s pre-politics career is less impressive than most people named here, incidentally.
Bob Dole: Representative for eight years (KS-1 and KS-4), Senator (KS) for sixteen years. He’s got Clinton tied at worst, right? Nah, he’s got her beat. Dole was an extremely important Senator.
John McCain: Representative for four years (AZ-1), Senator for 30 years and counting, thought it was 22 years at the election. Surely that’s got Clinton tied?
John Kerry: Lt, Governor of Massachusetts for two years, Senator for Massachusetts for 19 years when the election happened. That’s about the same as Clinton, surely?
Michael Dukakis: State rep for six years, then Governor of Massachusetts for ten years (he was Governor for 12 years but some was after the election.) Hey, that’s pretty good. Does HRC have that beat by far?
I could go on, but I think the point is made. Clinton is not unusually qualified as Presidential candidates go. She destroys Donald Trump, but Trump is the LEAST qualified candidate in I don’t even know how long. The last serious candidate with no elected office experience was Eisenhower, and Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied mega-army that conquered Western Europe, a job that involved more than a little bit of politics, so I say he has Trump stomped. Trump is the unusual one, not HRC.
I’m going to assume that a majority of voters will not take complete leave of their senses and will select the lesser evil (that would be Mrs. Clinton), but I have to confess a growing disquiet. It certainly seems as though more and more people want to vote Trump as, I don’t know, a means of flipping the bird to The Man, I guess. It’s the same impulses that got that vessel named ‘Boaty McBoatface’ when the selection was thrown out to the public. It’s as though Gotham City wants the Joker elected Mayor.
So, seems like there’s at least an even chance we’re going elect to give a monkey a machine gun with the safety off, just to See What Happens.
No extra charge for the bonus metaphors.
I said one of the most qualified candidates in recent memory, meaning she is more than qualified relative to a number of the candidates we’ve had over the past few election cycles and arguably as qualified as the others you’ve mentioned. And yes, I absolutely would include her time as the Secretary of State. She was a visible First Lady and unlike any other First Lady before or since, she was actively involved in trying to develop policies, so she wasn’t just reading books to inner-city school children and visiting hospitals. She’s more qualified than Barack Obama, than Mitty Romney, than John McCain, than George W Bush, and John Kerry, and probably even more qualified than her own husband. She’s probably as qualified as Al Gore and George H W Bush. That’s pretty damn qualified. I’m not going to debate whether she is the most qualified.