I hope you are right, but would guess you are wrong. I’m a staunch conservative (edit—more of a libertarian), and have no intention of voting, but I know of a lot of others that say Trump is right, and plan on voting.
Easy mistake. Neither party meets this criteria.
It’s this. Trust me. I’m one of them.
Agreed.
Do you really think the average Trump supporter gives a damn about what people overseas think? My god, I hear some of them speak FRENCH. How stuck-up is that?
I would lay a bet that over 90% of Trump supporters have never owned a passport. And that a like number have never visited New York, DC, LA, San Francisco, or Chicago, because those places are full of the fags and the coloreds.
True they may be in the 10% minority, but I’ve seen quite a few American Trump supporters here in Thailand.
Anecdote time:
One of my Facebook acquaintances (and her husband) are die-hard trump supporters. Both HIGHLY educated (she’s a lawyer, he’s in finance). Both naturalized immigrants (she’s from southeast asia, he’s from europe).
They LOVELOVELOVE Trump, for 2 reasons: 1) his anti-muslim stance and 2) his anti immigrant stance (and she’s actually an immigration lawyer).
Maybe 3 reasons - they also hate Hillary (and Obama) with a passion, for reasons that even they can not fully articulate. The anti-Hillary rhetoric come from way before this campaign.
These are the only things that matters. Trump could eat a live baby on CNN and they’d still vote for him.
You CAN NOT reason with these people. Its very interesting from an academic standpoint - on almost any other topic, they are sane, well informed, and capable of holding a reasoned discussion. But with Trump, its like a switch is turned.
I hope that they are outliers. I fear they are not.
Ah, but are the Trumpians in Thailand to
A) Study the history of the Khmer Empire and the ruins at Ayutthaya
B) Devote themselves to deep reflection and meditation at a Buddhist temple
C) Boff underage whores?
Luckily, loud vocal minority does not equal majority.
Unluckikly…Trump is major candidate.
Trump voters earn more and are better educated than the typical American. I’d guess that much more than 10% of Trump voters have passports and have been overseas, and even more have been to the big cities in the US. Of course I don’t know how many care about opinions overseas or opinions of big city people.
It’s not (in this case), and I really am almost on board as well, not pro-Trump but anti-Clinton. Beleive me…If I were less sane I could almost emphasize.
Right. Paradoxically the Trumpistas remind me a lot of the most fanatical Chavistas in Venezuela: they don’t care that much if the country is crashing and burning because their POV is their life already sucked before, but they have the satisfaction that for the people who *used *to have middle class lives it now sucks too.
Of course, The Man includes all those R-denominated politicians who, deprived of the external threat of the commies, switched inward and for a generation went to that population telling them the country we live in is a dystopian hellscape of crime, promiscuity, secularist amorality and and statist tyranny, and promising to institute some bizarre unviable hybrid of business Libertopia with social Jesusland (Christ’s Gulch?) knowing full well they really had no way to deliver it all.
It’s the “respect” they understand. The respect born of power. It’s the world-model of the “Stern Father” as source of morality, of the threat of punishment as the prime motivation to act properly, what’s called authoritatian personality. They grew up taught you don’t kill not out of empathy for another life but because we’ll hang/gas you; you act morally not because it’s better for society but because otherwise God will set you on fire for the rest of eternity (and to say the contrary will itself get you set on fire for eternity).
You don’t question the boss about the wisdom of a decision because he’ll fire you, nor your dad because Honor Thy Father or else he’ll whip your hide; you don’t date that boy or else we’ll cast you out on the street.
Confronting the authority is, in this worldview, an act of personal disrespect and great impudence. Respect is submitting to authority. Want to question it? Get *greater *power yourself.
Too many people misinterpret Machiavelli’s maxim as saying that the ideal state is to be feared. Machiavelli was arguing that the Prince needs to be respected, and explaining that alas due to human nature, no matter how great your good policies you can’t impose love, but with a reasonable level of rigor you can impose fear. Many skip right over the part where he proceeds to say that the Prince must take care that he not go overboard and actually begin gratuituously harming people because that will only make him himself hated, and then he’ll fall.
Alas, a lot of people among the R base have had so ingrained and drilled into their minds what utter horror a continued Democrat adminstration would be… and yes, many of the Trump base ARE 100% convinced of how utterly horribly we are on the way to dystopia, and if only everyone else woke up and opened their eyes…
The scary part is they’ll find fertile soil among many R and potential-R voters thanks to decades of having that soil watered from a poisoned well. Many of those voters may be tempted by the idea of maybe having some legislation and SCOTUS appointments that kill any leftward movement whatsoever for a generation.
According to a co-worker I otherwise like, Jesus Cheeto “says the things we all want to say but are afraid to. Because political correctness.”
538 has Hillary leading the polls again. Silver’s “who would win today” scenario has Clinton by a landslide.
Silver says she as a 51% chance of winning. This is very different than if she wins it will be by a landslide.
And actually, I don’t see anything on there about a Clinton landslide. He says that Trump has a 88% chance of doing better than Romney in 2012.
If any situation ever called for the “what you mean WE, Kemosabe?” wisecrack…
That was touched on above by DSeid. A large number of people are existentially convinced that the vast majority of us cannot possibly feel or believe any but same way as them, and that our expressions and even factual counter-evidence to the contrary are entirely disingenuous and fabricated, for the sole purpose of gaining an advantage.
Yes, even some looking down on ‘uneducated Trump supporters’ seem to have trouble themselves distinguishing the statistical concepts of being ahead in a poll (or average of polls) by X% points and having X% points greater chance of winning according to a model based on polls.
The race has changed and will probably change again one way or another before it’s over but as of now the principal reason someone might think Trump will win is that he’s basically tied in the polls and some model output’s like Sliver’s*‘polls only’ show that outcome virtually as likely as Clinton winning (again 2% points ahead in average of polls is a real though not comfortable lead in the polarized US electorate, 51% chance of winning in a model output is negligibly different than an absolute tie).
*in fairness some other poll modelers’ results haven’t shown Clinton’s winning probability getting down close to 50, and even Silver’s ‘polls plus’ model is back to 60-40 in favor of Clinton. But again even 40% chance of winning is not the territory where you start psychoanalyzing the ‘delusion’ that that candidate could win, it’s saying the person well might win.
Well, either that or Trump voters lie their faces off about their education and incomes in exit polls. I mean, just because they all tell the pollsters that they have college degrees doesn’t mean they actually do.
Silver has three forecasts. That’s polls only. The polls-plus has her chances at 60% and the nowcast is at 56%. None of them mean much of anything because most of the polls following the convention haven’t yet appeared.
Interestingly, Rasmussen, which for a month was the only outlier showing Trump ahead before the Republican convention just released results that shows Clinton with a one-point lead. Statistically insignificant but the reverse of the trend line is the important takeaway.
We have 4 post DNC polls now. Hillary has received a bounce. We have reverted to a more typical Hillary lead.
July only:
I’d like to get Trump down to 35%. That would send a message to future demagogues.