By a lot of measures, Donald Trump does not appear to even be making an effort to win the presidency. For example, so far this month Hillary Clinton has spent about $23 million running mostly positive advertisements in battleground states like Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. Apparently, Trump has spent nothing on ads in the battleground states. Mitt Romney was famously outspent during the same time period four years ago, but even he managed to spend 46% of the total ad dollars in June 2012. And that clearly wasn’t enough, as the White House successfully branded him as a Bain Capital vulture capitalist who doesn’t care about you.
According to Philip Bump at the Washington Post, in April, Trump had about thirty paid staffers to cover the entire country, while Bernie Sanders had more than eight hundred. Clinton has more than eight hundred today, and Trump clearly doesn’t have anywhere near that number.
It isn’t working. On Saturday night, Utah Republican Party Chairman James Evans sat down with Trump in a Las Vegas casino to explain to him that he isn’t a lock to win the Beehive State in November. Afterwards, Evans, who is black, tried to spin away Trump’s racism:
“When you sit down with him you can see that it is more of a show, you know, and if anybody would know that somebody has that kind of sentiment in them, it would be me growing up in the South,” said Evans, who is African-American. “I could spot it a mile away and you just don’t see that in him.”
Evans said Trump’s statements about the judge and Muslims were “unproductive” and he argued Trump “recognizes he shouldn’t have made those comments.”
But at the same time, he said, “a presidential race cannot come down to one or two comments.”
When the best you can do is tell people that Trump’s racism is just “an act,” I think you’re in a pretty big hole. And it looks like Speaker Paul Ryan is at the bottom of that hole with a shovel. Meanwhile, Trump is out on the stump accusing Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz of plotting a coup against his nomination in Cleveland next month. Even if this were true, highlighting it isn’t any way to unite the party.
Things are so bad, in fact, that Trump felt compelled to personally respond to speculation that he’d drop out in return for a cash payment in the neighborhood of $150 million.
Trump himself says it’s a ridiculous proposition and that he’s not a fan of the question.
“This story is a total fabrication from you and POLITICO, as usual,” the New York billionaire said in an email sent by his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. “I will never leave the race, nobody has enough money to pay me to leave the race, and if they did, it would be totally illegal anyway. Did Obama and the Clintons get you to write this garbage?”
It’s true that Trump was successful in the primaries despite running a nontraditional campaign that did not rely on paid advertising and a lot of staff, but he’s asking Republicans to put faith in him to pull it off again in a general election, and that’s not a convincing argument when his polls looks worse than John McCain’s at this point. Instead, he’s just getting hammered with dozens of negative articles out there this Sunday morning and virtually no push back from his organization and almost no one in the GOP willing to get his back.
More than a year ago I began predicting that this would be a landslide election one way or that other. I suggested that the odds were better than it would be Democratic landslide, but I was most confident about is that it wouldn’t be close. The time has come for the country to decide whether it wants to be run by Democrats or Republicans, because this split government thing doesn’t work anymore. It’ll take a lot for the Republican House to fall due to the way the population is sorted and the districts are drawn, but I have little doubt which party will win the popular vote in the House. The Senate is almost definitely gone for the GOP, and it looks like they won’t even be seriously competing for the White House.
Can things turn around?
I can’t see how.
Whether he believes it or not is another matter, but Trump is running on a theory that has its counterpart on the left.
There are millions and millions of [fill in the blanks] out there whose natural predispositions gibe with yours, but who never vote because a candidate [fill in the blank] enough has never been offered them.
All you have to do is finally nominate a real [fill in the blank] and those voters will sweep you into power and usher in your revolution.
It’s the only conclusion from the abysmal voting participation rates in the US, isn’t it? 🙂
No, it is not the only conclusion which could be reached to explain our voting participation rates. Many, many conclusions could and should be reached to explain poor voter turnout.
I think you failed the eye test.
Gotcha.
It is not clear what demand Trump is meeting on the right, other than I guess for a business man to run.
The chief demand certain voters have which Trump is meeting is dispensing with the racist dog whistle favored by most GOP candidates and using a blaring air horn of eliminationist language instead.
Twitter and chuck Todd are all he needs. These complaints are being made by the media afraid of lot campaign ad revenue and professional political consultants who are out of work. Trump will lose either way, but there is no point spending all that money when a tweet generates all kinds of free media. Most republicans will hold their nose and vote for him anyway.
Actually, there’s a very real reason to spend that money: downballot races. Ramesh Ponnuru has argued that the GOP could lose the House:
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/republicans-should-worry-about-losing-the-house
I think that’s unlikely, but this time last year I would have said it was almost impossible.
Ramesh Ponnuru writes for Bloomberg now? LOL!! Does he explain how the GOP will lose the House? Does he know how incompetent the DCCC is? That they aren’t even running candidates in some races that should be winnable if what he says is true?
I hate to say this, but it’s really not a bad article. In spite of the clickbait headline, the analysis is pretty careful. Ponnuru says that split ticket voting is very rare now, and that would hurt the Republicans, but he also notes that Trump is such an outlier that this election might be different. He goes into a number of other factors, too.
It’s worth reading. And, again, I don’t think the GOP will lose the House.
The House changes when 30 incumbent Republicans are defeated by 30 challenger Democrats. That’s the easy part of how.
Which 30 Republicans is the difficult part. Likely areas are Kansas, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and California.
Sanders is backfilling a number of states in which the filing deadlines have not passed.
Democrats must not let the incompetence of the DCCC get in their way of forcing victory and responsibility on the Democratic Party this year.
The opportunity is there with the anchor of Trump around some (Latino Republican and Asian-American Republican) districts by connecting the entire GOP to Trump.
The only unwinnable ones in principle are where filing deadlines have passed.
That said, not something for Democrats to be triumphalist and sit on their hands about.
Would welcome seeing the details of this (even just a link would be fine).
The “Sanders-doing-nothing-for-downballot” criticism always seemed both premature (sheesh, he was giving all he had to contesting the nomination . . . and you wanted MOAR???) and likely to prove wrong when it mattered.
Still, would be nice to see the evidence that that was in fact the case.
Trump doesn’t need to spend it. What does he care about congressional elections?
He doesn’t care. That’s the problem.
If Trump has a Democratic Congress, that’s all he needs to explain failure to deliver.
Besides, for several years, all I’ve seen on this site is how people want a Democratic Congress but can’t get it because of gerrymandering.
Third point if there are crossover voters, they surely will vote Republican downballot to hamstring Hillary. Republicans who are anti-Trump are not pro-Hillary, except for the extremely rich.
The one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that there’s no way Trump could have a Democratic congress in 2017. That would require massive GOP losses in Congress and very substantial GOP wins in the electoral college.
No chance.
a problem?
Looks pretty all-good from here.
There are a huge number of voters fed up with conventional political campaigns. Anyone who analyzes the 2016 election in horserace terms based on past campaigns with get their ass handed to them come November. Nate Silver has already had this experience.
My current view is that Trump is trying to run an “American Idol” media campaign that winds up the emotion with as little cost as possible to peak on getting the requisite number of people to run push the button or mark the ballot for Trump on a highly-promoted election-day “event” (notice the marketing view of that) just-in-time to shove him into office as the next American Idol.
My hunches: Expect something big in August to throw the Clinton campaign off pace for a routine Labor Day launch. Expect late October to be less saturated in ads and money but more intense in off-the-wall messaging. Expect Trump willing to sacrifice the GOP downticket in order to win the prize and “Win Big!”
It would make sense for the Democratic team to effectively jump Trump in August and get him off-message. It would make sense to have a media story that could suck in all the narrowcasted outlets during the third week of October. The destruction of Daesh/ISIS/ISIL could be such a story but is a very difficult story to time given the administration’s ambivalence of working to stabilize the existing Syrian government and collaborate with Russia, who it wants to maintain is an enemy. The Trump University scandal has already been taken off the table while the Clinton emails issue persists.
At the moment, one senses that the Democratic leadership is hoping that Trump’s choice of Vice-Presidential nominee will serve the purpose.
What Tarheel said.
We have a new world here. It’s been developing at a rapidly accelerating rate since the internet became pretty much a necessity for commerce and information gathering in the U.S., and now it is the dominant force in the society. It runs everything. tTrump understands this at a gut level and he is the first national politician to not only understand it but run his campaign upon that understanding. All of the predictions of essentially pre-internet oriented politicians and pundits are missing this boat, but it’s sailing along very well without either their participation or understanding.
Booman quotes Trump as saying:
He also writes:
Booman is living in the past, I am afraid. The people who are going to vote for Trump? They do not give a good goddamn about those (old-school) so-called “polls” that have been used for 40 years or more as part of the PermaFix. He’s “…getting hammered with dozens of negative articles out there this Sunday morning” with no pushback? How he responded to the bullshit Politico article is his style of pushback. It’s worked very well for over a year. Why would he change it now?
And…why can you not see what’s up?
I personally think you are not seeing what is happening because you are living too deep in the old-style media woods lLike WAMO) to see that Trump is massively deforesting those woods around the outskirts of their territory. Just because WAMO is primarily internet-based doesn’t change the fact that it is still operating on the “articles from those who know” level. The old-school “those who know” people have been defeated by Trump every step of the way. He lines ’em up and then knocks ’em down with a widely-covered one-liner. What he did to Megyn Kelly…who was without a doubt tasked to bring him down that night by the old-school RatPub might…is a perfect precis of his tactical mastery. It’s working, Booman. The DemRat opposition better get on board with that understanding and start attacking him on a personal, factual level if they want to win. HRC? She and her campaign appear to not have a clue as well. They spend millions; they have their little polbots feverishly “organizing” at the grassroots level, but if they don’t get with the asymmetrical political war style that Trump has literally invented they are liable to get blown away by November.
It is said that a fish rots from the head. HRC has been swimming in the old-school political oceans quite successfully for over 40 years, and she is…as the old Long Islanders with whom I grew up used to say…sot in her ways. So’s her organization.
It’s a brave new world, alright. Not too bright on many levels, but ready to rumble.
All the scurrying little polbots and lost-in-the-woods pundits in the world won’t do any good once Trump manages to kick their boss’s ass in public.
Watch.
AG
P.S. The very best thing HRC could possibly do is to hire a talented political barfighter for VP…Elizabeth Warren would be my first choice…let her slug it out in the pits with Trump while she remains above the fray, acting all “presidential.”
There are reasons why Warren wouldn’t do? The MA Senate seat? Two females? Two easterners? That’s political oldthink. I don’t see any of the other oft-mentoned VP candidates…including Biden…who have a chance in the ring with Trump. None of them. Except for Biden they’re all prelim fighters…relatively unproven and therefore unusable in a championship fight. Biden? A proven pro, but he’s a little over the hill and he’s never won big. A professional “opponent.” If HRC goes oldthink and hires a VP who is supposedly going to help her to get a certain segment of the vote…racially, in terms of age and /or in terms of location…she will have to fight Trump on his own level. His own emotional level.
I don’t think she can do it, myself.
Do you?
Really?
AG
Clinton has at least one other surrogate who’s good in the ring: President Obama.
“This is why actually, if you watch my political interactions, I am always best as a counterpuncher. You know, if somebody comes at me, I will knock them out. If not, then I will try to understand their point of view; and that actually serves me well.
I give people the benefit of the doubt. I try to understand their point of view. If I perceive that they’ve tried to take advantage of that, then I will (…pause…) crush them. (disarming smile and general laughter)”
https:/masscommons.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/barack-obama-is-who-he-said-he-is
He’ll help with independents but just incite the Republican base to come out and vote. Their base hates Obama and HRC more than Pol Pot and Josef Stalin. Remember, their base thinks Obama is a Muslim mole and Hillary is a Communist (ridiculous as that is).
Their base hates all of us. Whatever. There aren’t enough of them left to matter, and the crazier they get, the better off we are. Our job is to get out the Dem base, first, and then the Indies and Moderates if we have the time and money.
I doubt Voice will see any/all that as HIS(/her?) job.
Thanks for your response. I have no idea what impact President Obama might have on voter turnout (likely minor, since he’s not on the ballot?).
What I think Obama can do, is expose Trump’s weaknesses and knock him off balance (perhaps even, metaphorically speaking, knock him down).
Only for those who respect his opinion. BTW, please note that I am not arguing for the desirability of Trump in this thread, but merely pointing out what Republicans think which (duh!) is considerably different from what Democrats think!
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everyone except some lowlife racists and complete idiots thinks the same way as you do. They don’t, in general. That’s why there is a whole field of polling and analysis. Because it’s not obvious.
“Only for those who respect his opinion.”
Right. Which is a majority of the nation (both in the 2008 and 2012 elections, and in current opinion polling).
In addition, President Obama is the kind of political counterpuncher who has the ability to draw an opponent off-balance, so that the opponent either makes “unforced” errors, or opens himself up to damaging counterattacks.
I’ll add that I remember Democrats who were delighted that Reagan got the nomination in 1980 because obviously he would be so easy to beat.
IMHO, the nominee that would have been easy to beat would have been a second run by Romney. Oh, and Jeb(!) after his fatuous statement about W.
I don’t know. The problem with running as an entertainer is that your act can get old and boring- and if the Donald hasn’t yet jumped the shark, he seems like he’s getting pretty close.
And, honestly, he ends up in a bit of a bind- to get the free media coverage, he has to keep outdoing himself on the outrage meter. But eventually, he loses much of the Republican party, such that it is. And he still needs the party somewhat… Not as much as a traditional candidate sure, but he still has to get through the convention.
The question is, are there any limits to how far he can push the party before they change the rules and deny him the nomination? Can he take a giant crap on stage and still get the nomination? My guess is probably yes, if only because the party really has no clear alternative. But that’s not going to get him elected president.
And I’m not saying that Trump won’t get his act together and run a smarter anti-establishment campaign that puts Hillary’s coronation at risk, but it seems right now that he is in over his head and struggling for air. Still, its a weird election and anything can happen- I wouldn’t be calling anything at this point.
I have written this before.
Trump is the dog who caught the car.
He does not really want this job – he’s not that stupid.
The game for Trump from here out will be how he loses. And his goal will be to make himself look good and the GOP bad. He will blame the crooked awful Republican Party for all of it.
————–
The reason they couldn’t fight him off in the primary is precisely because he was saying the things out load that the base wants to hear (instead of whispered it) and the base loved it. And it’s why they will have trouble dumping him even now, unless he wants to be dumped.
It will take the GOP a generation to recover from the beating Trump is going to give them. And the damage that he has already done by exposing in bright daylight the amazing and exciting things the GOB base will vote for when given the opportunity. Where the GOP goes from here is really hard to understand.
You write:
“The reason they couldn’t fight him off in the primary is precisely because he was saying the things out loud that the base wants to hear (instead of whispered it) and the base loved it.”
Yeah, but…
What if that “base” is much broader…and deeper and angrier as well…than you or any other of the Trump “Can’t happen!!!” people realize?
What then?
“He does not really want this job – he’s not that stupid?”
He’s enjoying every minute of this fight. He’s spending a lot of time and money on this, too. Imagine how much he’d enjoy being the center for attention of the whole world!!!
I think he’s dead serious. I also think he’ll go right, straight ahead no matter how hard the RatPubs try to stop him.
Watch.
AG
Arthur has lots of angry white people he counts as friends. We should listen to him. Or so he says.
He doesn’t seem to know the points of view of his multicultural neighbors. Not that I would trust a Ron and Rand Paul supporter to share the views of non-whites honestly. In fact, I’m certain that non-whites are disinclined to share their political views with a Cliven Bundy supporter, particularly one so dogmatic and verbose.
Arthur thinks a Trump Presidency would be just fine. He’s excited by the prospect. That is sickeningly apparent, despite his flimsy denials.
Sheer bullshit.
As usual.
AG
Actually, he’s not spending a lot of money on this campaign. He’s loaned (not given) his campaign some money. It’s possible he’s raised lots of money that nobody knows about, but we won’t know that until the next FEC reports come out. Most reporting from Republican sources says the opposite is true.
And he’s not spending lots of money.
He’s not going to spend a penny on this thing.
Did you see that story where he handed the RNC a multi-millionaire dollar bill for reimbursment to Trump Inc for the cost of using the Trump Jet?
Remember this one thing: Trump Never Ever uses his own money in these little capers of his. He never has and he won’t start now.
And if the RNC doesn’t bankroll him, it will just be one more excuse he’ll use to trash the GOP for being such losers, and how they don’t deserve to win anyway.
“What if that “base” is much broader…and deeper and angrier as well…than you or any other of the Trump “Can’t happen!!!” people realize?”
And what it Trump is secretly the smartest man who ever lived! He’s just waiting to show us in Cleveland!
And what if all the magic unicorns appear and all the people will vote for Trump and the we can starting winning so much!
And what if Hillary Clinton murders Bill Clinton next week, after she finds him in bed with 3 hookers and a pony! She’ll never win this thing then!
This is the thing. I was somewhat concerned about what AG is talking about last year, but subsequent events have driven me to the conclusion that Donald Trump is not crazy like a fox; he’s just crazy. I’ve also always felt that it’s obvious that he’s lazy and not particularly bright; being smart requires you to be aware of your own faults and failures, and I have seen no evidence that he possesses anything resembling such awareness. He may be a master con-man, but if he’s really not even close to a billionaire (and I become more convinced of this every day), he would be far, far more wealthy if he had dumped his inheritance into bonds and golfed his life away instead of trying to apply his “brilliant” business mind.
The talk about Trump kicking Hillary back on her heels just doesn’t pass the smell test, to me. Donald Trump is physically incapable of making the election about Hillary Clinton. Any other Republican would have had a shot at doing this, and John Kasich probably had the best shot at that kind of campaign, but no one wanted him. Donald Trump can’t step out of the way. Even when a horrible tragedy occurs, Donald Trump has to make it about Donald Trump and how he was “right” that “Muslims is bad yooze guys!”. Everything Donald Trump does forces the campaign to be about Donald Trump. And a very large majority of people really do not like Donald Trump. Against Donald Trump, a vote for Hillary basically becomes “vote for generic Democrat/not Trump”. That would have been inconceivable last year, but with Trump it’s a reality.
The election will be a referendum on what people think of Donald Trump because that’s what he wants and it’s what Democrats want, and there simply does not exist a majority of people in this country (according to the polls) that actually likes Donald Trump – and I don’t see how he changes that in a matter of months. He can generate a media sensation all he wants, but if people are repulsed by him, that doesn’t help his cause.
All that said, I do agree that Warren would be a great choice for VP; I was less sure of this last year, but now I see it. Although I’ll miss her in the Senate, I think a Clinton/Warren ticket would be an absolute juggernaut.
“The election will be a referendum on what people think of Donald Trump because that’s what he wants and it’s what Democrats want…”
This is an excellent point.
Tarheel and Arthur’s comments are both predicated not only on ignoring everything we know about the polls, candidates and history of presidential campaigns in this country, but also on completely inverting that. “Sure, Trump’s ‘campaign’ lacks staff, a strategy, and a coherent message. Sure, the polls show he’s the most unpopular major nominee ever. Sure, he says he’ll raise less than a third of what Hillary has raised. Sure he seems so spectacularly undisciplined that he’s attacking everyone but Hillary. Sure, it looks as if the Democrats have a massive advantage in the electoral college. Sure, the BUT ALL OF THAT IS WRONG!”
There’s no way massive numbers of people are suddenly going to vote, let alone for Trump. That didn’t happen in the primaries, and now it’s more likely that the opposite will happen: Trump almost certainly will lead to an upsurge in Latinos and other people registering to vote against him.
He has to pick up 63 electoral votes to win, and he has no GOTV operation and doesn’t believe in voter analytics.
The guy’s a joke.
I hope you’re right, but the past year’s worth of similar comments regarding Trump and his erstwhile competitors have sounded very much like what you are saying applied to a smaller scale. Is this national scale going to change things? Could be…size does matter sometimes.
But what I am hearing here and from the 90+% anti-Trump mass media is a form of self-righteous bluster. “We’re so good, so smart, so organized…so right…that this fool is doomed to self-desruction!!! And his so-called “followers!!!??? What a bunch of dolts!!!”
I would like to call your attention to the internet again. Who now rules that internet in terms of numbers? Dolts, baby., Dolts. Twitter dolts. Facebook dolts. Drudge Report dolts. Porn dolts. Sports dolts. Insult dolts.
Dolts.
They are a majority.
If they vote this time? If they identify with Trump’s doltishness and actually vote on Election Day instead of taking a day off to drink bad beer and eat artificially colored orange crackly things?
Watch out!!!
Remember…Reagan was ridiculed too.
Until he won.
AG
Maybe. Just a minor point to add here: the shift in scale Trump is attempting to navigate right now isn’t from local/statewide/regional to national. It’s from one subculture to the rest of the country.
It’s a leap Rush Limbaugh attempted in the 1990s and he failed. He’s still a big fish in his own pond, but all his attempts to break into national sports broadcasting, late night television, etc., failed because what worked in his subculture didn’t work in the wider culture.
Now, maybe Trump will succeed where Limbaugh failed, maybe the nation has changed that much in the past 20 years, but that’s the shift in scale that Trump is dealing with.
You said:
—
“I would like to call your attention to the internet again. Who now rules that internet in terms of numbers? Dolts, baby., Dolts. Twitter dolts. Facebook dolts. Drudge Report dolts. Porn dolts. Sports dolts. Insult dolts.
Dolts.
They are a majority.”
—
Sure, there are many many loud dolts who post on the internet, but what information/factual basis do you have to claim “they are a majority” of the (presumably) voting population? They may be LOUD but do they have the numbers?
How many more people DON’T post negative reviews on an Amazon product page or a Yelp restaurant listing than DO post? I’m willing to bet that you’re confusing the volume of a bunch people with the numbers of a larger larger bunch of people who aren’t screaming and yelling, and that it won’t correlate to enough votes in states that matter to change the Electoral College equation in Trump’s favor.
Could be. What is your own evidence that I am totally wrong? As I have said here before, I am in a position where I get to travel fairly unnoticed through many layers of this country’s society. I watch; I listen; I observe and I report.
If I’m wrong?
Great. I certainly don’t want to see Trump become president. However…since I refuse to live in an “either/or,” two-dimensional world, I also do not want to see HRC become president. There’s always a third option, even if we often cannot see it…the “everything else” possibility.
So it goes.
Sue me.
AG
There is no third option, Arthur. It will be either Caesar or Pompey.
There is always a 3rd option. It’s God’s hole card.
AG
the onus is on you to provide the evidence SUPPORTING the claim you made, not on others to provide the “evidence that [you are] totally wrong”.
See how that works?
Why is the “onus”never on the media…or people who approve of certain media… to prove what they are saying?
Where is the “proof?”
It’s in the pudding, or so I have been told.
Many of the same media pollsters who insisted that Romney was neck and neck with Obama in 2012 are now once again resuscitated as reliable pollsters today.
Where is the beef in all of that fat and gristle?
Really.
Just askin’…
AG
on the media, imo.
They just suck at what they do, including abdicating the core functions that inspired the Founders to grant them, unique among secular institutions, their very own protective clause in the First Amendment.
a fairly useless concept, imo. (Usage in law, where it’s a least reasonably well defined, maybe an exception.)
I practically never use it (see e.g., instead, “provide supporting evidence” above).
That’s because — with the exception of the special case of disproving a universal claim, where all it takes is demonstrating that a single counter-example exists — it’s practically impossible to do.
This probably reflects a combination of my inherent skeptical tendencies with my scientific education and experience. Many non-scientists have the misconception that science is about “proving” stuff (e.g., “theories”, etc.). Anyone could disabuse themselves of this misconception simply by reading scientific literature, e.g., peer-reviewed journals, where in my experience you could search forever in vain to find an actual, working scientist ever claiming to have “proven” anything. The closest we ever get is stating a high level of confidence (e.g., 95%, 99%) in a conclusion, usually derived from statistical tests performed on the data.
This is about the biggest load of wishful bollocks I’ve seen in a while. Trump’s crowds (never much of an indicator of anything important) are shrinking, and the lying has been in overdrive, and it’s being noticed a lot more.
The emails are not only going away for you as you salivate over an indictment that is simply not going to happen, and never was. The emails were never here in the first place. (Like Whitewater, the email “scandal” requires complicated explanation and conjuring of nonexistent evidence to reach an accusation that is still hazy.)
The damage done by Trump to himself has been massive and predictable, with no signs of abating. His constituency, always an overrated thing to begin with, continues to shrink. Orlando, supposedly the sort of thing that would be a game-changer in Trump’s favor, instead became another opportunity for Trump to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
By Election Day, Trump’s dwindling supply of voters will probably be unable to tear themselves away from the flame wars on the Internet to actually remember to vote.
Sorry, but Stupid + Stupid = Defeat, not Victory.
Everybody laughed at that buffoon Austrian paperhanger, too.
He didn’t win on his own. He got in power because a bunch of idiot conservative politicians thought they could control him. Not happening with Drumpf.
Yeah, the Army thought they could use him and control him also. Turned out the other way around.
His rise to power was considerably more complex than that caricature, and there were plenty of people, even in the early days, who did not find him laughable.
Also, there is very little evidence that he ever actually did work as a paper hanger. That pejorative appears to have originated with a 1937 speech by Cardinal Mundelein in Chicago which attacked the German people for allowing themselves to be subjugated by him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_hanger_(Mundelein%27s_speech)
There are multiple aspects of the change in media. Not all of them benefit Trump. However, as you point out almost none of them benefit Clinton who was part of winning under the pre-Internet medias era.
The media that Trump is best in is the old mass media of single source-almost exclusive audience media with limited alternatives. That is still the mindset at the major networks, and The Apprentice was an NBC-distributed product. This is the media world that Trump knows well.
He has quickly learned how to use Twitter to drive the established media. That at this moment seems to be his entire Internet campaign of note.
Sanders used Twitter, some web sites and other internet media to create a national campaign from scratch. That is not insignificant and can be of great use to Democrats down-ticket if they understand what exactly is going on. That massive down-ticket campaign can indirectly bouy Clinton’s campaign and prevent a Trump victory if the Clinton camp doesn’t step on it.
I don’t think either Trump or Sanders themselves understand the way to use the current media infrastructure politically, but what they have done is shaved the cost of media coverage from the status quo political media consultants and media companies. Whether that extends into the general election remains to be seen.
From Clinton’s perspective, her campaign would be foolish to conduct significant media buys from the corporations that have been hyping Trump for free. She of all people does not need name recognition and legitimacy as a candidate, which are the main things that media placement gets you. All she needs is for the people who actually support her to get off their duffs and go bust through the maze of obstacles to actually mark their ballots. That indicates more money directed to election lawyers to protect voters and electoral integrity as part of a GOTV campaign.
If anything, it is Sanders’s rise that shows that media does not control the results. And Trump’s campaign that shows that a good shark can take over a failing company at the right time through clever moves. Without 13 candidates to wade through, Trump likely would not have prevailed. I wonder how much Trump through surrogates put into encouraging more candidates in the clown car. But there never is a shortage of egotists and narcissists among politicians.
The truth about opinion polls is that Trump has been so stigmatized outside of some geographical areas in which there is peer pressure to say you support Trump that phone polls are going to undercount people who will lie about their intention to vote for Trump with a minor offset in pro-Trump areas. This is not a year to poll based on long records of past behavior. And there is not way to methodologically offset that uncertainty. This is an election that voters will decide, and both parties and the media better start concentrating on the voters and not some professionally assembled random sample of their opinion, which going to be scrambled from now until election day and at any rate is unlikely to be represented by their feet and what their hands do if and when they enter the polling booth (and what the authorities do with that vote).
Hitler and FDR had the communication to pull of a media-dominated campaign during a national crisis. The media has changed, and the crisis is more amorphous; Trump will not win by media domination. It will be something else, if he does win.
Do you think the Hillary campaign had anything to do with the 51 diplomats? Does she want to start the war before she is elected? Maybe wrap herself in the flag.
Not really, but wanted to counter that unfair troll rating. It’s a legitimate conjecture.
Inquiring minds want to know!
This is as far as I can go in skimming another Trump FP piece and thread. (Trump’s is going with “No such thing as bad publicity,” and media folks and bloggers are determined to prove that’s false.)
Anyway —
The extent of his message is “Make America Great Again” and “The Donald is the greatest.” HRC attempted to get him off the first with “America is already great.” It bombed because it’s a passive endorsement of the status quo which is not the theme of the 2016 election.
Should have said “2016 elections.”
Of course that’s based on exit polls which most people here at the pond constantly point out to me that exit polls don’t and can’t project election results.
Really the only candidate who has ever been this disliked at this point was Bill Clinton.
Clinton’s campaign turned with his VP choice and Perot’s decision to exit during the summer. Clinton’s favorables in ’92 were never really all that good though.
So the VP choice and the Conventions are huge events, and account for the vast majority of movement between now and October. For Trump I suspect the VP choice will be his last real chance to get back in the race.
I think there is a pretty good chance that the Trump campaign just implodes in a way no one has seen since McGovern’s choice of Eagleton.
In general most pundits are placing much too importance on TV advertising, which really hasn’t moved anything significantly in a general election that I can remember since maybe 1988. Mostly I think people just tune the stuff out.
The Democrats don’t need to jump Trump in August – they can do that at their own convention.
I think Trump could easily lose by 20.
But so what? Does he take the Party down with him? About this I am much more skeptical.
Trump is going to get killed for personal reasons. I don’t see an ideological component.
Will tossing Corey Lewandowski out the airlock help (get a better operative in place) or hurt (chaos, backstabbing, incoherence reign supreme) his joke of a campaign?
Help I guess.
My worry is that they recognize they have a problem – denial is in our self interest.
Trump’s favorability doesn’t really mean anything.
That said, candidate preference polls are meaningful, and more predictive than favorability polls. And those also paint a grim picture for Trump.
Yea – that upshot piece was pretty idiotic.
At the time the poll was taken Clinton was in the mid-20’s in preference polls.
Bill Clinton is the only candidate in political history to have an upside down favorability rating of more than 10 the year of the election and win.
So yea – pretty much bullshit.
It’s professional wrestling. He’s the bad guy who’s supposed to lose. Just enjoy the show.
Well, maybe I’m missing something, but it sure seems to me that Trump is doing very well indeed. Kicking back and letting Hillary self-destruct is a very wise policy, and almost certain to work. Her support is declining pretty rapidly at this point, and her credibility is entirely shot with the revelations about emailgate. The hatred and bigotry that her supporters are showing to other Americans is seriously damaging her prospects. It’s hate speech and very offensive, even to other Dems. And remember, it’s only June, and elections generally kick off at Labor Day. So Trump has plenty of time.
Would you mind explaining what you’re talking about.
Thank you for your concern.
Where did you get all of that?
Under a bridge, methinks.
Don’t disturb the music playing inside their heads.
And there is some LOUD music playing in some of the heads posting in this thread!
.
Swapped a cow for it.
It was either that, or a handful of magic beans.
Thanks for your comment. RCP’s polling averages show Clinton’s support solidifying/climbing and Trump’s support declining in recent weeks. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton-5491.htm
l
What sources are you using?
Dean Chambers, glad to have you with us.
Like dat!!!
Without Warren (or someone just as good at the game), HRC stands a good chance of being on the losing end of a modern rerun of the Truman-Dewey election…the “little person on the wedding cake” to whom Trump gives Trumanesque hell.
You remember how that turned out, right Booman? No matter what the polls said?
Yup.
Let us pray that if it does turn out that way, Trump is not as trigger-happy as was that other mob-allied preznit, Harry Truman, because this time the nukes are everywhere!!!
Later…
AG
Oh, I get it: ‘the lesser of two evils’—so-called—with Elizabeth Warren at the helm. P.S. This is not an endorsement of the man who used to be derisively called The Donald, however it is definitely a rejection of The Clintons.
Arthur’s entire schtick is ignoring facts and evidence, and opting for his own gut feelings presented with bizarre typography and random graphics.
No,
His entire schtick is to pretend progressive values, while subtly undermining all positions held by democrats, then present republican values as equal, then eventually, as superior. He’s a republican, and has supported republican candidates for the last 10 years.
It’s a grift, through and through.
.
I am truly not sure which of these two choices is “the lesser of two evils,” Quentin. Like Scylla and Charybdis in the Odyssey, they each offer their own possible ‘evils.”
The whole system will begin to collapse under Trump if he does even half of what he says he is going to do. It that worse that a continuing slow calcification under HRC?
I dunno, myself. Whether this country slowly grinds to a halt or strips all of its gears in a wild ride to nowhere, it all sounds bad to me.
AG
Seriously consider my Caesar-Pompey analogy.
I hope that Booman’s analysis is correct, however nervous it makes me feel and that, as much as I learn from his posts, that TarheelDem’s scenario doesn’t occur. Yes, we’ve another few months for things to go bad for the Dem side, but that’s also true for the GOP side.
Living where I do, I don’t hold out much hope for an overwhelming rejection of the GOP in the downballot races, nor even in the Presidential one. For one thing, there aren’t any recognizable Democrats to fill most of those slots. 10 of the 14 Congressional seats here have gone exponentially more conservative, almost extremely so, since 2010. A handful of those don’t even have a Dem on the ballot in November.
Maybe that will change after Obama has left office, as it was his presence in the White House that helped to speed the pace of conservative white male dominance among elected office holders here at both the state and federal levels. Perhaps, too, if Hillary succeeds and is both elected and governs well, that will begin a shift towards diversity. It really needs to.
Thanks, Booman, for your pragmatic and generally positive posts. It’s very easy to become a real cynic. Always has been.
Yeah, I don’t see any change in down ballot races here. In fact, we have a real nobody running for congress. It seems nobody is interested. Maybe Bernie’s encouraging young people to get involved will help in 2018.
It would be very useful if commenters tell where they live when they describe the local situation. Otherwise how can anyone know what you’re talking about? The US is a big and varied place.
As I’ve often posted here about the campaigns I worked for,i.e. Michelle Nunn in 2014, I mistakenly assumed most people figured out in which Red southern state I reside. Sorry.
Well, educate me, which one is it?
he thought he was doing that (if unnecessarily cryptically) with references to Michelle Nunn and southern red state, i.e., Georgia?
“?” because, though I suspect a quick google would confirm that re: Nunn, I’m too lazy!
14 Congressional districts plus Southern state confirms Georgia.
I’ve been away from the computer since my last response. Thanks to oaguabonita and curtadems for responding for me. It is indeed Georgia.
How much are Georgia demographics being transformed by in-migration? Is Georgia another North Carolina in the making?
The Atlanta metro area is huge and diverse. Most of the rest of the state, except for the coast, remains rural and economically challenged. There are similarities to what’s happening in North Carolina. And, actually, our Republican governance has tended to be a bit more sane than theirs of late.
Certainly our two Republican governors since 2002 (the first ones since Reconstruction) have managed to steer a sane and slightly more moderate course, even at the political cost of vetoing some controversial legislation coming from the conservative extremists there. Like our version of RFRA and a measure to force guns onto college campuses. They are far from liberal but they’ve not yet imbibed the water from the fever swamps of far rightism.
Respectfully, nearly all of you above are missing the point (especially Gilroy, who of course specializes in not just missing the point but doing so in the most cloying, long-winded, condescending way imaginable).
Speculating about “silent majorities” and “non-voting blocs” and “disenfranchied, dissatisfied people” (and any other blue-sky theories about how we’ll be surprised by who comes out of the woodwork and votes “against the system” in November) are totally misplaced and irrelevant in our modern era of networked, digitized, number-crunched, statistically-sophisticated polling, campaigning and voting — as misplaced and irrelevant (and dangerously misleading) as talking about “hunches” and “streaks” and “luck” at Vegas gaming tables. In neither scenario can one beat the math.
Donald Trump has a certain canniness and commercial sensibility — a kind of low cunning that works in the simplified, garish scenarios contrived around him for this purpose on television — but he really is a profoundly stupid and ignorant man; the kind who believes himself to be smart and to understand everything, because it’s all really very simple (in a loud-drunk-at-the-end-of-the-bar kind of way).
From this standpoint, with these skills and limitations, he managed to gin up more primary votes than any of his (profoundly, historically weak) GOP opponents, mostly by exploiting the double-think rhetorical dilemma that bound those opponents between their coy racist “dog whistles” and their big-money party obligations. He saw big cheering crowds at his venues and he beat the other candidates, in the kinds of stagy “world wide wrestling” theatrical put-down-based scenarios he’s used to.
But, needless to say, none of this has anything to do with a modern, digitized, well-staffed, nimble, funded, advertising-and-PR-bolstered Presidential campaign (which, as Josh Marshall put it, is half flash mob, half Fortune 500 company).
Trump is literally too stupid to realize this. It’s not just that he’s reluctant to “pivot” — he doesn’t even understand, on the most basic, fundamental, conceptual level, why anyone “pivots,” what the “pivot” is beyond a rhetorical device. All the numbers and polls and computers and ground-game networks and field studies and advertising schemes and funding networks mean nothing to him — they mean as little as any kind of “boring” market analysis or actual knowledge meant in any of his failed business or while building those awful, garish concrete-and-gold-paint buildings.
He doesn’t understand and he doesn’t care — he saw the crowds; they love him; let’s keep going and win. (As in my Vegas metaphor, he’s already won a hand…why won’t he win the rest of them? It’s “a streak.” And the next time you see that person they’re selling their wristwatch and car and taking out another mortgage to pay their electric bills.)
ADDENDUM: (Having just seen some recent comments by Trump): He seems to be conceptualizing this like a Wrestling tournament or a Basketball bracket: you beat the opponents; you advance; you win the division (or whatever); you advance; you take the title. And listen to those crowds; they love him. He’s unstoppable.
The idea that those cheering crowds he enjoyed are a specific, distinct, non-representative self-selected group of a finite number, whose response to him is totally irreproducible elsewhere — is beyond his comprehension.
There are many, many people at various levels and positions in the GOP who are trying to explain this to him and keep despairing.
Thank you.
As I expanded upon in my subsequent post (but maybe didn’t make clear): the inapplicability of the wrestling tournament or basketball bracket is that, whether a team has sustainable momentum up the pyramid or not, they’re always playing the same game — even the unlikely team who makes it to the playoffs or semifinals or division championship (or whatever) through a string of unlikely victories is always in the same sport; the rules of basketball don’t change as you ascend the pyramid. Presidential elections aren’t like that: rise up a level and it’s a totally different game. Trump doesn’t understand this, because, why would he? It requires a Copernican Revolution he’ll never have.
repeatedly, i.e., the critical difference between the GOP primary electorate and the general electorate.
Yeah, like many, I thought him winning the nomination was highly implausible (but not out of the question) from the start.
But to put it in statistics/sampling terms: the “population of interest” for the GOP primaries is just a subset . . . half-ish . . . of the “population of interest” for the general.
So it’s a complete misunderstanding to conclude that, just because he steamrolled over the other occupants of the Clown Car in the primaries, he therefore has a better chance of winning the general. The Base that enabled that becomes a much smaller proportion of the “population of interest” now that we’re in the general campaign. (And polls have already started reflecting that, which I always thought highly predictable.)
So it remains as implausible as always (or nearly so) to me that “President Trump” becomes a thing.
Not that the degree of “success” he HAS had isn’t telling us something very disturbing about this country.
Furthermore, if you have votes for eleven (eleven!) candidates in the primaries over however many months with however many debates, endorsements, dropouts etc. then the last person standing can be the person who garnered as little as 9% of the total votes, with the other 91% voting against him or her — that person will still win simply because of the attrition process and the math of the eleven-way split.
So it’s not “GOP vs. Democrat” meaning that the 50% or less (actually it’s much less) of the population that identifies as GOP voting for Trump. Especially since all those Cruz supporters and Bush supporters and Rubio supporters and etc. are far less likely to vote for Trump than (say) Sanders supporters are to vote for Clinton.
you picked 11 (didn’t the clown car start out holding 17? did six of them never get a single vote anywhere, ever? seems hard to believe!), but for the rest, agree completely.
hit most of those points in your next (for now) comment downthread, replying to AG. Hadn’t gotten to it yet when I replied above.
Our “our modern era of networked, digitized, number-crunched, statistically-sophisticated polling, campaigning and voting” has so far been totally defeated by this man and his rump staff. You think HRC will do any better? I hope you are right, but then again…overall (As in real results…like total victory?) how well have our hottest-thing-ever “networked, digitized, number-crunched, statistically-sophisticated” military done against brownish guys in armed Toyota trucks using improvised explosives and terrorists using automatic weapons and suicide bombs?
You will probably say that the two competitions have nothing to do with one another. I will answer that bureaucracies are incredibly inefficient from the getgo, and when they get to a certain point of size they basically freeze because most of the real efforts of the bureaubots are centered around saving their own ass in the hierarchy.
Same same. Both systems. Too big, too interested in covering their own asses to get shit done.
Watch.
It’s going to be closer than any of you think.
Bureaucratic incompetence vs. a form of inspired insanity.
Watch.
AG
Your typically soggy, associative thinking — in this case, comparing systematized data processing in a stable civilian population (voting; polling) to the unpredictability of chaotic, asymmetrical warfare — is as misapplied and wrongheaded as ever.
Do I have to cite the overwhelming data on my side? How about the WP on how “Trump’s polling numbers are setting historical records for personal toxicity”: https:/www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/06/17/trumps-poll-numbers-are-historically-aw
ful-and-he-doesnt-even-know-it
And the only thing that’s been “totally defeated by this man and his rump staff” is the raft of (as I said) historically weak GOP candidates, who are competing for a fraction of the general voting population (GOP primary voters) in complex, over-designed caucuses and tallies, with fifteen candidates, not one (further splintering the anti-Trump vote), so that the splinter of the population that supports him could gain a plurality (not a majority) over the other candidates. None of this has anything to do with the national contest, in which Trump’s “base” are (and always will be) statistically overwhelmed by everyone else, including (as has been detailed in the piece I linked and dozens of others) an enormous supermajority of registered and likely voters who “strongly dislike” Trump and “will never vote” for him. And that’s now, before the months of GOP infighting and awful Trump behavior which (in the weeks since his presumptive victory) has already caused him to disastrously plummet 10 points.
None of what I’m saying is unusual or radical; it’s what everyone’s saying, on both sides, from either party, unanimously and forcefully. It’s based on not one poll (or one polling instance) but an amalgamation of all available data, no matter what the bias or source. You can’t possibly miss it.
This isn’t an Arlo Guthrie song; it’s reality. You can imagine all the “storming the battlements” fantasy scenarios you want (and insist we “watch” and “bet on” them), but wishing don’t make it so.
We shall see. Barring a total collapse of one or the other candidate, I do not believe that this is going to be a blowout either way no matter how many corporate-owned-and-operated polls or CIA-allied newspapers say lotherwise. I simply not only no longer believe in those entities’ accuracy or truthfulness. In fact, I actively disbelieve everything that they say about anything important. Feel free to continue believing them. My own lie-accepting quotient is totally filled up. Does that make me a kneejerk contrarian in your eyes? So be it.
AG
Like a badly-quarterbacked football team, you always advance downfield to “Like dat. Bet on it” only to retreat just as quickly to “We shall see.”
I am not omniscient, nor do I claim to be. I just write…as honestly as possible.. about what I see.
Deal wid it or not. I don’t really care.
AG
This is the Winter of our discontent.
P.S.
I love all these explanations of republican voters and how they are going to come over the Hillary (and reject their Republican Congressman too!) from people that live in an echo chamber and never have even talked with republican voters, much less listened to them.
To quote some old Democrat, “It’s the economy stupid!” and running as Obama’s third term won’t hack it. Ronald Reagan beat a sitting President running on an economic platform that most voters were skeptical of and was derided as a “B” actor. But people were willing to try anything. It all depends on how bad people are hurting in November, and NOT how the government can fudge the numbers to make it look good.
Trump won’t get any latino votes? I know at least one black person who voted for Wallace in ’68 because he believed “all that racist talk is just political gas to get the cracker vote. He doesn’t really mean it.”
It’s “creditur” not “creditor” — and the correct translation is “A liar is not believed”, (factual) not “a liar is not to be believed …” (obligation, requiring the passive periphrastic “non credendum”.)
Like the boy who cried “wolf”.
By the way, like you I am very wary of the “managed” news. But it’s also pretty obvious when they’re spinning something.
I don’t agree with you about Trump, though. He really doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, for reasons many on this thread have already expressed very well.
(Lyrics from an American Songbook standard by George Gershwin, “Let’s Call The whole Thing Off”…1937.)
I do not speak Greek Others do. I learn from them…and from you.
Whatever.
How about this one?
Good enough for you?
If not?
Sue me.
Common sense will prevail. At the very least…it should prevail.
As our wonderful Preznit Butch II once said:
Duh.
In any language,
DUH!!!
AG
Latin, Arthur; it’s Latin, not Greek.
But then, it’s all Greek to you, isn’t it?
Latin. Ok. So? How does this pertain to the concept at hand?
Nitpicking.
Lame.
AG
P.S. Sorry about my educational lapses in certain regards. I dropped out of mainstream academia at 17 to study music, and I dropped out of music school at 20 to go learn the real stuff at the feet of the masters of my idioms.
I am basically self-educated. An autodidact.
And…I can think you around the block. Bet on it.
AG
LOL! In other words, a solipsist.
As Muhammad Ali replied when Howard Cosell said he was being “extremely truculent”:
I’m with Ali.
AG
P.S. Unless of course you mistyped.
I make a large part of my living as a musical “soloist.”
Could it be…???
Naaaah…
Thank you for ‘creditur’. I see similar with ‘res ipsa loquitur’ and ‘non sequitur’ all the time.
I guess that means that your handle should be “Davis Ex Machina?”
AG
Tell that to my homies Francis X. Bushman , David X. Cohen, and Malcolm X.
What!!!??? Were they Latin purists too?
AG
I think it’s a pun.
Right, in all three it’s the third person singular passive indicative ending in the third conjugation. Although loqui (to speak) and sequi (to follow) are deponent verbs (passive in form, active in meaning).
Of course there IS a word “creditor”, but it’s a noun; means the same as in English, but also “believer”. Well, a creditor is a kind of believer — someone that believes you will pay him back.
Maybe AG’s auto spell check played a trick on him, happens all the time.
The way this gets talked about in military circles is OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act). Korean War veteran Col. John Boyd was the key architect of the theory, and argued that if one force could “get inside” the others’ OODA loop, it could disrupt and defeat a superior opponent.
That’s as good an explanation as any for how Trump defeated 17 other Republican contenders (and especially ones like Bush and Rubio).
The problem for Trump is that, based on the evidence of the past few weeks, it’s the Clinton campaign that is getting inside the Trump campaign’s decision loop. Of course, that could change and it’s a long campaign, but it doesn’t bode well for Trump.
http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/08/john-boyd-in-the-news-all-you-need-to-know-about-ooda-loop/
402847/
The only decision loop in the Trump campaign is the loop in Trump’s own noggin.
True.
And it’s been a very effective loop, so far.
Hasn’t it.
AG
Yes, it has. Pretty much right up until he wrapped up the Republican nomination.
However, in the past few weeks it hasn’t been an effective loop. Trump’s comments about Judge Curiel weren’t a one day story (to be replaced by yet another outrageous Trump statement, and then another); they became a lingering problem for him as Clinton and her allies managed to stretch it out, and hammer away at Trump, forcing him into a defensive crouch.
Sen. Warren has provoked Trump into repeated Twitter battles. Whether he’s “winning” or not isn’t the issue. The issue is that she’s determining the “battlefield”, defining the terms of engagement, and forcing him to “fight” on her turf. She’s inside his decision loop.
Now, it’s a long time until November and all of this could change. But the past month is the first time in a year that one of Trump’s opponents seized the initiative and has made him look weak.
Yes to most of this.
But…to those many people (or few, depending on how you see things) who are temperamentally predisposed towards Trumpishness, this is all just another attack by a failing system that does not want Trump to change it.
Whatever the percentages of the overall legal electorate…percentages of true “undecideds,” percentages of undecideds who are likely to vote, etc. all. estimates of which are really sheer guesswork no matter who is doing the guessing…whatever their numbers, I am willing to bet that at least half of them if not more are hostile to the current governmental system as it now stands.
Why do I think this?
Because if they accepted it as valid they would have been voting. Duh.
So here’s the kicker in this equation…a kicker that is not “pollable” as far as I am concerned. If they believed in this system then they would answer polls. They’re the dark matter in this political physics experiment. What are they? Who are they? How many of them are there? How many will vote for Trump?
Nobody knows, but the Permanent Government/Corporate-owned media continue to squeal out their “sure thing” licks at ever-increasing volumes and frequency. Looking at Google News today seems like looking at a DNC publication. All anti-Trump, all the time.
Now…one might say that his is because he’s so bad. But…bad or not…that is not what is up here. The last time I saw this kind of intra-media agreement…agreement among all sides of media the political spectrum…was during the run-up to the Iraq War. And you know what that was all about, right? Control of the money. Nothing more and nothing less.
Ditto here.
Will it work? Dedicated, 24/7 mass forcing of popular opinion in the face of a perceived threat to corporate hegemony?
I don’t know.
All tactics come to an end of their usefulness eventually. This one has never been tried on a master of media judo. Every tme hey have tried it before this on Trump they have ended up with their ass on the mat and Trump standing over them doing his best LeBron James imitation.
Wil even more media firepower finally succeed in disrupting the Trump Train?
We shall see.
AG
Anything’s possible, but one problem Trump has is he’s no LeBron James. James has one of the finest strategic and tactical minds in the history of professional basketball…as well as one of the greatest combinations of finely honed skills for the game.
Trump, by contrast, has yet to display a command of the skill set required to excel at the “game” he is currently playing (i.e., electoral politics). And based on the performance of his campaign over the past month, he doesn’t seem to have the strategic and tactical sensibilities for this “game” either.
Again, it’s early days and anything could happen; but it’s not a good sign for a campaign built on winning “earned media” that when you’re “looking at Google News today (it) seems like looking at a DNC publication”.
I’m starting to think Donald Trump has some old man, feeble brained business strategy stuck in his head for the presidential election, as if winning the election is akin to a good quarterly report. Something like, “Look how many votes I’m getting and how little money I’m spending to do it.”
In a winner take all election, though, you don’t get anything at all if you don’t win. Your profit margin doesn’t matter. There are no prizes for a a superior votes won to money spent ratio.
Donald Trump calls profiling Muslims `common sense’
Source: Washington Post
After doubling down on his proposal to ban immigrants from countries with a history of terrorism, Donald Trump is now doubling down on another controversial idea in the wake of the Orlando massacre: profiling Muslims already in the United States.
In an interview with CBS’s John Dickerson that aired Sunday on “Face the Nation,” Trump called profiling Muslims “common sense.”
“Well, I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” he said when Dickerson asked Trump whether he still supports the idea, which he has floated before. “And other countries do it; you look at Israel and you look at others and they do it and they do it successfully. You know, I hate the concept of profiling. But we have to start using common sense, and we have to use, you know, we have to use our heads…we really have to look at profiling. We have to look at it seriously. “
Many Americans white and black, agree with that.
I fear you are right. I have the historical example of the internment of ethnic Japanese in front of me daily here in Portland, Oregon. Walk down to the Willamette River waterfront and there’s a sculpture making the point.
As has been noted in other, previous comment threads, “common sense” seems to be unexamined racism in many cases.
Someone at Balloon Juice made this astute point:
Trump has been trying to get money from people WHO KNOW ALL ABOUT HIS BUSINESS PRACTICES.
They KNOW him.
They KNOW that his ‘self-financed’ campaign was utter bullshyt, and refuse to open up their checkbooks to pay off the ‘loans’ that he made to his campaign.
He’s trying to shove off the ground game to the GOP. Trying to do it on the cheap.
Think there’s anything to this?
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/end-of-conservative-supreme-court-clarence-thomas-may-be-next-to-l
eave/article/2594317
Caveats:
Just my opinion,
I’ve always thought Thomas would leave if the republican majority was lost, and he might not be alone. When you are as full of righteousness as Thomas it would get pretty discouraging if those womenfolk started dictating the course of the Court.
Add to that what you referred to, Thomas is also the one most likely to want to cash in. His wife seems like the ‘cash in’ type.
Roberts……would he want his name attached to a liberal court? He’s still young, plenty of time to cash out.
Alito…no way this guy, who seems bitter as hell, could be happy being on the losing side of 6-3 or 7-2 votes.
.
I think he’ll quit if a Republican wins the presidency (currently unlikely), but otherwise not. He certainly has motive to retire, but the entirety of the conservative establishment will come down on him (and Kennedy) to stay. 5-4 is potentially reversible before demographics grind down the Republicans, but 6-3 isn’t, never mind 7-2. He might end up quite miserable on the bench but he will face enormous pressure to stay.
Kennedy is going to be 80 next year. I doubt he cares what pressure can be brought.
Thomas? Maybe. But once Kennedy goes it’s 6-3.
.
Maybe, but it’s probably just a way to persuade people to vote for Trump.
Sanders collides with black lawmakers
The Congressional Black Caucus ‘vehemently’ opposes Sanders’ call to abolish superdelegates.
By DANIEL STRAUSS 06/19/16 04:17 PM EDT
Bernie Sanders is on a crash course with the Congressional Black Caucus.
In a letter sent to both the Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns, the CBC is expressing its resolute opposition to two key reforms demanded by Sanders in the run-up to the Democratic convention: abolishing the party’s superdelegate system and opening Democratic primaries up to independents and Republicans.
“The Democratic Members of the Congressional Black Caucus recently voted unanimously to oppose any suggestion or idea to eliminate the category of Unpledged Delegate to the Democratic National Convention (aka Super Delegates) and the creation of uniform open primaries in all states,” says the letter, which was obtained by POLITICO. “The Democratic Party benefits from the current system of unpledged delegates to the National Convention by virtue of rules that allow members of the House and Senate to be seated as a delegate without the burdensome necessity of competing against constituents for the honor of representing the state during the nominating process.”
I’m trying to unpack this: ” …without the burdensome necessity of competing against constituents for the honor of representing the state during the nominating process.”
Translation?
They’re elected officials in the party and the want to be delegates to the convention on that basis, without running for the honor against other citizen delegates.
Why do they hate democracy? Why should party leaders get special status? They haven’t done a lot to deserve it.
I disagree. I think elected office holders, certainly at the National level, deserve a seat at the party convention without the necessity of competing against the party regulars who would probably lose their seats when running against an elected Congressman. I also don’t have a problem with the Super delegates. A political party has to have a way to reward its winners and workers. and,frankly, as a general rule, I value their insight and experience. I agree with the Congressional Black Caucus.
So they don’t want to allow constituents to run against them for the honor, is really what they’re saying?
There is another side to this, though, and here it is:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-african-americans-cornel-west-hillary-
clinton-213627
California just joined 8 other states in suggesting reforms that curtailed their power.
Aaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnddddddddddddd
Another wheel falls off: Corey Lewandowski is out.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/20/politics/corey-lewandowski-out-as-trump-campaign-manager/index.html