Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

I'm not assuming anything and I expect many voters to come out and vote against Clinton or Trump. I think Trump is less palatable to a lot of people and his support is more limited. Many, including myself, would vote for Hillary because Trump could be a dangerous choice. But I certainly won't be stunned if he somehow wins.

 

Hokie, while much of the electorate might say they're against Hillary now, when it comes time to define policy differences, they'll see how much common ground they have.

Reproductive rights and immigration are the two biggies. While I don't for a second think Trump has any problem with PP or any interest in cutting back reproductive rights, he is going to have to maintain that stance to bring Republicans out.

There are all sorts of other positions that the Democrats can take advantage of in a way that Trump's GOP opponents can't -- because they agree with him. These differences only get easier to capitalize on when Obama nominates a minority to the Supreme Court and the GOP rejects him/her.

 

I could be wrong, but I don't think he's going to do that.

 

I guess it depends on what you mean by "turn out." There isn't some binary on/off switch where they either turn out or don't. I suspect that most Republicans will talk themselves into Trump eventually, but that's just a guess. But there are absolutely differences in the way the two are perceived by their party's bases. On Clinton's side, the nomination fight with Sanders isn't any more contentious than the one with Obama. It is, in fact, significantly less so.

Trump has some very specific polling problems that Clinton doesn't have. Roughly half, sometimes a bit more, of Republican voters describe Trump as unacceptable in polling. Despite some loud people on the internet, polling data indicates that the vast majority of Democratic voters would be fine with either candidate. Her net unfavorables are around -10 to -15, Trumps are over -40. So there is definitely a difference between them in how they are perceived within their base.

Will that matter? I don't know, maybe. I could see Trump pulling only 80 or 90% of the Republican base and that would run up the margin of victory for Clinton pretty badly.

But that's not why she's going to win over him in a walkover. She's going to win over him in a walkover because Democratic-friendly voters make up more than 50% of the presidential-year electorate in 2016, and Trump has absolutely zero crossover appeal. His favorables outside of his base are worse than any candidate in modern memory. Absent a major shift in the national zeitgeist (i.e. an October terrorist attack that scares everyone), whether or not Trump can consolidate the Republicans is going to be the difference between whether he loses 51-48 or 56-43.

 

I agree. I think she is going to absolutely destroy him in the debates. Following the last debate, the Fox News postgame had a segment with nearly every one of the viewers calling the performances embarrassing. And Trump has nothing else. Though I'm sure he has brushed up on the nuclear triad by now, right?

 

Do you understand that garbage is a huge component of his appeal to his supporters right now? He doesn't have many other plays in the playbook.

 

Um, the exact quote was from Jindal's op-ed column.

And here you are claiming I don't know English.

 

What am I missing here, Rick?

Trump is actually far less strictly tied to a particular ideology than any GOP candidate I can remember.

He's certainly not a social conservative.

I'm honestly not even sure he's a Republican.

And yet, he's the prohibitive favorite to represent one of the two major political parties in a presidential campaign.

How is that not "crossover appeal?"

 

And is also why he has a shot against Hillary in the general election:

 

Rick Stain: I agree with most of your analysis. But we need to focus our arguments on the three or four states that matter: Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, maybe Nevada. The rest of the 50 states' electoral votes are set in stone.

Hillary is doing great in the southern state primaries, but will any of those electoral votes go to a Democrat in November? Very doubtful.

My hopes for this election are long-term: the weakening of both the two-party system and electoral college. I'm optimistic we're trending in the right direction.

 

Because the 33% of the primary voters that have made him the prohibitive favorite were already voting Republican whether they agreed with the whole platform or not.

You keep trying to reason this through and you don't have to. We have polling data that tells us what people think of Trump. He is extremely popular with poor white male and even more unpopular than the average Republican with everyone else.