- Instinctively, Hillary Clinton has long seemed by far the more electable of the two Democratic candidates. She is, after all, an experienced, pragmatic moderate, whereas Sanders is a raving, arm-flapping elderly Jewish socialist from Vermont. Clinton is simply closer to the American mainstream, thus she is more attractive to a broader swath of voters. Sanders campaigners have grown used to hearing the heavy-hearted lament “I like Bernie, I just don’t think he can win.” And in typical previous American elections, this would be perfectly accurate.
But this is far from a typical previous American election. And recently, everything about the electability calculus has changed, due to one simple fact: Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee for President. Given this reality, every Democratic strategic question must operate not on the basis of abstract electability against a hypothetical candidate, but specific electability against the actual Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
I don't really buy it. Donald Trump can't win a general. The big secret about these primaries is that very few people go to these things and they are often not representative of either parties interest in the state. The people that come out to primaries and caucuses are the really politically involved. The reason Donald Trump is doing so well is because it is super easy to get the outliers all to vote at one time, and the general populace tends to be more apathetic to this early election stuff. The general election for a presidential candidate is a whole different beast. I'm pretty confident Clinton or Sanders could beat Trump in a general if not from just the sheer amount of disgust for Trump.
Exactly. In the primaries you're appealing to roughly 50% of roughly 97% of the electorate that has made up its mind and will never vote for the other side's candidate. In the general you're trying to grab the 3% that's legitimately up-for-grabs, doesn't hear your dog whistles, and has somehow managed to stay undecided in the most polarized political climate since the Civil War.
Every election is a few points off of 50/50. Nobody gets a "mandate" any more. So the driving is done by those who give a shit and show up to caucus. Then the PACs use their money to influence the media we proles are exposed to every day, and make a certain outcome seem "inevitable", so we'll just sheeple along with their message and vote the way they want us to. It's the 3% of undecideds that sway every election. But... when do they Decide? And how can we influence them? I think that answer is "Big Media Buys", but only in the three states that ever matter. Which includes Florida. Which means we are all fucked.
Stopped reading right there. Off the top of my head - - Donald Trump tweeted about an Apple boycott... from an iPhone - Donald Trump talks about preserving American jobs... while hiring 17 out of 500 American applicants at Mar-el-Lago (the bulk of employment there made up of Romanians, whom Trump keeps in green cards) - Donald Trump on the record (on video) saying he'd date his daughter if she wasn't his daughter - Donald Trump offending every minority that has ever been, often within days of crassly and obsequiously flattering them - Seasons upon seasons of Donald Trump, entertainer, to feed into hours and hours of political advertising Let's be clear about one thing: Donald Trump has yet to partake in any public event whose staging he can't control. To the best of my knowledge, no presidential candidate has ever decided to take his ball and go home from a debate. I mean, look at this shit. Up to this point, the race has been about who can be the most reactionary conservative. Who wants to build the highest wall. Who will deport the most immigrants, deny the most abortions and give away the most taxes. That there has been no substantive discussion allows crazy shit like this: A gentle reminder of Donald Trump vs. vague criticism: That's FOX F'ING NEWS right there, folks. That's the official mouthpiece of the Republican Party. I mean, John Tesh could annihilate Trump in an open debate. Jimmy Fallon could outmaneuver Donald Trump. The man has been a flamboyant, preening asshole in front of any lens he can find since Reagan's first term. The man's boorishness and anti-humanitarian record is a part of American folklore. He's never run for an elected office with any seriousness, and he's never faced any oppositional party in any capacity. The reason the Republicans are scared to death of Trump winning is that they're fucked if that happens. I'll bet I could craft a PAC "you're fired" campaign about jobs, Hispanics, working mothers, the middle class, you name it, using fair use and royalty-free music: I mean, just in googling "Donald Trump fired compilation" here's half.a.fucking.hour of the choad on ALEX JONES: Look - I'll vote for Clinton. I'll vote for Sanders. But I, and every sane individual in America, will never vote for Donald Trump. The discussion up to this point is "would you rather Donald Trump OR Ted Cruz OR Marco Rubio OR Carly Fiorina OR Jeb Bush?" To which the answer is "I would rather Hamburgler than any of the above, but Donald Trump is certainly the face I've seen the most." As soon as the discussion is "would you rather Donald Trump or a qualified politician" the folx voting for Trump are going to be scarce. Remember: The National Review printed an entire issue against Donald Trump. Ask yourself: will an NRO reader vote for Trump? Will an NRO reader vote for Clinton? Will an NRO reader vote for Sanders? I'd wager that a substantial portion of mainstream Republicans will vote for Clinton over Trump. A larger portion will opt out but Trump legitimately scares the shit out of mainstream Republicans. Clinton? She's just an anti-hero. Sanders? He's an ineffectual Vermont socialist. Trump? Trump can destroy the brand for a generation.Every one of Clinton’s (considerable) weaknesses plays to every one of Trump’s strengths, whereas every one of Trump’s (few) weaknesses plays to every one of Sanders’s strengths.
“And honestly, Megyn, if you don't like it, I'm sorry. I've been very nice to you, although I could probably not be based on the way you have treated me,” he added to the moderator. “But I wouldn't do that. But you know what? We, we need strength, we need energy, we need quickness, and we need brain in this country to turn it around. That I can tell you right now.”
Not that it's a high bar, but Megyn Kelley has become my favorite Republican shill. I hear people who used to be talking about Obama's birth certificate talking about Donald Trump being misogynistic, and it is hilarious. If only she used her powers for good more regularly.
I looked through hubski posts submitted from the culturalaffairs.com domain, and there are only a few, one of which was this. I'm rereading the discussion, and it's striking how less confident I am that folx voting for Trump will be scarce in November. The NYTimes mentioned in a blog post introducing a predictive model of the election, and put the odds of Hillary losing at 34%, or about the liklihood that an NBA player will miss a free throw. I agree though, where's the PAC running boorish comment n montage ads of Trump?
In my opinion, it's exactly as it was. I mean, This is June 21: I mean, the Koch Brothers are sitting this one out. That 3%? That's all about money.In the primaries you're appealing to roughly 50% of roughly 97% of the electorate that has made up its mind and will never vote for the other side's candidate. In the general you're trying to grab the 3% that's legitimately up-for-grabs, doesn't hear your dog whistles, and has somehow managed to stay undecided in the most polarized political climate since the Civil War.
Trump raised just over $3 million in May — the month he secured enough delegates to win the Republican nomination — while Clinton raked in more than $26 million, according to the latest filings from the Federal Election Commission.
Is that right? I've heard so much conflicting analysis regarding money in politics that any consensus, if there is one, is that votes follow the more monied candidate but also that money naturally finds the likelier candidate anyway etc. with the cause being difficult to single out. Is money really the only (/largest) influence on that 3%? And why is it 3%, not 5% or 25%? How come it doesn't ever swing to 60% one party and the other 30%? Why is the party breakdown always so nearly even? Also, now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever known someone in that 3%. Who the fuck makes their mind up about something like that based on a 30-second ad spot?That 3%? That's all about money.
You convert an undecided voter to a decided voter by carpetbombing their field of view with propaganda. Propaganda costs money. Current polls seem to put "undecided voters" somewhere between 10% and 20%. Whenever I find someone skeptical about the general stupidity of the human race, I encourage them to read some Youtube comments. If that doesn't work, I advise them to sell something on Craigslist. Elitism only grows easier the more you interface with the proletariat. TRUE STORY: The last time I voted in person in Washington, I crossed the street to the church and walked into the foyer. Someone struck up a conversation with me. We chatted for a minute. Then he said "You seem to be pretty intelligent. Who should I vote for?" I told him that it was an important decision and I'd be happy to help him, but I wouldn't tell him, and he shouldn't let anyone else tell him, either. He gave me a thoughtful look like he'd never heard such a thing in his life.
I find my incredulity from last night somewhat foreign to me now. I literally just sold my car on craigslist and the experience was very much what you describe. My love for the proletariat is very abstract.
Your videos and the subsequent clicks they provided led me down a 30 minute wormhole I didn't have time for :) Trump is nothing, if not entertaining. His twitter feed alone is amazing. It's seriously hard to fathom someone that tweets, "When Mitt Romney asked me for my endorsement last time around, he was so awkward and goofy that we all should have known he could not win!" being our president. Seriously, take a moment and read his tweets. It's like he's a 13 year old girl. (no offense #grrlski) He's extremely catty.
To what degree is the rise of an extreme candidate like Trump the Republican Party's own fault? There's a great article (in Dutch, sadly) I read this morning that tried to explain the rise of Trump using the insights of Thomas Mann and Norman Orstein: [...] Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. That quote is from 2012. The article further argues that the polarizing politics of the Republican Party has lead to candidates getting ever closer to the end of the political spectrum. "Trump is what you get when your party abandons all moderate politics." Do you think there's truth to that?Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.
One hundred percent. The Republican Party used to be all about fiscal conservancy and social issues weren't their bag. Remember - Richard Nixon not only started the EPA, he wound down the Vietnam War and launched the HMO act, which was sponsored by Ted Kennedy. When the Democrats managed to run him out of office, however, the sting of "Dirty Tricks" and the annihilation of Barry Goldwater combined to convince the party to listen to Lee Atwater (and others) to appeal to the baser instincts of uneducated whites through the Southern Strategy, religious conservatism and other similar gambits. The only way to get the poor to vote against their own self-interests is through broad values appeal and the Republicans were perfectly willing to become the party of God, Guns and Glory. Lee Atwater learned from Nixon, Karl Rove learned from Lee Atwater. The Tea Party? Didn't exist prior to a black man becoming president. Trump is what you get when your party abandons all moderate voters. Something like 80% of the country believes that abortion should be legal in some cases at least, for example, and the number one concern across all spectrums is jobs. Yet the republicans are still about repealing Roe V. Wade and are willing to make Obamacare their Waterloo.
I just don't buy it. I'm definitely in Sanders' corner, and I am not a fan of Hillary at all. But this article didn't really allay any fears I have about Sanders' ability to win the general election. I think the big difference between Sanders and other Democratic candidates is that while the others have been called socialist, Sanders explicitly identifies as one. I disagree with the author. The Cold War mentality is still alive and strong in the United States even if it has weakened relative to that time period. All Trump has to do is keep repeating that Sanders is a socialist, and I think he'd win. Half of Sanders' own party doesn't agree with him economically, conservatives will view him as the devil, and I think independents will be mostly turned off by the socialist rhetoric as well. Plus, I think Sanders will struggle to attract hispanic and black voters, even though I think he really shouldn't. I wish that wasn't the case, but that's what I believe. Meanwhile, Trump's candidacy is gaining, but I still think his nomination would be a sign for how weak the Republican party is right now on the national stage than a sign for how strong a candidate he is. He's doing well in the Republican primary, but I think that's a different beast than the general election. Trump can't be stopped now, but that's because the Republican primaries include the demographics that will find the most appeal from Trump. For one, I think Clinton would do better with the aforementioned hispanic and black voters as well as women in general. And I think Clinton would keep the moderates and independents as well. I also really don't see many Sanders supporters voting third party if Trump has a chance, and I really don't see most voting for Trump. This all depends on Clinton remaining scandal free, however. And I haven't exactly been paying a ton of attention lately so I might be completely off-base. Trump has the celebrity of Reagan, but he's not nearly as clean a candidate. I really can't see him winning, and if he does, well, I'll just have to sit back and watch the trainwreck.
I'm also afraid of Sanders' electability. While Clinton may be losing ground to him, she's been the one to take the brunt of Republican character assassinations. And not just this election cycle, but for the last 25 years. Sanders has recently been doing well in national level polling -- a poll has him leading amongst Democratic primary voters nationwide over Clinton -- but that's before taking into account an 8-month long smear campaign by the GOP, assuming he were to win the Democratic nomination. The Republicans have been fighting each other too vehemently to launch any sort of sustained attack on the Dems. But once a candidate is selected, the anti-Bernie attacks will come, and I have nothing but my gut to go by. Trump is a colossal, very sad joke. There's a reason why the sentiment that "Trump will obviously fall out of the race any minute now" was so pervasive for so long. He's a complete ass. But Bernie is a socialist. And I don't know how receptive this electorate will be to nuanced discussion of socialism.
Hmm. If I was Trump running against Sanders I would capitalize on the natural resistance that Americans have to Socialism and Communism to paint him as a naïve idealist. Pretty easy job really since he is a Socialist Idealist. For a quick side-trip to elaborate on that let's look at how Senator Sanders plans to pay for his "College for All" plan, one of his most successful campaign promises. From his own site, the paper he cites to explain his FTT (financial transaction tax, or the actual term for 'taxing Wall Street speculators') has this excellent disclaimer. I'm not exaggerating, this is literally under the heading Caveat Emptor in the paper: "We assume that, due to the imposition of the FTT at the rates we propose above, trading volume will fall no more than 50 percent relative to current levels of trading. As one of us (Bob) has explained over the phone, in fact, it is very difficult to establish the answers to your questions on the basis of serious analysis and references to evidence and credible research. To begin with though, again, we emphasize that our conclusions are not based on anything close to the type of solid foundation in research and evidence that one would normally expect in considering such an important question. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, such research and evidence are simply not available, to us or anybody else." So the researchers who provided the research for this whole plan working STARTED with the assumption that it will wreck stock market volume by 50%. Now, I understand that volume is not profit. Nor is a reduction in trading volume due to per transaction taxes going to end the world. But there are a lot of people who are going to be very disappointed in the rate of returns dropping by 5% when they buy, and 5% when they sell. Especially since the rate of returns on the stock market has been 5.8% over the last 15 years. So you just made the stock market a negative investment for a lot of people, and that's a big deal for a lot of reasons that don't affect stock market 'billionaires'. The stock market is where people's 401k is. It's where pensions are. When you take the return out of that equation, you just ruined a lot of people's retirement savings to pay for college. So Bernie is dead in the water as soon as someone with business sense and a marketing pitch gets ahold of him. And I'm not saying that any of these ideas are actually untenable, or even trying to argue the merit. I'm just saying that if I was a political consultant with 10 minutes of free time, I could have already wrecked Bernie's campaign with the information that he gave me. Here's the pitch: 30 second spot. Voiceover:"Bernie Sanders' own sources say that paying for his college plan will cut the stock market in half." Red line graphic down a growing stock market and newspaper economic recovery graphics implying that unemployment will rise and America will begin another recession. VO:"He says he wants to try something new." Bernie video of him saying something like 'we've never tried this here before and it's time' Graphics of Greece protests and EU Bailouts (the one of dumping the Swedish Kroners that they did for the universal income protests would be an awesome one!) VO: "Well it has been tried Bernie, and Europe is still digging it's way out. This November stand with a leader whose business know-how will Make America Great Again! Stand with Donald Trump." Trump: "I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message." So why isn't the RNC doing that? Because they want Bernie to succeed so that they can harpoon him when he's most vulnerable and Hillary is out of the picture. It's brilliant. It's like letting your opponent with a tank (Hillary) continue to be flabbergasted when people are picking up bows and arrows instead because they don't like the tank driver. And then when the tank driver runs out of gas because everyone waited too long, boom, you run them over. This whole article is based on the premise that Trump is ineffective when he goes political. He doesn't have to go political for himself if he can be successful going political against Sanders. He has people on his team who are paid to be really good at that. It's not rocket science.
America has a lot of faults; the more I've lived outside the country the more noticeable it has become. But I refuse to believe someone like Donald Trump could win a general election. This is a guy who has no real consistent political ideology, is lacking any sort of real, robust debating skills, has no really ideological or practical framework for most of his policies...And frankly, he's just scary. He's scarier than some far-right European leaders. I have to believe that the American electorate would be repulsed by what he's saying. If he does win, I honestly don't know what I'd do. I'm a Muslim American that's spent half his life outside the country, and most of that time I was living in the Middle East. I already feel terrified by the growth of the right here in Europe and if someone as flat-out bigoted as Donald Trump were to actually become the leader of the only country I've ever identified with, I'd not only lose all faith in our political system but in the very ideological fabric of our country. I don't think I ever believed in American exceptionalism or the American Dream, but I sure as hell believed in American inclusivity.
This campaigning style makes Hillary Clinton Donald Trump’s dream opponent. She gives him an endless amount to work with. The emails, Benghazi, Whitewater, Iraq, the Lewinsky scandal, Chinagate, Travelgate, the missing law firm records, Jeffrey Epstein, Kissinger, Marc Rich, Haiti, Clinton Foundation tax errors, Clinton Foundation conflicts of interest, “We were broke when we left the White House,” Goldman Sachs… There is enough material in Hillary Clinton’s background for Donald Trump to run with six times over. It's sad to think that Clinton actually being a viable candidate with public service experience may make her a weaker candidate than Trump.Trump’s political dominance is highly dependent on his idiosyncratic, audacious method of campaigning. He deals almost entirely in amusing, outrageous, below-the-belt personal attacks, and is skilled at turning public discussions away from the issues and toward personalities (He/she’s a “loser,” “phony,” “nervous,” “hypocrite,” “incompetent.”) If Trump does have to speak about the issues, he makes himself sound foolish, because he doesn’t know very much. Thus he requires the media not to ask him difficult questions, and depends on his opponents’ having personal weaknesses and scandals that he can merrily, mercilessly exploit.
I've read through all the comments here, and Trump's "landslide" in Nevada was him winning less than 3% of the voters in that state. It is true that in a general election, only about 20% of Americans turn out to vote... but I don't see Trump having a smooth adoption curve across that entire voting populace. Of course, we are media-controlled animals. And Trump knows this. The more his election seems "inevitable", the more people will vote for him simply because "everyone else is". (Imagine I inserted a link to a psychologists' student project, where he sent people onto the subway specifically to ask people to give up their seats... and the vast majority of people did, without argument. People are sheeple.) The article makes a very strong point that Hillary doesn't win against Trump, simply because the differences are minor details to the rest of us, who are more concerned with commuting, picking the kids up from school, whether the milk in the fridge is spoiled, etc. And now, in my state and several others, we don't even have the pomp and circumstance of going to a polling place and voting in person. We get a piece of mail, make a mark on it, and try to find a mailbox to drop it into. There's no gravitas to voting any more. So... shit... fill in the circle, try to find a mailbox somewhere. Who gives a shit which circle I filled in? I have to get across town in traffic to blah de blah blah, and if I detour over there, I'm just gonna get caught in game day traffic snarl, so I'll just... oops. The ballot fell under the passengers' seat. Shit. I'll get it... later.
I didn't notice, I used to submit to Hubski button and it picks up the format that the source has apparently. But I think there is a difference when you are posting content that you aren't attached to as opposed to your own blog. I didn't block anyone but I filtered them. I would expect anyone to do as much to me if all my posts were in caps.
Ha. No I filter people that I think are only posting content I don't like and have no interest in participating in the community. In this case, they happen to post in all CAPS EACH TIME THEY POST CONTENT FROM THE SAME SITE. So I filter that user. It has no effect on what other people do or do not see etc. Just keeps their posts out of my feed. But there is not an ALL CAPS filter :)