Buttload of Faith: the 2016 Presidential Primary Thread (Pt 2)

from what i've noticed anecdotally any of the affection for trump in the orthodox jewish republican community comes entirely from identification w/ ivanka

he must realize it too "You just like me because my daughter happens to be Jewish," Trump said as he took the stage. He added that his daughter Ivanka has a great husband and is very happy, but "the only bad news is I can't get her on Saturday," referring to Shabbat, a Jewish day of rest.

is that the daughter he publicly speculated about schtupping

"get her"

i think she is gorgeous but i'm not her father

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgPvoMR-aZo

from that screengrab, i'm assuming the answer is "you, little boy"

from mouths of babes trumpjungen quex

he's a regular hadrian

that ppl are into him is even harder to understand than the whole "I'd have a beer with GWB" thing

well he is stupid, loudmouthed, rude and overpriveleged ie like most of America

which is not to say that most of America likes him - at this point I hope he gets the nom just so the GOP gets absolutely hosed in the election

he doesn't seem v convincing on the deep fascist charisma level but then i watch videos of hitler giving speeches and think he looks like a creepy balding dude. the crowd loves it tho. (not to say that trump is hitler but i haven't watched a lot of mussolini or franco speeches)

Mussolini is hilarious

stylistically he's def a closer fascist analog for Trump than Hitler

analogue even

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-KzYATY5apTg%2FUXuEm5wJdKI%2FAAAAAAAALbg%2Fre9FLJyJ3dI%2Fs1600%2FMussolini.gif&f=1

lol

at this point I hope he gets the nom just so the GOP gets absolutely hosed in the election

i've often had this thought too (it's still my default opinion at this point, i guess) but then i remember how wrong i and everyone else on earth have been about trump so far. everyone thought he would have imploded by now - everyone figured he'd implode after a couple weeks, even. everyone has been so wrong. and it's true, it seems like he'd do very poorly in a general election, but i can't deny any scenario given the involvement of my beloved fellow americans as voters. there could be a major terror event just before the election, or some sort of scandal erupts around clinton, some other october surprise...i dunno. just like europe, there's a considerable white supremacist voting bloc in the U.S., though most of them probably would recoil at that description of course. the thought of trump being in power in a time of crisis and uncertainty, paired with the bloodlust that enters around 90% of american's hearts in the wake of disaster (source: W's polls after 9/11) and the support of a ton of terrible bigots with guns, frightens me.

but who knows, maybe the crest of the trump wave is right now and a few months from now we'll all be laughing about it as the attention steers toward rubio or cruz.

there's a considerable white supremacist voting bloc in the U.S

not considerable enough to beat the non-white voting bloc -- if it votes in 2016.

yeah even in my darkest nightmares i think the us has enough useful architecture to keep it from sliding too deeply into psychotic fascism

i still plan on voting trump in the republican primary. either him or bobby jindal

we all thought people would have lost interest by now, yes - but that's just misreading the GOP primary voters. He does not have a prayer of winning a general election. It's worth noting that he's only winning a plurality, not a majority, of the GOP primary vote, and that he has consistently polled really negatively with the general electorate. Break down that electorate into "swing" states Trump would have to win (Ohio, Florida, etc.) and there's no way he would get them all. Party turnout on the GOP side would also be depressed just because of how many people hate him, which would contribute to losses across the board.

xp

it'd be interesting to see if any beurocrats would be in open revolt against trump, like Reagan vs epa style

I still don't think he'll get the nom, honestly. Party machinery is liable to throw a monkey wrench into him actually racking up delegates. Plus as soon as he loses anything, his mystique is punctured...

xp

there was a NYT feature yesterday which described GOP leaders saying

1) He would drag the party down to massive down-ballot defeat in November

2) I'M not going to savage him! He'll be publicly mean to me.

i'm not sure what, say, rubio would stand to lose by calling trump and bigot and a bully.

i mean i know what he /thinks/ he stands to lose, i'm just not convinced the concern is entirely warranted.

"there could be a major terror event just before the election"

Non-hypothetical! I actually heard some conservatives today smugly not-quite-crowing that the shootings in San Bernardino significantly helped Trump's chances of winning the nomination.

Apparently Ben Carson repeatedly referred to Hamas asHummus during a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition which is actually making me smile despite this seeming an otherwise dreary day.

wait Hitler was balding

I agree that the Trump thing has lasted a lot longer than I ever thought it would. But we really are still basically in the same phase we were a month, two months, three months ago. The big unknown was, and remains: what does this Trump support look like when it comes to showing up for primaries? The Iowa Caucus is Feb. 1st and the New Hampshire primary is Feb. 9th. I see it as entirely possible that all of a sudden, after those, we'll be looking at such radically different numbers that all the ink spilled on the race thus far will seem even sillier than it might already.

Until then, it seems clear enough that as far as the watch-the-polls aspect of the races go, Trump has the same Teflon cover with the segment of the poll-responding public that he's had roughly since August. Nothing really reduces his numbers, nothing really raises them either. His negatives with the people who don't consider him their #1 are really high. If the polls are reliable, he still doesn't have much of a shot IMHO. He's leading a very, very crowded field with 25%, but there's not a lot of evidence that the people who say Bush or Rubio or whoever is their fave are actually ever going to switch to Trump if their candidates bail.

Take the latest Quinnipiac poll, with the usual caveat that this is ONE poll and may not accurately indicate the current state of the race. Here's the headline question, who would you vote for if the election were held today:

27 Trump
17 Rubio
16 Cruz
16 Carson
8 Don't know / no answer
5 Bush
3 Fiorina
2 Christie
2 Paul
2 Kasich
1 Huckabee
1 Wouldn't vote
- Gilmore, Graham, Huckabee, Pataki, Santorum

So: Trump's winning! But, okay, now: are there any of these candidates you would "definitely not support"? (multiple responses allowed, so total > 100%):

30 No/No one
26 Trump
21 Bush
13 Christie
13 Kasich
13 Paul
11 Pataki
11 Fiorina
11 Graham
10 Carson
9 Huckabee
9 Gilmore
9 Santorum
6 Cruz
6 Don't know / no answer
5 Rubio

So, as much as "Trump tops polls, is set to win!" you could easily write the story as "Trump most hated candidate among Republicans, has no chance!" As many people as consider him their first choice consider him their last choice! Granted, this also doesn't look like great news for people like Bush, who also have a lot of "not that guy" ... but my guess would be that those people correspond with the people who are already on Team Trump, whom Bush isn't trying to win over. Meanwhile, if all the non-Trumps actually combined into one candidate, Trump would be doing worse than Sanders versus Hillary.

I don't expect such a combining of forces to ever happen, but the idea of Trump winning the nomination still just looks ludicrous to me. The only way that happens is *IF* he translates this level of support into votes, AND everybody else stays it in all the way through, AND the voters continue humoring all of them, AND the primary calendar/delegate math doesn't fuck him up in the first place. In the poll above, 15% of the people who'd even made up their minds are going to Fiorina, Christie, Paul, Kasich and Huckabee, none of whom have a snowball's chance and who surely are going to drop out after Iowa or so if not before. If they all give up the ghost, their numbers have to go somewhere, and it seems really unlikely that most of their fans are "well, Trump is my second choice" people, if such people even exist and are not Carson voters.

Short version: I think Trump's basically at his ceiling. The others are hoping to claim the don't-know people, to look like the biggest "not Trump" contender when the voting actually starts, and to wait for the other not-Trumps to quit. They may also be waiting until more people are paying attention to make a big-tent, anti-Trump "you don't represent the sober, bipartisan, get-things-done, down-to-earth conservative values of this party!" type speech. I don't think it really helps them to give Trump more time to beat up on them before voting time.

(Bear in mind also that delegates won by candidates who later drop out still get to vote at the convention, and it seems unthinkable that delegates initially pledged to Bush or Rubio would ever vote for Trump if there was any other option. So my imaginary "everybody besides Trump" coalition does kinda exist.)

wait Hitler was balding

maybe it's just his hairline

this is probably going to be offensive but sometimes i can't help but wonder if ben carson isn't actually an idiot savant, like the genuine article

They may also be waiting until more people are paying attention to make a big-tent, anti-Trump "you don't represent the sober, bipartisan, get-things-done, down-to-earth conservative values of this party!" type speech

I don't think any of them are waiting to give this speech tbh

I agree that at this point all these lower tier candidates are staying in cuz why shouldn't they. it's a war of attrition and no one's gonna drop out if they have functional organization + fundraising to keep going. they're all waiting for a bloodbath. what cues that bloodbath is probably going to be Iowa and New Hampshire but who knows.

Agree that it looks like no matter what happens there's going to be a lot of panicked horse-trading and delegate arm-twisting involved, dunno if Trump is actually smart enough to navigate that stuff.

i can see trump losing the primaries for precisely that reason, not running as a third party in general but forming some kind of dumb PAC or organization on the basis of "the GOP establishment screwed me out of the nomination" and becoming something like the whole sarah palin personality cult but writ larger and slightly longer lasting.

I think Rubio sees himself as the guy to give that speech. It would be disingenuous and cynical, but his brand claims he's the young, fresh face of a reinvigorated GOP for the 21st century and he's got to be looking for ways to cement that. He's not going to win by trying to out-Trump Trump or out-Cruz Cruz, but clearly anyone still backing Bush will be ready to leap to Rubio if Bush finally gives up, and if he looks like the last and best grownup in the room, he wins, especially if it turns out half the people who answer their phone and say "Trump" or "Carson" don't really show up to vote on primary day.

I personally think it's more likely that Carson voters 'ghost' in the end - Trump's people seem pretty fired up and eager to rub their guy in everybody's faces. If Carson - who is short on that GOTV ground-game stuff AFAICT - can't get his fans to show up, the distribution of votes cast will look really different from the distribution of people who answer their phones for a poll. Trump could easily lose Iowa and NH without anybody formally 'quitting' or anybody having to 'switch,' if the turnout belies the poll pools.

In no circumstance will Trump be able to wrangle delegates IMHO. The people not already supporting him know he's toxic and bad for the party, and do not want him to be the nominee. I really REALLY don't think we'd get to that point, but I also really think the non-Trump delegates would seriously choose anybody but Trump. Especially if he's "won" the primaries with 20-25% of delegates total and doesn't have any claim to a mandate from the party. At which point, yes, he'll become a permanent aggrieved "they stole the nomination from Trump" personality cult.

it's amazing to think that marco rubio, who looks and acts like a dimwitted boy scout troup leader, is now the go-to "adult in the room"

the 'clown car' analogy covered a lot more than the number of human beings in the car. it's a terrible slate of candidates tbh. if the GOP has really great people in the wings (???), they stayed home figuring (correctly so far, based on the polls) that presumed dem candidate hillary's numbers beat any republican you throw at her, so why bother even trying? who they got were the people both ambitious and clueless enough to try anyway. if trump hadn't shown up and taken all the air, the real story on this race would be how there's fourteen candidates and not one of them is exciting anybody.

a dimwitted boy scout troup leader

lol so otm

it seems like a lot of other years, there's some older GOP stalwart who runs just because this is his last best chance -- dole, mccain, whoever. there's nobody like that this year.

those guys are all dead

basically no one from the Dubya administration can run, the House leadership is hated, and the available governors are a joke. So yeah, it's like there's a generation missing.

sometimes i fantasize about some situation where these candidates are locked in a room for six hours with some journalist who really cuts to the marrow, and after the jive breaks down all you hear is the buzzing inside their heads as they begin to realize they have no idea who they are, why they really want this job, or what they would do once in it.*

*this is mostly true of the guys in the middle of the pack: your rubios and bushes. the really scary guys are some of the exceptions to this. i have no doubt that cruz could talk anyone's ear off with all the garbage i really do think he buys into.

**i feel like in this scenario, after a few minutes ben carson would start whistling and rubbing his belly.

Doctor Casino is mostly otm, but it's worth pointing out that Trump, Carson and Cruz combine to take 59% of the votes. Those are all anti-establishment candidates. I have a hard time seeing their votes going to Bush or Rubio.

great, those guys can go off and form their own party then

Trump's votes are probably largely Trump-specific, Carson's are Evangelicals who have found a nice dim man with a soul of blood and fire. They probably won't switch to each other, but Cruz obviously hopes to hoover both up.