Posted on 09/12/2015 5:49:05 AM PDT by BobL
1) Trump has a single-spaced, 6 page, policy paper on immigration, yet others complain that he has no specifics. What are they offering – some vague promise to “secure the border”, perhaps by adding more ‘sensors’, as if sensors stop vehicles and illegals.
2) The GOP leadership has been DEMANDING that its candidates reach people outside of its white, male, conservative, base. Trump is polling better with women than men. Trump is at 25% of the black vote, the highest for a national Republican in at least 2 generations. Trump is holding his ground with Hispanics. Trump is defeating all potential Democrat opponents. And Trump is pulling in white Democrats, who see him as providing blue collar jobs, rather than food stamps.
3) The GOP leadership response to the above - TRUMP MUST BE DEFEATED.
4) The lowest percentage of the Hispanic vote that any Republican, short of David Duke, will ever get is about 30%. The highest, 45% - it takes a perfect campaign to get to those higher numbers and it is virtually impossible to reach that number without angering huge numbers of white voters (ask Jeb).
5) Romney got 59% of the white vote in 2012, while getting only 30% of the Hispanic vote. If he got 61% of the white vote, it would have been just as many extra votes as instead hitting 45% of the Hispanic vote . Trump is already there, as he's giving white, working class, people a reason to support him.
6) Most Hispanic voters are in states that have pre-defined outcomes. The largest of them being California, New York, Texas, and Illinois. Republicans won Texas by 20 points in 2014 and did nothing to pander to Hispanics - Texas is not going blue for a very long time. California, New York, and Illinois are solid Democrat states - increasing the Hispanic vote for Republicans in those states is not going to flip them. Florida is the only competitive major state with a large number of Hispanics and most of them are Cubans, which have voting patterns completely different than other Hispanics.
7) The natural base of the Democrat Party are blacks first, and then other minorities. In total, Democrats get 80-85% of this natural base (85% for Obama, due to his 94% black support). The natural base of the Republican Party are whites. Of these, Republican candidates rarely exceed 60%.
8) Looking at the above numbers, a reasonable question for a Republican leader to ask might be why are Republicans getting such a low share of the vote from their natural base, when there is so much room for improvement there, and considering that whites are still more than 70% of American voters. But it is never, ever, asked. Instead Republican leaders DEMAND that Republican candidates get higher percentages of minority votes (and then when Trump shows 25% of the black vote, they demand he be defeated). It’s not very hard to understand why the Republican base DESPISES the Republican leadership. If I were in that leadership, I would try very hard to accommodate Trump, as his people are in no mood to lose another election by running Jeb, or Walker, or Carly, or Carson.
9) Republicans will never reach the Democrat levels of 80-85% of their natural base (i.e., white voters) due to a large number of sub-groups that are solid in their opposition to conservatism (gays, college-age socialists, for example), but if the Republicans had reached just 70% in 2012, Romney's 4 point loss in that election would have been a 14 point landslide for him, as whites still comprised almost 74% of the voting populace that year.
10) While it is true that the white percentage of the vote has been and will continue to decline into the future (as the Republican Party finds itself unable to stop lecturing us on that point), raising the Republican percentage of the white to 70% will still mean Republican victories for the next 20 years. How about trying to win in the short term, for once, before worrying about things to come 30 years in the future? It really doesn’t help to have a plan that starts (maybe) providing victories in 30 years, when there is no country left to govern.
11) And speaking of the white vote, Republicans did win 75% to 89% of the white vote in the South in 2014 (percentages varied by state), and while whites in the south are certainly more conservative than elsewhere, 70% as a national target is not unreasonable. As a side note, Republicans also won 40-45 of the Hispanic vote in the South - not by pandering for Open Borders and Amnesty, but by calling for a secure border and promising jobs for Hispanics. It is certainly possible to win high numbers of both white and Hispanic votes at the same time - providing you give the people something to vote for.
12) There is no assurance that Amnesty is a winning issue for Republicans. I doubt anyone has bothered to do the necessary research (certainly Frank Luntz hasn't), but I suspect that for every Hispanic vote flipped from Democrat to Republican because of support for Amnesty, 5 white Republican voters stay home. That was certainly the case in 2005 and 2006 when President Bush, McCain, and most of the Republican leadership made their hardest push every for Amnesty. By the time the midterm elections came around in November 2006, Republicans were fed up and stayed home, while Reid and Pelosi coasted to LANDSLIDE victories in their respective chambers of Congress.
13) Speaking of 2006, that was the year that the "Secure Fence Act of 2006" was passed by Congress, AUTHORIZING 700 miles of border fencing. Virtually none of that got built. So instead of attacking Trump for saying that he wants to complete that fencing (and more), why aren't the Republicans telling us why they NEVER BUILT THAT WALL? That fencing certainly had more support that Obama's executive Amnesty and Obamacare, yet those programs seem to be unstoppable. In fact, if the Republican leadership really wanted to slow Trump down a bit, they could include the fencing in their 2016 budget, and take away Trump’s main talking point (I know, I know, don’t given them ideas for defeating Trump…but I also know they would NEVER listen to this suggestion).
14) The people here, and elsewhere, that are convinced that Trump is lying to us and will turn against us, should he actually win, are the SAME PEOPLE that have pushed other Republican politicians on us that have double-crossed us, with Rubio being the best example. He ran in 2010 promising border security, but the first chance he had, he was front and center pushing Amnesty. It's hard to see Trump being any worse than Rubio. Even Bush-43 continually let the Republican base down after winning the top job twice, not to mention today's Congress rubber-stamping every priority of President Obama, despite being elected to stop him. If Republican officeholders had anything close to a decent track record of sticking to their campaign promises, Trump would have NOTHING to run on.
15) Even if Trump does wind up double-crossing us, he has still blown the lid off of the GOP leadership. Until Bush-43 opened up our Southern Border, the GOP leadership, more or less, supported the wishes of the GOP base. But now that the donors have tasted cheap labor, they simply WILL NOT permit the Republican Party to support a candidate that wants to go back to the old way (i.e., border security) - and the GOP leadership is doing everything in its power to give the donors what they want, and they could care less what the base thinks.
16) And don't forget that GOP leadership is paid by the fat-cat donors, and those donors want Open Borders and Amnesty. And while they would love to see Jeb win, their jobs are actually safer if Hillary/Biden wins, than if Trump wins. Be prepared for them to run a Third Party candidate next November to try to take votes away from Trump, so that the Democrat can win. That’s how bad things are with that bunch.
There are some very nice insights there, BobL. Thanks.
Well stated.
Trump is also forcing the GOPe to demonstrate just how corrupt they are with every attack they launch - they have all but abandoned supporting their actual candidates.
Matthew 10:36 could not be more relevant here.
Very nice summary, Bob. Thanks for posting.
Thanks guys - love this forum.
You too...
It not about Trump the man....
It’s about what he is saying. We at Free Republic have to defend A LOT of what he is saying about the borders, jobs, ISIS, etc...
The media and the Establishment want to make it about Trump the man and not about the ideas.
Any candidate that said many of the same things Trump is saying now would be very popular because THAT is what the American people want in spite of what radical leftist and the Establishment tells us.
Excellent insights Bob
He is also a good listener. He learns and that is obvious.
Another thing.
Trump is winning because he has outlined things he would like to do. A candidate cannot be too wonkish and win anymore. Attention spans are short and details bore people.
He always repeats his “make America Great Again” slogan all the time. This is a great tactic. The other side does that all the time. The GOP gets caught up in detail. That detail rarely happens in the way a candidate describes because they have no way of knowing what is going to throw that detail off track.
You saw people sleeping while Jeb talks? This is why. The GOPe and the MSM love to get candidates caught up in detail. The media never ask Rats detail and they never offer it. Yet they win and we do not.
The GOPe, MSM, RAT party are trying to derail Trump by trying to get him caught up in detail. If he doesn't deliver, then he isn't worthy by their opinion.
Another thing in closing, Trump likes the people. He never calls the American voters nasty names.
Did you notice that bobblehead Rick Perry exit speech? He pontificated that a candidate has to “listen to the grassroots”. Then he closes by calling the grassroots “nativists” and dividers of the country. That guy is a true jerk.
Kind of sums it up...
Interesting stats and very good thoughts, BobL. Thanks. How many - lowest information television engaged LITE - voters will see the name Trump on the ticket and vote for him?
bttt
These are some excellent strategic thoughts - well done.
These strategic thoughts need to be translated to and coordinated with state-by-state, precinct-by-precinct tactics. We need 270 electoral votes in November 2016.
In short, we need to fight the battle on every front.
God is in control.
I’ve been mulling over some of what you’ve written here too for the past months - thanx for actually writing it down! In short, the GOP, pundit class, US Chamber of Commerce, et al must in actuality, not, want to win. I see no other possible conclusion given Trump’s demographic pulls. Or, perhaps, in their twisted view they do win when the rank and file lose.
Maybe everyone should stop talking about Goldwater and Buckley as saints and look toward the Reagan landslides. The heartbeat of the country took on the elites and gibsmesumodat crowd and emerged YUGE! literally saving the country for another 40 years.
“Another thing in closing, Trump likes the people. He never calls the American voters nasty names.”
The STRONGEST MEMORY that I have from the 2008 campaign was when Rush played a clip from a McCain rally. The clip started with a DJ whose job it was to “warm up the crowd” for McCain. He did good job, firing up the people and saying, at the end something like: “Do we REALLY want a person named BARAK HUSSAIN OBAMA as our next president?” (saying Obama’s full name, slowly).
McCain then comes out and says something like: “We need to get past the divisiveness and name calling that my predecessor here just used to describe my opponent...”
Yea...that’s a winning strategy. Of course McCain then really let us know what he thinks of us by calling us “crazies” this time around. You’re right, Trump treats his supporters with RESPECT...and that seems to RARE for Republican candidates.
“Did you notice that bobblehead Rick Perry exit speech? He pontificated that a candidate has to “listen to the grassroots”. Then he closes by calling the grassroots “nativists” and dividers of the country. That guy is a true jerk. “
ABSOLUTELY. He was a good governor here in Texas because we had high oil prices and he had some good instincts when it came to the federal government (i.e., he kept clear of Common Core and the Obamacare Medicaid expansion - both moves by him were proven to be the right way to go).
But he also was a CREEP. He was owned by big business, he loved Open Borders, and he often had to have people beat the crap out him politically to stop his other crazy ideas (like shooting up little girls with Gardicil so they can wild and crazy sex starting in middle school, and turning our freeways into toll roads). The entire state was glad to see him go.
“How many - lowest information television engaged LITE - voters will see the name Trump on the ticket and vote for him?”
Perhaps quite a few. His high numbers with black voters have been attributed by some to the respectful way he treated blacks on his shows.
If that helps get votes, more power to him.
Excellent analysis, as usual, BobL. Thanks.
Legal immigrates and their children oppose amnesty. Only radical LaRaca types, Marxist Democrats and the Chamber of Commerce donor class want amnesty. The first two groups seek the destruction of the USA and the third is just greedy for cheap labor.
“If that helps get votes, more power to him.”
Exactly. Some LITE voters may not even think on that level…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_9hfHvQSNo
Trump cuts across a lot of demographics.
HOORAY Trump
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