Good post.
Looking forward to this one.
He’s right, the punditry has been wrong all along. The issues that resonate with the public are in plain sight, but politicians (and pundits) from both sides have dismissed them as irrelevant for decades: fear of a son going off and dying in a war, fear of being killed by some fanatic who just wants to sow terror, fear of losing a job because their company is shutting down the location where they work, fear that the government seems to keep spending more and more money, and the average person is getting less and less in return. Mostly fear that the American dream was being given and sold away to the highest bidder.
A lot of fear in there, and the source of most of that fear is a political class that refuses to acknowledge or listen to that fear.
This year there were a handful of candidates on the Republican side and a single socialist on the Democrat side that listened to the fears of the people.
Donald Trump has been brilliant in his use of short, tight messaging to connect with millions of people without using traditional methods. He has been brilliant in his control of news cycles and his ability to use his celebrity to get free air time.
He isn’t the perfect candidate, but he is the perfect candidate for this election. He has been dealt good cards, but more importantly, he has known how to bet and how to play his hands.
He has a 0-0 political record, and he is going up against someone who is 1-1. While he hasn’t run a campaign to the end before, Clinton botched her coronation in 2008 after winning her Senate seat in an unimpressive manner.
(Yes, she did win her seat 67% to 31%, a 36% margin, in 2006, but that was a year where the Democrats picked up 5 seats in the Senate and did not lose a single incumbent in the House. In 2004, Schumer won his New York Senate seat 71% to 24%, a 47% margin, in a year where the GOP took control of the Senate by flipping 4 seats, including knocking Tom Daschle out of his seat.)
So both Trump and Clinton are neophytes who haven’t run in hard races against an opposing party nominee before.
Hillary melted in her nomination bid against Obama, and Obama was fairly nice to her compared to what we have seen Trump is capable of doing and saying about his opponents. If Trump gets under her skin, we will see how tough she can be.
The real problem is the media. CNN, in particular, has given up all pretense they are not in the can for Hillary. On Facebook, CNN is essentially running free kiss-ass political commercials for Hillary, pretending it is “news.”
What worries me is Hillary is going to instruct the media to stop covering Trump and only cover her, and we are going to have a de facto news blackout on any coverage other than Hillary as the anointed one.
Trump was always Clinton’s worst nightmare.
And it’s just going to get worse.
That is a lot of words to say not very much.
“To really do this well, though, people should be looking for arguments as to why the outcome they dislike will happen – a quest that is, admittedly, made more difficult by the fact that no one, right or left, is actually making such arguments.”
His journey is leading him in the right direction. He is asking the right question now. In other words, he’s asking for arguments supporting Trump’s path to victory.
The same arguments that I had posted on my home page here and tag line 18 months ago (it was for a generic candidate then - and then morphed into Trump once he was ran). It simply was based on the 2014 Texas results, where an election that was supposed to at least be close, if not a Democrat win (remember Wendy Davis) instead turned into a GOP blowout, at all levels of government. The same was repeated throughout the South.
And what happened here was very simple: Whites voted, in HUGE MAJORITIES, for the Republican candidate. And white voters are still at least 60% of the electorate in every state in the South (Hispanics voted strongly Republican too, about 40%, - which should have given the Dems some clues that they were really off the grid in the left-wing direction). The white vote was between 75% and 87% Republican. It was simply way too much to overcome with special interests.
So now apply this to the Rust Belt and a bunch of other toss-up and light blue states, which are substantially more white that the South (as the south has much higher minority percentages) - and you don’t need 75-87% of the white vote, just 65%. At that level states like PA, MI, and WI come into play, and other states that already toss-ups, like Ohio, and many smaller states, move strongly towards our side.
But it takes a candidate that RESPECTS white voters, rather than thinking there’s no point in spending time on them, as they have nowhere else to go (especially with Obama, then Hillary, on the ticket). So the overwhelming concern of white voters, IMMIGRATION, is virtually ignored. In 2008, after 2 runs of leading the Senate in getting Bush’s huge Amnesty passed - the Republicans run McCain, almost to spit in our faces. In 2012, after Obamacare passes (another huge issue for white voters), the Republicans run Romney, the only candidate to actually implemented a version of Obamacare. And in 2016, after another run at Amnesty, we were supposed to nominate Jeb, who thought it was a great idea.
So 16 candidates line up in the footsteps of McCain/Romney, all with at least shady political histories, if not outright hostility towards white voters, and all of them go by the same playbook - which is the one from 2008/2012 - which is to throw some red meat to the base, but privately suck-up to the donors and the people that run the party (same types of people) - remember Scott Walker ‘privately’ saying he was for Amnesty, but publicly saying the opposite (too bad for him he didn’t consider the concept of the ‘recording device’). Then came Trump, and he did two things - he told the people that run the party to shove it, and he effectively told white voters (and anyone else interested in keeping this country safe and prosperous), that he had their backs. He’s the first national candidate to do that since Reagan and he’s in the process of getting Reagan’s results.
And what is saddest of all - is that Republican leadership had to have known this would happen THE ENTIRE TIME. For, to this day, even with Trump now pulling ahead (and it hard to see Hillary getting a bounce after this week’s spectacle), the GOPe STILL REFUSES to support him. Earlier on the reason was that he could never win - now he clearly can win - and since we’re past the primaries, there is absolutely no way that anyone could replace Trump without Trump’s voters walking and taking down the entire party. They know that - and yet THEY PRESS ON, both at National Review and Weekly Standard - writing article after article on just what a horrible person Trump is. Obviously, their ONLY GOAL now is to install Hillary (since it will either be Trump or Hillary). They may deny it, but that is their goal. They don’t even care what happens to the Supreme Court (and the lower courts). They are simply HELL-BENT on handing the country to Hillary.
But back to Trump. His real path to victory, the white, working class, voters, wasn’t created by him - it was created by the Democrats going hard-core left, leaving those whites blowing in the wind. And the only reason the Dems still managed to win was that the Republican Party simply REFUSED to make a play for them. Trump saw that. It was noted in poll a few days ago that Trump is now up 62-23% among white, non-college educated, voters (and that includes women in that class). White, non-college, voters, until quite recently, WAS THE DEMOCRAT BASE - that’s where Democrats drew their strength from (since minorities didn’t vote much in the past). But the Dems left them, the Republicans wouldn’t pick them up (since, I guess, that would be racist), and they were more than ready for Trump.
So that’s the story - and maybe this guy will finally get there - particularly if he comes to this site.
Having just completed a Ph.D thesis, I have a bit more to say:
If the people opposed to Trump, on all sides, figured that he would do as they ‘predicted’, which was never make it to the next step, much less to where he is, then why didn’t they simply laugh him off as a buffoon and simply ignore him? Why, instead, did they IMMEDIATELY go after him with a vengeance (think of Megan Kelly shooting her blood at the first debate)? After all, Trump was at 2% immediately after he announced - the Republicans had 16 candidates, and the Republican voters were happy with the choice (at least I was...and I think others were too). There was no reason to worry about Trump - he was a late-comer, had a shady past, had virtually no support from Republican voters...he would be on his silly 757 right back to NYC in a week.
The answer to that is that they actually KNEW Trump was moving into an area he could ride right into the White House (again, the white, working class - roughly 35% of the electorate).
And so the reason for their non-stop ‘predictions’ of Trump collapsing (which, by their actions, they knew wasn’t true), was to try INFLUENCE Republican voters into not supporting him. They were playing mind games with us - telling us that we were betting on a losing horse...hoping that would get us to bet elsewhere. Thankfully we called their bluffs.
Interesting post. Krauthammer instantly recognized the trap that Trump laid for Hillary in his brief statement - and that her campaign marched right into it. Donald Trump has been living inside Hillary’s OODA loop for weeks, and nobody knows how to fight him.