Posted on 03/18/2016 7:32:49 AM PDT by Kaslin
For seven months, Republicans -- myself included -- have argued against the data. The data showed that Donald Trump would be a viable candidate. Many of us presumed he would eventually fade. Many of us presumed he would eventually burn out his supporters with his gaffes, waffling and walk backs.
What many of us misunderstood was Republican voter anger. There are a lot of angry people out there and they are flocking to Donald Trump. They have good reason to be angry. Washington politicians, particularly Republicans, have broken promise after promise. People in Washington seem to be doing quite well while the nation suffers.
Those of us who were skeptical of Trump could not comprehend that voters were so angry they would align with a man who actually has profited from the system the voters hate. But many of Trump's voters are perfectly fine with Trump as a flawed vessel, so long as he burns Washington to the ground, which they are convinced he will do. Ask a dozen Trump voters why they support Trump and you will get a dozen different answers. But each will end with a rebuke to Washington.
The problem now, as Trump appears more and more likely to be the Republican nominee, is the data. This time it is not Trump skeptics arguing about the data. It is Trump supporters doing so. They find themselves in the ironic position of arguing that the very same data set that showed Trump's rise also shows he cannot beat Hillary Clinton. They want the first half of the data to be true, while hoping the other half of the very same data is false.
The data does not work that way. The polls that showed Trump winning the Republican nomination also show that he cannot beat Clinton. In 19 of the 20 past polls, Trump consistently trailed Clinton by around eight points.
Certainly polling can change, but therein lies the rub for Trump. Trump performs remarkably well with blue-collar white men. He performs terribly with college educated white men, women of any background, black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters -- pretty much everyone other than blue-collar white men.
For Trump to make inroads with those voters, he risks alienating his core. If he wants to build a Hispanic coalition, he is going to have to walk away from his wall. If he walks away from his wall, he is going to see his voters walk away from him.
On top of that, only a quarter of voters in the polling believe Trump is trustworthy. In fact, Trump is actually the only candidate running for president viewed as less trustworthy than Clinton. On top of that, is the only candidate with higher unfavorable ratings than Hillary Clinton.
Beyond that, take the exit polling from North Carolina, Ohio, Florida and Missouri. All are swing states. The exit polling data from those states show that fully one-third of Republican voters would not vote for Trump in a general election. Of voters who rejected Trump so far, that number goes up to 40 percent of Republicans. Hillary Clinton has no such problem with the Democrats. Virtually all Democrats would support her in the general election.
Trump voters, to make a plausible case for him in November, have to now discard all the data they have used thus far to declare him a credible candidate. They have to ignore all the polling that Trump championed for so long himself. A Trump nomination will bring about a Hillary Clinton presidency.
Republicans face a problem. Because so many of their voters would not turn out to support Trump, they need a third party candidate if Trump is the nominee. Someone will have to run for president to motivate a Republican turn out, if only to get voters to show up for down ballot races. A Trump nomination does not just guarantee a Hillary Clinton presidency, but also makes it likely the GOP loses legislative seats at the state and national level.
Trump voters who disagree are only arguing with the very data that shows Trump will be the Republican nominee. The only way to avoid it is to avoid making Trump the Republican presidential nominee.
The polls may show Hillary leading Trump right now, but Trump has been playing his subterranean oppo game mostly against the contending Repugs so far. Once that field is cleared, he’ll shift his attention to undermining Hillary, and the polls will change fast.
Mittens: we all know Romney would beat Hillary. /s
“The trite “Trump only does well with uneducated white men” meme is utterly tiresome and threadbare. Give it a rest, Erick.
I observe how inner-city Hillary supporters work on Mars spacecraft and/or cures for cancer when not working hard at their 9-5 jobs”
It is well known that Hillary’s voters take their welfare checks and the money they made from crime to spend their leisure time perfecting fusion technology and solving inconsistencies in string theory.
Ericsson developed severe TDS after the spanking Trump administered to him this summer. I suspect he will never recover.
Lol, ‘bout sums it up. He’s a lost soul, preaching to his dogs who show up in all his twitter feeds. He’s a bloated know nothing hater. Add him to the growing pile of those I shall never ever listen to for sound reasoning again.
So Erickson spends the first paragraph or two acknowledging that he got it wrong with regard to Trump. So what does he do for the remainder of the article? Proceed with some humility in his predictions for the remainder of the race? Not in the slightest. He propounds his flawed analysis with the same arrogant certainty that he had when he was insisting Trump would drop out.
Cruz can get to 1237
Even Kasich can get to 1237 because there are more than 1237 delegates left.
Nope. There are not.
At this point, there are about 905.
I think this is a fair assessment of the situation:
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/03/presidential_primary_schedule.html
Trump currently has 678 delegates, 559 short of the number needed for the nomination. His closest rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, has 413 and Ohio Gov. John Kasich has 143. About 60 percent of all Republican delegates have been awarded so far, with Trump winning 47 percent of those. If that pace continues, Trump could end up about 100 delegates short of the 1,237 needed at the convention. To win the nomination outright, Trump needs to win more than 60 percent of the remaining delegates.
The previous pace of delegate percentage is a proper measure because of the remaining 19 states, 11 are winner take all, 3 are winner take most, 1 is direct election, and 4 are proportional. Prior to March 15, most were proportional and winner take most.
This was demonstrated on March 15, when with mostly winner-take-all delegates, Trump came away with about 250 of 400 or 63% that day. Cruz failed to take a single state. Kasich won’t win another state probably, and Trump is leading the polls in most of the remaining states, and especially in the large ones.
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