Donald Trump for President?

Bernie might not care about those damn e-mails, but Trump attacks and attacks, regardless if it's true, and it leaves an impact. He also has all the money he wants to spend.

Trump's trick is saying "I keep getting calls saying (whatever he wants them to 'say') and other things that can't be proved.

Yeah, on the rare occasion when someone tries to verify this sort of thing, they basically never can. If he mentions anyone by name, they'll almost always say he's just flat-out making it up. Sometimes he slips up and says something that can be demonstrably disproven, like about his polls. Really tells you how highly he thinks of his supporters that he assumes they won't spend 30 seconds Googling the veracity of that stuff.

And a bit more on the polls:


The idea that people need to accept this walking electoral disaster is ridiculous. There's no argument for it from principles or pragmatism.

What bet? I said he was ahead in one poll and he is. This poll.


https://mediarelations.gwu.edu/ameri...tleground-poll


I went direct to the source, which is why you don't get a headline that highlights that. The report focusing on the three percent difference between Clinton. and Trump came from THE HILL. What is relevant about it is it's a recent poll and may show Trump narrowing his gap. I emphasize may because we don't have other polls yet verifying that. But all the previous polls showing a wider gap are older polls. There is also a recent poll showing Trump has for the first time the support of fifty percent of Republicans. So this poll may be consistent with that. But honestly, even if he currently has an actual three percent gap, I suspect it's a brief spurt. But it is interesting if his poll numbers are that fluid.

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I'm not a Republican. At this point I don't plan to vote, but if I did I would vote for Hillary Clinton. But I've said this before here. I would much rather the Republican Party nominate Cruz to put to rest the notion the reason the party has been losing is because they nominate RINOS. So nominate Cruz and let's see what happens. I think in a general election he is going to be a disaster, too. Cruz's problem is he is generally unpleasant and far to the right. Trump's problem he is all bluster and he has a big mouth. He has the potential to moderate somewhat for the general, but he is too undisciplined to likely do it. Cruz is stuck with being who he is. I think if he got the nomination his negative numbers would rise to Trump levels. The Republican Party has got Hobson's Choice at this point. The two front runners for the nomination are the two worst to go against Hillary Clinton. Even Jeb Bush would have had a better stab at it than those two. Cruz has pretty much collapsed after his Wisconsin win. If he is doing that badly among Republicans, how can he beat Hillary Clinton in a general election? Yes, they were blue and purple states, but that's where he has to beat her. Hillary was never going to take a red state.


How am I trolling when many Republican commentators are also saying it's over? Most of them don't sound happy about it, but they see the writing on the wall. I didn't say it was over last week. But look what happened this Tuesday. Trump swept five states in the fifty percent plus range and Cruz and Kasich were total non factors.

I think you mean barely losing in one poll, rather than "ahead." Regardless, the point is that there are fifty polls which show him losing, most by much more, so for the moment this is a pretty substantial outlier.

I'm not suggesting that you can't or shouldn't post this, but this is exactly the kind of things a candidate's supporters do: they post newsworthy things, but express their inclinations in what they choose not to post with them. Skim your last few posts: they're mostly indistinguishable from someone who likes him/wants him to win.

That's perfectly fine, except that you're basically giving "advice" to a part you don't support that, surprise surprise, happens to coincide with what most neutral observers think is most likely to lead them to lose. It's a lot like Republicans cheering on Bernie Sanders because they know he'll be easier to defeat.

Not trolling, concern trolling. Concern trolling is using the guise of genuine concern for one's ideological opponents as an excuse to criticize them. IE: "I'm really concern about X in Y party." Usually, the person saying it isn't really concerned at all, they're just couching it that way to seem less partisan.

I am very glad to see Hillarys chances are better than I thought. ......whew!

I have said plenty of negative things about Trump. I do try to analyze his chances. From week to week they may change a little bit. My take on him does appear to be somewhat different than yours. I find him greatly amusing and not terribly dangerous. I also don't think he will do great harm to the Republican Party. He'll probably lose with no lasting effects. He's created a following from sheer personality. It doesn't have anything to do with ideology. Trade wars, no GOP politician talks about that except him. My point of the GOP accepting Trump at this point is this. He is either going to win outright or get real close. You try to stop him with that momentum it will be a mess. Cruz no longer has a case he is the stronger candidate. It is time for the GOP to accept the inevitable and unite behind the only one who isn't mathematically eliminated. That way instead of having a convention battle the time can be spent to praise the virtues of Trump. A lot of Republicans still won't support Trump, but that will be an individual decision. The party has to unite behind Trump because he is the only game in town now. When he loses, they can move on because he won't be hanging around the party. He'll be gone. He doesn't care about it. He isn't the Koch Brothers trying to shape the GOP to their image of what it should be He isn't going to create any PACS to support candidates that share his America First manifesto.. The argument he is more of a drag on congressional races than Cruz I don't buy. The party will be more split if Cruz is selected at a brokered convention after his dismal Tuesday lost. That will infuriate Trump supporters. Cruz supporters will just be disappointed.

Yeah, I'm not surprised that someone who votes against Republicans would have a skewed view of the kind of damage this would do to the party. It's the same reason you don't think much of the attacks on Kasich.

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I find the cottage industry of "advice" offered to political opponents to be faintly ridiculous. On the rare occasions where it's even genuine, it usually fails to understand the party and what it cares about, which is why it's so easy for someone in that position to dismiss this as NBD.

How you lose matters. What you lose fighting for matters.

You can see, like anyone else, that Trump's supporters will be upset if he doesn't win. What you seemingly can't see (because you're not one of them) is how actual conservatives will feel if he is. And I daresay conservatives are probably the future of the Republican party.

So Cob just outed himself as a Trump supporter, and I'm feeling really disheartened. I feel like I'm missing something. How can someone who I always found really smart and intuitive be a Trump fan?

I actually wasn't sure if that was serious or not.

I posted something earlier about how I thought I could construct a hypothetical argument for Trump that an intelligent, thoughtful person could be persuaded by. It was some version of "yes he's awful, but the system is irrevocably broken and this is the best option for fundamentally changing it." I find that unpersuasive and overly despondent for all sorts of reasons, but it's something I can disagree with while still understanding. So...maybe that?

Select the text in white under the picture I posted.

COBPYTH!!!! This is serious business, you can't go tricking us all like that.

Felt like trolling.

On a more serious note, though. I think, like Yoda kind of said, people are probably feeling like the world can just as well burn for a few years for only being able to produce someone like Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz as Trump's only legitimate opponents during this race.

It's maddening that there aren't any better options left.

Wheres this pic you guys are talking about?

It's in the election thread that was bumped today.

Conservatism isn't the future of the Republican party. It is the Republican Party. But what kind of conservatism? Tea Party conservatism, which has now split itself into the Donald Trump camp and the Cruz camp, or the libertarian part, which is another smaller split in the Tea Party? Or the social conservatives, which lately have been clashing with business conservatives with anti gay legislation at the state level, and is also in conflict with the fierce anti immigration wing. The neocon wing, which currently doesn't have a horse with neither Trump or Cruz being one (Kasich, I don't know what he is on foreign affairs)?. They used to be able to co-exist with each other to some extent, but no longer. So it is simplistic to say conservatism is the GOP's future. And with Trump's popularity we find large segments of the Republican Party aren't buying large segments of the party's mantra. So it is simplistic to say conservatism is the party's future. This year is hopeless and nothing can be done about it because it is either Trump or Cruz, both very divisive candidates. After last Tuesday there is no believable scenario that the party can nominate Cruz with so many Republican voters resoundingly rejecting him and his radical conservatism. Cruz's conservatism (bring back the gold standard?) definitely is not the future.. Trump will be nominated and most likely lose, then comes the hard part, rebuilding the party to something that can win presidential elections. They will have to rebuild no matter who they nominate as the standard bearer this year. Trump is not responsible for the debacle the party is facing. The Republican Party is. The Republican Party's coalition was cracking up before he got into the picture. He's just exploiting it. Look what's going in the House. What a mess that is. That's not Trump's fault. It's all Republicans, and all conservatives, fighting with each other unable to agree on a budget.

It would be simplistic to say any one of those types of conservatism is the future of the GOP, but that's the whole point: Trump is almost none of them. He's sorta-kinda conservative in maybe one way, and blatantly unconservative in nearly all others.

Rebuilding after a loss with someone perceived as "too conservative" is a lot easier than rebuilding with someone who isn't a real conservative at all. We know because it happened already with Goldwater. Putting a clear ideology out there and losing with it has long-term benefits, particularly if the person you lose to has problems. That advantage doesn't exist if you nominate some weird ideological chimera.

This isn't about winning in 2016, in all likelihood. It's about losing the best way. And there's really no plausible future Republican party that looks anything like Trump.

How can it look like Trump when there isn't one Republican politician who endorses trade wars, which is the main issue where he differs from other Republicans? If he loses, that is the best way to discredit his platform. If Cruz wins and loses badly, he discredits his brand of conservatism. When Goldwater lost, who was nominated four years later, Richard Nixon, a mainstream Republican.. Ronald Reagan, the next Barry Goldwater, sixteen years later, had two things going for him Goldwater didn't, charisma that transcended ideology and running against an extremely unpopular president during bad economic times and the Iran hostage crisis. The best way to get Donald Trump mania out of the Republican Party is let him run and lose. He will be a non factor after that.

There are a few issues with that:

First, getting Trump (and Trumpism, for lack of a better term) out of the GOP isn't the only concern. Nominating at least semi-respectable candidates sends powerful signals to the electorate. Cruz would probably lose, but Trump has the ability to taint the party's brand in an entirely different way.

Second, you say Trump losing would purge the party of this, but that's not a given. Already we see both Trump and his supporters making preemptive excuses for his loss. He'll have no reason to accept blame, and every reason to deflect it and try to retain what influence he can. Literally nothing about my interactions with Trump supporters suggests that they're prepared to reflect and genuflect on an electoral loss, even by a substantial margin.

Third, you've already made an argument going the other way: if Cruz loses, it incentivizes the GOP to nominate someone more moderate next time. A Trump loss doesn't really incentivize the party against doing anything it could have plausibly done anyway. Pretty easy to imagine Cruz using it in four years as another example of the dangers of nominating a RINO, because Trump is one of the few Republicans to who that term actually applies. So not only does nominating Trump stop this from happening, it actually seems likely to reinforce it. Which means with Trump, you might have to nominate someone like Cruz anyway, and now you've potentially thrown away two elections.

And fourth, you can't talk about the dangers of upsetting Trump supporters while disregarding the dangers of upsetting conservatives. And primary results aside, there are still far more conservatives in the party than there are Trump supporters. I don't think this genie slides right back into the bottle.

Also, whatever division exists on the GOP side is largely a byproduct of its success: it's been dominant in literally every area other than the Presidency. Especially at the local level. It's one of the natural checks that stops any party from retaining dominance for too long, in either party. The more people you fit into your tent, the less elbow room there is inside.

The Democrats have plenty of problems, but their lack of viable options and superdelegate-centric primary system makes them less noticeable. Looking at the massive demographic divide, though, and the similarities between Sanders and Trump on key issues, and it's going to be a real problem. You say Trumpism is going to go away after he loses, but there's no way Sanders' brand of progressivism (or something a lot like it) is.

How can you act like you know there's 'this one reason you support him'? Probably bc it fits into what you want to do here and talk down on anyone who supports the candidate you want to kill. Honestly i think your whole slant here is super a$$hole. I've been in the middle of Finals week, so i haven't had time to solve the entire riddle of the 2016 campaign. Does that mean i should be talked down at? Apparently so.

Trump does fund his own campaign WAY more than the other candidates. Link. And yes, that is important to me. It's not the only part that's important though, even if you want to make it sound that way. This has been a great campaign season, i wish all of them were like this