Who's your money on?Follow

He can't win the popular vote. He might, at best, get a plurality of votes. Maybe. But, as I've pointed out repeatedly, his negatives among the GOP are too high for him to get anywhere near a majority of voters. His only route to victory is to take advantage of the delegate award process to garner proportionately more delegates along the way than he actually has in voter support. And yes, the possibility of that happening does increase the longer the rest of the field remains divided. But by no means does he have anywhere near "popular support" among Republicans.

He also signed a pledge not to run 3rd party. Which may not matter at all to him, of course. And he's certainly trying to play up some kind of "I got back stabbed, so previous deals are off" angle. But the reality of his debate performance is that he just plain did poorly. He got rattled by the first actual serious attacks against him, and dropped his Republican mask and started speaking his own mind for once. And what came out was far left rhetoric. That was not lost on conservatives.

I kinda see Trump like that big bug alien in Men in Black, walking around in his Edgar suit, hoping no one notices that he's not really human. Trump is walking around in a Republican suit, hoping no one notices that he's not really a conservative. He let that disguise slip on Saturday. That's why he got booed so much. Not because the GOP was being unfair or something.

He got booed at because the RNC paid people to stand in the crowd and boo at him. --and you want to talk about wishful thinking. The clock is running out. Unless more voters who identify as conservative start to share your opinions on Donald Trump(and they won't), any hope they have of beating Hillary/Sanders is dust in the wind.

"Around 35%" isn't terribly accurate though. RCP numbers just a couple days ago (when I last looked) had him at 35%. Today it''s 33.5%. He was up like +17, and is up +15 today. Remember that those are rolling averages of a number of polls, not all of which gathered data only after the debate itself, and certainly not all after a few days of media coverage about said debate (which is where most of the impact usually occurs). I'd say that it definitely hurt him. How much in the short term versus long term? Hard to say.

People like me have been looking at Trump as a faux-conservative all along, but he's done a decent job at masking this to those who don't pay as much attention to politics. And maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but it's hard to imagine that there are many conservatives who failed to notice that he more or less repeated verbatim several arguments that were stock anti-Bush talking points of the Left from 10 years ago. Even one of my co-workers, who's not a conservative by any means, and is actually a Sanders fan (we've had some interesting "conversations" about his views on Wall Street, wealth, etc), was shocked by Trumps language in the debate. He more or less saw this as Trump unraveling (I think he even made some argument about the wheels coming off the bus). He couldn't believe that someone trying to run for the GOP nomination would say stuff like that.

I get that Trump's supporters are pretty staunch and whatnot, but at least some of those numbers have to be coming from normal Republicans, perhaps dissatisfied with their leaders of late, but who still hold to the ideals of conservatism. And while I can see some number of these people thinking Trump represents something new/fresh for the GOP, and are perhaps impressed by his brash countenance, but I can't believe that very many of those folks would think that he would actually represent them after what he said in that debate. He's been pretty clever and coy with his language up to now. But he totally lost that on Saturday. He more or less sounded like a liberal. And not a moderate liberal. He came off as being well to the left of Clinton on that stage. And that's kind of a problem for someone running for the GOP nomination.

People like you were certain how "astonishingly well" Romney was doing.

I'm only feeling the Bern!

We get it. It's why we constantly have to remind people about the importance of the ideological basis we operate on, and why this will result in better outcomes for everyone than simply separating ourselves into groups and pointing fingers at each other as the Democrats (and populists like Trump) do.



Sure. I don't doubt that. The problem is that they're supporting a guy who is more or less the poster child of the exact form of opportunistic capitalism that has most screwed them over in their lives. That's the freaking insane part. Trump has made most of his money (well, the parts he didn't inherit) by exploiting government regulations (or lobbying politicians to create them for him), and crash and burning businesses, never caring about those who worked in them, as long as in the end, it made him money. He has on several occasions dismissed allegations about the businesses he drove into bankruptcy by countering that "I have never gone bankrupt". It shows how self centered he is. It doesn't matter if other people lost money and lost jobs, as long as he had more money in his pocket in the end.

And that's who these people are championing? I think that's stupid.



Sure. It's called a populist message for a reason. What's strange is that they don't stop to think about how many job-sealing immigrants were likely working in the hotels and casinos and golf courses that are his preferred purchases. Trump cares about trade with China only to the degree that by talking about it, he can get foolish people to support him. He frankly knows even less about trade with China and how it actually affects business and jobs in the US.




Yeah. Again, those people don't normally vote in GOP primaries and likely not in the general either. You get that a set of people who historically feel disenfranchised by both parties likely also historically don't vote in general elections. See my whole point about how these people staying home likely doesn't affect GOP election math much, while young voters staying home massively affects Dem election math.

I get what you're saying, I just don't agree that it has much weight in the long term. It's easy to find groups of people who are angry and feel marginalized. And you can even sometimes get them to rally around someone with the right messaging. But that hardly represents a broad ideological shift in our political landscape. Trump's level of support among GOP voters is driven by two groups. The disenfranchised right leaning independents you mention above, who will support him pretty much no matter what, and some percentage of more rank and file GOP voters who see him as a strong candidate who may not be mainstream, but is "conservative enough", for them to support. That's the set that are going to shy away from him now, and that's the set he really needed to put him in a competitive position in the race. The outsiders coming in to support him just aren't a big enough faction by themselves to do it.

I'm calling it as Cruz, Trump then Rubio.

Tell me again why you think that's bad when Trump does it, but it's Super-Cool when Romney does it?

A week ago, I would have said Trump, Cruz and then Kasich. I believe the combination of attacking President Bush, attacking the Pope, proof of lying about the Iraq war with the lies from Ted Cruz will have an impact. However, I still believe Trump has a better chance of winning than not winning.

Or, you know, one of the other 10,000 things happening this week had an effect but I guess you were unaware that anything's happened since the debate

Well, the only reason to really care about "hurt" is if it's costing him the election. Look, if you want to feel better by saying that Trump will sweep 60 delegates in SC by 15 points instead of 18 points because of the debate, go for it.

Edited, Feb 19th 2016 8:13pm by Jophiel

In S. Carolina, probably not much. That's Baptist and Evangelical country. If we were about to vote in Massachusetts it might matter.

Honestly, if anything, the Pope thing has kinda helped him. Most people (yes, even conservatives) overwhelmingly poll that the Pope was wrong to say what he said about Trump. Of course, that polling is the result of some pretty amazingly poor reporting of what the Pope actually said, but that doesn't mater, since the same misreporting that might affect the poll results will presumably affect people's election choices (at least to the degree it might anyway).

Hint. The Pope didn't say Trump wasn't a Christian. And he didn't say that anyone who proposes building a wall along the border is not a christian. He said that anyone who thinks only of building walls and not of building bridges is not a christian. He was being pretty metaphorical in the statement. But never underestimate the media's desire to sensationalize.

You didn't build that!