Donât forget the influence of social media which have you think that Donald Trump was hated over there. âOh John Oliver (watched by less than 2% of Ordinary Americans) made a video slagging Trump, heâs done for now!â.
I was in the States a few times in the last year and they are looking for an outsider, not a âpoliticianâ. The young social media warriors think they have a real influence, no doubt butteresed by Obama being elected and then thinking they were responsible (when it was really his traditional messaging to traditional voters that got him in). People have voted for Trump and Sanders for economic reasons. Hillary has legacy voters because of Bill and her gender. The middle class with their wages suppressed, the low wages earners- thatâs who youâre appealing to.
Maybe if they put a few more fucking rainbows on the ballot papers the social media millennials would have come out. Iâm convinced even if the Micks who share Bernieâs latest escapade could vote they wouldnât bother. A useless generation.
I was having a root canal done the day before the 2008 election and the dentist spent a good five or six minutes before it telling me why McCain was going to beat Obama. I at first disagreed, citing the consistent trend of the opinion polls, but ended up pretending to agree with him out of boredom.
The Republicans already win the white male vote. The problem is that anti-immigrant rhetoric has destroyed their appeal to the non-white vote, which is 30% of the electorate at this point. George W Bush squeaked past Kerry because he won 40% of the Latino vote. Trump is going to get slaughtered in that demographic. But like I said before, his biggest problem is massive unpopularity with female voters, the biggest voting block there is. He is going to lose that vote by margins that could be historic.
Even with Clintonâs unpopularity, the odds are much higher that Trump will be crushed than they are that he will win. Heâs a weak candidate.
An impressive display of data mining, although the conclusion is based on blatant cherry picking. I never said Trump couldnât win the Republican nomination, in fact I am pretty sure I have been consistent in warning he could, but concede that I had him in the unelectable category in the general election early on.
The biggest flaw in your otherwise impressive analysis was ignoring the caveat given in the second quote above; âTrump could win if the electorate is angry enoughâ. This is what has come to pass, and by November there will be a lot more angry folks as the recession takes hold.
Trump has the lowest favourability ratings of any Presidential candidate in the history of such polls, which go back to the time of World War II.
If I was looking for historical precedents as to how this election may go, it wouldnât be 1964, it would be the French presidential election of 2002, when a huge majority voted for the the widely disliked Jacques Chirac as the least worst option against Jean Marie Le Pen, although clearly the margin for Hillary Clinton will be considerably closer.
Thereâs enough stuff out there to paint Trump as a Jean Marie Le Pen-type character, if he hasnât been painted as one already, and I expect his brand to be utterly toxic by October.
Fox news radio are creaming themselves today over some Romanian lad who says he hacked hillaryâs email,his trial wonât be starting till the end of September for some strange reason
Thereâs no comparison. Chirac was running for a second term and the French economy was relatively strong at the time. The surprise was that the run off was between Chirac and Le Pen, and not Jospin, which demonstrates how out of favor the left were at the time more than how popular the far right were.
Having lived in the US for many election cycles, there are essentially two simple factors that truly matter, the economy and charisma. Bush lost in 1992 because the economy had entered recession and Clinton was more charismatic, Clinton was reelected because the economy was doing fine in 1996, W was elected because Gore had the personality of a stone (the economy had not started to go downhill until after the election), Bush was reelected because the economy was in recovery mode in 2004 and Kerry was an oaf, Obama was elected and reelected because the financial crisis crashed the economy and he exuded charisma compared to his rivals.
I agree with everyone here that in a strong economy Hillary wins in a canter. However, the primary reason Trump is so popular is the economy is shit for most people, 7 years into a ârecoveryâ. If it comes down to charisma Trump wins hands down, as Clinton has the charisma of a rottweiler.
And to close the loop on that, Reagan is still viewed by many conservative baby boomers in mid-west states as the âgreatest president in their lifetimeâ. They completely overlook (or most likely are ignorant to) his foreign policy or the fact that he was an evil cunt that facilitated secret genocidal wars by funnelling money and weapons into death squads in independent Central American countries. He had as much blood on his hands as any other American president, and quite possibly more.
The smart vote is to not vote.