Battle for the White House RCP Poll Averages
(Note how ridiculous that 43% outlier is)
Softening!
Voters are paying attention now!
| National | Iowa | New Hampshire |
|---|---|---|
Trump27.5 | Trump25.5 | Trump26.6 |
Carson19.8 | Carson20.3 | Rubio12.0 |
Rubio12.5 | Cruz17.3 | Cruz10.0 |
Cruz11.3 | Rubio11.8 | Carson9.8 |
Bush5.5 | Bush4.8 | Bush7.6 |
(Note how ridiculous that 43% outlier is)
Softening!
Voters are paying attention now!
Battle for the White House RCP Poll Averages
National Iowa New Hampshire
(Note how ridiculous that 43% outlier is)
Softening!
Voters are paying attention now!
this will just be another instance where Vit was right and you will move to the next fringe talking point.
The more people pay attention the worse it gets for trump. Pray for Rubio
When you have a poll with a sample of at least 1000, come back and post your infantile knockout bullshit. Reuters uses samples in the low 100s, so volatile results like this will happen.
Trump has been in the steady 30s across the board for MONTHS.
In the meantime...
Trump beats Hitlery
Cruz beats Hitlery
Let me know when you're ready for your lifetime ban bet.
If there is a G-d, PLEASE be Cruz. Cruz plays the insane base like a fiddle.
The idiots that will accept a lifetime ban bet if it's Cruz will clean the garbage out of this place. Only sane right of center conservatives will remain(I'm lookin at you, Trends), along with normal moderates and liberals.
The idiots that will accept a lifetime ban bet if it's Cruz will clean the garbage out of this place. Only sane right of center conservatives will remain(I'm lookin at you, Trends), along with normal moderates and liberals.
Black Pastors Expected to Endorse Donald Trump
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/fir...ack-pastors-expected-to-endorse-donald-trump/
Mr. Scott, who said he was a registered Democrat who had voted for President Obama, said that he had been impressed by Mr. Trump as a leader and that he liked his ideas for improving the economy. He said that when he closed his eyes and listened to all the candidates, he found Mr. Trump to be the most appealing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If Trump is the nominee, Democrats are going to get absolutely slaughtered!
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/fir...ack-pastors-expected-to-endorse-donald-trump/
Mr. Scott, who said he was a registered Democrat who had voted for President Obama, said that he had been impressed by Mr. Trump as a leader and that he liked his ideas for improving the economy. He said that when he closed his eyes and listened to all the candidates, he found Mr. Trump to be the most appealing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If Trump is the nominee, Democrats are going to get absolutely slaughtered!
ointer:Now for someone who knows what he's talking about re: polls, as opposed to Casper:
[h=1]Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls[/h]By NATE SILVER
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump after speaking Saturday in Birmingham, Alabama.
ERIC SCHULTZ / AP
Lately, pundits and punters seem bullish on Donald Trump, whose chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination recently inched above 20 percent for the first time at the betting market Betfair. Perhaps the conventional wisdom assumes that the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris will play into Trump’s hands, or that Republicans really might be in disarray. If so, I can see where the case for Trump is coming from, although I’d still say a 20 percent chance is substantially too high.
Quite often, however, the Trump’s-really-got-a-chance! case is rooted almost entirely in polls. If nothing Trump has said so far has harmed his standing with Republicans, the argument goes, why should we expect him to fade later on?
One problem with this is that it’s not enough for Trump to merely avoid fading. Right now, he has 25 to 30 percent of the vote in polls among theroughly 25 percent of Americans who identify as Republican. (That’s something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.) As the rest of the field consolidates around him, Trump will need to gain additional support to win the nomination. That might not be easy, since some Trump actions that appeal to a faction of the Republican electorate may alienate the rest of it. Trump’s favorability ratings are middling among Republicans (andawful among the broader electorate).
Trump will also have to get that 25 or 30 percent to go to the polls. For now, most surveys cover Republican-leaning adults or registered voters, rather than likely voters. Combine that with the poor response rates to polls and the fact that an increasing number of polls use nontraditional sampling methods, and it’s not clear how much overlap there is between the people included in these surveys and the relatively small share of Republicans who will turn up to vote in primaries and caucuses.
But there’s another, more fundamental problem. That 25 or 30 percent of the vote isn’t really Donald Trump’s for the keeping. In fact, it doesn’t belong to any candidate. If past nomination races are any guide, the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their minds yet.
It can be easy to forget it if you cover politics for a living, but most people aren’t paying all that much attention to the campaign right now. Certainly, voters are consuming some campaign-related news. Debate ratings are way up, and Google searches for topics related to the primaries[SUP]1[/SUP] have been running slightly ahead of where they were at a comparable point of the 2008 campaign, the last time both parties had open races. But most voters have a lot of competing priorities. Developments that can dominate a political news cycle, like Trump’s frenzied 90-minute speech in Iowa earlier this month, may reach only 20 percent or so of Americans.
We can look deeper into the Google search data for some evidence of this. In the chart below, I’ve tracked the aggregate share of primary-related searches in the 2008 and 2012 presidential cycles, based on the number of weeks before or after the Iowa caucuses.[SUP]2[/SUP] As you can see, public attention to the race starts out quite slow and only gradually accelerates — until just a week or two before Iowa, when it begins to boom. Interest continues to accelerate as Iowa, New Hampshire and the Super Tuesday states vote, before slowing down again once the outcome of the race has become clear.
To repeat: This burst of attention occurs quite late — usually when voters are days or weeks away from their primary or caucus. At this point in the 2012 nomination cycle, 10 weeks before the Iowa caucuses, only 16 percent of the eventual total of Google searches had been conducted. At this point in the 2008 cycle, only 8 percent had been. Voters are still in the early stages of their information-gathering process.
[h=2]When should you start paying attention to the polls?[/h]
But maybe you don’t trust the Google search data. That’s OK; exit polls likethis one have historically asked voters in Iowa and New Hampshire when they made their final decision on how to vote. These exit polls find that voters take their sweet time. In Iowa, on average, only 35 percent of voters had come to a final decision before the final month of the campaign. And in New Hampshire, only 29 percent had. (Why is the fraction lower in New Hampshire than in Iowa? Probably because voters there are waiting for the Iowa results before locking in their choice. In fact, about half of New Hampshire voters make up their minds in the final week of the campaign.)
By comparison, voters decide much earlier in general elections. In Ohio in 2012, for example, 76 percent of voters had settled on Mitt Romney or Barack Obama by the end of September. This is why it’s common to see last-minute surges or busts in nomination races (think Rick Santorum or Howard Dean), but not in general elections.
If even by New Year’s Day (a month before the Iowa caucuses, which are scheduled for Feb. 1) only about one-third of Iowa voters will have come to their final decision, the percentage must be even lower now — perhaps something like 20 percent of voters are locked in. When you see an Iowa poll, you should keep in mind that the real situation looks something more like this:[SUP]3[/SUP]
So, could Trump win? We confront two stubborn facts: first, that nobody remotely like Trump has won a major-party nomination in the modern era.[SUP]4[/SUP]And second, as is always a problem in analysis of presidential campaigns, we don’t have all that many data points, so unprecedented events can occur with some regularity. For my money, that adds up to Trump’s chances being higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent. Your mileage may vary. But you probably shouldn’t rely solely on the polls to make your case; it’s still too soon for that.
Read more: “The Perfect Republican Stump Speech”
[h=2]Footnotes[/h]
Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. @natesilver538
[h=1]Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls[/h]By NATE SILVER
ERIC SCHULTZ / AP
Lately, pundits and punters seem bullish on Donald Trump, whose chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination recently inched above 20 percent for the first time at the betting market Betfair. Perhaps the conventional wisdom assumes that the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris will play into Trump’s hands, or that Republicans really might be in disarray. If so, I can see where the case for Trump is coming from, although I’d still say a 20 percent chance is substantially too high.
Quite often, however, the Trump’s-really-got-a-chance! case is rooted almost entirely in polls. If nothing Trump has said so far has harmed his standing with Republicans, the argument goes, why should we expect him to fade later on?
One problem with this is that it’s not enough for Trump to merely avoid fading. Right now, he has 25 to 30 percent of the vote in polls among theroughly 25 percent of Americans who identify as Republican. (That’s something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.) As the rest of the field consolidates around him, Trump will need to gain additional support to win the nomination. That might not be easy, since some Trump actions that appeal to a faction of the Republican electorate may alienate the rest of it. Trump’s favorability ratings are middling among Republicans (andawful among the broader electorate).
Trump will also have to get that 25 or 30 percent to go to the polls. For now, most surveys cover Republican-leaning adults or registered voters, rather than likely voters. Combine that with the poor response rates to polls and the fact that an increasing number of polls use nontraditional sampling methods, and it’s not clear how much overlap there is between the people included in these surveys and the relatively small share of Republicans who will turn up to vote in primaries and caucuses.
But there’s another, more fundamental problem. That 25 or 30 percent of the vote isn’t really Donald Trump’s for the keeping. In fact, it doesn’t belong to any candidate. If past nomination races are any guide, the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their minds yet.
It can be easy to forget it if you cover politics for a living, but most people aren’t paying all that much attention to the campaign right now. Certainly, voters are consuming some campaign-related news. Debate ratings are way up, and Google searches for topics related to the primaries[SUP]1[/SUP] have been running slightly ahead of where they were at a comparable point of the 2008 campaign, the last time both parties had open races. But most voters have a lot of competing priorities. Developments that can dominate a political news cycle, like Trump’s frenzied 90-minute speech in Iowa earlier this month, may reach only 20 percent or so of Americans.
We can look deeper into the Google search data for some evidence of this. In the chart below, I’ve tracked the aggregate share of primary-related searches in the 2008 and 2012 presidential cycles, based on the number of weeks before or after the Iowa caucuses.[SUP]2[/SUP] As you can see, public attention to the race starts out quite slow and only gradually accelerates — until just a week or two before Iowa, when it begins to boom. Interest continues to accelerate as Iowa, New Hampshire and the Super Tuesday states vote, before slowing down again once the outcome of the race has become clear.
| SHARE OF IOWA VOTERS WHO DECIDED | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ELECTION | > 1 MONTH OUT | 1 WEEK TO 1 MONTH OUT | FINAL WEEK |
| 2004 Democrats | 30% | 27% | 42% |
| 2008 Republicans | 28 | 31 | 40 |
| 2008 Democrats | 49 | 24 | 27 |
| 2012 Republicans | 32 | 21 | 46 |
| Iowa Average | 35 | 26 | 39 |
| SHARE OF N.H. VOTERS WHO DECIDED | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ELECTION | > 1 MONTH OUT | 1 WEEK TO 1 MONTH OUT | FINAL WEEK |
| 2004 Democrats | 26% | 19% | 54% |
| 2008 Republicans | 29 | 22 | 50 |
| 2008 Democrats | 34 | 17 | 48 |
| 2012 Republicans | 28 | 26 | 46 |
| New Hampshire Average | 29 | 21 | 50 |
By comparison, voters decide much earlier in general elections. In Ohio in 2012, for example, 76 percent of voters had settled on Mitt Romney or Barack Obama by the end of September. This is why it’s common to see last-minute surges or busts in nomination races (think Rick Santorum or Howard Dean), but not in general elections.
If even by New Year’s Day (a month before the Iowa caucuses, which are scheduled for Feb. 1) only about one-third of Iowa voters will have come to their final decision, the percentage must be even lower now — perhaps something like 20 percent of voters are locked in. When you see an Iowa poll, you should keep in mind that the real situation looks something more like this:[SUP]3[/SUP]
| CANDIDATE | SUPPORT IN IOWA |
|---|---|
| Undecided | 80% |
| Donald Trump | 5 |
| Ben Carson | 4 |
| Ted Cruz | 3 |
| Marco Rubio | 2 |
| Jeb Bush | 1 |
| Carly Fiorina | 1 |
| Mike Huckabee | 1 |
| Chris Christie | 1 |
Read more: “The Perfect Republican Stump Speech”
[h=2]Footnotes[/h]
- The statistics I describe in this article cover U.S.-based searches for Google search topic“primary elections.” It’s possible that this data includes a small number of searches for non-presidential races such as gubernatorial primaries, but the historical timing of the peaks in the data suggests that the vast majority are related to the presidency. ^
- The chart covers the period from a year before the Iowa caucus to late June of the election year. ^
- The numbers below reflect what you get if you take the Real Clear Politics average, put 80 percent of voters in the undecided category and scale everyone down accordingly. ^
- There are better precedents for candidates like Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, who might loosely be compared to George McGovern and Barry Goldwater. ^
Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. @natesilver538
Donald Trump race shocker: Polls prove his success really is based on racists
New numbers prove that Trump is pulling support from the highly xenophobic Republican contingent
AMANDA MARCOTTE
TOPICS: DONALD TRUMP, IMMIGRATION, SYRIAN REFUGEES, ELECTION 2016, REPUBLICANS, ELECTIONS NEWS, NEWS,POLITICS NEWS
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll proves what gut instinct was already telling you: The Donald Trump campaign’s success is built on the backs of racists. Or, if you prefer a gentler word that captures the immigrant-specific questions the poll asked,xenophobes. Either way, fear of foreigners coming to America to white people isn’t just driving the rhetoric of the Trump campaign, but it’s, quite predictably, shaping who his supporters are.
“Nearly half of GOP-leaning respondents in the poll — 47 percent — both support the deportation of undocumented immigrants and oppose accepting refugees from Syria and other Mideast conflicts,” the Washington Post reports. “If a GOP-leaning voter supports deportation, there is a 79 percent chance she or he also opposes Syrian refugees, compared with 54 percent if they oppose deportation.”
Call them the twofers: Republicans who both want to kick out all undocumented immigrants and stop Syrian refugees from entering. A whopping 51 percent of Trump’s supporters are twofers, compared to only 16 percent of all other Republican voters. “Put another way, pro-deportation/anti-refugee voters account for almost three-quarters of Trump’s support,” the Washington Post reports.
To be clear, nearly every Republican in the race has pandered to the twofers on some level, stoking hysteria about Syrian refugees and talking tough on immigration, even if they fall short of embracing Trump’s build-a-wall-kick-’em-out program. But Trump’s laser-like focus on these issues, along with a simple-minded belligerence that appeals to the bigoted (who are not known for their nuanced approach to issues) means he is killing with these voters. Enough to hold a comfortable lead as the primaries draw closer.
While these results aren’t surprising, there’s a couple of important lessons to be drawn from them. One, traditional coalition-building is collapsing in the Republican Party, which has become victim of its own propaganda machine. Two, this should (but won’t) put to bed any lingering hope that Trump is somehow going to say something too racist and lose his base of support.
To start with the second one, because it is the sexier issue: For months now, there’s been a sense in the pundit class that Trump is going to cross a line one day, saying something that will wake his supporters up to the fact that he’s not ready to win a general election, causing them to give up their love affair with the Orange One and move, however reluctantly, to a Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. This assumption underestimates how enraged these voters are. These are people that often feel that they are losing their identity. This group is animated by the idea that white Christian conservatives are the dominant class by rights, and that any attempt to share power is capitulation. The Bushes and Rubios of the world are seen as squishes, people who think “conservatism” can somehow be separated from this white Christian identity.
As the poll shows, xenophobia is broadly popular in Republican circles, but clearly, it’s a priority issue for Trump supporters. People who are in such a panic state, believing their very identity is under threat by growing racial and ethnic diversity, aren’t going to be interested in people who they see as accepting change as inevitable (even if they promise to slow it down). They want to hear that it can be stopped, even reversed. And Trump is making that promise.
This entire situation is also a nice reminder that the politics of coalition-building, as frustrating and contentious as they can be at times, have benefits over the multi-decade conservative effort to use propaganda to create a singular, lockstep coalition. Democrats work by bringing people with different issues together, settling differences through compromise and often tedious amounts of discussion. For decades now, the right has gone a different route: Using talk radio, conservative publications and Fox News to create a singular conservative identity and persuading people in the coalition to adjust themselves to it.
There’s been a lot of political benefits to this, of course. For instance, it might seem like the churchy anti-abortion community would balk at slashing the social safety net on the grounds that it encourages abortion. But that doesn’t happen. Anti-choicers are conservatives first, and conservatives want to cut welfare and that’s that. To budge on this issue is to court accusations of liberalism, which cannot be countenanced.
Years of propaganda efforts have flattened out any differences of opinion on the right, creating a coalition that moves in lockstep. But the Trump candidacy shows the limits of that strategy. The xenophobic views are widely popular in the party, even if they aren’t priority number one for everyone. Once conservatives generally agree with each other, it becomes a competition to see who is the most ardent amongst them. That’s why, in recent years, we’ve seen a proliferation of the phrase “true conservative” in Republican circles. Having rejected the politics of coalition-building, conservatives just now want it to be a competition of who can be the most conservative conservative of all.
As long as immigration is a salient issue to conservatives, Trump is going to do well. He can convincingly portray himself as the most conservative on this issue, bringing a huge chunk of voters with him. The only way to combat that is to find some other enticing issue that a candidates is most conservative on, and distract voters with that. Carson was able to pull that off for awhile, but the immigration issue has surged to the front again because of the Paris attacks.
The Republican noise machine has been incredibly successful in building a powerful movement that moves in lockstep. But [insert your Frankenstein metaphor here]. There’s no real incentive for the Fox News and Rush Limbaughs of the world to dial it down. Lockstep conservatism is straight up good for ratings. But it increasingly looks bad for the Republican Party.
New numbers prove that Trump is pulling support from the highly xenophobic Republican contingent
AMANDA MARCOTTE
[*=center]Po
TOPICS: DONALD TRUMP, IMMIGRATION, SYRIAN REFUGEES, ELECTION 2016, REPUBLICANS, ELECTIONS NEWS, NEWS,POLITICS NEWS
(Credit: AP/Mary Schwalm)
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll proves what gut instinct was already telling you: The Donald Trump campaign’s success is built on the backs of racists. Or, if you prefer a gentler word that captures the immigrant-specific questions the poll asked,xenophobes. Either way, fear of foreigners coming to America to white people isn’t just driving the rhetoric of the Trump campaign, but it’s, quite predictably, shaping who his supporters are.
“Nearly half of GOP-leaning respondents in the poll — 47 percent — both support the deportation of undocumented immigrants and oppose accepting refugees from Syria and other Mideast conflicts,” the Washington Post reports. “If a GOP-leaning voter supports deportation, there is a 79 percent chance she or he also opposes Syrian refugees, compared with 54 percent if they oppose deportation.”
Call them the twofers: Republicans who both want to kick out all undocumented immigrants and stop Syrian refugees from entering. A whopping 51 percent of Trump’s supporters are twofers, compared to only 16 percent of all other Republican voters. “Put another way, pro-deportation/anti-refugee voters account for almost three-quarters of Trump’s support,” the Washington Post reports.
To be clear, nearly every Republican in the race has pandered to the twofers on some level, stoking hysteria about Syrian refugees and talking tough on immigration, even if they fall short of embracing Trump’s build-a-wall-kick-’em-out program. But Trump’s laser-like focus on these issues, along with a simple-minded belligerence that appeals to the bigoted (who are not known for their nuanced approach to issues) means he is killing with these voters. Enough to hold a comfortable lead as the primaries draw closer.
While these results aren’t surprising, there’s a couple of important lessons to be drawn from them. One, traditional coalition-building is collapsing in the Republican Party, which has become victim of its own propaganda machine. Two, this should (but won’t) put to bed any lingering hope that Trump is somehow going to say something too racist and lose his base of support.
To start with the second one, because it is the sexier issue: For months now, there’s been a sense in the pundit class that Trump is going to cross a line one day, saying something that will wake his supporters up to the fact that he’s not ready to win a general election, causing them to give up their love affair with the Orange One and move, however reluctantly, to a Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. This assumption underestimates how enraged these voters are. These are people that often feel that they are losing their identity. This group is animated by the idea that white Christian conservatives are the dominant class by rights, and that any attempt to share power is capitulation. The Bushes and Rubios of the world are seen as squishes, people who think “conservatism” can somehow be separated from this white Christian identity.
As the poll shows, xenophobia is broadly popular in Republican circles, but clearly, it’s a priority issue for Trump supporters. People who are in such a panic state, believing their very identity is under threat by growing racial and ethnic diversity, aren’t going to be interested in people who they see as accepting change as inevitable (even if they promise to slow it down). They want to hear that it can be stopped, even reversed. And Trump is making that promise.
This entire situation is also a nice reminder that the politics of coalition-building, as frustrating and contentious as they can be at times, have benefits over the multi-decade conservative effort to use propaganda to create a singular, lockstep coalition. Democrats work by bringing people with different issues together, settling differences through compromise and often tedious amounts of discussion. For decades now, the right has gone a different route: Using talk radio, conservative publications and Fox News to create a singular conservative identity and persuading people in the coalition to adjust themselves to it.
There’s been a lot of political benefits to this, of course. For instance, it might seem like the churchy anti-abortion community would balk at slashing the social safety net on the grounds that it encourages abortion. But that doesn’t happen. Anti-choicers are conservatives first, and conservatives want to cut welfare and that’s that. To budge on this issue is to court accusations of liberalism, which cannot be countenanced.
Years of propaganda efforts have flattened out any differences of opinion on the right, creating a coalition that moves in lockstep. But the Trump candidacy shows the limits of that strategy. The xenophobic views are widely popular in the party, even if they aren’t priority number one for everyone. Once conservatives generally agree with each other, it becomes a competition to see who is the most ardent amongst them. That’s why, in recent years, we’ve seen a proliferation of the phrase “true conservative” in Republican circles. Having rejected the politics of coalition-building, conservatives just now want it to be a competition of who can be the most conservative conservative of all.
As long as immigration is a salient issue to conservatives, Trump is going to do well. He can convincingly portray himself as the most conservative on this issue, bringing a huge chunk of voters with him. The only way to combat that is to find some other enticing issue that a candidates is most conservative on, and distract voters with that. Carson was able to pull that off for awhile, but the immigration issue has surged to the front again because of the Paris attacks.
The Republican noise machine has been incredibly successful in building a powerful movement that moves in lockstep. But [insert your Frankenstein metaphor here]. There’s no real incentive for the Fox News and Rush Limbaughs of the world to dial it down. Lockstep conservatism is straight up good for ratings. But it increasingly looks bad for the Republican Party.
Donald Trump race shocker: Polls prove his success really is based on racists
New numbers prove that Trump is pulling support from the highly xenophobic Republican contingent
AMANDA MARCOTTE
[*=center]Po
TOPICS: DONALD TRUMP, IMMIGRATION, SYRIAN REFUGEES, ELECTION 2016, REPUBLICANS, ELECTIONS NEWS, NEWS,POLITICS NEWS
(Credit: AP/Mary Schwalm)
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll proves what gut instinct was already telling you: The Donald Trump campaign’s success is built on the backs of racists. Or, if you prefer a gentler word that captures the immigrant-specific questions the poll asked,xenophobes. Either way, fear of foreigners coming to America to white people isn’t just driving the rhetoric of the Trump campaign, but it’s, quite predictably, shaping who his supporters are.
“Nearly half of GOP-leaning respondents in the poll — 47 percent — both support the deportation of undocumented immigrants and oppose accepting refugees from Syria and other Mideast conflicts,” the Washington Post reports. “If a GOP-leaning voter supports deportation, there is a 79 percent chance she or he also opposes Syrian refugees, compared with 54 percent if they oppose deportation.”
Call them the twofers: Republicans who both want to kick out all undocumented immigrants and stop Syrian refugees from entering. A whopping 51 percent of Trump’s supporters are twofers, compared to only 16 percent of all other Republican voters. “Put another way, pro-deportation/anti-refugee voters account for almost three-quarters of Trump’s support,” the Washington Post reports.
To be clear, nearly every Republican in the race has pandered to the twofers on some level, stoking hysteria about Syrian refugees and talking tough on immigration, even if they fall short of embracing Trump’s build-a-wall-kick-’em-out program. But Trump’s laser-like focus on these issues, along with a simple-minded belligerence that appeals to the bigoted (who are not known for their nuanced approach to issues) means he is killing with these voters. Enough to hold a comfortable lead as the primaries draw closer.
While these results aren’t surprising, there’s a couple of important lessons to be drawn from them. One, traditional coalition-building is collapsing in the Republican Party, which has become victim of its own propaganda machine. Two, this should (but won’t) put to bed any lingering hope that Trump is somehow going to say something too racist and lose his base of support.
To start with the second one, because it is the sexier issue: For months now, there’s been a sense in the pundit class that Trump is going to cross a line one day, saying something that will wake his supporters up to the fact that he’s not ready to win a general election, causing them to give up their love affair with the Orange One and move, however reluctantly, to a Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. This assumption underestimates how enraged these voters are. These are people that often feel that they are losing their identity. This group is animated by the idea that white Christian conservatives are the dominant class by rights, and that any attempt to share power is capitulation. The Bushes and Rubios of the world are seen as squishes, people who think “conservatism” can somehow be separated from this white Christian identity.
As the poll shows, xenophobia is broadly popular in Republican circles, but clearly, it’s a priority issue for Trump supporters. People who are in such a panic state, believing their very identity is under threat by growing racial and ethnic diversity, aren’t going to be interested in people who they see as accepting change as inevitable (even if they promise to slow it down). They want to hear that it can be stopped, even reversed. And Trump is making that promise.
This entire situation is also a nice reminder that the politics of coalition-building, as frustrating and contentious as they can be at times, have benefits over the multi-decade conservative effort to use propaganda to create a singular, lockstep coalition. Democrats work by bringing people with different issues together, settling differences through compromise and often tedious amounts of discussion. For decades now, the right has gone a different route: Using talk radio, conservative publications and Fox News to create a singular conservative identity and persuading people in the coalition to adjust themselves to it.
There’s been a lot of political benefits to this, of course. For instance, it might seem like the churchy anti-abortion community would balk at slashing the social safety net on the grounds that it encourages abortion. But that doesn’t happen. Anti-choicers are conservatives first, and conservatives want to cut welfare and that’s that. To budge on this issue is to court accusations of liberalism, which cannot be countenanced.
Years of propaganda efforts have flattened out any differences of opinion on the right, creating a coalition that moves in lockstep. But the Trump candidacy shows the limits of that strategy. The xenophobic views are widely popular in the party, even if they aren’t priority number one for everyone. Once conservatives generally agree with each other, it becomes a competition to see who is the most ardent amongst them. That’s why, in recent years, we’ve seen a proliferation of the phrase “true conservative” in Republican circles. Having rejected the politics of coalition-building, conservatives just now want it to be a competition of who can be the most conservative conservative of all.
As long as immigration is a salient issue to conservatives, Trump is going to do well. He can convincingly portray himself as the most conservative on this issue, bringing a huge chunk of voters with him. The only way to combat that is to find some other enticing issue that a candidates is most conservative on, and distract voters with that. Carson was able to pull that off for awhile, but the immigration issue has surged to the front again because of the Paris attacks.
The Republican noise machine has been incredibly successful in building a powerful movement that moves in lockstep. But [insert your Frankenstein metaphor here]. There’s no real incentive for the Fox News and Rush Limbaughs of the world to dial it down. Lockstep conservatism is straight up good for ratings. But it increasingly looks bad for the Republican Party.
Sewer rat posting his daily libtard trash from salon.com.
I'll accept that bet when you first accept my "fake ticket" bet Scott L and I agreed to. Predictably, the "knockout king" chickened out AGAIN.
Of course you'll have lost a lifetime ban bet so it would be moot at that point...
"I'm gone forever"
I would never accept a bet from you that you can manipulate. You lied about being a ghost, you lied about my quotes .....you can't be trusted.
My bet cannot be manipulated. Either I said it or didn't. Several other posters have called you out for making up quotes. Time to stop that.
