Paul over at You Might Notice a Trend has been messing around with the polling numbers and past voter turnout and looking at the possible outcomes for a Trump v. Clinton election.
Unless the GOP can suppress minority and youth voting to an unprecedented degree and turn out 83+% of the white vote for Trump, it could be a horrific November for the GOP. A blowout like that could end up in flipping the Congress to the Democrats.
(Play with it yourself.)
I don't like the current situation one bit. While I generally am in favor of divided government, Mitch McConnell would ban AR-15s if Obama proposed giving them away to everyone who graduated from college or a technical school. "Whatever it is, I'm against it" is a morally bankrupt way to pretend to be a legislator.
But this kind of blowout has the potential to wreak some real damage. Which is probably why the GOP establishment would put polonium in Trump's coffee if they could figure out how to blame Putin for it.
(H/T)
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7 comments:
"Sliding down the razor blade of life"???
Ow.
Also, I see you've dealt with Chinese spammers before. What the bleep do they write in their spam messages, anyway?
How does Cruz stack up against Hillary? You told us about Trump (I think he IS electable, but the GOP doesn't, and I think the polls are wrong, but what do I know?) but how does Cruz stack up?
Paul, I don't know what they write. Eck! gave me the wording and it seems to do the trick.
B, good question for Paul. I suspect that Cruz is possibly even less electable, but what do I know.
Hell, I thought Jon Huntsman was the one Republican last time who stood a chance at unseating President Obama, but nobody listens to me.
I don't know if Trump can win, but you can bet the house that whoever the GoP establishment wants to run doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. That's been true for a while now, and their prospects are not going to improve. Stick a fork in 'em...
Paul's assessment of those numbers was the first encouraging thing I'd read in a while.
-Doug in Oakland
To be honest the House elections and Senate elections are still separate from the Presidential elections. There is the fact that voter turnout picks up overall due to the Presidential ticket, but there's very little tie-in ("coat-tails" are a statistical anomaly from what I've learned).
What WILL hurt the Republican chances in the Senate is their own misconduct. Right now, their obstruction of Obama's SCOTUS nomination of Garland is a big red flashing sign of WTF. That combined with a Trump or Cruz nomination - which will send moderates and centrists into the warm arms of Hillary - could send a sizable number of general election results to the Dems. In the Senate, all they need is five seats to flip I think: the Dems are pretty much secure in flipping two (IL, WI) and are close to several more (best-case scenario has the Dems flipping ten seats).
The House is unlikely to flip even with a Trump nomination at the top of the ticket because 1) gerrymandering does have a nasty effect, 2) at the district level, voters tend to stick with their incumbents out of familiarity (and the misguided belief that "he's our crook"). House control only flips during period of clear voter outrage or persistent scandals (1994, 2006, 2010). The only way the Republicans lose control of the House is if the Republican establishment is foolish enough to contest a Trump nomination with a Third Party "establishment" candidate. That level of open betrayal/contempt for the Trump base would be enough to drive said Trump voters to refuse to vote any down-ticket Republicans.
Regarding Cruz as a possible nominee: His appeal goes only so far among the Republicans. I can't imagine how his alienating personality would go over with the independent - mostly centrist/moderate - voters. The lack of intraparty support for him would be a huge red flag. It doesn't help that the current GOP platform - more tax cuts, more bombs, more walls - is spiritually and metaphorically worse than Romney's 2012 pitch.
I think that all these projections come down to who most accurately predicts that scope of the Bradley Effect. I suspect that it will be substantial this year, and so the pollsters will once again be surprised. We certainly see much higher turnout in the GOP primaries than last go around. Not sure that will carry over to the genera, but don't believe that the pollsters can tell us, either.
But then again, what do I know? Last time around I said that Mussolini could beat Obama ...
Not saying this as a Trump supporter (not really my cup of tea) - probably will vote for Johnson again.
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