tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601639312234106733.post1103777455049501464..comments2023-11-10T22:27:47.359-05:00Comments on Eye on a Crazy Planet: Some takeaways from the Republican and Democratic conventionsRichard Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239826441964023625noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601639312234106733.post-32439688701657761852016-07-30T02:00:16.534-04:002016-07-30T02:00:16.534-04:00All that may be so, but Hillary has an immense lik...All that may be so, but Hillary has an immense likability problem and a negative charisma rating, which counts for a lot in elections. And more telling, Trump has been steadily narrowing the gap in poll trends over the last 8 weeks. Even her convention bump has only put her back to about a 1.5% lead, within most margins of error.<br /><br />It's now more than just Nate Silver among pollsters (most of whom decidedly don't like Trump) who are saying Trump's odds of winning are now better than Hillary's.Richard Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10239826441964023625noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2601639312234106733.post-82603009303013880072016-07-29T16:19:37.144-04:002016-07-29T16:19:37.144-04:00Sure, but registered Republicans are only about 28...Sure, but registered Republicans are only about 28% of the electorate, and he only has about 70% of them (although I haven't seen polling on that since the end of the convention.) Clinton is carrying slightly over 90% of Democrats, and she's clearly aiming for persuadable Republicans. 30% of Republicans is more than all of the fucking Bernie Bros alive today and yet to be born. If Clinton wins just 10% of them, it's all over. Bernie, in my opinion, matters a whole lot less than the commentariat seems to believe. <br /><br />In what might be the most counter-intuitive and ironic play I've ever seen, Hillary Clinton is running as the Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump's Jimmy Carter. Could an "America: Fuck, Yeah!!!" campaign lose? I guess so, but I've never actually seen it happen before. <br /><br />I'm also not sure that Ted Cruz and his ghoulish supporters are in any way reflective of "the Establishment." They sure spent four years persuading everybody otherwise. I suspect that his voters, along with Bush's (all three) Lindsey Graham's, John McCain's and Mitt Romney's will very quietly pull a lever for Hillary or Johnson. Otherwise, they admit, if only to themselves, that they've been lying about policy goals for decades. <br /><br />And if you look at the demographic breakdowns, he's getting slaughtered with everyone except dumb white trash in ways that I haven't seen happen to a major party candidate in my lifetime. But dumb white trash is a much lower percentage of the electorate than it used to be. Just in the last four years, whites as a whole have fallen from 72% of the electorate to 70%. Mitt Romney won whites by a blinding 20 points and Obama won by three and a half, anyway. <br /><br />His numbers with women and Latinos are abominable, orders of magnitude worse than they were for Romney and John McCain. George W. Bush only barely squeaked out a win with 44% of Hispanics. Trump will be lucky if he gets 12%. Trump is losing women across the board (by 19 points in Pennsylvania,) which I also haven't seen happen to a Republican in my lifetime. Bill Clinton won women by sixteen points WHILE HE WAS BEING SUED FOR SEXUAL HARASSMENT, but Bob Dole carried married women.<br /><br />Elections are about basic math. And addition beats subtraction every time. Since the day he spouted off about Mexican rapists, Trump has been running a subtraction game. <br /><br />Of course, I don't expect much else from a guy who could never quite figure out how to make a dollar from owning casinos.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02269077914921491721noreply@blogger.com