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2016 Presidential Election Thread Archive


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I am increasingly convinced that Trump's success is due to his opponents being feckless idiots than his campaign team being particularly clever.  Perhaps they are clever; we may never know because currently he hasn't been campaigning against anyone who has shown unambiguous signs of having a central nervous system.

 

Trump gets it coming and going now.  He is in charge of the OODA loop, to use corporate-appropriated military lingo.  Every single time he opens his mouth he is subsequently loudly denounced for being an evil racist liar.  And then the people doing the denouncing shut up and wait for him to say something else they can excoriate him for.

 

This is idiotic.  It's letting Trump get to say whatever he wants to say about anything.  Nobody contests him for the idea-space.  They think they can just react whenever he says something idiotic and offensive, and that he'll like, I dunno, disembowel himself out of shame or something.  The man obviously does not feel shame; there is no way this can work.  This approach has been failing for the better part of a year now, but nobody seems to have any alternatives whatsoever.

 

The US Government decides not to press charges against Clinton.  Trump can say that the system is rigged; this is just more proof that he needs to be elected so he can clean everything.  If they had pressed charges against Clinton then he would have said that it proves that the system is filled with corruption and criminals and he needs to be elected so he can clean up everything.  The actual events don't matter; it's letting him have the first say in everything and not challenging his hold on center stage.

 

The Clinton campaign site talks about how the US cannot afford to elect Trump as president.  The Trump campaign site talks about how Clinton is an untrustworthy liar.  The Clinton campaign has already ceded the concept of Trump as a candidate.  The Trump campaign doesn't even refer to Clinton like she's a peer.  The Clinton campaign has done nothing, that I am aware of, to redress this sort of posturing.

 

In the minds of everyone who hates Trump, this makes him look like a provocateur and a bully.  But that doesn't hurt him; those people weren't voting for him anyway.  The big question is what this makes him look like to the people who were on the fence.  I have a guess; when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.

 

Whether or not that's enough to make him win is an open question.  The current guess is "probably not," but seven months ago the guess would have been "lolwutno," so there's an obvious trend-line there.

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Trump's success in the primaries to me has two major contributors:

 

1) The right wing media that exploded during the 2008 election. I'm talking "Terrorist fist bump, Muslim Prayer Curtain, Death Panel," etc. right-wing media. Hate messages don't always stick to the majority, but when those messages to find a willing audience, it's hard to get rid of it. The people that believed every political macro on Facebook and in their e-mail soon became a marginal voting block.

 

2) The Republican party's fracture due to its own monster. The GOP may seem stern and coordinated, but they're in a mess right now. Not dis-owning the previously mentioned nutsos meant that they suddenly started getting Congressmen that wouldn't toe the GOP line. The Freedom Caucus is on a witch hunt for any party power, which means you'll only see moderation out of prominent members when it is only absolutely needed and they'll likely be disowned shortly after (see: Boehner). That and their cult of celebrity that started around the 2008 primary, and the post-election Palin boom means that the message is controlled by some weirdo of the month on a rotating basis.

 

If the party had told everyone but Cruz or maybe Rubio to get out of the primary, Donald would have taken a handful of states if he was lucky (remember, Bernie was losing by "a wide margin" with same numbers Donald won with). As it stands, those 40 and 30-some percents he got are translating nation-wide, and we're going to see some really nasty upsets in what were normally red states.

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The news with Hillary being above the law should be the final gasp of the #NEVERTRUMP movement in the GOP. If this is the case, and if the malcontents in the Republican Party finally come around to the New York businessman, the race is over since Trump has been poaching from the Democrat party with union voters, blue collar and "low information" voters breaking his way along with a higher percentage of Blacks and minorities (still small granted) than who voted Romney.

More important, Trump seems to have motivated the types who have never voted in elections.

Another factor is that Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, seems to be hurting Hillary in the polls. Johnson is running as a SJW who is open borders, pro-amnesty and down the the LGBT movement, is pro-drug and pro-abortion. And he is probably working on attracting disaffected Bernie Sanders voters.

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I do not understand those who think Trump cannot win this election. From my perspective, Celebrity Bachelor wins more votes than Entrenched Politico every day of the week.

Consider, 118 million votes were cast in the 2012 Presidential election. In the finale of the most recent season of American Idol, 122.4 million votes were cast. Mitt Romney needed about 2.7 million extra votes to beat Obama, an incredibly strong candidate.

So a candidate that has the distinct potential to summon up 5 million votes out of thin air is not one I'd be quick to bet against.

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RBG sounds pretty confident that the next president will be a "she".

One of the prospects I am most excited for about this election is the possibility that all of the people (on both sides) who are super confident in a Hillary win will be SHOCKED AND APPALLED if the Billionare Orange Marmot takes the White House.

 

I'm curious if the straight, white male on ah dot com who thinks his life will be in danger if Trump is elected will actually follow through with his threat to move to Canada.

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What does the board think of Mike Pence?

 

I've never heard of the guy.

I've only heard of him when Indiana passed one of those anti-gay cake laws. Pence seems to be overall a stereotypical conservative and could help bolster Trump's support among both rust-belters and right wing christians, but probably not significantly. 

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I wonder if the polls will continue to show Trump losing, though. Ever since the story about Reuters broke, I am very suspicious that most national polls are essentially fabricated.

State polls show him being very competitive in Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. Win those 3 states and he's effectively won the election. 

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State polls show him being very competitive in Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. Win those 3 states and he's effectively won the election. 

Electoral College interactive map

 

I have Clinton winning in a very close race. Trump needs to win those 3 states(which I think is likely) + a state like Virginia or Pennsylvania or a combo of smaller states like Maine + Colorado to win. 

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The outcome of the Hillary email scandal will be extremely revealing as to exactly how the media-government relationship works. If Hillary does not face consequences of one variety or another for it, we'll have learned something, and if she does, we'll have learned something else.

https://www.facebook.com/wesley.davis.3762/videos/1154437641283093/

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