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Actual Analysis Indicates We Aren’t Doomed
Donald Trump scored a third straight victory on Tuesday night in the Nevada Caucuses.
Sick of hearing about The Donald’s string of allegedly crushing victories (and being numerate, unlike the saps who follow Bernie Sanders), I decided to check out what was going on under the hood.
So, just as any decent engineer should, I opened up Excel and plunked in information such as we have it. Here’s the picture that emerged:
It seems that despite Trump’s supposed strength, the reality is that two thirds of the Republican electorate is actually arrayed against Trump. The delegate count favors him wildly and doesn’t reflect the weakness of his frontrunner status.
Trump tends to perform less well as the size of the sample increases; For instance, Nevada represented just 10 percent of the total votes cast in South Carolina, with lowly Ben Carson dwarfing Trump’s Nevada total. In short, Trump is once again, the tallest midget — not a colossus bestriding the horizon.
Having examined the numbers in detail at this point, my advice to conservatives is: Don’t panic. Yet. There’s still time to derail Trump given a couple of conditions:
- Ben Carson and John Kasich leave the race and endorse not-Trump;
- Rubio and Cruz reach détente for the good of the Party and the nation.
Offer Kasich the position of Postmaster General. Tell Ben he can host the National Prayer Breakfast live from the Great Pyramid. Do whatever you have to do — but get them out of the race.
The bottom line is this: There aren’t enough Trump supporters in larger primaries to beat the remainder of the party if it’s united against him. The numbers don’t lie. The only thing standing between us and defeating him is the ego of the assorted participants.
Published in General
Everyone needs to breathe easier…where is that knife?
And voting Libertarian would be almost as bad as voting Trump; looking at the electoral recommendations of the staff of Reason shows a gang of drop-out idiots who favor sex, drugs, and foreign policy isolation dreams, as though the world didn’t have bad guys. The staff of Reason needs to move to Teheran.
This may be a write-in-president-vote year.
There is zero evidence for this. There are no polls suggesting that Trump is anyone’s second choice, Mike LaRoche not withstanding.
Nevada is a bit of an outlier, though. Trump was polling high there for months. I believe it was his second-best state after Massachusetts.
The caucus size is very small, as you can see. That makes it easy to tip the numbers on one direction.
Add in the fact that last night was a chaotic mess with Trump supporters promoting the candidate while collecting ballots, the fact that the ballots had a dozen candidates that had already dropped out, and reports of questionable behavior.
Overall, I think Trump just won Nevada because it’s an odd state with a small electorate where he was polling exceptionally well for months now; I don’t think it’s evidence yet of any big bandwagon effect or momentum. His polling in other states is not nearly at the level it was at Nevada.
If the GOP doesn’t act soon, however, we will get stuck with this disastrous clown in the general election and the party will be destroyed once-and-for-all.
President HRC’s first act in office should be to have Reince Priebus’ face added to Mount Rushmore.
I should have thrown a ;) in there sorry.
Actually, if Trump were nominated, Libertarian would be the most conservative options. The conclusions of the folks at Reason/Cato are often at odds with their actual stated ideals. That happens in a lot of groups, but it doesn’t invalidate those ideals. Conservatism is (and should be) extremely libertarian in political form, which need not indicate an acceptance of libertine individual behavior.
Duane your aversion to all things libertarian is well documented but I kindly ask you not call us drop-out idiots.
That just isn’t so. Here’s the graph showing Trump’s support plummeting in the last ten days before the primary.
One would think that interacting with libertarians here on Ricochet like Molly or Tom or Fred or hell even myself would disabuse people of the erroneous notion that we’re all a bunch of drug addled libertine sex maniacs, but straw men are just too easy to argue against.
Last night, I spent the evening discussing this stuff with Jay, who pulled the lever for an anti-Trump vote. He fully predicted the high numbers for Trump, based on (among other things) the socioeconomic makeup of the electorate. Remember, this is the state that gave us Harry Reid. I know that’s not a particularly settling observation, but it is also safe to say that Nevada is not a very good sampling of the nation as a whole. This is still disturbing, but it isn’t unexpected, and I think Majestyk is correct that it is not the writing on the wall.
I know you were being sarcastic…but I try never to let an opportunity for self-deprecation or self-defacement go to waste. I have a nose for such opportunities…for the time being.
Definitely. I saw someone say, paraphrasing, “Surprise: Donald Trump wins state that is Donald Trump in state form.”
Brilliant comment. :-)
So you’re saying we’re doomed?
I kind of wanted this to be true but could you explain where Trump’s support plummeted in the last 10 days?
It looks like his support was in the mid to lower 30s and kind of stayed that way. The SC House GOP poll has the largest sample size and lowest MOE by far and was completely unchanged.
I hope the Trump Denialism at work amongst reeling Rubio supporters is not shared by the Rubio campaign.
Thus far Magical Marco Math has presented this proof:
1. Trump is winning contests with only one-third of the vote; therefore two-thirds of the voters are “against Trump.”
2 As candidates representing smaller fractions of that 2/3 drop out Rubio will gain their support because … See point 1 above.
3. When the contest narrows to Trump versus Rubio, Rubio will start winning majorities in large purple and blue states like OH IL, NY, NJ and CA because … See point 1 above.
and reached this conclusion:
Marco Rubio, the most naturally gifted and talented politician in the GOP, will win the support of real GOP voters aching for an intelligent, principled and daring young president to lead them into the New American Century and reject Donald Trump, a pimp supported by idiots who can’t even identify the real problems they face in their daily lives.
Good luck with that.
Bouncy writing, I like it.
I’d never go so far to say that Donald Trump is a pimp.
I keep wondering if people who like Trump have held back voting for him because they thought he wouldn’t get the nomination, so they voted for the other guys. Now that upcoming voters see all these people who are joining up, I fear that the quiet folk who really like him will join in and vote for him, too. Isn’t that a lovely thought?
I meant it in the Tattaglia sense of the term, though Trump is clearly a potent combination of Barzini and Moe Green. Rubio is Michael before the attempted assassination of Vito. He needs to change tactics just as decisively.
Count me among the skeptics that everyone not voting for Trump is ergo permanently AGAINST Trump.
A few things to keep in mind from previous primary cycles:
Remember that, based on current polling/primary results, all Trump has to do is convert about 1/3 of the voters who would be up for grabs if it suddenly became a two-person race and he has an absolute majority. That’s not inconceivable given the factors above.
Trump won 46% last night including 44% of Hispanics. He won evangelicals, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if he scored well with Nevada’s libertarian libertines, too! He brings out new voters, total voting went way up. He got more votes than Romney did when he won Nevada with over 50%. This was supposed to be Rubio’s firewall. Maybe some of those voters did so because Trump’s been a job creator there.
Trump had quite a bit of fun in the victory speech, saying that people would come out today saying but look, 54% didn’t vote for him, so if you put all those people together …
Reuters rolling daily national: Trump 41.2, Cruz 18.6, Rubio 12.9
This argument that Trump is beatable could vaporize in the next week.
So, there’s hope. Does it entail hiding out in Sicily for a while until things cool down?
What I pointed out is from the actual vote count percentages in SC & NV in the OP spreadsheet, not some poll.
The combined Cruz+Rubio vote percentage went up just 0.7 points.
While Kasich, Carson and Bush shed about 14.2 points combined.
Meanwhile Trump gained 13.6 points from somewhere. The Republican frontrunner might put forth the plausible theory that those Kasich/ Carson/ Bush votes jumped to him.
Of course, your mileage may vary.
The 44% of Hispanics is based on a sample size of 135 Hispanics. That’s 59 Hispanic Trump voters. Try not to get too excited.
I’ve been looking at the favorables and if Donald Trump gets the nomination, it looks like not only will he be more strongly disliked than any candidate who has ever won the Presidency, he will also be more strongly disliked than any major party candidate who ever lost the Presidency.
Hillary is unpopular, too, but she’s much less unpopular than Trump, and that’s before the media starts tearing him down and building her up. Being one-on-one against Trump should boost her popularity, as she becomes the face of anti-Trump sentiment.
Now I know Trump’s supporters think this doesn’t matter. He will use his fantastic “charm” to overcome his 2-to-1 unfavorables. There’s never much of a good explanation for how he will do it, just as there’s never any good explanation for how the immigration plan he’s scribbled onto a cocktail napkin is supposed to work. The same as they never have an explanation for how he’s going go give us universal health care, paid for by the government, to keep people–in his Obamaesque formulation–from “dying in the streets”, but without costing us anything or actually being single-payer. The same as they never have an explanation for a guy who says he’s Obamacare’s biggest enemy but who either loves the individual mandate or doesn’t actually know what the individual mandate is. (This latter statement also being proof, somehow, that he will appoint Supreme Court Justices who won’t sell us out like Roberts. Of course, Roberts actually seemed to think the individual mandate was terrible policy, which makes him more staunchly anti-Obamacare than Trump.)
This is gonna be one heck of a general election. Maybe we can get Martin Shkreli to run third party, so the three most-hated people in the country will be vying for what is sure to be the most dictatorial of all Presidential terms.
When Roots got a 70 share it was based on a sample of 1200-1500.
yep.
Y’all are forgetting that Rubio has survived millions and millions of attack ads from Mike Murphy. That he’s in this at all is a testimony to what a superb candidate he is.
It was also based on an entrance poll, which are notoriously less-than-worthless.
Also, keep in mind that these are GOP Hispanics, who are obviously inclined to vote Republican. So Trump saying he’s going to deport ’em all (and then let them back in) doesn’t faze them. Check out his numbers with non-GOP Hispanics if you want the world to make sense again.
I’ve heard over and over again from Trump’s supporters that he will “win the Hispanics!” but they never seem to specify that that’s only the in primary. In the general he will lose the Hispanics catastrophically.