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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
Yes, but that’s not how it works. Nevada voters are not South Carolina voters.
I thought it was Cruz (and his supporters’) logic. After all I continue to see him talk of uniting that massive and untapped conservative/evangelical base, which he says after every primary/caucus is coalescing around him (while leaving those other fake conservatives) more and more.
However, currently Rubio has the highest favorable ratings in the polls and is seen as the preferred second choice among the top 3 contenders. Its a rather logical conclusion for Rubio.
I’d suggest hiding out in VA, GA and MN for a week to try and win a state or two and hope that Trump finishes off Cruz in a hateful poisonous campaign that motivates Cruz and a large percentage of his supporters to accept a deal.
Rubio might even help Cruz avoid a humiliating loss in TX with a little two step trade for a Cruz halfhearted effort in GA and VA?
This assumes that attack ads actually have a big effect. We all think they do, but in my opinion that’s still a very unproven hypothesis.
There are no words.
Brian,
The 59 Hispanics all worked for Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. Just a coincidence.
Regards,
Jim
I’ve been thinking the same thing but I’ve also been thinking that the DOJ is a world-class snake pit. A significant percentage of its staffers are doctrinaire leftists. I don’t think Cruz has ever run anything larger then the Texas Solicitor General’s office. I love his principles but worry that he might be in over his head as a manager.
Nothing against the good people of Nevada but as a resident of the Palmetto State, Thank God.
Yes, it is dangerous to think they would all line up behind someone not named Trump… but at this point, what other option is there?
The key really is to get Cruz and Rubio to agree to support one of them. Whoever has the most actual votes after 3/1 would be my formula, but the problem is, neither will step aside for the other.
They both have reason to believe they are the better option. By the time the money runs out for one of them, it will be too late.
Here’s a more realistic scenario than many of the predictions thus far:
As Trump maintains his commanding lead over his rivals, he deliberately tones down his rhetoric, confident that his core supporters will remain loyal. This moderation makes him just palatable enough to poach enough supporters from departing candidates to make him the clear uncontested primary winner – either through absolute majorities or large margins over his competitor(s).
Yet at the same time, a core of about 30% of Republicans (people like us) still refuse to vote for him in the general election. This would be a real pickle: if 30% of reliable Republican voters don’t for their party’s candidate in the general, that candidate is hosed. But trying to unseat the legitimate primary electoral winner is both unethical and bound to backfire.
We might have to live with the fact that the pool of non-Democrat voters this years is simply too divided to win.
Which is a more acceptable sampling in line with what’s used by reputable polling firms. 135 voters is far below that.
Cruz for AG? or VP? Both a waste. He would make a great Scalia replacement
This is where I would be headed, and one that might actually tempt Cruz. Instead of 4 or 8 years, he would be shaping constitutional interpretation for 30-40 years. Much more impact.
Good catch. Now updated with truthful figures. Didn’t QA/QC myself.
Regardless of the specifics of this particular example, two inconvenient truths are emerging which all sides need to acknowledge:
Many will not be on the wagon. In all senses of that expression.
Oh. Because that sounded like fun.
I disagree with the first point. I always assumed that trump would garner a significant chunk of the electorate. My only question was how big this group was. trump no doubt brings in protectionists, keynesians, and other center left groups while winning over others who allege to be on the right by his nationalistic trope of “Make America Great Again”.
As I have said countless times, the Republican Party survived FDR by assuming the center and even some center left groups into its party. The past 80 years have seen the Republican Party moving back towards conservatism (while the Democratic Party moved left) and trump’s emergence is the cry from the “centrists”. Individuals that are indifferent to state power so long as it does not harm them and are usually oblivious to its workings.
They are the ones that support trump en masse. But how big are they?
Too bad there is no delegate laden winner-take-all Vulcan primary.
Can anyone explain the logic of Rubio magically sweeping purple and blue states when he is 30 points down in Charlie Baker’s Massachusetts with Cruz not even polling the margin of error?
Are you waiting for the battered rump of the California GOP to rejoice at Rubio’s time-released amnesty?
Rubio has to dismantle Trump as debates require more than 15 minutes of screen time.
He might start by looking Trump directly in his eyes.
Syllogisms are not going to beat Trump.
There is a not insignificant portion of Democrats who are crossing over to vote for Trump.
We shouldn’t be in the business of allowing a cohort of Non-Republicans to decide who our nominee is. If they want to come along with us, fine. If not, let’s not allow them to sink us.
I was going to say “too late!” but it got promoted 5 minutes after I posted.
Ah, Excel… where would we be without you? (Using Lotus 1-2-3, no doubt.)
That’s not the argument being made. The argument is that if there were only one non-Trump candidate, all that candidate would have to do to win is not utterly fail, and the anti-Trump majority will flock to that person. So even if Rubio isn’t a better actual candidate, he would win by default for simply being not Trump.
I find the theory dubious, but that’s the scenario being proposed.
And there’s another hurdle: even if Rubio (or Cruz) were to win in this type of scenario, party nominees who won based on “not an exciting candidate, but the other options were much worse” tend to lose in general elections (see: Romney, Kerry, or Dukakis).
I have to confess that I find it odd that your avatar is the emblem of a military force hostile to the United States of America.
I might think about picking a new one. Just saying.
Trump won’t be winning either with 2/3rds of the party against him.
I don’t see a credible argument he could make which would solidify support behind him. His victory would be at best, pyrrhic.
Maybe that was the point all along. Maybe Trump only wants to watch the world burn. If so, he’s achieving his goal.
No sense in arguing with people deluded into thinking that 2/3 of the voters are voting against Trump. It’s risible. Could Rubio make an effective direct assault on Trump after March 1 with the support of Cruz. Yes. But it requires relentless, focused face-to-face attacks on Trump (who has been the target of 2-3% of negative ads and zero direct challenges from Rubio).
Rubio will have to win and keep Cruz voters. Rubio will have to win and keep Kasich voters. Rubio will actually have to win some conservative voters back from Trump.
Lazy rationales, magic math and ascribing Japanese existential novelist motivations to Trump are not going to work.
Jonah Goldberg makes the case here that they work even against Trump. “Cruz finally broke the clinch in Iowa and demonstrated that negative attacks on Trump work.” He notes that so far only 4% of 215 million dollars of SuperPAC money spent this cycle has been spent against Trump.
Mike Murphy has a lot to answer for.
Or maybe he will build a different coalition. Two-thirds of the party not supporting him in the primary is not the same thing as 2/3 of the party staying home on election day. Lots of people who hate him may hate Hillary significantly more.
He might also make a play for some of the union vote. If Hillary turns out to be as weak a candidate as many suspect, there are some additional possibilities as well.
It would have some similarities to the New Deal consensus politics of the middle third of the 20th century insofar as the earlier coalition was able to contain both Northern progressives, African Americans and Southern segregationists. Not the most stable coalition, but pretty broad.
Not saying that Trump is assured to make this happen, but once he locks down the nomination, I expect him to make a pretty serious left turn. Who’s to say it doesn’t work?
Most reassuring. That’s certain to get every Republican and conservative rushing out to the polls.
My assessment of Trump’s character is like the early scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with Alfred Molina. “You throw me the idol, I throw you the whip.”
He will say what he has to say to get what he wants and then do what he wants after you give it to him. He will honor nothing.
The big push is going to be from people who say that he can’t be worse than Hillary or that not voting for Trump is a vote for Hillary. We will hear oodles of that. A lot of people will find that compelling, but not everyone.
She is definitely a weak candidate.
Sanders’ popular vote is far ahead of hers. That’s her own party.
Sanders’ older brother has said, and accurately by the way:
I have always looked to Bill Clinton’s presidency as evidence of (1) southern Democrats’ being conservative-leaning voters and (2) the Democrats always betray the people who voted for them.
He actively supported school choice, in opposition to the teachers’ unions that supported him, and after campaigning against NAFTA, day 3 of his first term, he signed the agreement.
After leading his state for nine years, the day Bill Clinton was elected president, the state of Arkansas was at the absolute bottom of the ranking for education excellence by state.