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I appreciate McConnell not wanting another ” I am not a Witch” candidate. That said he is nowhere near infallible in trying to pick winners. McConnell went against Sens. Cruz, Lee, Rubio, Paul and Sasse in their primaries. That is a pretty heavy weight group of Senators that McConnell did not want.
I think you missed what that fellow from Harvard Lunch Club was really saying. You should probably listen again (or actually listen to what he said for the first time) with a mirror in front of you, and everything you said about him, you should say again into the mirror.
https://www.davessodaandpetcity.com/locations.cfm
I went to the website to do just that, but it doesn’t look like they ship, and I live in Washington State.
I am just getting home from work today, but I think you are right. This business just isn’t built for shipping goods. You have to bring your printed out order form for bird seed to the physical location!!!
I did, however, look at some of the things the business did in the community.
The company raised more than $12,000 for an animal center in the community. They have birthday parties for kids with animals. They let no-kill shelters like Feline Friends and Greyhound Options adopt out animals from their stores.
You know.
Dave.
He sounds like a monster.
What with him taking a picture with the President of the United States.
I hope that he knows people who live in other states support him… even though I can’t take my boxer by to get a bath.
Hey @michaelgraham Michael –
You said Trump was the easiest Republican Presidential candidate to beat, ever. Yet 16 other Republican candidates couldn’t beat him. Not establishment squishes like Jeb Bush, not previous Michael Graham-endorsed heavyweights (no pun intended) like Chris Christie, not small government, anti-establishment, constitutionalists like Ted Cruz.
How is it that Trump was the easiest candidate to beat ever?
That’s a bit disingenuous. The primary vote was splintered in all sorts of ways. Trump had a strong base of 30-35% of the party that never wavered. No other candidate had that kind of base. This was very important during the primary, and it’s what led to his selection as the Republican banner holder.
Additionally, the media–and the Democrats–wanted him to win that part of the contest in much the same way Claire McCaskill wanted Todd Aiken to win. (You remember how she manipulated that primary, right?) The media was invested for ratings. The Democrats were invested because they thought he was the weakest. (Wait… Since they are often the same group, I guess those motives merge.)
But Trump was not popular in the general election. He and Hillary ran neck and neck in unpopularity polls. There’s a reason people in the wider public talked about voting for the Great Meteor of Death, and it wasn’t because Trump was a strong candidate. There’s a reason people who have voted their entire lives for Republican presidents didn’t turn up for Trump.
The thing is… Clinton really, really, really sucked.
And the election wasn’t like some landslide win for Trump. Far from it.
It’s impossible to say what would have happened if you had a different Republican run in the general, but the idea that Trump was strong is belied by the fact that his approval ratings are still amongst the lowest in modern political history.
Look at polling on why the majority of Americans who cast a vote for him–either Republicans or folks in former Obama districts–made the choice that they did, and you’ll discover they did not vote for Trump but against Clinton.
Someone had to make up a story about how not voting for Trump would be like allowing a plane hurtle into the Earth… People had to be threatened with the death of the country.
I can appreciate things that Trump does when they advance the ball I want him to carry, but he was a weak candidate.
Clinton was just weaker. And full of hubris.
Of course, you can be weak and still win. ;)
According to 538, Trump got 90% of the Republican vote in the general. He currently, according to the latest polls, has the support of 80% of Republicans.
(italics added)
First, I don’t understand why you are accusing me of disingenuity.
Second, when you correctly point out that Trump had a strong base that never wavered, a kind of base that no other candidate had, you’re confirming that Trump was in no way the easiest candidate to beat. Trump wasn’t a weak candidate, gauging by your description of the facts.
I pointed out that Trump was attacked from both ends of the conservative <–> liberal/squish Republican Party spectrum, from multiple points in between, and even from the relatively pure libertarian position. If Trump were so easy to beat, someone somewhere should have been able to knock him off. According to @michaelgraham, Trump was the easiest candidate to beat, ever. The evidence does not support that theory.
Well. That’s 10% that didn’t turn out, right? And a 20% peel, right?
I’m not trying to bang on Trump. It’s just not reality to think that everyone who identifies–or used to identify–with the Republican Party is happy with him.
Perhaps “disingenuous” isn’t the right word, but you seem to not recognize at all that there is a massive difference between a primary and a general. I explained why the staunch Trump base mattered when the larger Republican vote was cannibalized.
I suppose that we can agree when Michael says “easiest candidate to beat, ever,” he is using a bit of hyperbole because the “easiest candidate to beat, ever” was probably beaten. That said, his actual point is that Trump was not a strong candidate, and odds are pretty good that he would have lost to a different kind of Democrat.
These things are impossible to litigate, but Trump’s current numbers are pretty horrible. Also, while @Goldwaterwoman pointed out that a large majority of Republicans supported Trump in the general or still support him now, her figures do not include Republicans who simply stopped being Republicans.
I don’t know what the number of these people are, but they would no longer factor into the “Republican” approval numbers.
I think there is more data to suggest that Trump was a very weak candidate–even if conceding not the weakest ever–who won because the other candidate happened to be weaker.
Nice!
I get the difference between primary and general, but I cannot reconcile a winning candidate who had “a strong base of 30-35% of the party that never wavered” (through both the primaries and the general election) with an assessment of that winning candidate as an historically weak candidate. Seriously – weaker than McGovern? Weaker than Carter in 1980? Weaker than Mondale?
Regardless, I think Trump’s candidacy cannot be compared to any conventional major party candidacy since … well, certainly since Reagan. You might as well try to compare the color blue to the smell of popcorn.
I don’t know what’s hard to reconcile.
Every election has things that are unique unto that period and cycle, but Jimmy Carter built a strong base of support in his 1976 primary because he was running as the “outsider.” He garnered above 40% of his party’s vote in the end, which was better, I think, than Trump. (Actually, I’ve looked. This isn’t true. Trump outdid Carter by getting into the low 40s… Like the Never Trump movement, however, there was an Anyone But Carter movement, which deprived Carter a few votes.)
Did that make Carter an especially strong general candidate in 1976?
Not really but he was facing a president who was wounded by the Watergate scandal via pardoning Nixon, had never been elected at all, and who had faced a strong primary challenge of his own that left his own party weakened on the inside.
While I’ve never thought about it before, actually, you could say that Clinton was a bit like Ford. She was a member of the ruling party with which the country was disillusioned… Everything she did seemed tinged by corruption. Her party was split by Bernie as Ford’s was split by Reagan. In the general, she had to face an “outsider” without much of a national record, an “anti-establishment” dude who was going to “drain the swamp” much as Carter was going to restore trust in Washington.
I’ve never thought Reagan and Trump were good comparisons, but I like this Trump/Carter thing. Makes sense to me when I think about it.
Also, I’m pretty sure Jimmy Carter would hate being compared to Donald Trump, so as a native Georgian who knows all about Carter’s real history with race baiting, that gives me some pleasure.
I can only say, after being a registered Republican for 50 years, I can’t think of a single candidate every single one of us agreed with.
Amen. One billion percent agree with you on that one. And there’s nothing wrong with that because Republicans form coalitions to advance policies. It’s the Left that marries politics with identity. It’s the Left that drums people out for dissent.
(italics added) I don’t recognize this history at all. I recall clearly that in early 1976, few had heard of Jimmy Carter. Many more had heard of Jerry Brown, the then-sitting (and still-sitting!) governor of California. My recollection is that Jimmy Carter didn’t build a base of support, his primary electoral strength came from being a Democrat, thus he was not associated at all with Republican Richard Nixon, who had resigned in disgrace less than two years before the 1976 primary season. If there ever was an “Anyone But Carter” movement, it had to be in 1980, didn’t it?
Doesn’t your admission that Trump got more of his party’s vote run counter to your and Michael’s contention that Trump was the weakest candidate in [modern] history?
Memories can be fleeting, but you can look up history.
The Anyone But Carter movement was in 1976 and looked a lot like the Never Trump movement.
Carter would be hurt by a primary challenge from Kennedy in 1980, which is probably what you are thinking about, but this is not the race to which I’m referring.
As I said, all elections have circumstances that are unique unto them. For example, Trump had full name recognition in 2016 whereas Carter was “Jimmy Who?”
Yet they both ran in crowded primaries as “outsiders.” The power brokers in their parties didn’t have a lot of time for either of them. They ultimately built strong support via populist factions that pushed them ahead of their establishment peers.
In the end, Carter got a plurality in his 1976 primary as Trump got a plurality in 2016.
We could argue about words like “weakest,” but I contend Trump was weaker than Carter in the 2016 general because he was a known entity, and his character issues were not… helpful. His biggest selling point? He wasn’t Hillary.
Carter, on the other hand, was pretty unknown in the general… more of a blank slate like Obama in 2008. He benefitted from not being a Republican. He had Trump’s “outsider” advantages, but he didn’t have Trump’s deficits.
I’ll grant you that the use of superlatives can be hyperbolic, as I’ve said before in this thread, but not recognizing Trump as a weak candidate with some comparable attributes to past politicians seems willfully blind.
As we know, weak can still win.
Here you go. I found an article for you that compares ABC and Never Trump. It was in Politico in early 2016 but written by a history professor who has taught at Princeton and Cambridge. (Yep. That’s an “appeal to an expert.”)
Now who’s being disingenuous?
Your and Michael Graham’s unqualified, explicit description of Trump was the weakest candidate in history. Your own data disprove your strident defense of that superlative that you now call “hyperbolic.”
I repeat:
I think that you and @michaelgraham Michael Graham are conflating “unconventional” or even “unique” with “weak.” Trump was so unconventional that by conventional standards he appeared weak, yet that was not the case, as observers such as Salena Zito recognized. This is going off on a tangent, but I don’t know if political science is capable of measuring the strength of such an unconventional candidate. As George Will has noted, science is the study of events that can be replicated. Political science is therefore not science, since it is the study of unique events that cannot be replicated.
I am interested in history, which requires interpretation. Per my best judgement, Trump was weaker than Carter when going into the general election. Clinton was simply weaker than Trump.
You can disagree with that position, but it is a valid proposition per the data available as I’ve interpreted it.
I am more fascinated by why you care so much about an adjective if you propose total accuracy is impossible to ascertain?
I would not think you’d try to argue that Trump was the *strongest* candidate ever, right?
I am flummoxed as to why saying he was the weakest annoys you.
I can’t speak for Michael, but I don’t have a resistance t-shirt or kneel during the National Anthem.
The dude won.
That’s your bottom line, right?
I’m not working *against* him when I give my opinion about the circumstances of his election.
After all. Weak candidates who get into office via strange national conditions can show certain strengths once in command.
Ask Lincoln. ;)
And have a nice afternoon!
Football team A beats football team B by 40 points. Football team C beats football team D by 43 points. Technically, football team C has outdone football team A.
However, when you look a little closer you discover defeated football team B was the New England Patriots and defeated football team D was the New York Jets.
In addition, the team match ups going into the *next* game must be viewed through a similar prism.
The *strength of the teams* is every bit as important as the points wracked up in particular games.
If you only consider points, my son’s high school football team would *kill* the New England Patriots in a match up.
That is what your implication via this post is arguing, friend.
If thinking like a historian, that’s a very weak argument.
So do you suppose that prominent historian Victor Davis Hanson agrees with your impressively flexible argument?
I think that Victor Davis Hanson may have felt that Donald Trump was stronger in the primary than *I* think Trump was, though I really don’t know how he would measure that in this discussion.
I am *certain* he determined that Trump was the better of the two candidates running in the general.
However, if Hansen’s argument for Trump’s *strength* in that contest was built on a faulty syllogism–Winners of primaries are never weak candidates in general elections. Trump won his primary. Trump was not a weak candidate in the general.–then I’d say there were problems with his reasoning. (Those premises are valid, you see, but the argument is not strong per proving Trump wasn’t relatively weak.)
Anyway, as I do think he is a respected historian, I bet VDH could make a different, better case for why Trump won the election without insisting Trump wasn’t weak–the weakest even– by Certain measures.
In truth I *don’t* think this question of “was Trump the weakest” would be that important to him in the end.
It is more important to understand why Trump won the primary despite some deficits and how he then attracted a few million old Obama voters in key states into his camp.
I believe a good historian–as Victor David Hansen is–would care most about that, which seems to be what Michael ultimately cares most about, too, btw.
I mean, I don’t know what VDH thought about Trump’s *need* to insist Trump’s inauguration was the best attended in history either, though I’d guess he’d concede such things can be measured, even if imperfectly. I’d actually think–like this “most/least” discussion– he might find the data point mostly irrelevant.
This is because Two people could have gone to the inauguration and Trump would still be president. (Conversely, Trump could have been the weakest candidate to ever win a general election, and he still won, sooooooo…..)
The bottom line is this: Trump could have been a relatively weak candidate–the weakest even–and it doesn’t matter because Clinton was weaker in certain key states.
If the New York Jets played my son’s high school football team in the Super Bowl, they would get to wear Super Bowl rings! That’s what matters, but that doesn’t make them a strong football team in that moment of victory.
Maybe they’d *become* super strong. Great! All for it!!!
Then I’d evaluate their strengths differently in future contests….
I’m impressed by the OCD-like persistent flexibility of your argument, and you’ve drawn several bottom lines throughout, but the “superlative = hyperbole” tactic remains my favorite.
Well, @libertydefender, I believe we are at an impasse.
I’ve been flexible enough to recognize a somewhat empirically unquantifiable superlative can be hyperbolic–and was probably used that way here–even while being very consistent about my position that the “weakest” seems to reasonably fit in the Trump case.
There is, after all, an actual “weakest”, though I am completely–and cheerfully–able to say that where one chooses to put that label is subject to many factors, some of which require the application of opinion even after careful analysis because of the aforementioned “unquantifiable” that always exists in such contexts.
You are not convinced of my position. That’s okay. I’m still bemused as to why a word matters so much to you, but I’ve had fun with the back and forth. ;)