(04-30-2019, 05:29 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: PBR...I don't care about single polls. Honestly I don't care about polls at all. As it stands it is a decision between him and 20+ Democrats all of whom except for Biden and Sanders no one really knows much about--and those two are the only ones really viable anyway.
I select from many polls based upon a point made in that poll. I look forward to seeing polls that ask about the Mueller report, as I have yet to see one. What happens over time is the narrative, and the narrative about the Trump Presidency does not end until his term is through.
I have seen the statement many times: the only poll that matters is the popular vote as applicable to the election of people. It is typically the electoral losers who see the approval of an incumbent above 50% and think that they can still win, or the struggling incumbent who has support well under 50% who says such things. Trump was on the margin, and even if he was a long-shot, he still won.
200-1 long-shots occasionally win horse races. I can look at polling in recent years and I can handicap many elections as I did (if informally) in 2016 and say that Donald Trump had about 8-1 odds against him. He still won.
Quote:Right now the aggregate shows the President's approval in the low 40s. Against Sanders Trump will have no problem...he's a communist Jew. He is unpalatable to the country. Worse he is a Yankee and will lose VA, and NC which the Dims absolutely must take to get the White House.
The last two Presidents seem like unlikely winners. Barack Obama will stick out in any collection of images of American Presidents for obvious reasons. Could Americans vote for the son of an African immigrant and a nearly-white American woman? (Stanley Ann Obama, nee Dunham, was 1/16 black, and the one-drop rule is still a legal definition). Yes. Everything else was right, and Obama turned out to be an above-average President by most historical assessments. Sure, Obama might not have won without the underworld-style hit on Osama bin Laden, but that would have been impossible had he not been able to get along with the military and the intelligence agencies. Obama may have not seemed the likely President to arrange the death of the worst terrorist in history, but he was the one to do so.
Trump has a stormy relationship with the military, law enforcement, and the intelligence agencies, which is not what I expect of a right-winger. Character is destiny .
Donald Trump is the first President since Gerald Ford to have never have been elected to any statewide office or the Vice-Presidency, and to have never been a cabinet secretary since Eisenhower, who at least had been a highly-successful general. He is a disaster. Ford failed to get re-elected because he had no idea of how to run a Presidential campaign (because most Presidents have been Governors or Senators), and Presidential elections are basically fifty gubernatorial races with eight electoral votes decided as if House races or a race for mayor of one city (Dee Cee, and we all know how predictable that one is) until too late. The elder Bush proved a reasonably competent VP, but he had run only once for a Congressional seat -- and lost.
Trump got elected, perhaps with a little help from his friends. That may not be good enough in 2020. The negative ads practically write themselves. All Presidents who got re-elected had approval numbers in excess of 50% at this stage. Some won by landslides and some collapsed. Trump has had his collapsed.
Quote:Biden has run four times for President, he hasn't made it so far. Typically when one loses the primary of their own party once to someone who isn't a sitting President they don't become President themselves. That is the historical pattern and it hasn't changed and it won't change.
He faces the worst incumbent in American history since -- OK, Carter was a decent person, Hoover was fine except for bungling an economic meltdown, and Taft lost due to a split within his Party. Trump violated so many norms before becoming President and still got elected... and he is even more objectionable now than in November 2016. The rules of who can be President are shattered.
Quote:As for betting the farm on Millies. I hope that's a joke because I think you'll find they aren't as left wing as you have been told they are by the news media.
The Millennial generation is not going conservative until its Idealist children not yet born start rebelling against Millennial-created and Millennial-enforced norms. It has little stake in the economic status quo that includes a pay-for-play system in every aspect of economic and vocational life. It is getting a raw deal from America's economic elites who have done little good for any but themselves. It rejects fundamentalist Protestantism that is the cornerstone of Movement Conservatism.
The only questions that I have about Trump losing are
(1) actuarial -- and in view of his obesity, bad eating habits, and early signs of dementia, I would nit be surprised if the Grim Reaper removes him from political relevance or that he becomes debilitated by a stroke or heart attack
(2) whether he can undo the mass contempt that he faces
(3) whether he can pull off electoral fraud that gets him re-elected. For this he has the character
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.