Trump Vs. Alf Landon

[Dan '82]

If one believes the 4T started in 2008 then that’s makes this election a parallel to 1936 so who is a more incompetent candidate Trump or Alf Landon.

[Eric the Green]

If you give any credence to my astrological research, the scores indicate Trump is a better candidate. Landon: 11-19. Trump 8-4. However, Trump if elected would have the lowest positive score (8) since Herbert Hoover. Since 1928 no candidate with a positive score of less than 10 has been elected president. Also, the proportion of his score is a 2 to 1 margin. That's pretty good, but the only president elected with that percentage or lower since Hoover was Lyndon Johnson, and he had the advantage of Jupiter rising.

All presidents and probably all candidates tend to have higher scores in the modern era since FDR, than in the prior years.

Trump, despite his many faults, has the ability to make the case to a certain demographic that he is their "voice." People in that demographic tend not to care about the things that Trump's many critics like myself care about. Trump can appeal to the forgotten man, like Nixon and George Wallace did in 1968. Landon could never do that.

The closest parallel according to my numbers is 1908, not 1936. Trump is not really a "populist," but he appeals to white men who see themselves as forgotten and disadvantaged, and he's more populist than the typical Republican like Landon or Romney etc.. William Jennings Bryan of course was a real populist, but he was also able to appeal to the less educated in the way Trump does. William Howard Taft, like Hillary Clinton today, was the chosen successor of a popular incumbent who was a moderate progressive, Teddy Roosevelt. Taft was, like Clinton, much less appealing in his personality than his mentor, and like Hillary was more suited to a more intellectual policy-driven pursuit such as supreme court justice, which he became. Both were rather-unfairly branded as establishment types. Taft's horoscope score is identical to Hillary's, and they both have Jupiter rising. Bryan's score is almost identical to Trump's, 8-3. Bryan's score is higher by proportion than Taft's, but Bryan didn't have Jupiter rising (revolutionary Uranus rising instead). That situation is identical to Hillary vs. Trump in 2016 (except Trump has aggressive Mars rising, not Uranus). In 1908 as in 2016, the new moon before election forecast the party in power to win. Neither candidate had a Saturn Return problem in 1908 or 2016.

Taft won, and fairly handily. The precedent is set. Taft was also a one-term president, so 2020 may be a different story for Hillary. But other indications are different from 1912, so it's not like the pattern of 1908 can be extended.

[Anthony '58]

I laugh equally at the far-lefties who are saying that Hillary will win by a landslide and at the far-righties who are saying (more loudly) that Trump will win by a landslide.

The red-blue divide makes such an outcome essentially mathematically impossible - at least if one defines a landslide as an election in which the losing candidate is "lurched;" that is, fails to win 135 electoral votes, which is half the 270 needed to win.

The last losing candidate to suffer this fate was Michael Dukakis in 1988 - and it ain't gonna happen this year.