I ain’t worried about no Trump.
He’s not going to be president. He’s just not. There’s no way. Let me say that again. There is absolutely no fucking way Donald J. Trump is going to become the President of These United States. I’m completely confident in saying that.
Well, I mean, I suppose it’s possible. It’s also possible that the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park could erupt again later this week. After all, it’s been 650,000 years since its last eruption. So it’s within the realm of possibility. But is either of these massively calamitous events anywhere near likely to happen? Nope.
Here’s the thing: first off, Trump’s got no ground game. Sure, the guy’s pretty good at holding big rallies. Rallies are great visuals. All that spectacle — excited people waving signs and calling out the candidate’s name. That looks impressive on television and in news photos. But rallies don’t get voters to the polling stations on election day. You want to win an election, you’ve got to get voters to places where they can actually vote. You need a political infrastructure designed to both encourage voters and to shift their bodies from the sofa to the voting booth. Infrastructure is NOT flashy or exciting, so Trump and his crew of political remora haven’t devoted much time or effort to putting that infrastructure together.
Second, Trump hasn’t been tested against a Democratic candidate. He’s been ‘debating’ against dumplings who couldn’t really attack him because they mostly agree with him. And when they didn’t agree with him, they were afraid to alienate the Republican base (I almost said the ‘lunatic fringe’, but now that IS the Republican base).
I mean, look — in the Republican debates Trump could rise up on his hind legs and say astonishingly stupid things like “We’re not winning. America doesn’t win anymore. We don’t win. We’re just not winning.” and his opponents couldn’t say “What the fuck are you talking about — winning what?” They couldn’t say something like “Well, sure we’re winning, of course we’re winning” because that would be seen as supporting President Hussein Bams of Muslim, Kenya. If you look at the order of the fuckwits who dropped out of the Republican race, you’ll see that the most rational candidates dropped out soonest. The Republican primary was never a contest to determine who was the best person to govern These United States. It was always a contest to see who was the biggest asshole.
Which is why Trump’s biggest competition came from Ted Fuckin’ Cruz, the man whose own political party would vote him Most Likely To Be Left To Starve On An Ice Floe. Ted Fuckin’ Cruz is so actively disliked that if a plane carrying Republicans crashed in the Andes, they’d starve before they’d eat him. I don’t think anybody actually believed Ted Fuckin’ Cruz was the Zodiac Killer, but a lot of people wanted him to be. And that’s the guy Trump had to beat in the primaries. You put Trump on a debate stage with any Democrat not currently in a coma and Trump will explode like a popcorn fart. All it’ll take is somebody using a calm voice and saying “Well, no, building a wall along the border with Mexico is just a silly idea.”
But even if Trump had a ground game, and even if Trump was a competent conservative debater, he still couldn’t win the coming election. The math is against him — and math is a merciless sumbitch. Only about 23% of the electorate (those folks who are eligible to vote) are registered as Republicans. Democrats do a bit better (32% of the electorate) but the biggest voting bloc in the U.S. right now are Independents and unaffiliated voters (at 39% of the electorate). The remaining 6% are registered as Libertarians or Green Party or one of the whackadoodle political fringe groups.
So even if every registered Republican shows up at the pools and votes for Trump and if fully half of the unaffiliated and Independent voters experience a psychotic fugue state in the voting booth and go for Trump, that’s still only 42% of the electorate. That’s the most optimistic outcome for Trump.
The fact is, a lot of Republicans aren’t willing to vote for Trump. That’s especially true for women. Depending on which poll you look at, anywhere from 35-45% of women registered as Republicans have said they definitely won’t vote for Trump. Nor can Trump rely on many of those unaffiliated/Independent voters. Almost half of younger voters — those 18 to 35 — are unaffiliated/Independent voters. The same is true of Latino voters; nearly half are registered as unaffiliated/Independent.
Trump’s not getting the women’s vote, he’s not getting the Latino vote, he’s not getting the vote of any minority group. Trump’s wheelhouse is mostly filled with angry/scared white guys. It sure seems like there’s a lot of them these days; they make a lot of noise and we see them on television all the goddamn time — but happily there’s just not enough of them to carry an election.
Trump’s not a serious candidate. The political party he represents is no longer a serious political party. He’s fucked — and with any luck, he’s fucked the entire Republican party. Trump’s defeat may force them to get serious again.
The only way Democrats can lose is by dividing the party and not showing up to vote. Which, now that I say it, is possible.
In other news, back in March of this year locals reported an area of the Shoshone River near Yellowstone National Park was boiling. That boiling has stopped. For the moment.
gregfallis.com 
Awesome, as always. :)
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Now that the Libertarians have officially nominated Gary Johnson, and once the Democrats officially nominate Hillary, it will be interesting to see how Johnson affects the swing of independent voters. I have no doubt he’ll pull the vast majority of #NeverTrumpers, but if he is included in the debates, I can see him pulling a lot of on-the-fence independents as he has a pretty appealing (and sane) appearance. The question, though, as always, is how many will vote for him knowing that he’s not going to win? As with Florida in 2000, he doesn’t have to garner all that many votes to swing a state, and hell, he could even win a state or two, although I suspect these would be more apt to be a (damn, I really hate to use this term) red state.
More than anything, I wish the Democratic Party would get its shit together within the (here I go again) red states, by sending out its best messengers (Elizabeth Warren, for example) to meet with people who—just because they live in Nebraska or Kansas or South Dakota—vote against their own self interests every time.
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I think you’re right about Johnson and the NeverTrump folks. In an odd but very real way Trump is giving Republicans permission to vote for any jamoke they want. Since their party is going to lose anyway, they can throw away their vote on a symbolic candidate just to make a point.
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Curiously, the guy who created the cartoon Dilbert has predicted a landslide for Trump due to his skills of persuasion.
Since I’m not a fan of that particular strip, I probably shouldn’t give much credence to his projection… right? RIGHT?!?
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I’ve seen that bit with Bill Maher and Scott Adams. I don’t find it…well, persuasive. Adams suggests that Trump’s absolute lack of concern for fact and consistency deprives his challengers of a target they can focus on. That might work for folks who are swayed only by the last thing they’ve heard (and sadly, we have a LOT of those in the U.S.). Adams says Trump has fooled a lot of people into believing he’s a serious candidate for president.
I think that can work during a primary campaign — especially one like the Republicans ran this year. It was the weakest pool of candidates I’ve ever seen. But I don’t think Trump can maintain that through an actual presidential campaign. More and more, I think/hope, the news media will start to force Trump to take a position and hold it, or be exposed nationally as a Mitt Romney style flip-flopper.
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Uh, huh. I really hope you’re right on this one. Over here, we’re not convinced that your less insightful countrymen won’t vote him in. There was Reagan….although I realise he doesn’t compare to the obscenity that is Trump.
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I’m confident Trump will crash and burn. I may be wrong, but if so I’m wrong with confidence.
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all it takes is the Bern voters to not show up. And all of the other folks who think they don’t have to vote because, you know, Trump. With all of the laws that make it harder to vote, the most hard hit are the elderly, minorities, and young people who are away at college. These are the groups that would ordinarily make up the nay vote against the Donald. So, yeah, Trump can win. Perhaps not in a landslide, but it is possible to win enough electoral college votes that the popular vote doesn’t matter.
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I think there are relatively few true ‘Bernie or Burn It All Down’ folks out there. I know a LOT of seriously hardcore Bernie supporters who see Hillary as a corrupt corporate shill without any morals or integrity — but most of them also acknowledge that the lesser of two evils is still the lesser of two evils. They may not be motivated to vote for her, but they’re mostly motivated to vote against Trump.
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Such a pleasure to read something to counter the foam-flecked hysteria.
(oh and “floe”, not “flow”.)
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Oh, thanks…floe, of course. I’m so glad you caught that. Fixed.
About the hysteria — we’ve sort of created a media-driven culture that’s addicted to hysteria. It adds dramatic tension to otherwise routine lives. Plus that hysteria draws viewers/readers, which allows the news media to sell advertising. If content consumers accepted that the 2016 election is largely settled already, then how is Dodge going to sell more trucks? How is Pfizer going to sell more Viagra?
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Pingback: torching the orchestra pit | gregfallis.com
hey i want to know your thoughts about how this post aged.
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I’m pretty fucking worried about that Yellowstone supervolcano.
But I have to admit, I badly underestimated the number of white women who’d vote for Trump. It’s still difficult for me to believe that over 40% of college educated white women voted for him — but apparently they did.
I also never considered the fact that Russian interference would play such a critical role in the election. We can’t know how many votes that shaved away from Clinton, but considering Trump’s election basically was a result of winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — each of which he won by less than a single percentage point — it’s pretty clear Russian ratfucking had a major impact.
As I said in the post, math is a merciless sumbitch. Clinton may have received two and a half million more votes than Trump, but a few thousand votes in a few critical counties in three states turned out to be the critical ones — and they went to Trump.
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