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winning the nomination based on the asshole vote with no enthusiasm from the Repug establishment is a LONG way from winning the WH.
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/i...l#incart_2box_
President Barack Obama seems bemused by Donald Trump's insurgent campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
"He is a great publicity-seeker -- and at a time when the Republican Party hasn't really figured out what it's for as opposed to what it's against," the president said earlier this month. "He is, you know, the classic reality-TV character."
Obama added: "I don't think he'll end up being president of the United States."
That's been the conventional wisdom for months: Trump, with his bombastic, made-for-TV personality, is fun to watch, but sooner or later he's going to flame-out. Celebrated polling site Fivethirtyeight.com pointed out in June that 57 percent of Republicans disliked the real-estate mogul and reality-TV performer. "For this reason alone, Trump has a better chance of cameoing in another 'Home Alone' movie with Macaulay Culkin -- or playing in the NBA Finals -- than winning the Republican nomination."
But it's now four months later, and pundits are being forced to reconsider their predictions. Because Trump, defying all expert opinion, is still leading in the the GOP polls. In August, Fivethirtyeight's founder, Nate Silver, put Trump's chances at winning the GOP nomination at 2 percent. This week he grudgingly upped that prediction to "high single digits" -- with a caveat. "There's a lot of existential uncertainty here," he said. "If you're being purely empirical -- well, nobody quite like Trump has won a party nomination before, or even come all that close to it. So there's some universe where his chances are 0 percent."
Needless to say, that means there's also some universe where his chances are 100 percent. In short: no one knows what to expect anymore.
David Burstein, founder of the political-reform group Run for America, believes we need to start preparing ourselves for the possibility that Trump will indeed win the nomination and go on to become the next president of the United States. Burstein has looked at the polls and the electoral map for Vanity Fair magazine and has concluded that "Trump is just as compe ive -- and perhaps more so -- as either John McCain, in 2008, or Mitt Romney, in 2012."
The reason for this unexpected compe iveness: Trump has been astonishingly successful at defining himself as a pure, anti-establishment bellower of truths, which is exactly what Republican voters and many independents are looking for. Remember, the goal in a presidential general election is not necessarily to win the national popular vote. The goal is to win the Electoral College, and most of the states that make up the Electoral College vote are locked down for one party or the other no matter who the nominees are. Burstein's analysis suggests that, in a general election against Hillary Clinton or any of the other Democratic presidential candidates, Trump would do much better in the key battleground states than the mainstream punditocracy wants to admit. "Which all means," Burstein states, "that the election comes down to Florida and Ohio, two states where Trump has significant advantages."
In Florida, Trump is, incredibly, polling better than his Floridian GOP compe ors Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. The state's Cuban voters are less likely than Hispanics in other states to find Trump's anti-immigration bloviating offensive, and, Burstein writes, "the Florida voting population includes a high percentage of evangelicals (a group with whom Trump seems to have had baffling success)." As for Ohio, Trump has a magician's hold on working-class and many young voters. "Trump's resonance with today's version of the American Dream is hugely aspirational for people who are unemployed and financially hurting," Burstein writes. Burstein also believes Trump has the potential to turn out a huge number of new voters across the country -- basically, all those reality-TV watchers who don't normally pay any attention to politics.
The upshot: We can no longer consider Donald Trump a sideshow to the serious business of running for president. Trump and his reality-TV style of campaigning are the new normal. Notice has been given: We have four years to get ready for the epic 2020 showdown between Trump, the in bent, and insurgent challenger Kanye West.
-- Douglas Perry
winning the nomination based on the asshole vote with no enthusiasm from the Repug establishment is a LONG way from winning the WH.
He would just have to beat Shillary. Not too tough.
Be better then the Dude in their now
dude can't be stopped, hillary's record is so bad this is the only matchup that the republicans can actually win.
Until he gets to the general and says something so off-putting that it causes not only slight leaning righties to abandon ship but actively motivates the sleepy moderate base to wake the up and vote en masse.
The GOP is a perfect example why having more than a couple majority parties can be dangerous to democracy....
Having greasebag LePage as gov of Maine shows the danger of winning office with a no-runoff plurality rather than a two-party system.
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