I didn't watch any of the RNC speeches. I would sooner watch Triumph of the Will (again).

This isn't from a betting market, it's 538's polling projection model.

BTW, on CNN they mentioned that 60% of the sample in this poll supported Trump's policies -before- watching the speech.

Oh, oops.

I think that tweet may have been about Thiel's speech but not sure.

This is such an opportunity for Hillary. The single most important thing Trump said was the TSA comment. It is something that 100% of Americans agree with, it is totally nonpartisan, and it requires no effort or action. Just a promise and a plan.

If Hillary ends her speech with:
"I do have to give credit to my opponent for inspiring me to solve the TSA problem. I agree that airport security is a mess right now and I have a plan to fix it. Under my plan 96% of American citizens will qualify for TSA pre check and will no longer have to remove their shoes, belts, and jackets when they go through security. I developed my plan in partnership with the head of Homeland Security and when I become President I will enact it immediately."

... slamdunk.

It's probably already true that most people would theoretically qualify for pre check, and the statement requires a single phone call (or private email lol) to one person to corroborate in advance.

I think essentially all undecided voters would pick a candidate simply if it meant TSA stops sucking so bad. Trump suggested it but didn't have a plan. If Hillary can give a simple promise she resteals all those interested votes.

Can't imagine TSA efficiency is truly a voter concern, much less something that would swing an election. The data is a little old but something slightly less than 40% of the US flew on a commercial aircraft in 2009. Interestingly, 30% of the country reports having flown in the previous month which squares with some other things you can probably guess about air travel: it's heavily tilted toward business travelers who travel frequently. Now of course that was a down year for the economy, etc. etc., but presumably even assuming a 10% increase in unique commercial air-traveler, it's an issue that is not relevant to half the country except maybe as some sort of signal about efficiency or whatever. It's really not what pundits would call a bread-and-butter issue. Tactically politicians have sometimes been able to get mileage out of issues like TSA efficiency but the fact that, as you note, it is almost completely boilerplate and non-partisan means that it's hard something that would motivate anyone to vote differently than they would otherwise.

Last point: TSA's inefficiency are mostly a burden on business travelers (see above). This is glib and rough but you can assume most business travelers are middle class and above although potentially in an less-secure/high variance income class (e.g., sales). The business traveler profile probably doesn't map perfectly onto the electorate: it's probably significantly skewed toward older, college educated men. To wit:

This is probably NOT the typical profile of an undecided voter. Undecided voters are going to more downtrodden, far less likely to have a college education, probably the kind of people for who TSA is a bit of an esoteric and distant concern.

God damn it stop giving precheck to bozos who don't know what they are doing. If 96% have precheck it's ****ing worthless and I'll take off my damn shoes for a shorter line.

I'm very surprised 40% fly in a year. It's about 7 years since I flew.

I assume you're somewhat joking, but FYI ~20% of Americans have never flown a plane and about 50% haven't flown in at least a year.

I'm thinking of electoral votes moreso than the popular vote. Similar to the comment I made about SC justice appointments being the most important thing a president can do. While "most" Americans might not care about the Supreme Court or travel on airplanes... the Americans who actually influence elections do.

This is minor and maybe not worth dwelling on but the TSA pre-check thing is also the kind of thing that can become highly politicized, initially by a small minority of people but eventually just as another data point in a confusingly partisan world. The canonical example in campaign management literature or whatever is flag burning: you'll see these polls where like 90% of Americans disagree with flag burning, so some poor strategists will sometimes advocate candidates should come out very strong against flag burning. You even sometimes get the argument that, hey, look, that's entirely non-partisan! Everyone agrees.

In the 70s and 80s, flag burning prohibitions became a part of the American political zeitgeist; there's a good book,
Flag Burning: Moral Panic and the Criminalization of Protest which documents how minor issues like these quickly get politicized (e.g., it's minor in the sense that the US has never suffered from an epidemic of flag burning). I think it sort of speaks broadly to why political consensus is really hard to achieve. The basics are that while lots of people find flag burning distasteful, they quickly map some set of proxy concerns into the issue: that is, if flag burning becomes criminal, what other forms of protest or subversion or whatever ought to be criminal? Are flag-burning prohibitions really trying to signal something else ("better not protest Vietnam, the cops are watching!") Now you've got the basic forms of a partisan issue brewing, at least at the time: leftists, libertarians, etc. have their hackles raised that flag burning prohibitions are stand-ins for something else, whereas authoritarians, right-wingers, nationalists etc. start mapping all of their own proxy concerns into it.

Or consider abortion and abortion law, which is often a stand-in for morality theater, or the role of women in society, or other sexualized political concerns about control and patriarchy, or whatever.

Making TSA a centerpiece of rhetoric, specifically vastly expanding pre-check, can and almost certainly would quickly devolve into who isn't qualifying for the expanded pre-check. To be honest for Trump, this is probably easy and non-troubling: Muslims don't get it, BLM doesn't get it, everyone else sails through. For Clinton you'd like hear some wonkier, less coherent answer, but at it's core you have the foundation of another typical partisan political battle: what started out as non-partisan morphs into another issue highlighting our normal social battles about the surveillance state, how we treat racial minorities, whatever.

It wouldn't play out like "Clinton has good idea for TSA, everyone will stand up and applaud." That's not how these things work. The highly partisan atmosphere, the difficult in reaching political consensus about what seem like common sense problems and solutions -- that's not accident or some mystery. Clinton or Trump making hay about this will inevitably metastasize what was once non-partisan and trivial into something partisan and pertinent even if only as a proxy for some other battles we're having. We don't have this political culture by accident.

Electoral vs popular voters was a poor word choice. I guess I meant important people care about the Supreme Court and airline travel. Also, you don't have to fly regularly to hate TSA. We all have relatives who still tell the story about that one time they got searched 8 years ago.

Very well said and well thought out. I agree with you and think my initial thoughts about his comment were incorrect. Disregard my suggestion for Hillary. Though I am still rooting for TSA reform personally.

I'm with you to some extent that TSA could be a signal for a politician to show voters they care about practical issues and efficiency even if those voters don't fly. And I don't want to beat the horse dead, but jumping off on my last post, even these stories are tinged with some more overtly partisan commentary: tons of TSA hand-wringing, particularly from a subset of America's collective relatives, like the ones who still email you from aol.com accounts, are proxy complaints about not putting the boot to the throats of Muslims or other unsavory types they don't like.

I realize I'm slipping into editorializing here but lots (admittedly not all) of the "TSA is terrible" are really just right-wingers doing their mealy-mouthed dogwhistling, advocating for strict racial profiling or myth-making about government overreach. Their ham-handed complaints about the rank inefficiency in TSA are the kind of proxy battles I'm talking about: their idealized world is that whites sail through security without trouble, but make sure you shake down the Mohammedans and have them take off their burkas and turbans. And the world of TSA horror stories are replete with old white Apocrypha about how some old grandma got stripped searched and molested while Osama Bin Laden had a suitcase with wires hanging out and strutted through security untouched like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Remember too the right-wing went on some Glenn Beckian type crusade from circa 2009-2011 about how Big Sis lesbian pervert Janet Nepolitano installed new full body scan machines that gave you cancer and made you late for your flight so she could masturbate to an xray of your pre-pubescent daughter.

tl;dr summary: TSA is already politicized.

What a absolute nutter trump is. Surely Hillary will win. She might not be perfect but she won't do much damaging and will be a continuity president, whereas trump would Stoke racial hatred and pull down social bonds.

My thoughts watching it. Sure, it's low on policy specifics and high on dangerous strongman nonsense but anyone writing it off outright hasn't been paying attention to this electoral cycle imo.

Relative to the normal Trump stump speech it was certainly slightly more coherent and had evidence of an editor/professional speech writer even if the speech was overly long. It was a synthesis of his normal bleak talking points and anecdotes about how everyone will be murdered and things are terrible ("low on policy specifics, high dangerous strongman nonsense").

I guess you can say that if the gamble that the American political ethos is dark and somber then Trump's speech perpetuated the fear and cynicism about the future of the country. So if we think he "did what he needed" by keeping the anger and fear as the focus, then he did that successfully.

If the idea was that he was supposed to pivot into a more hope-and-change kind of candidate and away from the themes of the primary, I didn't see that at all. I think part of the prior assumptions of Trump and what he might do in the general election, you might bet his speech would have sounded alot more like Ivanka's: hey I'm not really partisan, (my dad) just likes solutions, let's talk about practical things, we don't hate anyone actually. Remember that was what a lot of us plausibly thought Trump might do once he got to this point in the face: just pivot to some non-partisan populist outsider.

So the Trump bet insofar as there is a long-term strategy here seems to be that the general electorate is alot like the Republican electorate and he's just pressing forward being mostly the same guy he was for the past year. That I think was the theme of the whole convention including Trump's speech; the unholy triumvirate of terrorists, immigrants and Hillary Clinton will probably murder you or otherwise make you miserable and Trump is here to stop that. There ain't much of a pivot here.

The dangerous strongman nonsense is exactly what a lot of people want.

But enough people to win an election? Surely no one non-White will vote for him, and quite low amounts of women. That's a narrow electorate. Will the republicans who hate trump end up voting for him or just not vote?

Well, we have a political / international climate of terrorist attacks, a revival of racial tension, cops being executed on the streets and the UK withdrawing from the EU. I'm being slightly glib writing that of course because each point has depth and complexity - but maybe the electorate is ready to cast their vote primarily in negativity and fear come November.

I disagree with Dvaut on that being the theme. The theme was "me." There was no one theme, everyone could glisten or take from it what they wanted. Because that's exactly what the GOP is for now, down to the rural voters. Facts don't matter. That the guy speaking before you said the complete opposite of what you will doesn't matter. Go out and deliver your message. Grift away. There is a slot for you and your opinion, no matter how crazy and/or stupid.

What is hillary's message gonna be? Basically that she will be a continuation of Obama and that she isn't trump?

Probably that, yes.