I also agree with Fly though that at some point Trump has some harsh demographic realities to tackle.

But let's take a step back and think about where he is with the GOP specifically and why he's winning. I'm too lazy to go back and cite them or polling data but here's the story in a nutshell. I think I've ham-handedly and not thoroughly alluded to this in various posts throughout the last six months, but to understand TRUMP is to realize three things about the GOP electorate: 1) he is winning downtrodden whites. Think the Mike Huckabee crowd. These people are nominally conservative Christians but that is not their defining feature. They are also economically anxious and can be won over with populist economic rhetoric, anger at globalization and immigration. Check for Trump, he's overcoming his lack of social conservative bonafides by being strong there. It's going to make Trump hard to beat in Appalachia and the south on Super Tuesday and the SEC primary swing.

But there have been tons of "captures the white trash" crowd candidates before that couldn't move beyond that.

Here's where Trump is special:

2) He's also got a pretty good mix of Ron Paul type fringe voters and various other misanthropic people (maybe ~5% of the GOP) without much ideological bent. They are likely completely incoherent and nonsensical. You are seeing these dudes show up in this thread at a very high rate. When you study these people, they don't make much sense but that's almost part of their joie de vivre. We often confuse them as maybe somehow ideologically libertarian or maybe full of righteous anger at the establishment but imo they're more thought of as just the kind of dudes (and they're mostly dudes) who hate other people, period. I don't mean in a uniformly racist or bigoted way, I mean they're the kind of people who literally just could not give a **** about walls or immigration rights and just want to be amused by Trump saying funny and mean and crazy things.

A small but maybe important part of the GOP on the margins, in a close race.

3) He's ALSO winning suburban and exurban whites with some money who are probably also NOT THAT socially conservative but otherwise kinda racist if you poke at their political beliefs a little. This is the key. I think the political media calls these people, I dunno, 'Reagan Democrats' or something. White working-class Northerners, and above. You find them in and around the suburbs that flank interstates that surround big cities, particularly in the rust belt and northeast. This is why Trump is going to be so formidable in delegate rich states like PA, NY, MA, MD, NJ, IL, MI, OH and then some have migrated to FL and they are slowly bleeding into northeast VA over time. They are a little uncomfortable with sanctimonious religious displays, particularly of southern Christian types, and they are not very stridently ideologically conservative. So Ted Cruz is dicey for them. These voters usually really do not matter at all in the general election because they're in places that aren't usually swing states (except some OH and WI suburbs, FL transplants, and now their incursion into suburban VA outside of DC).

They were part of the New Deal coalition, they mostly were urban, up until the Civil Rights Era and then fled to the suburbs. They are somewhere on the moderate to conservative scale and were it not for their racism or other things that fit into the colorful mosaic of white people anxieties ("ISS! transgender bathrooms! Immigrants!") are probably Democratic voters, the kind who aren't bible thumpers and aren't upset by abortion and used to pull the trigger for FDR and JFK but who the Southern Strategy pulled into the GOP column.

Trump is actually offering them up a pretty decent product for their market since they are not super socially conservative lest for the stuff Trump focuses on, and he's so far crushing with them (see the southeast corner of NH, far-flung Boston suburbs).

Unless the state of the race changes dramatically, I don't see how Rubio or Cruz can topple Trump with those specific people. Rubio is better positioned than Cruz for sure, but Trump is still their horse.

If we get to the part of the race where Kasich/Bush/Carson drop and it's those three AND we get to PA, NY, MA, MD, NJ, IL, MI, OH mattering -- I just don't see how Trump is going to lose in those states (MI and OH are dicey if Kasich is still around). Given the number of delegates at play in the northeast/rust belt corridors full of Reagan Democrat types, and combine it with Trump's strength among like actually super racist/poor GOP voters in the south...

...feels like something of a winning coalition.

Now back to the general election coalition: Trump can crush with the mix of misanthropic Ron Paul voter types, downtrodden whites in Appalachia and the south, and angry whites who inhabit the northeast suburbs and that mix might be just enough to win a GOP primary.

At some point he has to expand beyond that. And I suppose you can't rule it out. Because he's only 'winning' right now because the entire electorate at play is like so full of angry white people. Once you wide the game out to the full spectrum of Americans, it's no longer a winning coalition.

So far all of Trump's strategic brilliance seems to be playing angry white America's favorite folk songs with his bull **** fiddle, mixed with some vaudevillian interludes for the Ron Paul types who appreciate a little comedy now and then.

At some point he's going to have to broaden the show's appeal.

I think the fascinating state to watch in the event that TRUMP wins the nomination is Texas.

Texas is only 45% white and obviously white Texans overwhelmingly vote conservative, but if the Latino vote can be organized in states like Texas and Arizona to put those states in the blue column, it makes Electoral Math almost impossible for the GOP to overcome.

I agree on the whole that TRUMP will do remarkably well with white voters and remarkably poorly with minorities.

Sanders is more likable than Trump to me. Trump is more entertaining. But people cited likability as an asset of GWB so clearly the public at large differs from what I think.

It's amazing that TRUMP has already managed to get in a spat with the Pope, shock Benjamin ****ing Netanyahu with comments about Muslims, insult Mexico and probably all of Latin America, and have the British Parliament debate how much of a wazzock he is. And he is only campaigning in a primary. Being a diplomat in the TRUMP administration will not be an easy job. But he will hire the very best ones, so they can probably manage it.

I wonder if the takeaway from the TRUMP campaign is that it's no longer necessary to pander to evangelicals. To put it bluntly, it seems like in the GOP hating on Muslims is more broadly acceptable than pro-lifeism or Terri Schiavo or whatever moral issue du jour people used to bait God botherers with. TRUMP is miles ahead in SC and he's doing that while being an obvious fraud on religious issues. Possibly scaremongering about Muslims is enough to replace all the other means of inducing evangelicals to **** their pants about modern society.

Evangelicals have been pretty tolerant of obvious fraud. See Jim Bakker.

I'm pretty removed from the culture, so I'm not sure, but I think there's such a strong component of faith vs. practice and instant transformation that it's pretty compelling to accept it when people say the right things.

This article on the Fourth Great Awakening (e.g., the fleeing to conservative, right-wing branches of Protestantism from more mainline, apolitical ones) gives decent background to the point I'm about to make:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Great_Awakening

If you understand that sort of 'evangelism' as a movement that began in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the social movements of the time -- civil rights for racial minorities, feminism, gay rights, etc. -- so if you see the phenomenon NOT as singularly a religious movement but more of a political movement with a Christian veneer and the overtones of religious fervor -- then I think TRUMP winning these people makes sense.

I know some of the forum will tire of hearing it but I mean the 1960s/70s were a time of great trauma to the racist white American psyche. Some significant percentage found comfort for their anxieties in right-wing religious movements. When you sense their religious movement as a response to you know, the end to Jim Crow and assorted other instruments of white guy power -- what they reflexively did due to the anxieties caused by changing social structures where blacks, ladies, and other assorted minority types get more power -- and a guy comes along saying Megyn Kelly bleeds from her wherever and wants to build a wall to keep out Mexicans and ban Muslim integration -- maybe it makes sense.

Long and short of it: evangelism (the modern way to the American media uses it to describe you know, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz type voters) can be seem as not so much a religiously inspired response to like, the passions inspired by Jesus or whatever the ****, but as a political response -- then you have to determine the political reasons that drove them there. And if it's anxieties about social liberalization, it's not surprising a right-wing authoritarian populist is pulling at their heartstrings. Trump dispensed of Jesus and got right to the core of the thing. They're tried praying for 40 years and still America gets browner, women get more uppity year over year, and now a black guy got to be President for 8 years. Time for more extreme measures.

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/why-a...261597616.html

Jimmy Carter

Last time evangelicals voted for someone who really loved Jesus, they didn't like what they got.

Wow. Did not know that. Hard to imagine.

At the time, there were still tons of southern Democrats who were indistinguishable from Strom Thurmond and George Wallace or whatever. While it's true Jimmy Carter wasn't them, remember he also wasn't THAT notable either. The benefit of hindsight is like "woah what a miss" but remember in 1976 Carter was a southern Democrat peanut farmer governor without much of a known profile. Obviously Falwell, Graham et al thought they were getting a Dixiecrat kind of guy, not a closet liberal, but their brand confusion is totally understandable imo given the rest of the products on the market at the time that looked and sounded just like Jimmy Carter were something much different.

Not surprising understanding the gubernatorial elections in Georgia in 1966 and 1970.

Carter lost the 1966 Dem nomination because he wasn't racist enough. He courted the racist vote in 1970 and was labeled a racist by The Atlanta Constitution for pandering to racists during the 1970 campaign.

It was natural this was attractive to the Falwell types. Carter was ahead of his time for a white southerner in the 50's thru 70's but wasn't beyond blowing the racist dog whistles to get elected.

http://millercenter.org/president/bi...the-presidency

All those guys were Democrats, though, so it's not really as crazy as you think. The big flip to the GOP hadn't completely finished. I mean WV went for Clinton by 15 points in 1996, which is crazy to think about.

I'm pretty ignorant of the Carter years. I at least have some idea what transpired during the Kennedy/LBJ/Nixon years and then Reaganism after that. Carter I really only know as the butt of jokes about WEAKNESS etc which I assume is the Benghazi of its day. I have no idea what it was he actually did during his administration.

Sanders is extremely likable. Probably a fair bit more likable than Obama and Bill Clinton and far more likable than any other candidate in my lifetime. I also trust him more than any politician I remember but the fact that I fear he will follow through is exactly what scares me. There is no doubt in my mind that he is a great person and a very honest and honorable one too.

So hey remember that Trump v. Cruz thing?

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016...a-poll-n521101

Trump 28
Cruz 23
Rubio 15
Bush 13
Kasich 9
Carson 9

Crosstab takeaways: hard conservatives are overwhelmingly locked into their candidate while the moderates are predictably all over the place. Rubio is the second choice of a quarter of the field, Donald is 11% (let's face it those are all Cruz voters and not switching). Cruz will probably challenge at least 1 CD even if he doesn't win the state; nobody else has a chance.

NBC/WSJ also had Cruz ahead of Trump nationally Wednesday while USA Today and Q had Trump still up by 15% and 18% the same day, so maybe a grain of salt needs to be ingested, or maybe they are right....though every other poll taken the day before has Trump still up by large margins.

Maybe a time to check their methodology internally?

That is depending on one's POV. If one's vision of the ideal society is a giant Denmark (and I am not swaying that necessarily is a good or bad thing), then he is great.

If you have a different POV he can look a lot like the antichrist. There are many in this country that argue that America, with our seemingly strange ways , has been the most positive influence on the human experience in the past 240 years overall.

Likability is not a question of policy.

trump's net favorable ratings are really, really bad among the general electorate. his number of undecideds are really low so he's going to have to either convince someone who holds an unfavorable view to vote for him (unlikely) or change someone's mind about him (difficult given his campaign).

WSJ polls have a much smaller TRUMP lead and a much bigger Hillary lead thsn other polls, so I'd guess they use a much stricter "likely voter" screen.

MSNBC just showed an anti-Rubio ad that basically made it look like Obama was endorsing him.

This is the same argument people used to say he had a low ceiling in the Republican primaries: since he's already a known quantity, his unfavorables will doom him. And yet, he's done a remarkable job persuading people to his side. I'm (literally) betting he'll do the same in the general.

Obama should endorse Rubio, that would be the GOAT troll move.

As BigPoppa noted, NBC/WSJ polls have also been notable for large Clinton leads. It's probable they are modeling very tightly on likely voters. That's not to say it's incorrect, but it's a pretty clear pattern now. So if turnout is low and Trump/Sanders type voters don't show up, they will be correct and other pollsters will look bad.