On this, I can agree with you. Trump seems particularly deficient when it comes to winning at the convention. Cruz is going to steal the nomination from him if it's not settled before the convention. I was rebuked here at the start of the election for calling Cruz my darkhorse to win, but I still feel pretty confident it's going to happen. I had also thought Cruz would win the general. I'm less confident on that one. And, I thought Cruz winning would be the worst possible outcome, but now I'm waffling on whether Cruz or Trump is worse; it's tough to say. I think the interesting thing about winning at the convention is that it doesn't look like something that can be brokered by Party elites. Some people think that the GOP is going to hand the nomination to Romney or Kasich or other favored candidate. I don't think that's possible. They'll have thousands of delegates there to vote their conscience. The party bosses can go out there and say vote for Romney, but they'll be hard-pressed to ignore all the elections we've done. It's down to Trump and Cruz and that's it. Beat me to it. 14% growth rate would be up there with the best years of China's explosive GDP growth. And this is what the US under Cruz is going to average for 10 years? They say all models are wrong, but some models are useful. This is not one of those useful models.
I fail to see the relevance of Jack Kennedy's tax cuts, which helped fuel the explosive growth of the 1960's (in my opinion), to today's candidates for President. If you don't mind, Commodore, please post the tax rates that existed before Kennedy's tax cuts and contrast them with the tax rates after his tax cuts. That would be quite illuminating.
I did not think Cruz could win the nomination and I think that if had not been for Trump he wouldn't have. Trump effectively neutered the "establishment" candidates in a way that I just don't believe Cruz ever could have and now he is going to benefit by being the last one standing with any prominence. Had it not been for Trump dominating the media narratives, Bush's financial advantage might have mattered, Rubio could have been the middle ground darling, etc. Trump just dashed all of it.
I think you are giving Trump too much credit. Honestly if it hadn't been for having 17 candidates or whatever, then Trump would have been irrelevant. If there was always like 3 candidates Trump wouldn't have mattered because like 60-70% of the Republican party don't and wouldn't support him. His loyal cultists were enough to make the difference with the vote splintered a dozen different directions and that's the only thing that kept him in the race. If the candidates were Cruz, Trump, Rubio from the start, Rubio probably wins.
Well I won't vote for Trump or Cruz. Beyond that I have no absolutes lol. I know you hate Trump, but you are letting your own distaste for him cloud your perspective. Even when there were 17 candidates, in most of the primary states there were only ever 3-5 real players. You underestimate the amount of people who rallied to his brand of obnoxiousness and how damaging it was to be emasculated by him for someone like Jeb Bush. Cruz would never have attacked Bush the way Trump did. Never.
I think you are just overestimating the effect of those attacks. Even when there were only "3-5 real players", the votes that went to the other 5 or 6 candidates could have easily swung the election and given the state to someone else. Trump's delegate lead is largely based on early success in states he won with 35% of the vote or less. He got 50 delegates in South Carolina with 32% of the vote! If there are fewer people on those ballots those early states likely go to people other than Trump, and he never builds momentum.
Only if you assume that the 21-23 percent of the vote that went to someone other than the top 3 candidates went 100% to one of the two other than Trump would it have flipped the state. If all of those votes split something like 10.5% to Cruz, 10.5% to Rubio and 1% to Trump, he still wins South Carolina. I am anti-Trump, but it is annoying how everyone assumes that 100% of votes for someone other than Trump will stay that way if their candidate got out of the race earlier. For example, I don't believe that many Kasich supporters are lining up to vote for Cruz (or Trump.) Rather the pool of voters will just reduce.
Why do you think there was no one else lined up to run? They've known for 8 yrs that Obama's term was over and it was very likely Hillary would be the top contender. Yet the best they could do, was Bush (who had similar baggage to Hillary) Rubio (very junior at best) Christie (maybe?) and the Ohio guy who would have been an outsider regardless? Plus assorted long shots with only limited appeal. Looking at 2008, McCain, Romney and Huckabee are each more palatable. And if they go celebrity types, Thompson or Guiliani seemed to have had more upside and potential broad appeal. These guys aren't my ilk. But I am baffled. Even for the small boards I work with we line up candidates before regime change takes place. The Dems have an excuse (pitiful as it is) that Hillary was the heir apparent. But the Republicans had 8 yrs to come up with a better than plan than what has been presented, no?
Romney didn't want to run again, Paul Ryan doesn't want to be President as far as I can tell and most of the other mainstream Republicans probably look at the freak show going on right now and want nothing to do with it. I'm not sure how many Republicans really want to get up there and say they want to abolish the department of education. Heck, Paul Ryan gave an "I was wrong" speech recently regarding poverty. Rick Perry gave a speech addressing racial inequality in criminal justice. Rand Paul did both of those and has taken a stance against Neo-Con foreign policy. Those guys get blasted for that track. John Kasich is getting called a weakling. The quest for a strongman Republican is killing the Republican party.
I think it's a pretty safe assumption that the VAST majority of those votes would go to people other than Trump given numbers that show over 50% of Republican women say that they'd never vote for Trump under any circumstances, numbers that show that between 70-80% of African Americans, Hispanics, young people, and women have a negative view of Trump. Trump has his small little cult and nothing else. The vast majority of the Republican party and the overwhelming majority of the country are against him.
I think of it differently. I was expecting some kind of anti-establishment vote and I thought Cruz had set himself up as the recipient of those votes by taking such a hard line in the Senate. He was going to be the guy to 'shake up' Washington. But Trump came along and out-outsidered him. It's really hard to say what would happen in an alternate reality. Maybe if the field was more narrow, Trump would not have said as many things to alienate women and other voters as he found his base of appeal. There does seem to be something serendipitous about his success, but I wouldn't chalk it up entirely to the circumstances. Don't forget there were some other guys that we thought early on were going to be the big shots of the primary. You had Bush, Walker, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, maybe Jindal. I think there was an assumption that these guys would do a lot better than they did. I remember, in fact, some bragging a year ago about how the Republicans had such a deep bench and the Democrats were so thin. Unfortunately the Republican voters kept giving minutes to their version of Terrence Jones.
Also, what about all this talk "they all hate Cruz, nobody will work with him?" Bwahahahahaha! The proof is in the pudding. They don't hate Cruz and they appear quite pleased to work with him. In fact, it is Donald Trump they appear to be reluctant to work with. Ted Cruz is schooling Trump in "the art of the deal" right before our very eyes. And even though he would never be man enough to admit it, Trump knows that Cruz is schooling him, of that you can be certain.
I'm not sure what you are watching. It looks like the hate Cruz and don't want to work with him, but they hate Trump more. If they loved Cruz they would have been all over helping him earlier on in the race. Now it looks like he's the only one with any chance of stopping Cruz, so they are begrudgingly going to work with him because he's the anybody but Trump with the best chance to win.
I don't think they are worrying too much about working with Ted. I don't believe many people think he can get elected, they just think he won't hurt down ballot the way Trump will.
It's a real feather in his cap that he is only the second most objectionable candidate for the party establishment.
So much for Trump +10 in Wisconsin. Instead, it is currently Cruz +23. That is a 33 point swing, if this margin holds. And yet again, Ted Cruz has outperformed the polls, while Donald Trump has underperformed his.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">BREAKING: Ted Cruz releases new campaign ad <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RedEye?src=hash">#RedEye</a><a href="https://t.co/3KXPlwWod5">https://t.co/3KXPlwWod5</a></p>— Red Eye on Fox News (@RedEyeFNC) <a href="https://twitter.com/RedEyeFNC/status/718115417928011776">April 7, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
