Single most useful thing Trump could do next week or so is take a few shots at Jill Stein.
Pick a fight, do the media magnet thing, and then have her bask in the reflected attention, all over TV and the internet branding herself as The Progressive Alternative to Trump, promising all the sort of stuff Bernie did but Hillary won’t.
To hear the right’s triumphalism of recent
years, you’d think that only smug Democrats were appalled by Reagan
while Republicans quickly recognized that their party, decimated by
Richard Nixon and Watergate, had found its savior.
The Republican elites of Reagan’s day were as blindsided by him as their counterparts have been by Trump.
A typical liberal-Establishment take on Reagan could be found in Harper’s,
which called him Ronald Duck, “the Candidate from Disneyland.” That he
had come to be deemed “a serious candidate for president,” the magazine
intoned, was “a shame and embarrassment for the country.”
A strategic memo by Carter’s pollster,
Patrick Caddell, laid out the campaign against Reagan’s obvious
vulnerabilities with bullet points: “Is Reagan Safe? … Shoots From the
Hip … Over His Head … What Are His Solutions?” But it was the strategy
of Caddell’s counterpart in the Reagan camp, the pollster Richard
Wirthlin, that carried the day with the electorate. Voters wanted to
“follow some authority figure,” he theorized — a “leader who can take
charge with authority; return a sense of discipline to our government;
and, manifest the willpower needed to get this country back on track.”
What [Trump’s messaging on hispanics is] targeted at
is places like my homeland, the “collar counties” around Philadelphia
that determine which way the state swings. Places full of nice,
comfortable, suburban whites who vote that identity and those interests,
chief among them that they can keep thinking of themselves as nice (and
ideally not have to think of themselves as white).
Their concern
with immigration and racial policy isn’t with its effects but with its
aesthetics - they recoil from deportation and interdiction only insofar
as the attached adjectives are “malicious and hateful”, but if Trump can
sell the exact same policy as “tough but fair”…
Interesting point that the locals seem to view him as culturally moderate for a Republican because the relevant axis to them is religiosity. Knowing the area I can totally see that - Pennsylvanian Republican primaries are pretty heavy with the type of people that have bumper stickers about the Catholic radio stations they listen to, which was where Santorum came from - and the speculation that this would be just the moderation necessary to stop or reverse the Republicans’ suburban slide is totally plausible. Now enough to take the state who knows.
So I guess I should put it on record, my prediction for Trump’s VP is Newt Gingrich.
Doubling down on the old white guy thing?
Trump needs someone who knows where the levers of party and government power are yet is willing to associate w/ him, also his valuations of public figures’ reputational position seem based largely off the experience of the ‘80s/‘90s.
Gingrich still feels the mantle of destiny upon him but has no clear conventional route back to power, values the “eccentric genius’ thunderbolts” style of leadership, and has been talking Trump up in public for a while now.
Anonymous asked: What are Trump's chances in Washington/Oregon vs Cruz and Kaisich?
SE Oregon is part of the Great Mormon Desert so that’ll go Cruz, the old timber towns in the SW where they don’t even have money to pay cops will go Trump.
In the dryland farms of the east and the verdant ones of the Willamette the tension will be between a planter elite that depends on illegal immigration and a cracker base that resents it, but who knows how that plays out - I don’t know the local culture enough to say how much appeal Cruz has. Probably he does better in the east, they’re more anti-government sagebrushy.
The retirees of the coast SHOULD prefer defender-of-benefits Trump but who knows.
Lake Oswego will go Kasich, the rest of Clackamas Trump. Trump in Gresham and East Portland. Cruz might have a chance in the western suburbs over the hills.
I don’t know how to weigh that all in all. Oregon’s honestly a pretty Trumpy place, ranging from people who buy American to people who try to buy within a two-county radius, but part of that is left-laborism is still a thing, there was no push effect from minorities, and a lot of “natural Trumpites” are still Democrats.
Washington fuck knows, I only know Seattle and Seattle doesn’t elect Republicans.
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