2016 elections - because it's never too early

[Malthus]

A Trump Tramp.

Getting a Trump Tramp Stamp.   

[Berkut]

Kasich is surging!

[jimmy olsen]

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read-trump-still-top-getting-stronger-n474151

It's Trump's biggest lead in any live-telephone national poll. And here's the thing: He's likely to only get stronger, given that this poll was taken BEFORE the San Bernadino shootings. Why do we say that? According to the poll, more Republicans (46%) think he can handle ISIS better than his closest competition (Cruz at 15%); more Republicans (48%) think he's better on illegal immigration than his closest competitor (Rubio at 14%); and more Republicans (30%) see him better on foreign policy than anyone else (Cruz at 17%). Now we have two important caveats: One, CNN's GOP screen here consists of registered Republican voters and GOP-leaning independents. Trump's numbers have always been higher among GOP-leaning indies than core Republicans. Are these independents going to turn out in Republican caucuses and primaries? Are these independents going to turn out in Republican caucuses and primaries? Two, we recall when our national Dec. 2011 NBC/WSJ poll had Newt Gingrich up 17 points over Mitt Romney. Then again, Newt Gingrich isn't Donald Trump...

Here's the other striking finding from the CNN poll: Trump has a 30-point-plus lead among Republicans without college degrees. "Among those without college degrees, Trump holds a runaway lead: 46% support the businessman, compared with 12% for Cruz, 11% for Carson and just 8% for Rubio," CNN writes. By contrast: "Among those GOP voters who hold college degrees, the race is a close contest between the top four contenders, with Cruz slightly in front at 22%, Carson and Rubio tied at 19% and Trump at 18%." Wow. In today's New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks predicts that Trump won't be the Republican nominee. "In an era of high anxiety, I doubt Republican voters will take a flyer on their party's future — or their country's future [on Trump]," he argues. Brooks could be right. But here's our question: Does today's Republican Party look and think and sound like David Brooks? The answer could very well decide if Trump is the nominee.

[DGuller]

I find it ironic how Trump's base of support are people he undoubtedly deeply disdains.

[Valmy]

Man the smarter a Republican you are the more likely you are to support Ted Cruz? Well push me over with a feather.

[Razgovory]

I find it ironic how Trump's base of support are people he undoubtedly deeply disdains.

Well, we all deeply disdain those people.  He seems to have picked up a lot of the old Sarah Palin fanbase.

[Alcibiades]

The reason for Donalds popularity 

"They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head; it will produce no flour." - Hosea 8:7 (NIV)

Mr. Trump's candidacy is the culmination of a process that began nearly thirty years ago, when the RNC allowed the despicable Lee Atwater to implement his "Southern Strategy". It consisted of freezing out any Republican who dared to contemplate political compromise and realpolitik, and whipping up Southern evangelicals, libertarian kooks and states-rights radicals into an unthinking frenzy of blind ideological and theological mania, calculated to overwhelm any and all balanced views and reasonable analyses of what the party's - or the nation's - longterm and practical political objectives might actually be.

Since first being infected by the Atwater brain-disease, the Republic Party has acted like a horse breeder gone mad; instead of trying to improve the vigor of their political stable, they have actively and enthusiastically crossbred to increase its genetic susceptibility to political diseases: demagoguery, parochialism, falseness, paranoia, maliciousness, dogmatism, jingoism, racism, sexism, anti-intellectualism, close-mindedness and arrogance. These are all, of course, highly contagious conditions even under normal circumstances, but the GOP long ago decided to make their breeding stock doubly susceptible to such chronic infections.

Now, a wealthy outsider has appeared out of nowhere to enter the race - and from the way he struts around the parade ring, he appears quite capable of taking home the cup. While the GOP is still slowly training awkward colts to be political starters, he is already a fully finished product that has suddenly shown up, and is standing at the post.

The GOP's problem is that Trump The Donald (by Fred, out of Mary Anne) is not of the purebred Republican line, and has no GOP pedigree. Rather, he is a random, one-in-three-hundred-million genetic fluke, a human Seabiscuit, created and trained entirely outside the soundproof bubble of the GOP paddock. So it is no wonder these self-absorbed stable owners, who have not bothered to look at the competition beyond their own fence rail in three decades, sneeringly discount his potential to win.

In their arrogance, they fail to see that Trump's unique and privileged rich-boy upbringing has instilled within him not just some, but virtually all of the political deformities they have so long tried to breed into their own stock. And they stupidly remain unaware that he in fact carries them all in much higher concentrations than they could ever achieve with a candidate who meekly toes the party line for a decade or two, and passively allows himself to be groomed for The Big Race by those cautious billionaire owners and chart-gazing strategist-trainers that make up the very innermost of the GOP's inner circles.

This is the reason for Trump's remarkable popularity among the hoi polloi punters that populate the Republican grandstand: his appeal to the crude, the lowbrow and the unthinking is so strong because he is the concentrated sum total of exactly those racing qualities which the GOP has been promising to deliver to their base for the last three decades. And now, if the Republican establishment wants to win this race, they must take the desperate gamble of saturating the field with the rest of its stable, and sacrificing every single yearling it has left in its unfinished breeding program - however temperamentally unready to race, malformed, misshapen, and uncoordinated they may be.

And that is why Trump will remain the betting favourite on the GOP totalizer board, until the very moment the convention gates are flung open, and Mr. Priebus hollers, "Annnd they'rrre OFF!"

Kind of makes a good point

[11B4V]

Kasich is surging!

I like that guy, but he don't stand a chance in the gop circus.

[MadImmortalMan]

It seems surreal, but Trump has maintained a pretty much double-digit lead in the GOP polls for quite a long time now. Several times, things he said were supposed to sink him and didn't. I think that I and probably many others have misunderstood the guy's support, thinking that those kind of things will make people abandon him. I think maybe he's the kind of guy who people flock to the more he gets attacked. Accuse him of raping a baby and he might win the White House. Teflon or whatever. Maybe he needs to get ignored.

[Admiral Yi]

Absolute worst case is Donald runs against Hillary and loses.  Best case is, no one shows up on Caucus night to caucus for Donald because his supporters are all flakes.

[MadImmortalMan]

Best case is another Bush-Clinton election. Because I want to relive my childhood.

[Tonitrus]

Posted by request. 

[Admiral Yi]

Thanks bro.

[Valmy]

Absolute worst case is Donald runs against Hillary and loseswins.

[Admiral Yi]

Absolute worst case is Donald runs against Hillary and loseswins.

I don't think that's possible.