Donald Trump can actually win if Clinton makes these four mistakes. Spoiler alert: She’s already making all of them.
.. If you drill down enough, it’s clear there are at least four paths to a loss, and any one of them poses a real risk for a candidate likely to follow her usual careful, calculating playbook.
.. Step 1: Take Hispanic enthusiasm for granted
.. Yes, their numbers are growing. But Hispanics simply don’t like Clinton nearly as much as they like Obama
.. Step 2: Alienate the young
.. Step 3: Let establishment Republicans find another place to go
.. Step 4: Fumble on trade
.. Polls show that union households tend to oppose free trade quite strongly. Sanders has made free trade a centerpiece of his primary campaign against Clinton. Trump, hoping to woo Sanders voters, frequently praises his position on that issue.
Stop Trump Fever Breaks
There was former House Speaker John Boehner’s confession that he and Trump are texting buddies and golfing partners.
.. “We’ve had enough intraparty fighting. Now’s the time to stitch together a winning coalition,” said Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah. “And it’s been clear almost from the beginning that Donald Trump has the ability to assemble a nontraditional bloc of supporters. … The ability to cut across traditional party boundaries — like ’80, ’92 and 2008 — will be key, and Trump is much better positioned to achieve that.”
.. roughly 40 unbound delegates from Pennsylvania who they consider solid Trump supporters, according to two Capitol Hill allies of Trump.
.. It’s conceivable that a majority of the delegates at the convention in Cleveland will oppose Trump’s nomination, even if they’re bound to vote for him. It’s conceivable that a majority of the delegates at the convention in Cleveland will oppose Trump’s nomination, even if they’re bound to vote for him.
In that scenario, that majority could unseat scores of Trump delegates, rewrite convention rules to eliminate any binding requirements and make it less likely — if not impossible — for Trump to claim the nomination.
Trump, Rush, and the Establishment
Rush said yesterday that the Republican establishment is preparing to vote for Hillary to protect its “fiefdoms” from Trump. This doesn’t make sense to me. Yes, a lot of people in the establishment oppose Trump, but this is largely because they believe Trump will lose to Hillary, and perhaps badly. Since all the polling data at this moment suggest that this is exactly what would happen, this isn’t a far-fetched fear. As for Trump destroying fiefdoms in Washington, there is no doubt that he is highly unpredictable and that he is over-throwing conservatism as we have known it for decades, but it’s not as though he’s going to show up in Washington and all the lobbying shops and law firms are going to disappear. In fact, Trump is much less of a threat to the Washington status quo than a conservative like Cruz is, since Trump is not promising to reduce the size of the federal government or significantly reform it, only to run it better and cut smarter deals.
.. It’s notable in this connection that Trump has tapped a lobbyist’s lobbyist, Paul Manafort, to stabilize his campaign. There will be more where that came from if he’s the nominee, since he is evidently not liquid or rich enough to fund his own general-election campaign.
Who Are the Angriest Republicans?
These blue-collar white Republicans, a mainstay of the conservative coalition for decades, are now vilified by their former right-wing allies as a “non-Christian” force “in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture,” corrupted by the same “sense of entitlement” that Democratic minorities were formerly accused of.
.. Williamson portrays Trump’s struggling white supporters as relying on their imaginary victimhood when, in fact, he contends:
They failed themselves. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog— you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be.
Less well-off white voters have only themselves to blame, Williamson continues..
.. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
.. David French, also of National Review, writes:
I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.
..
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, wrote:
America’s self-appointed best and brightest uniformly view the passions unleashed by Trump as the modern-day equivalent of a medieval peasants’ revolt.
.. In 1992, 57 percent of white men without college degrees voted Democrat in congressional elections. In 1994, the percentage shrank by 20 points. Republicans captured the House that year and maintained control in 8 of the next 10 elections.
.. Between 1979 and 2005, the average real hourly wage for those with a college degree went up 22 percent and for those with advanced degrees, 28 percent. In contrast, average wages for those with only some college went up a mere 3 percent, actually fell 2 percent for those with a high school diploma, and for high school dropouts, declined a stunning 18 percent.
.. As a matter of practical politics, how can a party that is losing ground in virtually every growing constituency — Hispanics, Asians, single women and the young — even consider jettisoning a single voter, much less the struggling white working class?
.. The Republican Party has seen its core — married white Christians — decline from 62 percent of the population of the United States to 28 percent in 2015
.. Trump has won his biggest primary margins among less financially secure, less educated voters, turning the traditional winning coalition in Republican primaries upside down. Mitt Romney consistently did best among the most educated and most affluent Republican primary voters.