But if you have no familiarity with the relevant details and the levers of power, and no clear principles to guide you, you will, like most tenderfeet, get rolled. Especially if you are, at least by all outward indications, the most poll-obsessed politician in all of American history.
.. He appears to believe that the administrative state merely needs a new master, rather than a new dispensation that cuts it down to size and curtails its power.
.. Trump nevertheless offers a valuable warning for the Republican party. If responsible men irresponsibly ignore an issue as important as immigration, it will be taken up by the reckless. If they cannot explain their Beltway maneuvers — worse, if their maneuvering is indefensible — they will be rejected by their own voters. If they cannot advance a compelling working-class agenda, the legitimate anxieties and discontents of blue-collar voters will be exploited by demagogues.
Everybody Loves a Winner. So What Happens if Trump Loses?
He does like talking about himself. But he may also be trying to generate a bandwagon effect, a well-documented phenomenon in political science but one that may leave him vulnerable to future disruptions.
.. They found that uncommitted participants in an online experiment were significantly more likely to back a candidate if the candidate was described as narrowly winning in the polls rather than narrowly losing.
.. If these theories hold, Mr. Trump’s promotion of his poll numbers not only threatens to undermine his appeal if he loses, but may also help his opponents rally their supporters against him.
Donald Trump’s Electability Paradox
Generally, across the three polls, Trump has established a somewhat better image among men, and older adults nearing the end of their work careers (those aged 50 to 64), a group that has expressed enormous anxiety about their economic prospects in other surveys. Trump’s image remains especially toxic among the components of the “coalition of the ascendant”—the groups at the core of the modern Democratic coalition that are all increasing as a share of the electorate. Support from those growing groups—particularly the millennial generation, minorities, and college-educated, single and secular whites, especially women.. Figures provided by CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta, for instance, show that while 66 percent of Republican women expressed a favorable view of Trump in the December survey that plummeted to a minuscule 12 percent among all women who are not Republicans. Fully 81 percent of non-Republican women viewed Trump unfavorably... While 83 percent of Democratic women viewed Clinton favorably in the latest CNN survey, only 23 percent of non-Democratic women agreed. Only 19 percent of non-Democratic men expressed favorable views of Clinton in the CNN poll.
How I Helped Todd Akin Win — So I Could Beat Him Later
Tom Kiley, my pollster, turned up some findings that seemed crazy to me. For example, less than one quarter of the likely Republican primary voters believed that Barack Obama had been born in the United States. These were the voters who could help tip a Republican primary to an archconservative, but that conservative would have a hard time winning the state.
.. Using the guidance of my campaign staff and consultants, we came up with the idea for a “dog whistle” ad, a message that was pitched in such a way that it would be heard only by a certain group of people. I told my team we needed to put Akin’s uber-conservative bona fides in an ad—and then, using reverse psychology, tell voters not to vote for him. And we needed to run the hell out of that ad.
.. Sure enough, a radio ad calling Akin “too conservative” that went on the air in the closing days of the primary was paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. We would later find out that their rural radio buy was $250,000.
.. As it turned out, we spent more money for Todd Akin in the last two weeks of the primary than he spent on his whole primary campaign.