Clinton vs. Trump seems all but inevitable now

Originally Posted By Mr X

Agreed?

Any chance the Repubs will kick him to the curb, or that Bernie might stage some unlikely (er, impossible really) comeback?

So if this is the cards we're dealt, what do we think happens in November? Can she beat him? Do we even want her to (I'm assuming the answer is yes, but I'm always surprised at the amount of vitriol levelled against her)?

 

Originally Posted By RoadTrip

I disagree. With the Kasich victory tonight in Ohio, Trump would have to capture 60% of all remaining electoral votes to get to the needed 1,237. He has come nowhere near that so far, and I doubt he will in the future. The whole question is what will happen at the convention.

 

Originally Posted By Dabob2

Yeah, Hillary seems pretty inevitable now, but the best delegate counters I've read put Trump's chances at slightly less than even money that he gets to 1237 before Cleveland. It's certainly possible that he gets there (especially if he takes the two large-ish winner-take-all states remaining, AZ and NJ and/or he cleans up in NY which has a "winner take all trigger") , but slightly more likely according to these people that he doesn't.

If he doesn't, look for him to threaten a 3rd party run if he's not given the nomination. He said he wouldn't "as long as I'm treated fairly," and certainly being denied the nomination after winning the most votes would constitute "not being treated fairly" by him, even though it would be within the party's rules.

I imagine he'd hold that threat over their heads like a gigantic anvil, i.e. "You'd better give me the nomination or I'll run 3rd party, and you know I'd do it, too." If they DID deny him the nomination, he very well might have a big enough ego to think he could win that way in November - or at least a big enough vindictive streak.

And in more violence-related talk, Trump has already predicted that "there will be riots" if he's denied the nomination in Cleveland.

 

Originally Posted By ecdc

The ideal situation is Hillary vs. Cruz w/ Trump running as a third-party candidate. That's my dream ticket, right there.

While I think Hillary will *probably* beat Cruz or Trump in a head-to-head general, it's a high-stakes game that scares the living crap out of me. What if her email "scandal" somehow blows up and becomes a real scandal or a dozen other things? All these Democrats so certain that she trounces Cruz or Trump...I don't know.

 

Originally Posted By Spree

So basically what you're saying(and correct me if I am wrong..I don't wish to put words in your mouth here) is that you fear Hillary, like her husband, can't win a head to head contest and needs a viable 3rd party candidate to siphon off votes.

 

Originally Posted By Dabob2

Exit polls from '92 showed that Perot siphoned as many votes from Clinton as he did from Bush. Re-elections are usually referendums on the incumbent; Perot thus siphoned off as many anti-Bush votes that Clinton would have gotten as siphoned off more right-leaning votes that Bush would have gotten.

I agree with ecdc. Polls are showing now that Clinton would beat either guy heads up, but I would definitely breathe a little easier if the GOP food fight continued all the way to November.

 

Originally Posted By Spree

^Fair enough

 

Originally Posted By ecdc

>>you fear Hillary, like her husband, can't win a head to head contest and needs a viable 3rd party candidate to siphon off votes.<<

I think it's likely she will win, but my fear is with the gnat-like attention span of the American people. I have no illusions about her disapproval ratings or her limited ability to fire up the base.

But I also find the '92 exit polls interesting and didn't realize that. Dabob2, do you think this would be more like Perot in '92 or like Nader in 2000? Those aren't entirely analogous, obviously, but it does seem some third-party candidates absolutely siphon off a majority of votes from one candidate.

 

Originally Posted By Dabob2

Some third-party candidates are obvious. Nader definitely siphoned off a decent number of Gore votes. Enough to cost him Florida, certainly. Buchanan got fewer votes, and obviously those would have gone to Bush. (At least in the simplest calculation; there's a case to be made at least a certain percentage of Nader and Buchanan voters wouldn't have voted at all without "their guy" on the ballot.)

Perot and Trump have some parallels (self-funded, rail against the establishment, don't like trade deals), but without an incumbent, it's already quite unlike '92.

Trump is a wild card any way you slice him. If he's the third-party candidate, it's awfully hard to say what would happen, but I imagine that he'd take more from Cruz than Clinton. There doesn't seem to be much overlap between Trump and Clinton voters.

There are also some rumblings that if Trump is the GOP nominee that Cruz or someone else could run as the "Real Republican" or "true conservative." If that happens, there almost certainly wouldn't be much of any overlap with Clinton voters, and he'd just take away conservatives who don't like Trump.

A 3-way race with Trump and another Republican would seem to be a big winner for Clinton. At least as of March 16...

 

Originally Posted By Dabob2

By the way, the theory behind the "true conservative" running if Trump is the nominee is basically to protect the down-ballot races. The thinking is that Trump can't beat Clinton, so why worry about the White House anyway? But put a "real conservative" on the ballot so that "real conservatives" will come to the polls in the first place, and vote for other conservatives down-ballot. Don't know if this theory will last, but it's been the talk of certain right-wing sites for a day or two.

Things change awfully quickly this year though.

 

Originally Posted By ecdc

>>At least as of March 16...<<

That's the rub. It's been such a bizarre election already. Like I said, I'm reasonably confident Clinton wins this election against Trump or Cruz in a head-to-head. But her negatives remain high and a lot can happen. Heck, this country freaks out at Ebola and I don't think a single person died from that! Imagine a terror attack that kills 500 people. Imagine a major economic downturn.

It genuinely disturbs me that, unlikely as it seems now, we could be saying the words "President Donald Trump" or "President Ted Cruz" in a year. The American political system and the country itself suddenly feels fragile.

 

Originally Posted By Jim in Merced CA

This notion of getting someone in The White House to 'shake up the establishment' is just a crock.

 

Originally Posted By Dabob2

<It genuinely disturbs me that, unlikely as it seems now, we could be saying the words "President Donald Trump" or "President Ted Cruz" in a year. The American political system and the country itself suddenly feels fragile.>

Yeah, I get that.

Part of the genius of the American political system is that it CAN survive bad presidents. I think George W. Bush was easily the worst president of my lifetime, and he certainly did a lot of damage, but we survived 8 years of him. On the other side, I think deep down (past the rhetoric) only the most unhinged Republicans think Obama was actively trying to damage the country (as opposed to doing things they just didn't like), and from their perspective, we'll survive 8 years of him.

I don't much care for Kasich's policies, say, but we'd survive him too from a liberal perspective. Even Jeb Bush I'd feel the same about. I'm sure most Republicans, deep down, feel similarly about Hillary Clinton.

But Trump and Cruz are different. Trump is completely unqualified for the job, would be in WAY over his head, but would never in a million years admit it, due to his Montana-sized ego. He never admits to error, which is a downright dangerous quality in a president. He's also impulsive, immature, narcissistic, and quick to strike back at even perceived slights. At minimum he'd have an enemies list that dwarfed Nixon's. And I'm only half-kidding that if Putin implied that Trump had a smaller dick than him, we'd be in a land war with Russia.

And this isn't even touching on his fascistic tendencies; let's say that he doesn't actually even have them and he's just playing the part of a would-be Mussolini in order to win. Even if that were the case (and I go back and forth on whether it's so), all the stuff in the preceding paragraph is part of his permanent character and would not go away. There's also the fact that he'd have to worry about re-election, and thus have to play to the nativist and racist crowds for at least the first term, even if he DIDN'T believe that crap himself.

Cruz scares me for different reasons, primarily because he belongs to a sect that believes that the end times are coming, and an ends-time war between Christendom and Islam is both inevitable and desirable. That trumps even Trump fear with me, and even if that didn't come to pass, he's so far right-wing, he's off the charts. He's also a little baby when he doesn't get his way - again, a dangerous quality to have in a president.

Right now, most Americans agree with me if you read the polls, and Clinton would win if the election were today. But I've seen enough elections in my lifetime to know how quickly and head-scratchingly things can change. Probably the best example was 1988, where Dukakis was way ahead of Bush as late as the summer. But Bush had a brilliant (if Machiavellian) campaign chief in Lee Atwater, who was just waaaaaay better at the game than the Dukakis team. He made relatively trivial things like the pledge of allegiance (!), pollution in Boston Harbor, and Willie Horton into defining "issues" of the campaign. Never mind that Dukakis didn't have anything against the POA, that all environmental groups picked Dukakis over Bush, or that Reagan as Governor of CA had a virtually identical release program to the one that released Horton. Those were the "issues" that Atwater created and the media ran with, and Dukakis' lead vanished within weeks and he never regained it.

Now, the Clinton team learned from that in '92 and set up the famous "War Room" to instantly counter anything Bush/Atwater threw at them, correcting Dukakis' mistake of thinking that the public would understand the distinction between real issues and trivialities. And I'm sure Hillary will have something similar. But she's not the natural campaigner Bill is and Trump especially is likely to just throw ANYTHING and everything out there till he finds something that seems to stick that the media will somehow find fascinating and run with. It could be something nobody's thinking of now.

So I understand the feeling of apprehension. Either Trump or Cruz would be a disaster unlike even GWB, and we could get one of them. If you're a major-party nominee, you've got 40% of the vote pretty much locked in, and it goes from there. Elections are sometimes decided on the silliest things. So "President Trump" or "President Cruz" is possible, even if still unlikely in March. Which is why I'm hoping for a split party at this point.