{"id":263,"date":"2016-05-31T20:52:21","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T00:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=263"},"modified":"2016-05-31T20:52:51","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T00:52:51","slug":"trumpwillneverbepresident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=263","title":{"rendered":"#TrumpWillNeverBePresident"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing at Salon<\/a><\/em>, Anis Shivani<\/a> predicted last week that Donald Trump\u2019s campaign \u201cwill surely be victorious in the end,\u201d because he appeals \u201cto an elemental fear in the country, torn apart by the abstraction of the market, to which Clinton has not the faintest hope of responding.\u201d\u00a0 Trump, you see, \u201c\u2019builds\u2019 things, literal buildings.\u201d\u00a0 People can actually visualize these buildings and the cities they were built in.\u00a0 This contrasts with Clinton, according to Shivani, since her work with the Clinton Foundation and the State Department \u201crepresents\u2026disembodiedness.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIn this election,\u201d claims Shivani, \u201cabstraction will clearly lose and corporeality\u2026will undoubtedly win.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another Salon<\/em> writer, Musa al-Gharbi<\/a>, doesn\u2019t actually predict a Trump win, but he does seem to think the Donald has a path to victory<\/a>.\u00a0 He lays out three key reasons to think this: because Trump has more \u201copportunity to radically change public perception for the better\u201d since voters don\u2019t yet know Trump \u201cas a politician,\u201d because this election will turn on what voters think about both Obama and Bill Clinton, and because of something he calls \u201cnegative intersectionality.\u201d\u00a0 Al-Gharbi doesn\u2019t define this very clearly, but he seems to be saying something about political correctness: that Trump\u2019s bigotry and misogyny, \u201cheard in the context of a fundamentally anti-white, anti-Christian culture war,\u201d could actually make some voters see him more sympathetically.<\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t the only two writers working<\/a> to outline<\/a> a Trump path<\/a> to the Oval Office.\u00a0 These arguments mostly focus on three claims: both candidates have poor favorability ratings, Hillary Clinton is a bad candidate, and minority voters could shift to Trump. I challenge them below the fold.<\/p>\n

Yes, right now both Trump<\/a> and Clinton<\/a> poll poorly.\u00a0 But Clinton\u2019s numbers will come up as she consolidates Democrats, just as Trump\u2019s rose after he became the presumptive nominee.\u00a0 More importantly, Clinton should improve these numbers significantly as the campaign proceeds and she has a chance to show her competence, resilience, and policy chops.\u00a0 Polls taken right after the Benghazi hearing in October 2015 showed a bump after she pretty much manhandled the Committee<\/a>.\u00a0 We can expect similar preparation and skill during debates with Trump. \u00a0Anyone think his attack on her as an enabler of Bill’s peccadillos will work delivered in person? \u00a0Bet most women don’t, even conservatives. And remember that her favorability ratings were much higher during her State Department days, when America saw her as effectively managing American foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Much of this discussion of favorability ratings depends on the assumption that people think the country is going in the wrong direction.\u00a0 Polls seem to show this<\/a>, but remember that both conservatives and liberals could respond \u201cwrong track\u201d to this question for different reasons, and every voter can think of something they don\u2019t like (gay marriage, NAFTA, Wall Street, taxes).\u00a0 The fact that Obama\u2019s poll ratings have recently gone up says something: In the main, Americans would like to see his policy direction continue.\u00a0 In any event, it\u2019s difficult to think of which GOP voters abandoned Romney for Obama but will switch back to voting R for Trump.<\/p>\n

No, HRC is not the best retail campaigner.\u00a0 But she has an impressive political machine that she and other Democrats have constructed over at least eight years.\u00a0 She has dozens of professional political consultants on her staff with decades of experience with polling, messaging, data analytics, GOTV, and fundraising.\u00a0 Bernie\u2019s ability to give her a run for the nomination does not disprove the effectiveness of this organization – though he challenged it, she responded well. \u00a0And the Democratic Party\u2019s nomination process makes her race against Sanders look much closer than it really is.\u00a0 She has so far won 56.6% of the vote, and with almost 13 million primary votes she has a million-and-a-half more votes than Trump had on the GOP side.<\/p>\n

Trump on the other hand has no political operation to speak of<\/a>, recently fired the only pro on the staff, and has only one communications\/messaging expert working for the campaign.\u00a0 He plans to count on the RNC, which so far hasn\u2019t been coming through \u2013 and it\u2019s not clear why it would want to spend Committee money on a billionaire\u2019s campaign rather than protect the House and Senate.\u00a0 And as bad as HRC might be on the stump, Trump is worse.\u00a0 He actually attacked a popular governor in his own party \u2013 a member of an ethnic group he has alienated and needs to mend fences with \u2013 simply because she refused to endorse him at a rally in her state.\u00a0 To make it worse, he did this on a day when he should have allowed pundits to drone on and on about bad news for his opponent.\u00a0 We can expect more of this.<\/p>\n

Finally, it\u2019s difficult to see how Trump attracts minority voters after promising to bar Muslims for religious reasons, deport millions of Hispanics \u2013 the friends and families of Latino voters \u2013 and accepting the support of white supremacists.\u00a0 Donald Trump appeals to a very specific constituency: white males who no longer have a strong place in the US economy and have been criticized for blaming immigrants and minorities for their troubles.\u00a0 How he pivots toward engaging with minorities without alienating this base is not clear.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the GOP has done yeoman\u2019s work suppressing the votes of those who belong to the Democratic coalition.\u00a0 They have made voting more difficult on purpose<\/a> and using specific rules that impact minority and young voters more than they do middle-aged whites<\/a>.\u00a0 This is why I don\u2019t mind these stories \u2013 it\u2019s vital that Democrats, neoliberals, progressives, and anyone who cares about real social justice turn out in big numbers to vote.\u00a0 It\u2019s no time for complacency, given that the right wing will show up at the polls in force.\u00a0 But in the end I strongly believe that demographics, the electoral map, and the direction the US moving politically make a Trump win all but impossible.\u00a0 #TrumpWillNeverBePresident.<\/p>\n

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Writing at Salon, Anis Shivani predicted last week that Donald Trump\u2019s campaign \u201cwill surely be victorious in the end,\u201d because he appeals \u201cto an elemental fear in the country, torn apart by the abstraction of the market, to which Clinton has not the faintest hope of responding.\u201d\u00a0 Trump, you see, \u201c\u2019builds\u2019 things, literal buildings.\u201d\u00a0 People […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,75,70,84,76,71,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-presidential-race","category-bernie-sanders","category-donald-trump","category-hillary-clinton","category-immigration","category-political-correctness","category-politics-and-elections"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}