‘Twasn’t my intention at all. It was to show some possible reasons why Trump has been so successful thus far. And to point out that he may need to adjust his actions to go after the voters who are outside his present sphere of influence.

I’m agnostic about Trump. I see many of his strengths, but also his weaknesses. If he is to be a successful candidate and President he will have to continually adjust his MO based on the feedback he gets. He has a strong base of 30-38% of the GOP. At least that’s what the polls say. That means 70-62% are not in his camp. They are spread over the Carson, Rubio, Cruz, Bush, Christie, Fiorina, Paul camps. I don’t see any of the other candidates’ supporters as being easy pick ups by Trump when the winnowing out begins. (Which will be after South Carolina, IMO) Unless Trump adjusts his actions to win some of them over, I can see a scenario where we go into the convention with three candidates (Trump, Cruz, Rubio) – with none a clear leader. That scenario should be discounted by the fact that, thus far, I’ve gotten nothing right in the campaign. But it’s fun to try to be a pundit. 🙂

As I’ve stated before, I don’t love Trump. But I do think he could be a good President, if he is willing and able to rise to the challenge and not think it is like running his own private company where he is essentially a dictator. I don’t relish the thought, but I would vote Trump over Hillary.

She stunned my be saying, “I already decided that I’m voting for him a long time age. I just didn’t want to say anything that might get you upset. Glad to see you are finally paying attention.”

Last week our Mexican cleaning lady — after saying that she was not only legal but a US citizen and she hated what the illegals were doing, making people think that she was an illegal, too — told us that she & her family were all voting for Trump and only an idiot would vote for that crook Hillary.

Walked by the TV last night, my wife was watching the news of (I thought) a college game in a huge crowded arena. I asked what the game was, since she doesn’t usually watch sports.
“Not a game. A trump rally.”

Two anecdotes. But…. I suspect that next November the election will be a formality, everybody will know the outcome months before.

…a national sample of 1002 registered voters contacted by cell phone and landline.

I ask myself, “What kind of idiot would actually answer those questions over the phone to someone they don’t even know?” …let alone pick up the phone from a number they don’t recognize? Are these people that desperate for attention?

Trump has repeatedly made statements that he and his team had clearly made no effort to verify in advance, drawn from sources whose credibility should have been huge red flags, even though they were outside the common cultural and media conventional wisdom and therefore likely to be challenged.

Or the reverse – as my collection of headline stories that I’ve saved, shows.

Which suggests that either of us may be – like neo – engaging in confirmation bias.

My idea: try doing a hard tally before making sweeping assertions of fact.

Trump has an exceptional memory. He isn’t all just bluster and braggadocio and hyperbole, I’ve found. It’s often
been surprising to me – and almost as persistent as media distortion and smears of what he’s actually said (which ought to be legion – but who in the MSM keeps honest score anymore?).

It’s the latter that keeps me in the Trump (and Cruz) camp.

Trump generally has done better in online polls than in surveys done by phone.

The firm conducted an experiment aimed at understanding why that happens and which polls are more accurate — online surveys that have tended to show Trump with support of nearly four-in-10 GOP voters or the telephone surveys that have typically shown him with the backing of one-third or fewer.

Their results suggest that the higher figure probably provides the more accurate measure. Some significant number of Trump supporters, especially those with college educations, are “less likely to say that they support him when they’re talking to a live human” than when they are in the “anonymous environment” of an online survey, said the firm’s polling director, Kyle Dropp.

“Some of the polls that show heavy support for Trump have also shown him doing better among self-identified independents who lean Republican than among regular GOP voters.”
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trump-polls-20151221-story.html

To me, neither finding is surprising. Nor is the idea that more supporters might be ‘coming out of the closet’ over time, and perhaps accounting for recent boosts in his numbers.

But while neo puts much trust in polls, I think it’s worth noting that Gallup is sitting out this presidential cycle.

The Gallup organization has owned political polling since its scientific incarnation began. They were bitten badly last time, and prefer to recalibrate their measurements rather than suffer another hit to their reputation.

I stopped reading near the end.

Cruz’s third and fourth strategic choices are improvisations in response to how Trump reshaped the battlespace. They show more flexibility and learning capacity than Cruz’s critics might suspect. Cruz’s major vulnerability is being painted as an unelectable Goldwater-esque extremist even within the context of the GOP, let alone the general electorate.

Maybe Cruz will inherit Trump’s followers, if Trump implodes. They don’t have many options, after all. But I somewhat doubt Trump will implode. As the extremely astute blogger at Conservative Treehouse noted, Trump always owns the downside. As the media is finding out, it is very hard to attack somone who owns the downside.

“Trump’s fling-it-all-at-the-wall tempo of attacks and messages is unique. It starts with the fact that essentially everything that comes from the Trump campaign comes from Trump himself — his rambling, stream-of-consciousness speeches, his interviews, his tweets that he clearly writes himself in his distinctive style.

This gives Trump’s message approach a remarkable thematic and stylistic cohesion at any tempo (despite its underlying incoherence in terms of facts or principles, neither of which concern him). It extends to the fact that–bluntly speaking–Trump’s basic style is “BS,” in which he is interested neither in the truth nor in lying to his audience, but just in riffing on a theme without much connection to the facts and certainly without bothering to fact-check anything he says before he says it. Trump has repeatedly shown his willingness, to a degree unprecedented in politics, to heave personal insults at his opponents, mocking their appearance and their poll standing with put-downs.

These are all approaches Trump has been using for years and years. He didn’t improvise them from study of the battlespace, but just went with what he already knew how to do. But he was also able to gain unusually rapid traction because–unlike the typical insurgent–he had already been nationally famous for three decades and a fixture on network television.

(As we shall see throughout this review of Trump’s M.O. while he has executed some shrewd maneuvers, his success thus far says more about his ability to exploit his adversaries’ OODA Loops than having a particular mastery of his own.)

***************************************
The signs we have seen so far of Trump suggest that, while he’s very shrewd and swift in observing, orienting, deciding, and acting when he’s on familiar terrain, he draws information from a fairly closed loop, and is not well-suited to expanding to a broader, less familiar battlefield. Therein lies his vulnerability in a primary or general election, as well as his deficiency as a potential commander-in-chief despite his natural grasp of the basic precepts of strategy, tactics, leverage, speed, and ambiguity.

The way Trump has dealt with facts in his public statements is a tipoff. Political speech routinely incorporates assertions of fact that range from debatable to unverifiable to provably false, and sometimes this is a sign of shrewd cynicism rather than self-deception.

But Trump has repeatedly made statements that he and his team had clearly made no effort to verify in advance, drawn from sources whose credibility should have been huge red flags, even though they were outside the common cultural and media conventional wisdom and therefore likely to be challenged.

In political debate, that represents a vulnerability waiting to be exploited; in international affairs, where presidents must routinely cut through misinformation and direct their staffs to do the same, it can be fatal.

Trump has repeatedly made statements that he and his team had clearly made no effort to verify in advance, drawn from sources whose credibility should have been huge red flags.

The recent dustup over Trump’s claim–which was, at best, severely exaggerated–that he had seen video of thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in Jersey City is a classic example of this. So is the fact that Trump cites Infowars reporting in campaign speeches based solely on having clicked a link on the Drudge Report, and has gone on Alex Jones’ conspiracy-theory-soaked show to trade praise with Jones.

Trump’s willingness to pitch public battles on the turf of things he reads on the Internet without even remotely credible confirmation suggests that–despite his savvy in evaluating information when dealing with the U.S. national media environment and the economic bargaining tables he’s excelled at–Trump is vulnerable to psyop disinformation campaigns once he gets outside his comfort zone.”

It’s long, but well worth reading it all:

http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/16/military-strategist-explains-why-donald-trump-leads-and-how-he-will-fail/

Everyone is focused on the presidential race, but don’t forget that there are a lot of Republican Senators up for re-election. If Trump is any indication, they may finally be angry enough to burn out the dead wood.
Even if that turns out to be incremental, a Cruz presidency followed by GOP Senate intransigence will guarantee another cycle of culling.
The GOPe can ignore the loss of any one member, but they can’t ignore whole batches of RINOs being shot down. I would also bet that regardless, this is McConnell’s last term in office.

Then let Cruz pull an Obama and reverse everything Obama’s done by Executive Orders/Memos and order the bureaucracies to either rescind or ignore their own egregious regulations enacted during Obama’s eight years. There’s plenty of precedent for it now.

Additionally, if the Tea Parties get riled up enough maybe they’ll start primarying lots of squishes and RINOs. McCain has a challenger, one announced against Tillis today, and I’ll bet there will be lots more.

Even if I accept all the criticism of Rubio, I would still much prefer him to Hillary. Just after I posted above, I saw Karl Rove on Fox with poll analysis that showed only Rubio with a clear edge over Clinton. Early on, I sent money to Perry, Fiorina and Walker (but not Rubio), to encourage them to get traction.

I think it is a disaster that Trump entered the race, especially for Cruz. Trump is making the GOP look bad to the necessary middle. I disliked him from the start, even though he crudely champions my key issues.