Drat, I hoped you would have some good ideas. IMO, the awful truth is that there is no place to escape to unless you are very rich.

We have few options except to fight to stop candidates like Bernie and Hillary from getting elected. I’m feeling almost as desperate as I did in 1979 under Carter. I don’t see a Reagan among the GOP hopefuls, but anyone of them along with a GOP Congress (Reagan had to deal with a democrat Congress) could at least stem the leftward tide. We must all fight in what ever ways we can. Volunteer, write e-mails, make phone calls, talk to your neighbors, join an activist movement like Heritage/Judicial Watch/TEA Party/etc., become an activist ala Eric’s suggestions, and ??? It’s time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their party. 🙂

For what it’s worth, my old mother, a liberal Democrat, can’t stand Hillary and likes Rubio. She’s repulsed by Cruz and Trump. Cruz is great on paper but he can’t communicate without a high-pitched phony televangelist whine that alienates even many Republicans.

“Worthless”? Hardly. As I wrote in the post, all of the polls (both of registered voters and of likely voters) show the same trend re Trump, which is that he does the worst of all the leading GOP candidates against Hillary. Also, I wrote, ” One poll or another tends not to tell the whole story, but the average tells you a lot more, although nothing’s infallible.”

The most recent poll, the one that I linked to, happens to have asked registered voters about the head-to-heads against Hillary, and for the Republican primary questions they asked likely voters in the Republican primaries.

Those are ‘vote for‘ constructions.

The third consideration is voting against.

Ignore the politics. Which candidate is more exciting to write about, talk about, and will generate more clicks for the media?

Trump.

So, beyond helping Hillary, they’d still push Trump.

What Trump can do is read a crowd. The birther thing didn’t get it done for him before but he stumbled onto immigration this time around and has gotten every mile out of it that he can, despite having no real plan, no cohesive platform or anything else. Mainly, he gets a positive response from flapping his gums and being aggressive and offensive. We’re all sick of PC, but Trump is not anti-PC – he’s just a big, loud, obnoxious bully. He doesn’t care if he eventually crosses the line and derails his campaign, because this is a game – he’s not a politician and when he fumbles this, he’ll go back to his day job.

I get the “not a politician” appeal, but this insensitive, attention-whoring, egotistical turd would be destructive as the leader of a world power. I would vote for him over Hilary or Bernie only because they might be worse.

What impresses me about Trump is his mastery of sales, managing to transform himself from a joke that no one believed in, to the leader in the Republican race. Managing to transform “gaffes” into winning campaign issues. Managing to transform ultra-high negatives into positives. (see this poll). And with a few simple comments effectively neutralizing a meaningful part of Hillary’s appeal … the War on Women.

Trump’s first job is to win the nomination and he’s focused on that. If nominated he’ll focus on his next goal and that’s beating either Hillary or Bernie. At that point the polls will be more meaningful.

This question goes to the root of the thread.

Nate Silver finds that if it is the person, Trump will do worst. On the other hand, we’ve all seen him take the right and winning side in matters like defense and terrorism, as well as immigration.

Silver sums the available data up this way:

Head-to-head polls of hypothetical general election matchups have almost no predictive power at this stage of the campaign [LINK to more in original], but for what it’s worth, Trump tends to fare relatively poorly in those too. On average, 2 in polls since Nov. 1, Trump trails Clinton by 5 percentage points, while Clinton and Marco Rubio are tied.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-really-unpopular-with-general-election-voters/

Richard Nixon was unpopular to look at – yet he still won the presidency in 1968 and 1972. And he wasn’t a popular and successful television personality for a decade, like Trump.

Thus, I see no reason to call Trump out at this point.