I can just see the press conference now: “There is no truth to the accusation that I had anything classified on my server.” Sniff, sniff. “All that stuff about “special access programs” was just the schedule for advanced yoga classes at my gym.” Sniff, Sniff. “Benghazi? Never heard of it. Is that in Indiana?” Sniff, sniff. “Russians buying influenza? From me? You think I’m some kind of bacteriological warfare expert?” Sniff, sniff. “But, for the good of the country, I have suspended my campaign until this vast right-wing conspiracy to harm me is defeated!”

Good Old Uncle Joe “reluctantly” steps in, every time Trump insults him, Joe gets another vote, he wins, and on his first day in office pardons the Evil Empress. So it shall be written, so it shall be done!

View on abortion and PP. Too extreme for her. She didn’t like that at all. She thinks PP does good things. She thinks Trump’s idea of not funding the abortion, but continuing support of PP’s other stuff make sense.

There are right-wing religious people that don’t want anything to do with abortion, want to reverse the gay marriage position, want to put bibles back in schools…I could go on. I am Christian, but I don’t want a religious fanatic running the government with his ‘brand’ of Christianity.

You can decide that right-wing religious doesn’t exist or is indefinable, but clearly some moderates voters have already defined it in their heads and Cruz seems to fit that and scares them.

Speaking as someone who is literally a Christian apostate, I continue to be perplexed where this idea of rampant contemporary “religious far rightism” comes from. Actually, no, that’s rhetorical – I’m not perplexed. I know exactly where it comes from – a media and culture that makes up whatever it wants people to believe and acts like there is no one alive who is capable of remembering anything from more than two minutes ago. One of the things it’s trying hard to sell is the lie that the left is where it’s always been and anyone to its right is therefore running wildly into unexplored regions of religious whackism and nuttery, when of course the truth is that the left is a hundred miles to the left of where it used to be and the right is left of where the left used to be. Anyone who thinks what you’re claiming is not a moderate – just a lemming and a LIV. Your friend would think I was a right-wing nutcase – when in fact, I hold the same opinions on every relevant topic that I held in 1990 – back in the BBS days, when I was fighting the opposite side of these same battles – when I was a fiscal conservative and a social libertarian.

Are we under 30? Do we not remember the 1980s, when things that are taken for granted today were beyond the pale? We survived eight years of Reagan and four years of Bush – consecutively – and all of their SC nominations, and didn’t lose legal abortion, and somehow still managed to not throw gay people off rooftops. We have literally gotten to the point that if someone admits publically that they have christian beliefs, there is an immediate response by the brainwashed, brain-of-a-goldfish set to imagine that person wants nothing less than a Spanish Inquisition-esque theocracy, even though it was mainstream christianity which outgrew medieval religious zealotry centuries ago. (This by idiots who make excuses for muslims and don’t even know what the Spanish Inquisition was about.)

I don’t give one rat’s butt if Cruz (horrors!) has christian beliefs and (OMG!) is willing to admit it in public. I know exactly who would have hanged, burned or drowned me in another time, and I don’t fear 21st century christians. I’d rather have a christian with constitutional principles be president than a Trump, who probably has no additional room to worship anything but himself, who would govern by whatever he says today – in complete disregard to whatever he might have said yesterday.

I think they will gladly hold their noses. In that regard, I believe Democrats in general, even the idealistic Sanders supporters, would be much different from Republicans, but I don’t think the liberals are as thoroughly disgusted with the Democrat party as conservatives are with the Republican party.

I have no illusions about what they will do to any GOP nominee. The point is that they have a lot of unused ammunition waiting to go against Trump, and Cruz, but I think even more against Trump.

But they would do it to anyone who is the GOP nominee. Dog on the roof.

To answer your question: depends what you mean by “big.” He can win “big” in a split field while only getting 40% of the Florida GOP vote. A result like that wouldn’t tell us much. However, if he gets something impressive—for example, 60% of the vote—that would certainly indicate he appeals to a majority of Florida GOP voters and that it might be applicable to other states. However, even then it’s not clear it would be applicable, because Florida is a kind of “home state” for Trump, who is heavily invested there and often lives there, and employs a lot of people there.

None of it has much to do with how he would match up with Hillary (or Sanders). If his unfavorables remain high, and if a great many Republican voters say they won’t vote for him even if the nominee, that’s a big big problem for him.

That is what I’m talking about with Trump. We don’t need to win over Bernie democrats. We only need to win over the moderate middle. And some democrats are in that camp.