There are four methods Democratic candidates can generally employ to win campaigns.
1) The first targets groups, often employing identity politics, trying to forge enough ‘pieces’ of the Democratic Party together to achieve victory. Young voters, old voters, blacks, latinos, labor, environmentalists — you slice and dice a collection large enough to bring you a plurality — or, better yet, 50%+1.
This works fairly well in primaries, but only works in general elections in areas where Democratic constituencies have enough votes to win… and, even then, probably only if there’s a terrible Republican to run against.
This will especially struggle in statewide elections for important seats (Senate, Governor, President), or close legislative districts, because there’s often no cohesive, resonant message gluing things together. It’s not making a unified pitch or compelling argument. Maybe some talk of leadership or experience, but it’s basically hoping people show up.
Martha Coakley ran this campaign, twice, as did Ed Markey. I’d add John Kerry and Al Gore to that list. Maybe Dukakis in ’88, but that was a bit before my time.
2) The second aims heavily for independents. Most often, these campaigns result in establishment, corporate-oriented, ‘moderate’ candidates, who often aren’t going to have great success at record turnouts across the base (beyond assuming many of them will vote Dem out of desperation) — and so will rely all the more on independents.
Bill Clinton won two general elections doing this, Sister Souljahring across the country, with an assist from Ross Perot. John Silber tried this in Massachusetts… and if you’re asking “John Silber who?” you can tell how well that turned out.
3 and 4) The last two, and I think most successful in general elections, aims to do both — appeal to the base and independents alike. These campaigns rely on strong, bold candidates who cut across ideology and diverse constituencies, and come in two variants: A) aiming for people’s pocket books, by employing economic populism, or B) by running high-minded campaigns, about bringing people together and making government work again.
Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown won their campaigns with economic populism, while Deval Patrick and Barack Obama appealed to people’s aspirations, with pitches on good governance and working together and Yes We Cans.
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There is of course plenty of overlap — no candidate is exclusively one or the other — but there’s the big three.
So, how are things looking in this race?
We all know where Bernie Sanders is — running as an economic populist. While his general election polling looks strong, his campaign is only having mixed results in the primary thus far.
He’s considerably narrowed the gap from even a couple months ago, but Hillary Clinton’s used her much stronger brand in the Democratic party to hold together just enough constituencies so far to staunch the earlier wounds of her campaign.
Hillary Clinton’s identity politics is the scissors in this primary campaign to Bernie Sanders’s pamphlet-flavored paper. Bernie Sanders has a lot of work to do to try to overcome it.
But is Hillary’s identity politics campaign a winning formula for the general?
I don’t think so, not when it can’t even reliably win campaigns in Massachusetts (never mind key battleground states), and it’s a great part of why I think people should hold credence in her poor polling match-ups against the Republicans.
So…. will she shift?
It’s hard to conceive of Hillary trying to run as an economic populist, with her strong roots and connections to Wall St. — that dog just ain’t hunting.
And it’s nearly as tough to see her running a high-minded goo-goo campaign without the soaring rhetoric of Obama and Patrick, as well as her flip flops and a history of scandals that have stuck to her, even if not all of them are deserved.
So, will she shift gears back to the center, turning to the right on some of the key issues she’s used to rally her core constituencies?
While Bill Clinton used this path incredibly successfully in the 90s, Hillary isn’t nearly as popular with independents as Bill was then, and there ain’t no Ross Perot to cut into the GOP ranks. Moreover, this strategy has led to a blood bath for Blue Dogs and many, many establishment ConservaDems in the 2000s, especially after the Great Recession.
There just isn’t that much stomach for Republican-lite anymore, especially with America moving to the left on many social issues, and with the Democratic Party increasingly reliant on smaller numbers of constituencies.
So, I don’t think so.
And this is what’s so scary about a Hillary Clinton general election campaign: she doesn’t have a good path.
when your candidate has almost no path to the nomination?
The primary’s over in Massachusetts, Ryan. The choir has sung. Why are you still preaching to it?
indeed, I believe I expressed some very real doubt here about the prospects of Bernie being able to pull this out. No one spinning would do that.
What I am saying, however, is that what makes Hillary’s campaign strong against Bernie is exactly what makes her weak in a general election. She’s carved up enough of the Democratic Party’s constituent base that Bernie will have trouble overcoming her. But in the general, the kind of campaign she’s running isn’t going to appeal to independents, and hasn’t demonstrated the kind of enthusiastic turnout in the democratic base to show she can win without significant numbers of those independents.
This won’t be the cakewalk for Hillary so many are making it out to be. Trump has tapped into constituencies that don’t regularly vote at all, don’t regularly vote Republican, and aren’t widely understood.
That’s from a Times article. I don’t see that crowd voting for Bernie or Hillary, nor did they bother to vote between Mitt and Obama. But this year they are making Massachusetts a purple state. And Democrats deserve it for neglecting these constituents for so long.
If Hillary wants to be the high minded civic leader running against a troll, she’s fucked. As much as Jeb!
She’s gotta be a street fighter who will deliver jobs and hope to the folks this economy has left behind under both parties. To her credit, I think her staff get this. We will see how they execute.
I think if she could pull off a Deval Patrick/Barack Obama goo goo campaign, about bringing people together and making government work again…. it would be her best bet. But you have to be sort of seen as above the system to do that, not someone who’s stuck in the thick of it.
If she had avoided those Wall St paid speaking gigs and didn’t try to keep her emails secret by putting them on a private server (which she didn’t get away with anyway), she may have been able to pull it off. I don’t think she can, now, though.
Even if she was clean enough to pull it off. I think people are angry and want a fighter to win their battles. It’s a performance she nearly pulled off in 2008, but one Bernie wrestled from her in 2016. I hope she refines that voice for the country’s sake.
If it wasn’t that, it would have been something else. We all know that.
This is not the year that MA will be a purple state. I still think the Trump oppo ads write themselves. There has to be at least 30 seconds worth of footage out there of Trump saying some absolutely outrageous things. Run that montage with “I’m Hillary Clinton and I approve this message” on the end and we can all go home early. I know his base might circle the wagons, but that base is still a relatively small slice of the general electorate. Plus, a fair amount of people voting for him are probably trolling the GOP.
Insert Jeb! , Marco, Ted, or Kasich and it’s the same failed tactic. Granted, the black, Latino, and women bases of the Democratic Party are not at play in Republican parties but it worries me that his totals with whites making under 250k in this primary have been drastically higher than Mitts four years ago. Or that 20,000 left the Democrats to join the Trumpists. I’m not saying he will win, I am saying it’ll be a lot of hard work. Certainly harder than beating Ted or Marco at this point.
I think that some portion of the 20,000 voters who left the Democrats to join the Trumpists did so as a “prank”. I think this is what christopher means by “trolling the GOP”. I don’t know what that share is, but I suspect there’s some truth in it.
I don’t think 20,000 hard core Democrats unenrolled to become Trump voters thinking he is the least electable candidate, not when they had Bernie to vote for. I think 20,000 lax Democrats, including some who called my office for some reason, unenrolled to vote in the GOP primary. Most likely to vote for the Donald. I bet that woman in Everett the Times quoted was a lax Dem her whole life who left to vote for Trump. As were the Gilmore voters in Chelsea. The white working class is tired of getting fucked, and he is the only candidate being honest about their predicament even if his solutions are a dangerously radical fantasy of racial retribution.
Jeb, Marco, Ted or Kasich can’t and won’t employ that tactic because they’re too busy pandering to the same racist base that Trump has mobilized. They can’t point out that Trump is a racist demagogue whilst engaging in racist demagoguery.
I saw them take aim at each other, but I never saw an anti-Trump ad like the kind I’m calling for. In fact, many analysts are blaming Bush’s failures and the lags of others on their failure to even try to really take it to Trump.
But I spent some time in the field these past few weeks, and I talked to a decent number of those voters who dropped their Democratic affiliation so that they could take a Republican ballot. They were voting for Trump. And I’m not sure, having spoken to them, that there’s anything Hillary Clinton could do or say that would bring them back to vote for her in November.
From what I saw, they know perfectly well that Trump isn’t qualified to be president. But they’re too angry with the system and with anything they view as the DC establishment to care. You can call it Clinton Derangement Syndrome, and you might well be right, but it’s real. The best we can likely hope for with these guys is that they won’t come out at all, and it’s a faint hope. They were motivated enough for the primary, after all.
A couple of them did tell me that they’d vote for Sanders if he’s on the ballot in November, and be relieved to get to do it, since they saw him as a sane, qualified non-establishment figure. But they were still voting in the Republican primary, which suggests to me that they’re more interested in voting to burn down the entire system than they are in any conventionally-reasonable message.
The only question in my mind, really, is how many of these people there actually are out there. If there are enough of them, we’re in real trouble.
To the extent this is taking place, I suggest that “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” incorrectly focuses blame on Ms. Clinton.
It is, in fact, the voter that is deranged.
…but I cannot for the life of me figure out why that means voting for the very people likely to make it even worse. The system is in some ways already burned down, and it is the anti-establishment GOP that started the fire.
What does this mean, though?
When someone says “we’re all afraid to say it”, I get the distinct impression that they mean to follow this with “… because we’d be called racists”.
Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, probably is a duck.
Donald Trump is the physical embodiment of an internet comment. I’m not saying that he should be dismissed, but the people that will vote for him are not people who the Democratic party should open their tent for.
…that in 2016 such a high portion of Americans really want to say how awful Mexicans and Muslims are.
is that it disqualifies Sanders. I voted for him, but I don’t see how Sanders could win under any of these four models.
What makes Sanders look good in the primaries is that he’s running against someone who seems to be trying not to alienate him and his voters. The very thing that would make him strong in the primaries is exactly what would make him vulnerable in the general election–once the attack machine got going.
had a very darn good one in the primary — one that drastically closed in on Hillary month after month after month, but she’s sharpened her campaign and the establishment has rallied around her, staunching the wounds.
I still think Bernie can win. But I think he needs to start having some really frank conversations with the voting public, and go hard at Hillary’s record. He hasn’t yet, not really, and it’s time now.
He’s very much an underdog, but I think he still has a real shot. A few good wins is all he needs to turn the narrative around.
Democrats like us will vote for whoever the Democratic candidate winds up being. We vote all the time. We are not the issue. The same thing goes for our Red friends. Only they have an advantage in that more of them are regular voters. If you are an independent or casual Democrat or Republican who only votes every four years, you’re going to need a reason to get out and vote. As far as I can see, Rubio, Cruz, Clinton, Kacish, are having a hard time giving this demographic a reason to vote. Hillary keeps saying that she will “continue the work of President Obama”. Okay, same old, same old. The other guys are saying what every Republican candidate has said for the past 40 years. Same old same old. What stirs someone out of a four year hibernation to get out a vote? That’s the problem and as far as I see, there are only two candidates who are willing to poke that bear.
Voters have to choose between candidates, not just choose a candidate. The question isn’t merely what’s going to make Hillary more appealing? The question is, what’s going to make her more appealing than Trump?
The electorate is unlikely to remain static. Trump changes the conversation in the general electorate like he has in the primary. The general election is going to be about Trump. People will be less concerned about Hillary than about Trump means and whether Americans want to go in that direction.
By summer, Trump is testifying about Trump University. His “connection” to the mob, his business deals, his bankruptcies. Even teflon wears out. As David Axelrod suggests,
That street runs in both directions. Hillary’s deep ties to Wall Street are going to be target #1 with Trump’s campaign. Those mysterious transcripts will surface as sure as Romney’s 47% remark.
…are going to be the target #1 of the guy who epitomizes the 1%? It’s amazing how little reality-based this thread is!
Because he is open and honest about it. People appreciate honesty, and his base still believes the great myth they too can be billionaires if only we get the Hillary Clinton’s out of their way.
Trump is proud of his money. Clinton is defensive and evasive about hers. Pride and in-your-face enjoyment of wealth play a lot better on television than “Everybody does it, and I’m not releasing those transcripts.”
…and her trying it would also come across as phony. Of course Clinton is defensive. She has been attacked her entire career from the right, and now inexplicably, from the left.
Sorry, Christopher, the attacks from the left are completely explicable. Particularly given how she is now making the argument that progressive policies on things like health care and economic inequality are pie-in-the-sky ideas not worth spending political capital on.
Congratulations, BTW.
Clinton’s statements in no way say that health care and economic inequality are pie in the sky. She said that we need to fight incrementally, and with the house and senate the way it is, I would be interested in how you think Sanders could pass any of his “revolutionary” proposals as is.
There are a lot of short memories around here with Clinton’s health care battles, which I believe soften the fight enough to move forward on health care. The goal is universal health care, but we just can’t snap our fingers and have it appear.
People are pissed, they want a warrior, not a wonk. Rerunning the Jeb! canpaign won’t cut it.
and to conflate Hillary Clinton in ANY way to Bush is just wrong.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I’m voting for Hillary. But running on unifying the country and being civil did bupkis for Bush against Trump. She will need to kick the shit out of him, and I’m not sure her message is designed to do that. The country is angry and upset, you can’t run as the adult in the room this year. You gotta be a bully willing to stand up to a bully.
she is a fearless warrior for the cause who has been fighting bullies all her life.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
You fight fire with water.
I voted and canvassed for Hillary, so I am under no illusions that Sanders would be successful as President. But you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. “We can’t do that” is a lousy campaign message even if true.
Christopher, I agree with you that her trying it comes across as phony. I don’t pretend to know what she or her team have been thinking, but her reaction to questions from the media about those speeches has in fact been (1) everybody does it (or at least, every former SoS has done it), so why are you picking on me; and (2) I’ll release those transcripts when everyone else releases theirs, and that includes the Republicans in this race.
It doesn’t matter why she’s feeling defensive. What matters in campaigning terms is that she looks defensive and like she has something to hide or to be ashamed of, whether she actually does or not.
She’s reinforcing the perception that there is something to hide.
Trump has been attacking his current opponents as pawns of special interests. Even though he himself is a special interest, he can make a strong argument that he cannot be bought. When it comes to Clinton, he can also say that he’s given her money and she’s done things for him. It might just be that she attended his wedding. But she also might have taken his calls.
It puts Clinton in a tough spot to position herself as someone who will break down the rigged system when the other guy is saying “Yeah, the system is rigged, I helped rig it, and my friends and I bought Hillary Clinton.”
Look, Hillary’s got the nomination and my support and I think she’ll be a good president. What you fail to realize is Trump’s business experience is an asset and her Wall Street ties are toxic. His narrative is that he’s risen above it by being a man who can’t be bought, especially for the paltry sum she did by Goldman in comparison to his wealth.
He could even pull out a check and tell her to dance for him at a debate and the crowd will eat it up, same amount Goldman paid. Or whip out her wedding appearance for him that he paid for. It’s naive to expect this to go away. This election will be nasty, brutish, and long.
I make the perhaps rash assumption that Ms. Clinton is able to buy and retain competent media and political advisers. I just don’t see these attacks by Mr. Trump as being particularly effective, and I can imagine multiple scenarios where their blowback to Mr. Trump outweighs whatever temporary advantage they may gain.
For example, one response to the “dance for me” quip is to calmly point out that she did NOT “dance” for Goldman, she does NOT “dance” for anyone, that she most definitely REFUSED to dance for Mr. Trump despite his repeated and boorish attempts to demand such behavior, and that the premise exemplifies Mr. Trump’s sexist attitudes.
Similarly, a calm Ms. Clinton could respond to the “being a man who can’t be bought” narrative by observing that the issue with Mr. Trump is his lifelong attempts to buy people, rather than vice-versa — Mr. Putin cannot be bought either. Ms. Clinton can observe that foreign and domestic policy requires gaining advantages from leaders who cannot be bought (I can imagine Ms. Clinton saying “Mr. Trump apparently believes that the entire government is as corrupt as he is”), and that Mr. Trump’s history as pyramid-scheme-con-artist does not translate to either domestic or foreign policy expertise.
I think the ACTUAL differences between Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton are real and striking. I think that even the angry and disillusioned voters that form the center of Mr. Trump’s base are able to recognize those differences. I can only hope that America is, at our core, a nation who prefers people like Ms. Clinton over people like Mr. Trump — especially when it comes to selecting an occupant of the Oval Office. If that hope proves to be naive, then the war is already lost and none of it matters.
When Lazio walked across the debate stage and shoved a pledge in Clinton’s face, that did not go over too well.
…though I suppose I will concede that it IS the attitude that is manifesting. Then again I think Wall Street ties, especially for an NY Senator, are much ado about not very much. We need to address the Wall Street issues, but it would be nice if we were a bit clearer headed about this and not blame everyone with WS connections for the problems, but just the people who actually acted badly.
not just choose a candidate.
What may get him are the tax returns. Either he’s worth less than he says- $1B vs $10B, or something really crazy is in there.
Either way, Trump University will show him as a narcissistic predator. If it turns out he’s done something illegal, that’s an additional weight. The Donald lives on his image. The media have helped build him. The only thing they like more than building him up is tearing him down.
“He created something to make money and some people didn’t think they got their money’s worth” is hardly a campaign killer.
Remember that his supporters don’t trust the media, and certainly the media hasn’t treated him kindly to date, and it seemingly has had no effect.
I’m not sure how much the media has talked about the pyramid scheme that operated under his name (“The Trump Network”) selling worthless health-care supplements. I assume that “Trump University” was something similar.
There is a difference between not getting your money’s worth and barely-disguised fraud.
About 5,000 people spent $40 million. Trump got something like $10 million
He’ll say that he wasn’t running it. He’ll say “why would I risk anything for that paltry amount of money?” He can always pay the money back.
I’m merely pointing out that Trump University is not the thing that’s going to bring Trump down. It could cause him a little trouble, but I”m sure they’re working on how to spin it.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/08/donald-trump-university-new-york-lawsuit
” I’m not a crook ” Nixon ?
I do.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
1) being too rational 2) not seeing things as part of a bigger picture.
in 1984 Geraldine Ferraro spent a lot of the campaign defending herself when her husband’s business dealings were spotlighted. I’m willing to bet that 30 years later most people (by this I mean low information Trump supporters or potential supporters) assume rich people have questionable business dealing and it’s all part of the deal.
I could be wrong. I thought a year ago Clinton would be toast over both the e-mail server and questionable connections to the Clinton Foundation, and apparently no one cares about that.
The comment from Mimolette reflects what I keep reading in reader comments everywhere, even at Huff Post and Reddit. “having spoken to them, that there’s anything Hillary Clinton could do or say that would bring them back to vote for her in November“. Folks here are mostly true party loyalists; in deep and devoted. Move just a little right and the guaranteed vote for the party’s nominee, regardless of whom it is, just disappears. IMO there’s a large group of Sander’s supporters and independents, who will just not vote for Sec Clinton. They sound a lot like Rye, but without his party loyalty.
I could never vote for Mr Trump, or anyone like him. It doesn’t bother me that he’s rich and successful, It bothers me that he’s a narcissistic fool.
The media Clinton Rules, I mean: the ones that guaranteed throughout the 90s that any matter involving any Clinton would be treated in the press and on television as an unprecedented and horrible scandal, whether the facts supported it or not. After the Arkansas Project found so little by way of any fire amid all the smoke that Starr and his people had to fall back on a tawdry sex scandal that they helped to manufacture themselves, why wouldn’t people who remember all that assume that any insinuations about Hillary that arise now are similarly ill-founded?
I know that formed part of my own response to initial reports about that email server, and even about the Clinton Foundation connections — Here we go again, there won’t be anything to this, either, and we’re still going to spend years and millions of dollars ‘investigating’ it. At least voters won’t care, we’ve all seen this show before. But her handling of things like questions about those Goldman speeches makes me wonder now whether this stuff is going to have an effect in the general election after all. It doesn’t give me as much confidence as I’d like to have in the likely outcome of a Clinton/Trump race.
how can anyone be too rational ?
Fred Rich LaRiccia
emotions. (Probably wrong choice of words).
GIVING THE SAME WEIGHT TO A LIE AS YOU DO TO THE TRUTH.” ANON
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Not convinced that they describe why these other campaigns won, either. (Or lost: I have never heard Silber described as an appeal-to-the-middle accommodator before! He was a lot more like Trump, actually, though the analogy is imperfect.)
Clearly Clinton has problems, and we underestimate Trump at our peril. But we don’t even know at this point what kind of campaign Clinton will run. Despite some missteps, it has been generally disciplined and nimble so far.
Sanders has done spectacularly and my big concern is that the forces he has mobilized will be shut out when Clinton makes her pitch to disaffected moderate Republicans. (I don’t like the idea, but I think it is inevitable.)
The challenge for Sanders and his supporters is how to stay relevant after the convention. Not going to be easy.
As Mark says upthread, no campaign is a vacuum, it’s a choice. Often, the campaign you run is predicated on the opponent you have.
I also disagree with conflating Massachusetts and national elections. They don’t match up. A base election may be smart if your base is changing in your direction — if Trump is driving away Hispanics, it’s smart to be more attentive to Hispanics. Our only woman governor thus far hasn’t proven very memorable, but I personally don’t think voting for a woman for Massachusetts governor “feels” historically significant. Voting for a woman for president does, and I think that matter when women are your base.
If Hillary captures a higher percentage of base groups than Obama did, and Trump drives their turnout, that is a winning strategy. I don’t agree with this taxonomy in a vacuum.
Sanders never really had any chance. It going to be Clinton and Trump, both have high negatives. So in that scenario, how to do get people to vote. Under normal circumstances Democrats need GOTV to win, Republicans normally come out to vote. But in the election many R’s will sit it out.
Voters are apathetic, even with Sanders turn out is lower than 2008 for Democrats as well.
Ultimately Clinton matches up better with Trump given what would likely be her far more forceful approach to Trump than Sanders’s approach would be.
I see the situation in a nearly opposite way from the original post: Sanders has actually run a good campaign for a Democratic nomination, a high-minded one, but one that would not work nearly as well in a general election campaign against a populist insult machine like Trump. I could imagine Sanders staying very positive, challenging Trump on his ideas and racism, but unwilling to cut to the core of who Trump, the man, really is. I could imagine him patiently explaining to the American people that the onslaught of conservative advertisements against him is unfair, because he’s a democratic socialist, not a Soviet-style anti-American communist as the ads imply.
That approach won’t work against Trump. What is needed is to expose Trump for the lying, thrice-married, hypocritical, fraud that he is. That’s likely to be the only way to cut into his siren song of faux-populism. It’s also something I have more confidence the Clinton campaign knows how to do.
Fortune
Trump will have the nomination locked up fairly soon, at which point I expect Bloomberg will announce as an independent, the establishment GOP will bolt Trump, the unenrolled anti-Hillary votes will move towards Bloomberg and there will an insane campaign where very few states will be considered safe for any of the three. I heard from a consultant friend who said that Bloomberg is still making the rounds among the establishment players, including the consultants and state party leaders and will go into the field with a poll before the end of March.
If Baker, Romney, Lindsey Graham, Wall Street, the GOP’s old foreign policy elites and people of their ilk have a choice between Trump, Hillary or Bloomberg who do you think they will support?
But replace Hillary with Bernie and you have a different question.
Lo and behol, the NYTimes front page currently has an article on the subject of the GOP establishment seeking a third party candidate, but with a lot more detail than in my post, although they did not mention Bloomberg’s name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/us/politics/anti-donald-trump-republicans-call-for-a-third-party-option.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
The folks over at 538 think he’s at pace to get 51 percent of the delegates. If he loses Florida to Marco Rubio and Ohio to John Kasich, he’ll be pacing for under 50 percent.
Mr. Trump needs to pick up 4-5 winner-take-alls in a row for him to look like locking this up.
It’s over
the Fascist 1%ers are starting to mess themselves with buyers remorse.
Don’t count your Trump chicks until they hatch. A deadlocked Convention could get VEEEEERY INTERESTING !
I’ve got the popcorn ready 🙂
Fred Rich LaRiccia
So far the only real convention I’ve seen in my lifetime was on The West Wing. When Trump actually has a majority of delegates in the bag and not just predicted then JConway can tell me it’s over, but not a moment before.
THE FAT LADY HASN’T SUNG YET !
It ain’t over ’til it’s over.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
in a Clinton-Trump matchup in the general. But I do think it is a mistake to take what happened in the primary here as a sign of what might happen in the general. Rypower states:
This statement confuses the primary with the general.
While rypower’s four methods for winning elections are all true, there is one additional way to win that isn’t mentioned: run against a candidate in the general who is largely unacceptable to the country as a whole. I think this will be true of Trump. Trump may do very well in Republican primaries, but he won’t be as acceptable in the general. It’s the way LBJ beat Goldwater in ’64, to go back to a period a bit before my time!
In my view, the only way Trump beats Clinton in November (assuming both get their respective nominations) is if moderates and independents stay home and don’t vote. I don’t see them voting in large numbers for Trump, but if they stay home, Clinton is in trouble.
Look, the Trump / Clinton general election battle will be so overwhelmingly negative it will make the Swift Boat and Willie Horton attacks look like puppies and rainbows. The goal of them will be to depress turnout among the other’s base. It will be scorched earth politics that will turn everyone off and who knows what sort of downballot impact it’s going to have.
Everyone is so focused on attack as as weapon of choice. Certainly the Republicans are, and it is a gross error. it will backfire there.
Different in the general, but still, you don’t fight fire with fire—you fight it with water.
…and vote against the most obviously bigoted candidate we’ve seen in a long time regardless of how negative the campaign then they deserve what they get. I very much hope you are wrong and if you are right I don’t know what I can say about my country.
I think there’s something existential going on here. Maybe it’s the collapse of the Republican Party. I heard Lindsay Graham saying that political parties can afford to lose a race, but they can’t afford to lose their souls. He made it clear that he’d rather see Trump lose the Presidential race than see him elected because he’s not a a conservative. He and a significant number of Republicans will oppose Trump, if he gets the nomination.
There will be negative ads, but Swift Boats and Willie Horton were dirty lies. I don’t know how much of that we’ll see. We know Trump will lie. That’s what he does, but I’m not sure that will be Hillary’s strategy. It won’t be hard to point of Trump’s negatives, but I think she ends up taking the high road and responding with facts and reason. With a there-you-go-again response, a reality-based response would heighten Hillary’s bona fides and contrast with Trump’s charlatanism. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t work, but Trump has changed a lot of rules.
It took the threat of nuclear war to get voters to abandon Goldwater. At the time that was regarded as a bad thing.
Now, after multiple attacks on American soil, many usually non-voting and uninvolved voters might say, ‘So? We aren’t safe now anyway’.
The American electorate of that era was less ignorant than today.
The plain fact is that ANY nuclear exchange in which the US is a party will be an unmitigated disaster for all of humanity. The concept of “limited” nuclear war is lunacy — the defense establishment has understood this for decades. Even the Russians and the Chinese understand this.
America does not HAVE “tactical” nuclear weapons. Our military does not even have conventional weapons designed to survive the EMP of an adversary’s use of a tactical nuclear weapon — our military assumes that if we are targeted in a nuclear attack, we will respond with a strategic weapon. Conventional forces are irrelevant to that scenario.
America remains the only nation in human history to use nuclear weapons against an adversary. In 2003, we invaded a sovereign nation in a “preventative” attack — we started the war.
Any voter who believes that American involvement in a nuclear exchange is anything but suicidal is much worse than “non-voting” or “uninvolved”.
Such a voter is, in fact:
– Immoral
– Ignorant
– Bat-shit crazy
Sadly, such voters seem to form the “base” of Mr. Trump’s support — which makes sense because he meets all three criteria.
I also dispute your premise that Goldwater’s stance towards nuclear war was the reason for the LBJ landslide.
Barry Goldwater was FAR OUTSIDE the envelope of US opinion at the time. The fact that the GOP has used its wealth and power to move the US electorate towards the lunacy of Mr. Goldwater does not change the reality of just how extreme Mr. Goldwater was.
The perceived threat of a nuclear exchange was just one of a GREAT MANY issues that disqualified Mr. Goldwater in the eyes of most voters.
The “daisy” ad was a classic — yet was NOT that influential, aired only once, and was notable more as filmography and “craft” than as something that actually changed public opinion.
Goldwater was too far right for the electorate, even some Republicans, a decent percentage of who crossed over to vote for Johnson. I also agree with your take on the Daisy ad.
I studied US foreign policy and military strategy in the 70’s. The idea that the Soviets invade West Germany and we resort to tactical nukes always seemed a bit crazy, but it fit in with the policy, just like the midrange ballistic missiles. The idea was that we would have a more “limited” nuclear war.
Seems crazy now. Remember the neutron bomb?