“Poetic Justice, A Big Beautiful Wall”: Will Latinos Wall Off Trump From The White House?
How’s this for poetic justice? Donald Trump’s favorite scapegoats could end up having the satisfaction of blocking him from the White House.
Latino voters have the potential to form a “big, beautiful wall” between Trump and his goal. If Trump gets the Republican nomination and Hispanics are provoked into voting in numbers that more nearly approach their percentage of the population — and if, as polls suggest, they vote overwhelmingly against Trump — it is hard to see how the bombastic billionaire could win.
Such an outcome would serve Trump right. Unfortunately for the GOP, it would also threaten to make Latinos a reliable and perhaps monolithic voting bloc for the Democratic Party, just as African Americans have been since the 1960s. If this were to happen, simple arithmetic would make it increasingly difficult for Republicans to win the White House.
In 2012, Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of the Latino vote; his policy of “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants is believed to have contributed to this poor showing. After Romney’s defeat, a GOP postmortem called on the party to regain its footing with the nation’s largest minority group. “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform,” the report said.
This never happened. A group of senators who became known as the Gang of Eight, including Marco Rubio, managed to win passage of a reform bill, but House Republicans refused even to consider the legislation. It seemed the immigration issue would once again be a liability for the GOP in the presidential contest.
Then along came Trump, who opened his campaign by charging that immigrants coming from Mexico were criminals and rapists — and promising to build a wall along the border to keep them out. As for the 11 million undocumented immigrants already here, Trump’s solution is not self-deportation but rather forced deportation: He pledges to round them all up and send them home.
Trump may be all over the map on a host of issues, but xenophobic opposition to Latino immigration has been his North Star. He invites supporters to see their nation under siege from Latinos who allegedly take away jobs, commit crimes and alter traditional American culture. Last year, he criticized campaign rival Jeb Bush — whose wife is from Mexico — for speaking Spanish at a rally. “He should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States,” Trump said.
Trump’s chauvinism has been winning approval among the mostly white, working-class voters who form the core of his support. But there are signs that he may also be animating Latinos — to come out and vote against him.
A poll last month by The Post and Univision showed that just 16 percent of Latino voters had a favorable view of Trump, as opposed to 80 percent who view him unfavorably. The remaining GOP candidates — Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich — all do considerably better. But no Republican does nearly as well as Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, both of whom are seen favorably by healthy majorities.
In a hypothetical matchup, according to the poll, Clinton would beat Trump among Latino voters by 73 percent to 16 percent. Assuming those who had no opinion went equally for the two candidates, Clinton’s share of the Latino vote would approach 80 percent. Swing states with large Hispanic populations such as Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado would effectively be off the table for the GOP.
Moreover, the sheer number of Latino voters will almost surely increase across the nation. According to the Pew Research Center, the 23.3 million Hispanics who were eligible to vote in 2012 will have grown to 27.3 million by Election Day, mostly from young citizens who turn 18. The specter of a Trump presidency is giving urgency to widespread voter-registration drives.
Trump’s claim that he “won” among Hispanic voters in Nevada is based on entrance polling at the party caucuses, but the sample was so small as to be virtually meaningless. More pertinent is that more than twice as many Hispanics participated in the Democratic caucuses as in the Republican ones.
Assuming Trump wins the nomination, where does this leave him? If Latinos come out to vote against him in greater-than-usual numbers, he would have to win what looks like an impossibly high percentage of the white vote to be competitive. Even if the Latino vote just grows proportionally with population, he would have a hard time winning states that GOP presidential candidates can’t afford to lose.
He may wish he could say “I’m sorry” in Spanish.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 7, 2016
“Can Trump Bully His Way To The White House?”: Channeling Anger In The Most Ugly And Predictable Way
Donald Trump—with his swashbuckling, profanity-laced bigotry and searing, rapid-fire assaults against his opponents—is poised to either upend modern-day conservatism or reveal the true nature of its ideological roots. For now, it appears, his most serious remaining challengers—Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio—possess neither the gravitas nor the electoral might to save the GOP from the darkest impulses of its base.
Notwithstanding their fervent attempts to distance themselves from the billionaire businessman, Trump’s brand of conservatism is a creature of their own making. Until now, as long as the monster could be controlled, it found safe harbor in their midst. It has proven difficult to walk away from Trump wholesale or even authentically criticize him when they themselves have peddled a more digestible, coded form of the same cultural biases.
Trump, however, has now given voice to an ideological strain of extremism that is imbued with an ugly nativist theology and racial animus. Once secreted away in the shadows, where questions of its existence and influence over the party’s platform could be batted away or outright denied, the roots of economic loathing and racial resentment have been unearthed and paraded under cable news studio Klieg lights.
Some of the same party establishment players who chafe at Trump’s prominence now once delighted in the bully’s capacity to fell his foes. One after another, they trekked to his gilded Manhattan office tower to curry the favor of an unrepentant birther. In their lust to reclaim the White House, they relished the fruits of his largesse—pocketing thousands in campaign donations—despite Trump’s extensively documented track record that included allegations of housing discrimination, corporate bankruptcies that crushed small-business owners and their families, and tales of marital infidelity worthy of an E. L. James trilogy.
But, then the tables turned. Trump, the archetypical ruffian, grew dissatisfied with the size of his political kingdom and proffered himself for the grandest prize of them all—the American presidency.
In doing so, Trump, the celebrity wrecking ball who eschews the confines of conservative principles, has built an intractable movement fueled largely by a wave of white male resentment. It is the same tide, advanced by gerrymandering and funded by billionaire kingmakers, that swept through state legislatures—especially in the South—and delivered congressional control to Republicans. It was in that climate, one seeded and nurtured by conservatives, that the Trump candidacy found fertile ground.
“Conservatism has never been about anger,” Rubio told a crowd gathered at CPAC Saturday.
In fact, conservatism—from William F. Buckley to George Wallace, from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich—has always been about the politics of resentment. Rubio’s flowing rhetoric is soundly disproven, both by contemporary evidence and the history of conservatism in the U.S. Party re-alignments that came after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation proclamation and Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Acts demonstrated the willingness of conservatives to switch parties when one or the other proved too liberal for their collective tastes. Because of this, the GOP has not always been the “party of white men.” But conservatism has always been driven by a desire to maintain their political and economic power—and their anger at the possibility of losing it.
And there has always been a chest-thumping, populist ringleader willing to take up that charge.
Early on, Trump validated the most deeply held anxieties of his supporters with coarse language aimed at the marginalized and disenfranchised. He, his base said, was just “telling it like it is.” Only Trump, they believe, can protect them from the boogeyman of their shrinking majority.
Trump’s popularity is buoyed by his ability to channel and manifest the anger of those who believe they are losing power as the country—and the electorate—grows more diverse. For them, the casino magnate is the perfect antidote— the proverbial captain at the blockade—who represents their best and last hope to maintain an economic system built on racial privilege.
No one—least of all Mitt Romney—cared about Trump’s volatile temperament, his string of failed businesses or his proclivity toward xenophobia and chauvinism while he was helping them carry the water. Ironically, for Trump, the measure of leadership is counted in the number of people who fit tidily under his diminutive thumbs—people like Romney, whom Trump alleges was once so desperate for his endorsement that he would have “dropped to his knees.”
That he would utter something so foul, so devoid of basic decorum, should have come as no surprise. According to researchers, studies of teens with history of aggressive bullying behavior suggest that they derive pleasure from seeing others in pain, and there is no question that Trump enjoys pummeling anyone who utters an unkind word about him. His goal has always been to strike enough fear to silence or discredit his naysayers.
“We find that bullies have a strong need to control others,” John Lochman, a psychologist at Duke University Medical School, told The New York Times. “Their need to be dominant masks an underlying fear that they are not in control, and they mask the sense of inadequacy by being a bully.”
“Bullies see the world with a paranoid’s eye,” added Kenneth Dodge, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University. “They feel justified in retaliating for what are actually imaginary harms.”
Like any self-respecting schoolyard bully, Trump is unapologetic, seemingly emboldened by the cheering crowds and rising poll numbers. In turn, his swell of supporters continues filling hotel ballrooms and bingo halls—cheering his unchecked bravado, erupting loudly as he unleashes round after round of bombasts. They rejoice in his ability to degrade and dominate, proudly shoving and heckling dissenting protestors. Young activists for Black Lives Matter have drawn Trump’s specific ire and his supporters make no secret of their disdain.
“Their thuggish and uncivilized actions are going to be met with a response these people understand,” one Trump supporter posted on Facebook.
Trump, who has promised to pay the legal fees of anyone who assaults a demonstrator, has faced no backlash on this issue from his opponents. That silence is tacit approval and now, it appears, nothing stands between Trump and the GOP nomination.
“There’s nothing short of Trump shooting my daughter in the street and my grandchildren—there is nothing and nobody that’s going to dissuade me from voting for Trump,” 71-year-old Lola Butler told a New York Times reporter.
But will it be enough? Can Trump ultimately win the keys to the Oval Office?
“I haven’t even started on her yet,” he says of Hillary Clinton.
However, “the math suggests Trump would need a whopping 70 percent of white men to vote for him,” writes David Bernstein for Politico Magazine. “That’s more than Republicans have ever won before—more than the GOP won in the landslide victories of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and far more than they won even during the racially polarized elections of Barack Obama.”
But that the GOP cannot find a single candidate who can fell this tailor suited-hooligan once and for all, speaks volumes about the party itself. Over time, Trump has vilified undocumented immigrants, suggested a travel ban on all Muslims and even demanded that the nation’s first black president produce his birth certificate and college transcripts—to prove he was born here and had duly earned his laudable achievements. He has openly mocked a reporter living with disabilities and regularly disparaged the journalists who cover his campaign events. Cameras have captured him jeering and sneering at protestors from behind the microphone.
“Get out! Get ’em out!” he shouts.
For his part, Rubio claims Trump is attempting to “hijack” the conservative movement. The truth is the real-estate titan is simply taking the wheel of a car that was custom-built for him.
There is no evidence that a kinder gentler Trump will voluntarily emerge, nor is there—at this point—any incentive for him to rehabilitate his public personae. Once a bully has established his superiority, he tends to escalate the “violence” in order to maintain that reputation. He knows that when the fear is gone, power walks out behind it.
A bully like Trump will continue to wreak havoc on the meek, fueled by his escalating hegemony, until he is felled either by humiliation or brute force (in this case, a brokered convention). Or, as my late Uncle Ross used to say, “They won’t stop until you knock ’em on their ass.”
By: Goldie Taylor, The Daily Beast, March 6, 2016
“Trumpkins Beware, It Get’s Worse”: Why We’re Segregated On Super Tuesday And How It Helps Explain Trump
The most segregated place in American politics just might be a partisan primary.
The massive racial disparities in voter turnout between Republicans and Democrats help explain how Donald Trump seems to be insulting his way to the nomination. But this same dynamic also underscores how screwed the GOP is in terms of national demographic shifts if they choose to go further down this dangerous path.
Today is Super Tuesday, nicknamed the SEC primary because it includes many states in the Southeastern college sports conference. Contrary to stereotypes, the South is more racially diverse than many regions in the United States. Also contrary to stereotypes, Republicans field a more diverse set of statewide elected officials than Democrats, as evidenced by the presence of two Hispanic senators from the South running for president on the right side of the aisle.
But the good news stops there. The racial polarization beneath our politics becomes clear when you look at who turns out to vote in partisan primaries.
Let’s start with a look at South Carolina—a state where black people make up 28 percent of the population, roughly double the national average.
Hillary Clinton won a massive victory there this past weekend, winning 86 percent of black vote in a primary where African Americans made up 61 percent of the turnout.
A week earlier, Republicans ran in the same state and CNN exit polls showed that black support for Republicans was almost nonexistent—or, in the statistical parlance of exit polls, “n/a”—not applicable.
This troubling trend is likely to become only more pronounced on Super Tuesday. Eight years ago—the closest comparison we have to this open-seat presidential cycle—voter turnout was high but the diversity was also skewed to one side, especially in the South.
In delegate-rich Texas, for example, black people make up 10 percent of the population, but made up only 2 percent of the voters in the 2008 Republican primary. Hispanics made up 38 percent of the Lone Star State population, but only 10 percent of the Republican votes. But in the Democratic primary, black Americans were 19 percent of the vote and Hispanics 32 percent of the vote, respectively.
In Alabama, black people make up 26 percent of the population, but made up only 4 percent of GOP primary voters in 2008. On the Democratic side of the aisle, black voters made up 51 percent of the primary electorate.
The same dynamic was evident in Georgia. Black Americans made up 31 percent of the population in 2008, but only 4 percent of the GOP primary vote. In contrast, black voters made up 52 percent of the Democratic primary turnout.
We’ll round out the sample set with Virginia, where black people make up 19 percent of the total population but made up only 3 percent of GOP primary voters in 2008. On the Democratic side, black voters constituted 30 percent of the primary turnout.
If you’re from the South or have spent much time there, these results may seem unremarkable. But they are a sign of a deeper sickness in our political system, where race is too often a partisan signifier.
Here’s the short version of how this happened in the South: This division is rooted in the legacy of slavery and the Civil War: The states of the former Confederacy voted against the Party of Lincoln for a hundred years (and blacks who could vote were loyal Republicans) until conservative Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Southern Strategy began. White Southern Democrats became Republicans, but they remained conservative populists.
This dynamic was compounded in recent years by collusion between the two parties in the form of the rigged system of redistricting, which gerrymandered the South into white and black congressional districts, rural and urban, driving the Bill Clinton-era Blue Dogs—centrist white Southern Democratic congressmen—into extinction. There are no swing seats left but the racial polarization of the parties in the South is intact, further reinforcing the sense that partisans can simply play to the political and racial base rather than reach out to form new coalitions.
Almost needless to say, this racial polarization does not mean that voters in the respective parties are racist—especially by the standards of a generation ago—but it does mean that the rank and file of our political parties are more segregated than our society at large. And the elevation of Donald Trump to the GOP nomination will only compound these problems.
This primary turnout explains how the rise of a Trump is possible while spewing divisive racial rhetoric: There is no short-term political cost and quite possibly some short-term political benefit in playing to fears of demographic change, cultural and economic resentment and anger toward the first black president. But the long run is all downside.
That’s because partisan primary turnout is often unrepresentative of the overall state. So you can win a partisan primary without having those results be a predictor of how the state will vote in the fall, especially in the case of a crucial swing state like Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, or Virginia. The primaries become the tail that wags the dog: A small number of voters, represented by an even smaller number of professional partisan activists and special interests, get massive attention from candidates trying to win the nomination. If you’re campaigning for the Republican nomination, you can safely ignore diverse communities, but that play-to-the-base path to winning the nomination is a surefire path for losing a general election.
Say what you want about George W. Bush, but he was genuinely passionate about increasing the reach of the Republican Party into communities of color. The foundation of his 2000 presidential run was his landslide re-election as governor of Texas in 1998, when he won 40 percent of the Latino vote.
Trumpkins will point out that The Donald won the Latino vote in the Nevada caucus last month. This is true and doubly impressive/depressing running against two actual Hispanics, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz—as Ruben Navarrette predicted in The Daily Beast. But it’s not incidental to point out that while a record 75,000 Republicans caucused, only an estimated 6,000 were Latino—well below the 27 percent of the population that is Hispanic. Cut this stat with two other facts—President Obama won the Latino vote by 50 points in Nevada and 80 percent of Latinos nationwide have a negative view of Trump—and you quickly pack up any notions that Trump’s Nevada caucus victory is an indicator of general-election strength.
And so it goes. The increasingly narrow base of the GOP, dominated by conservative populists, has created the conditions for a celebrity demagogue like Donald Trump. The absence of a strong center-right or real depth of diversity among the Republican constituency means that the party can be too easily hijacked in five weeks of partisan primaries by pandering to an electorate that doesn’t look much like the America that candidate will have to win—let alone govern.
While the polls show that Donald Trump is primed for a big night, don’t believe the hype: No matter how “yuge” the win, the underlying electoral math is apocalyptic for any party that chooses to not only ignore but insult the growing diversity in America.
By: John Avlon, The Daily Beast, March 1, 2016
“Doing It Wrong”: Stop Attacking Donald Trump’s Politics; Attack His Character Instead
Some Republicans, at least, are starting to cotton up to the idea that if you don’t want someone to win, maybe you attack him. Marco Rubio has begun attacking Donald Trump on the stump. It’s a pretty timid jab, but a significant one for the very message-disciplined candidate who has tried to run a positive campaign.
The problem is that he’s been doing it wrong. Conservatives have insisted on attacking Trump on policy, and in one direction: charging him for not being right-wing enough.
In what may be the most frustrating news to come out of a very infuriating election cycle, Politico describes the reasons why the GOP’s mega-donors and heavy hitters are afraid of launching a wave of attack ads. Only 4 percent of the $238 million in advertising spent by big-money groups so far has targeted Trump. One reason is sheer cowardice (they’re afraid Trump might hit back). But another reason is that previous ads didn’t work.
But these ads are practically designed not to work, because they only reinforce Trump’s message. The ads either decry Trump for being politically incorrect, or describe him as not a traditional conservative. Both things are precisely his appeal, and both boil down to “He’s not one of the guys you hate.” The ads are saying: “All those reasons you like Trump? They’re really true!”
The reason why Trump shouldn’t be president, fundamentally, is not his position (or lack thereof) on this or that issue. Trump doesn’t care about the border wall or ObamaCare (whatever his position on it is this week). The reason Trump shouldn’t be president is because he’s probably a sociopath.
So this is what the attack ads should focus on. The ads should focus on what people like about him, and invert it. As Ross Douthat put it in a column last month:
So don’t tell people that he doesn’t know the difference between Kurds and the Quds Force. (They don’t either!) Tell people that he isn’t the incredible self-made genius that he plays on TV. Tell them about all the money he inherited from his daddy. Tell them about the bailouts that saved him from ruin. Tell them about all his cratered companies. Then find people who suffered from those fiascos — workers laid off following his bankruptcies, homeowners who bought through Trump Mortgage, people who ponied up for sham degrees from Trump University. (…) If you want to persuade his voters that his “New York values” are a problem for them, put his alleged dealings with the Mafia on the table. [The New York Times]
Would these ads work? Well, they just might work enough to puncture his aura of inevitability and maybe, just maybe, keep his ceiling low enough to allow a non-Trump candidate to break through. They sure as heck would work better than doing nothing.
If not now, we’ll find out how well they work once Trump has the nomination locked up and Hillary Clinton starts airing them.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, February 26, 2016
“Ideological Malleability”: Why Trump Could Be Tougher In General Election Than You Think
Donald Trump may not wind up as the Republican nominee for president, but at this point it’s far and away the most likely outcome of the primary race. Having won three of the four contests so far, he’s heading into Super Tuesday six days from now in a position to widen his lead beyond the point where his opponents could catch him.
Which raises an inevitable question: Is he really as terrible a general election candidate as so many people have assumed?
The most rational answer is that we have no idea. If Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio were the nominee, the general election would likely be fairly predictable, in that the debate would revolve around traditional partisan divisions on issues, and we know which states would be competitive and which wouldn’t. But just as Trump’s unique candidacy has defied all that we thought we knew about what matters in primary campaigns — the damage done by outrageous statements, the importance of ideological consistency, the key role played by party elites — so too could a Trump nomination produce an utterly unpredictable general election.
There are still good reasons to think that Trump would be be obliterated by the Democratic nominee. But there’s also a case to be made that Trump would so scramble the election calculus that he could win. Indeed, you might even argue that he has a better shot than a more traditional candidate. Let’s examine each way of looking at the general election.
The case against Trump’s chances begins with the fact that he’s tremendously unpopular. As much as he has thrilled a certain segment of the Republican electorate, everything he has done and said in the primary campaign — the xenophobia, the bigotry, the bombast — has served to alienate him from voters he would need to win the general election. Polls of all Americans, as opposed to just Republicans, show that around 30-35 percent of the public have a favorable impression of Trump, while around 55-60 percent have an unfavorable impression of him.
Furthermore, talking about building a wall with Mexico and rounding up 11 million undocumented immigrants might make the audiences at his rallies cheer, but it won’t play so well with the broader electorate. Everyone understands that the GOP must improve its showing among Latino voters, one of the fastest-growing parts of the electorate, if it’s ever to win back the White House. Trump wouldn’t just fail to improve those numbers, he’d make the bottom fall out: polls have shown (see here or here or here) that Trump is spectacularly unpopular with Latinos, just as you might expect, with approval ratings as low as 11 percent. Furthermore, his nomination would be a terrific mobilization tool to get Latino voters to the polls.
That’s true of other voting groups as well. If you’re not a white guy and Trump hasn’t insulted you yet, he probably will by the end of the primaries. Imagine that the Democratic nominee were Hillary Clinton. How wide will the gender gap be when the potential first woman president is running against a guy who shows such contempt for women and discards each of his wives as soon as she hits her 40s? (Note to Melania: the clock is ticking, so you might want to prepare yourself.)
There’s no doubt that Trump has tapped into something important within the Republican electorate, but that’s where it resides: that combination of anger at their party’s leaders and fear of a changing world sowed the seeds for Trump’s rise. But the general electorate is very different from the Republican electorate: among other things, it’s less white, less Christian, and younger. The positions Trump has taken as he’s appealed to Republicans — overturn Roe v. Wade, loosen gun laws, cut taxes for the wealthy, repeal the Affordable Care Act — are all unpopular with the public at large.
So that’s the case for a Trump defeat in the fall: he’s got the wrong positions on issues, he’s ticked off a lot of voters he’ll need, and he’s generally considered to be an obnoxious jerk.
The argument in favor of a Trump victory has two pieces to it, one about demographics and one about the kind of candidate he’d actually be in a general election. The demographic argument says that Trump has an appeal that other Republicans don’t have. We’ve seen again and again how party leaders (and his opponents) have attacked him for liberal positions he’s held in the past (like being pro-choice and saying nice things about single-payer health care), and even some heresies he’s offered in the present (like his bizarre assertion that George W. Bush was president on September 11, 2001 or his criticism of the Iraq War). Trump’s voters, it turned out, didn’t care. Ideological consistency isn’t important to them, because their affection for Trump is based on other things, like their contempt for Washington and the belief that he’s a “winner,” and if he were president he’d spread his winningness over the whole country, through some process that need not be explained.
Since these beliefs aren’t tied to conservative ideology, they could have appeal beyond Republicans. And even if Trump alienates women, his displays of chest-thumping dominance could appeal to lots and lots of white men, particularly those who are lower on the income and education scales (as Trump said after his Nevada win yesterday, “I love the poorly educated”). That could make Trump competitive in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan that have been in the Democratic column in the last two elections. Unlike other Republicans who have to work to convince voters that they aren’t just on the side of the rich, Trump, an actual rich person, has an economic appeal that has nothing to do with facts but is more about feeling. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders may be leading Trump in general election trial heats, but not by much — just a few points.
It’s the second piece of the puzzle that may be less appreciated at this point. To put it simply, Donald Trump would be a completely different candidate in a general election than the one we see now. Conservatives are justified in being terrified by Trump’s ideological malleability. They look at him and see someone with no true beliefs and no commitments, who will quickly change positions if it suits him. He’s only presenting himself as a conservative Republican now — to the degree that he’s even doing that — because he’s running in a Republican primary.
When conservatives think that, they’re absolutely right. He will indeed transform himself once he has a different audience. We don’t have to wonder about that, because he has said so on more than one occasion. “Once you get to a certain level, it changes,” he told Greta Van Susteren a few weeks ago. “I will be changing very rapidly. I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.”
On another occasion, he told voters in Iowa, “When I’m president, I’m a different person. I can do anything. I can be the most politically correct person that you’ve ever seen.” While ordinary politicians try to convince you of their consistency, Trump proudly says that he’ll turn himself into whatever the situation demands. And if it demands someone who has moderate positions, that’s what he’ll be.
Will the voters buy it? We have no way of knowing, because we haven’t seen that version of Trump yet. But we shouldn’t assume that the fact that most of them dislike the current version means they won’t like the next one.
At the moment, I haven’t decided which of these scenarios I think is more likely, Trump getting blown out and taking the Republican Party with him, or Trump forging a heretofore unseen coalition that carries him to the White House. I lean toward the first, but I can’t tell if that’s because the idea of this despicable buffoon being the most powerful human being on earth is so ghastly, and my judgment derives more from hope than anything else. The truth is that with Trump in a general election, we’d be in uncharted territory. Anything could happen.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, February 24, 2016
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