* Trump and Clinton are merely figureheads for identity politics. Who they are or what they’ve done is actually not that important.
* Over the last year or so of following the US election I’ve often pictured the Establishment as the characters in an action film who insist their bank vault, fortress or system of defences are impregnable. “These walls are six feet of reinforced concrete. It would take a celebrity billionaire with his own broadcasting system to get through them!” and then along comes Trump and Twitter.
* Hillary has a pattern of doing things that are not in the national interest, and very good for her own self-interest, and there’s no way to disguise that.
These particular acts of hers threaten the national and personal security of all Americans:
1) Not caring that her emails are secure against foreign spying.
2) Benghazi. She’s very slow to recognize miltiary and terrorist threats, and then goes into denial and tries to blames someone or something else for the assault.
3) Wants to let in millions of foreigners who view whites, white culture, and white relition as The Enemy.
4) Is soft on crime, and she blames police for policing instead of criminals for committing crimes.
As for her own self-interest:
1) Pay to play money via the Clinton foundation.
2) Years spend racking up expensive speech fees.
3) Lusting after the presidency so hard the even though she’s elderly and ill, she’ll make her aides drag her corpse over the finish line if she has to.
4) You can even add in her cattle futures trade long ago, as the beginning of her unhealthy obsession with making cash in a dubious fashion.
During Bill’s administration, Hillary did not come across as especially greedy for money, and that was a trait that marked her as different from her greedy brothers, Tony and Hugh, who both got into trouble for taking money to arrange favors, and her greedy father, Hugh senior the businessman. Well, it turns out Hillary was just a chip off the old block, and was every bit as and venal and unethical about it as the rest of her family. She just delayed her money grab until she thought it was safe.
* I always thought that the Blythe political machine was overrated at the task of winning office. Bill won twice with a third party candidate sucking up 19% and 8.4% of the vote in 1992 and 1996 respectively, and really putting Bush in a political doublebind in 1992 with an assist from a fawning press corps. And that was with the alleged charismatic Bill making headway for the Baby Boomers in their push to take the mantle of National leadership. Hillary was always an unlikable harridan with a perpetual sourpuss look on her face, typified by her condescending “bake cookies” comment in 1992. The true power of the Clinton machine should be all of the favors exchanged over a few decades, but even that was outdone by a neophyte on the national stage in 2008.
At the end of the analysis, Hillary is a peerlessly unlikable character and a poor candidate. Someone in the media whom I cannot recall had a real insight when she said that Hillary becomes much more unlikable when she seeks power. There’s just something in her aspect that telegraphs that she’ll abuse whatever power she acquires, and this gets reinforced by actual events (such as the server/email issue).
* I’m finding Hillary’s remarks ever more mysterious.
It seems she knew that the “deplorable” event was being covered by reporters, and there is a video of it. It may be that the remarks were prepared, though I find that hard to believe — even her god awful campaign staff can’t be that clueless.
And if you see her on video, you just have to be struck by her somnolent, seemingly stoned delivery.
She even moves her lips thirstily like someone on potent drugs.
What the hell is wrong with this woman?
At this point in the campaign, she seems like she’s having some kind of health related meltdown.
She’s what? 68? Whatever this condition is, it’s not going to get better — that we know — it’s only going to get considerably worse. It may be that there’s no “smoking gun” of a particular disease in her case, but how does one attribute this sort of behavior to anything less than some kind of general decline?
One senses that her remarks came out because she just didn’t have the energy to keep her usual filter up.
* Obama’s legacy will be destroyed if Trump wins. Absolute humiliation for him.
* Coalition of the Fringes / Democratic Partisans Message to Trumpkins:
“Shut up.
Stand up and move to the back of the bus for you.
Empty your wallets and pay for all the new passengers who just boarded”
* The single most disgusting thing Hillary said was that these “deplorables” were “irredeemable”.
Who, with an ounce of charity or understanding in her system, would presume to denounce, publicly, such a huge swath of the American people as “irredeemable”?
* Having made some cash betting on Trump winning the primary, I started buying GOP wins Gen Election* shares on predict it when he was at 28, bought more as he fell to 22 after the convention. He is now at 28/29.
(*You can also buy Trump win, but for the unpleasant reasons I do not want to explicate, I think GOP win is a safer).
I think that is about right to a slight underestimate, 538 also has him around 30%. This isn’t Silver’s stupid guess, but his model that weights polls by age, past accuracy, and deviation from other polls and assumes regression to mean of wide leads. He offers two other models called “NowCast” and “PollsOnly” also around 30%.
There are at least five big new unknown factors here that make polls less useful than 2012, 2008, 2004, etc. First, Trump is the least and Hillary is the second least popular presidential nominees in all of polling. What effect on turnout that will have is unknown.
Second, we do not know to what extent people are afraid to say they are voting Trump because it is stigmatized. Brexit was also stigmatized, and the poll averages had it losing by 2 when it won by 4. That 6 point gap should give Trump some hope. However, polls in England have a very long and consistent history of underestimating the right. That is not the case in the United States.
Third, Trump has rejiggered which states are true swings and which are not by performing worse than normal with hispanics and rich whites and better than normal with poor and middle class whites. This is going to be the first election in which Iowa and Michigan votes more Republican than Virginia for example. Indeed, it looks like Iowa may even vote more Trump than North Carolina and be the first modern election where Pennsylvania will vote more Republican than Colorado.
As Steve has noted, this is to Trump’s advantage as Romney lost a large number of white-heavy midwestern states by less than 5%. Trump could do a little better than Romney there, a lot worse elsewhere, lose the popular vote by as much as 1.5%, and still win the election.
Fourth, polling has never shown the Don’t Know/Third Parties bucket so high before, usually above 20%.
Fifth, we have never had a Republican candidate not run a normal ground operation. I’ve long thought Trump was crazy for not doing this. I guess Kellyanne Conway agrees, as she is rushing to set one up. But a proper ground game takes more than 6 weeks to set up. It is obsessed with, 4+ months away from the election at recruiting volunteers and IDing weak supporters and partisans who vote irregularly. Then, closer to the election, sending campaign field staff and volunteers to talk to them in person and on the phone. Finally, it gets them to actually show up.
Throw all of these together, you might take the poll average, add 2 points for Shy Tory effect, add 2 more because third party support is always overstated in polls and Johnson is doing better than Stein, subtract 3 points because Trump lacks a ground game, add 1 point for the Trump electoral college advantage, and I think Trump will likely win if he is polling 2 points behind Hillary or better.
* The most effective cough suppressants (antitussives) are all CNS depressants. They are either opioids like codeine or disassociatives like dextromethorphan.
Used rarely and as directed, for most people the effective dose for cough suppression should not make them feel intoxicated. There are many examples, such as Rush L. and a billion doctors, of people being highly functional while high on opioids. However, if she is taking them every time she’s on camera, or taking extra large doses “to be safe,” and on top of the stress and pressure of the campaign, that could be enough. Also, people all react differently to psychoactive medication.
Dextromethorphan is the most common antitussive ingredient in OTC cough and cold medication. Unlike opioids, it presents low risk of addiction, though it is often abused by teenagers. The mental effects of DXM, however, are more often present at effective antitussive doses, and is most similar to alcohol.
* Campaigns are like big ships, they are hard to change direction.
Two years ago, the Obama strategy (100% blacks, add some hispanics and then a little white on top) was a winning presidential strategy.
(It never worked very well in Congressional/state and local elections).
Turns out that riling up the blacks to get to 99% vote share really ticks off a lot of other people.
Throw in the economy (I don’t want to go into details, but it isn’t where a lot of people would like) and you’ve got a close election.
The real mystery is why even encourage BLM. Just have Michelle+barack hit the train in 2016 summer, targeting black communities. Maybe they will this fall. They just don’t seem — as they have not since 2008 — that they worry about anyone’s election except their own.
* Black self-censorship truly is crazy. It wasn’t always so, though. A hundred and twenty years ago there were plenty of black folks who openly said the Negro race had a long way to go and a lot of race work — civilizational work –to do.
Both Booker T Washington and WEB Dubois were quite blunt about it. Their racial self-criticism was so strong that quoting them nowadays will get you fired (if you are white, anyway).
Back then Negro’s took it seriously. Hell, Negros would lynch fellow Negros for trifling with little black girls, beating their wives, etc. And there were fewer black bastards than there are white bastards now.
Something happened in the last 50-75 years. Somehow it all became the white man’s fault (and his responsibility to fix).
* If their Black tribal loyalty exceeds their civic virtue, they are not our friends and deserve nothing from us.