* A poll conducted a couple of days ago and an entrance poll at the caucases today showed Trump leading, but he’s losing the actual caucus vote. It’s hard to admit being for Trump in public. The other primaries will be decided by secret ballot, where Trump’s opponents won’t have this advantage.
* Rubio wants to increase neocon wars, flood the U.S. with cheap labor (illegals), and support TPP. Ted Cruz wants to quintuple H1B visa workers, support TPP, et al. I say fuck conservative middle America. They had one last chance with a non-politician billionaire. But they’re too stupid to know what’s good for them. I’m a 2%-er living comfortably in Massachusetts. Fuck those evangelical losers with low IQs in flyover country and I’m done caring about them.
* What’s great about those numbers is how much room for growth there is in there for Cruz vs. Rubio. Forced to choose between the two is a Trump/Paul/Carson voter more likely to choose Rubio or Cruz?
68.4% of the vote appears to be going to the Fuck RINOs Party. That’s the number we see over and over again nationwide – polls showing ~70% of GOP voters wanting anyone but an establishment candidate. Win or lose in November this revolt isn’t dying anytime soon.
* I think the very fact that Trump firmly staked a claim on what was believed to be a politically untenable position – building a wall and expelling illegal immigrants, confirms that he is sincere in this position and will attempt to follow through. If he didn’t want to do it, why in the world would he campaign on that platform when the conventional wisdom was that it was stance held only by racist Nazi sympathizers? I think Trump was truly convinced by Coulter’s book.
I also think it’s safe to believe in his trade protectionist positions. He is on the record advocating a more pro-America stance on trade deals since the 80′s.
I have no idea if he can be expected to follow through on his rhetoric with respect to guns or abortion, but I don’t really care much. The 2nd Amendment will still protect our guns rights, and nobody has done anything about abortion for 40 years so there’s no reason that Trump will do anything different.
* Iowa has picked the correct GOP candidate 3 of the last 7 contested races so all the losers have something to cling to tonight. Cruz won by throwing bibles around and that means he has zero chance in New Hampshire. But, Rubio will be the darling of the Conservative Industrial Complex now so my guess is they drag him over the line in New Hampshire.
The funny thing to me is we’re going to get Clinton – Lazio 2.0 in the general with Bootsie playing the role of Rick Lazio. If I did not know better, I’d think these things are scripted.
* I’m disappointed, but I don’t think Trump sitting out the debate had anything to do with it. Certainly, there weren’t a lot of Trump voters going to Rubio.
What appears to have happened is that turnout was high, and a lot of that turnout went to Rubio or Cruz, both of whom were energized by fear that Trump might win.
However, Trump had to have done pretty well to keep 24% of the vote, which means he wasn’t asleep at the wheel.
Immigration isn’t a big deal in Iowa, and in fact, shockingly, many learned that the cities are “sanctuary cities”, meaning they’d lose funding under Trump or Cruz.
Trump had a good speech. That shows he’s in it to win it. Let’s hope he comes out hard for immigration restriction. And if there are too many anti-restrictionists out there, then it’s justs not the time.
I don’t think I’ve posted this yet, my Trump post: It’s the Immigration, Stupid.
* Holy shit, look at Bill Clinton. He’s a f–king vegetable. It looks like he’s actually dead and embalmed, and they’re just jerking his body around with strings.
* 8 out of 10 Trump supporters don’t have college degrees and many of them have never voted before. You need an army of volunteers knocking on doors and dragging these people to the polls. Otherwise, they’ll be sitting at home watching TV. Trump should seriously consider investing more in a serious ground game. Being a New Yorker, a celebrity, a TV star, and having enjoyed all the media coverage and favorable poll numbers for the past 6 months, Trump probably underestimates the basic mechanics and nitty gritty of electoral politics.
* Cruz made a good case before the election that, if you want anyone other than Trump to win, you should vote for him in Iowa, because a) he had the best chance of beating Trump there and, b) If Trump won Iowa, the race would be over.
* It would seem that many Iowa Republicans saw Cruz – who is also described (wrongly, to my sense of matters) as an “outsider” – as the safer “outsider” choice to Mr. Trump who is an actual outsider. Cruz’s Iowa ground game was also far more muscular than Mr. Trump’s nonexistent one. All that considered, in national terms I might lean toward reading their numbers as an actual tie.
The real shock is Rubio’s strong third-place numbers. How a Midwestern Republican could vote for Rubio is beyond my power to comprehend. But then Iowa has had some twenty-to-thirty years of LaRazatino meat-processing & stoop labor immigrants whose Chamber of Commerce employers may be more than a little inclined to support a rat like Rubio.
Sanders’s numbers come as no shock at all. For the last two weeks Enemedia-Pravda have been giving Sanders a propaganda boost at the same time as they’ve been boosting Hilligula while also reporting on the latest State Department release of her cavalierly handled “special access programs” e-mails. If Sanders runs away from Hilligula in New Hampshire, look for Enemedia-Pravda to worship Sanders in exactly the same way they worshipped candidate Obama – and to promote Hilligula as Sanders’s top veep choice. To me the most depressing thing about Sanders is this: Sanders is purely the product of forty years of the radicals’ takeover of public edudoctrination of America’s children – including children of blue collar Americans who have been most grievously screwed by Sanders/SJW types.
* Suppose in order to win the nomination, Trump may have to simply remain competitive in the Bible Belt states, and win outright in such states Northeastern/Rust Belt/Upper Midwest/Pacific as NY; PA; New England as well as OH; MI; WI; IL; and also CA; NV; CO; out west. Could that be done?
Because if all the Bible Belt primaries want is for someone to read the Bible to them and not really discuss the issues, then son of a preacher has it pretty easy. Trump’s great ace in the hole or, “Trump” card may just be that he’s from the Northeast and perhaps could use that to his advantage in the West, where social issues/religious language isn’t as strongly appealing in a primary, particularly in CA. As the US’s biggest state ergo it must also carry the most delegates (even though most of the time the primary race is pretty much over by the time CA primary voters go to vote).
* There’s an earlier shot of the three family members on a stage with Bill in the middle. They are all holding hands, and it looks like he actually needs support to stand. He has fallen so far, so fast that it’s impossible not to notice.
It’s not just his physical state that alarmed me somewhat. Did you catch Hillary’s wild eyes in her victory speech? She looked ready to leap from the stage, jump in the cab of a long haul truck, and drive an all nighter to Oregon. Whatever she’s on, it’s the good stuff.
* Iowa was always one of Trump’s weakest states. Unfortunately the chance he might win it, as was indicated by the most recent polls, makes this feels like a loss rather than a solid start. Thankfully he is so far ahead in NH and SC I can’t see those results changing. Ultimately there has been little change in the delegate number he has won, one less than had he won. The result does explain why Cruz started attacking Rubio though.
* Veganism seems to have sapped Bill’s powers.
* Rubio is the new GOP mafia darling since Jebra is a dud. Could there be something nefarious going on? Check out where and by how many votes Rubio surprisingly came in a strong number ONE.
* Rubio’s showing stinks of fraud. None of the polls hinted at anything of the kind, and he’s not the sort of candidate who gets massive grassroots support that might be underrepresented in the polls (e.g. Ron Paul in 2012). And the voting software was provided by a major Rubio donor (Microsoft).
* Cruz doesn’t even have a path to win the nomination. He will get schlonged in any state without a heavy population of evangelicals. Your choices, if you’re supporting a Republican primary candidate, comes down to Trump or Rubio/Bush et al.
But I’d argue you’re wrong about Cruz’s general election electability.
He does very well with “very conservative” voters, hence the Iowa win. But he won’t carry swing states. Take a look at the Obama-Romney map and try to find 270 for Cruz. Its tough.
Trump can win Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and he may even put New York and New Hampshire in play. He’s stronger in swing states mostly due to Trade and secular appeal.
* Cruz’s Swaggert performance was quite funny. Mike Savage said on his radio show that “For a moment there I thought Cruz was going to pull a snake out!”
* No surprises here. A lot at risk. The Establishment wins again … as it must to keep the system going. I wonder how much political chicanery went on behind the scenes. We not only have a rigged economy. We also have a rigged electoral system.
The Republicans don’t get it. Imagine running Romney as a candidate for President … someone from among the Wall Street M&A insiders who promises to increase jobs. [?] Imagine running Cruz as a candidate for President … someone whose wife is a principal at Goldman Sachs and who has taken political loans from Goldman Sachs in the past. [?] So obvious …! Why can’t Republicans camouflage their hand a bit better?
I can imagine a third party run that splits the vote. If Trump runs as an independent, Cruz is “toast”. If Sanders runs as an independent, Hillary is “toast”. If necessary, let’s hope both run as independents. Then, no one can credibly claim they were elected to the presidency with something like 25%-30% of the vote. Sometimes a stalemate is best so that the “winner” cannot press the illusion of empowerment.
* The truth is that the liberal media-driven campaign has won again. They made massive and concerted effort to paint Trump a second coming of Hitler. And it worked – huge caucus turnout meant that people in Iowa went to caucus in droves with one main goal: stop Trump.
Face it: the tiny number of people who control 90% of our media had won almost every war they waged against core American population: offshoring, trade agreements, immigration, restrictions on freedom of speech, feminism, homosexuality, wars abroad. Guns are the only exception. (But wait, that win will come, too).
* We’ve just witnessed jeb’s campaign blow through a huge war chest for negligible results. Do the consultants working for him suffer any consequences in their careers? Do they have to go work for some small time incumbents in impregnable districts to rebuild credibility? Or can they just blame Jeb as a bad candidate and hop right back on high profile senate and presidential campaigns?
* “baby boomers are truly the worst generation”
I’m one of them and unfortunately there is too much truth in what you say. We erred in not telling our children that the whole inclusion thing was just a passing fad, conceived of and spoken in a fog of pot smoke. “Hey kids, you weren’t supposed to take it seriously.” After all, we didn’t. Although we marched with blacks during protests on campus, just look at who we chose for neighbors when we went to buy a house and start a family. Not a groid in sight.
But our daughters really believed that they were supposed to earn their liberal bonafides by dating black guys. And our sons listen to mono-tonal ghetto music on the radio to the exclusion of everything else. The music put out by modern white guys is tepid and thin, a distant echo of the muscular, melodic Rock of our, the baby-boomer generation. Modern white-guy music is a thin cry of anguish at being ignored by the wider culture in general and white girls in particular.
And our election of rootless Obama, an abandoned, mixed-race, foster child, adopted out to a family of an alien culture and then raised by his Grandparents was and is the perfect expression of our dazed and confused state. We attributed magical powers to him and bestowed honorifics upon ourselves for our open mindedness and magnanimity in helping the symbol of a prostrate race off the mat. But self congratulation is not an adequate map or basis for a plan for moving forwards.
So, we’ll just throw it all at you and leave it to your generation to figure out.
Good Luck!
* Iowans are not natural Trump supporters, even in the absence of the evangelical Christian and ethanol subsidies. Trump, to many Iowans, is an abrasive New York real estate/casino developer on his third trophy wife. His claim to fame is a television program in which he summarily fired a contestant a week. Moreover, his principal policy difference with the rest of the Republican field, immigration, is something that doesn’t yet resonate with most Iowans. Iowa has only limited immigration, so it’s still the smiling Mexican restaurant owner, and not the drug gang that Iowans think of when they think immigration.
So I’m surprised that Trump did as well as he did. It tells me that, even in Iowa, Donald Trump is tapping into an anxiety about where the country is headed. The dead heat between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side, also tells me the same anxiety is being felt there as well.
