* Hillary cannot drop out and be replaced easily. Each state has its own laws for getting on the ballot and it is too late for Tim Kaine to take her place in most states. I am not going to look at each states laws on this but it must be too late today or within two weeks.
Thus Hillary must win and make it to inauguration day.
An alt reading on this is perhaps Hillary just has to win the election. Then if she becomes disabled Tim Kaine/Democrat party/media pressure can force the Electoral College to vote in VP Tim Kaine as President.
* The Clintons are one gang I would not mess with. Both are full on sociopaths with immense pull in the establishment. They are in fact the face of the establishment and Deep State.
You don’t screw with them. Even if you’re a Congressmen. Michelle Bachman made the mistake of raising questions about Huma Abedin(Hillary’s lesbian lover), The Senate GOP’ers – McCain and McConnell destroyed her political career for it.
Imagine what they’d do to some IT peon. Jail time and their family made homeless at the very least.
Even at the best of times, calling attention to criminal activity within the government by Federal employees or contractors is a career killer. There is no real protections if you point out problems.
Remember Nidal Hassan? A bunch of senior officers knew he was full tilt insane and ready to kill people. They knew if they reported him to his superiors or the FBI their careers would be over with.
* I realize of course that Hillary’s now a bit ahead in the polls, but I seriously wonder if she isn’t going to have a health melt down before Nov 8 rolls around.
In at least two recent appearances, including the now infamous “basket of deplorables” event, she looked so obviously drugged up or ill that I just don’t see how she can project an image of being up to the job physically.
It may be that she’s as drugged up as she is to keep the coughing at bay. But even if that’s the explanation, if it requires medication load that high to suppress the coughing, and the effects of the medication can’t be counteracted by other drugs, then she’s got some real health issue. A genuinely healthy person would quickly find some balance in medications that would work.
Unlike earlier, she needs now to keep in the public eye to fend off the criticisms that she was low energy, and/or in poor health, and/or hiding from the public. Her frequent public appearances are all the more urgent because she’s falling in the polls. But the more she appears in public, the more of a toll it takes on her, the more obvious are her problems, and, in consequence, the more she has to demonstrate her “health”. It’s a vicious cycle. I don’t see how she keeps it up for the final two months.
The media will be “with her” every way it can, of course.
But I don’t see all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men putting Hillary back together again.
* All through June & July I was reliably informed by ensconced Nevertrump dork columnists that DJT wasn’t going to stick in the race; that as soon as he hit minus-10 (or whatever– the precise # varied) he’d just bug out and suspend efforts, resort to whining, etc.; that yes, verily he might even drop out* at the end of the summer when It Was Too Late, thus “finally screwing over all Republicans for all time.” Some of them were even saying this as late as the I’m-with-you-themed convention speech, or the week after. Whatever happens in November it would seem the dire landslide scenario predicted by conservative experts is not taking shape. Defying the Beltway ghetto cons turns out to be a good move– you do have to put up with the tantrums of course but at least you don’t get their schmutz all over you.
* My wife and I have agreed that we will not reveal to any pollster our choice (Trump) because it is impossible to know who we’re talking to. In our area, support for Trump could be risky to our livelihoods. It would make things unpleasant for her at work, and I would lose business.
Yes, we’re college-educated white people, the kind of Americans for whom openly supporting what is right and true is now a hazard.
We’re in the “basket of deplorables.”
We share our thoughts on the election vigorously with people we know who have no connection to our livelihoods. I talk to a lot of people. We have both quietly discovered other Trump voters just like us. It’s like being in the closet or something. We’ve developed “Trump radar” or “Trumpdar” to identify likely companions.
* When he started mass-leaking DNC e-mails. Being persecuted by the left-wing Swedish government for “raping” a woman who let him sleep over the next few days and went out to parties with him afterward helped too.
* Basket of deplorables is a very odd phrase, and one suspects it must have been fed to her by one of her speechwriters.
It is unusual to see deplorable used as a noun, but there might be some correlation with Les Miserables and in fact the word déplorable is probably more common in French than in English. In Spanish it translates as canasta de deplorables, but I have never heard the expression used in Spanish. However, one gets the feeling that this must be a translation from another language.
#BasketofDeplorables comprised of Americans who understand statistical reality and won't lie about it. https://t.co/L9NwsIncAy
— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) September 10, 2016
* 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.
Taylor and Spencer, like many on the alt-right, believe in the relative superiority of different races; social conservatives believe that adherence to traditional Judeo-Christian values would bring about harmony. As the Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff prodded Spencer into admitting, the “utopian” alt-right state would include European whites but no Jews.
“Does anyone in this room really think that differences between pygmies, Danes and Australian aborigines are just social constructs?” Taylor asked at one point. “Really? This idea is so stupid that only very intelligent people could believe it.”
…Yet when they got inside the downtown Washington hotel where Spencer, Brimelow and Taylor would speak, reporters could ask whatever they wanted. That was on brand; alt-right figures write and talk constantly and make themselves available to the media. They also seem totally uninterested in dissembling — the more shocking and blunt the answer, the better…
The alt-right doesn’t have a political strategy yet. The Friday news conference was loose, with no real agenda apart from clearing up who represented the alt-right (no one person, said Spencer) and what the alt-right believes. Highly aware of their toxicity, the alt-right’s leaders support Donald Trump but admit that his attitude and elevation of the issues of race and immigration are more important — in the short term — than what he says from week to week. The closest thing to a political ground game on the alt-right has come in the form of clumsy robo-calls from California’s William Johnson…
The alt-right isn’t into American exceptionalism. At the Values Voter Summit, this year and every year, politicos and activists hark back to the founding faith of America’s revolutionaries. Hardly an hour can go by without a nod to John Winthrop’s “city upon on a hill” quote, as handed down (and slightly altered) by Ronald Reagan.
For the alt-right, America is more at risk because it is less providential. “We question America’s founding myth,” Spencer explained. “If you look at the Declaration of Independence, it’s not just the notion of ‘all men are created equal’ that I would object to. It’s also this notion that states come into being as entities for people to defend their inalienable rights. I find that to be total hokum, nonsense. That’s not how any state, including the United States, came into being.”
Brimelow used his briefer remarks to speculate about a balkanized American future, where some states — led by the Pacific Northwest — would declare the experiment over. “I think it will break up,” he said. “In some ways, that’s the best we can hope for.”
…Downtown, the alt-right troika praised Trump not because he was adopting new beliefs, but because he had found and defeated the right enemies.
“I don’t think our support of Trump is about policy, at the end of the day — it’s about style,” Spencer said. “We live in a fragmented, decaying society. We live in a society of moral degeneracy. We’re going to fight our way out it, and sometimes that means using the tools at hand. It’s going to mean unleashing a little chaos.”
