Don’t worry, eventually you’ll get your loopy, underqualified, celeb left-wing candidate.
If I were a betting man I’d put a few bucks on Woody Harrelson taking a serious run at it some day.
Russell Brand would be perfect for this analogy, were he born in the USA.
Bradley Cooper? He’s currently in the news as being a Democrat.
Alec Baldwin. And you know it.
as long as Adam Baldwin is the GOP candidate.
The #Gamergaters just managed to get one nominee onto the ticket; now you want another one?
Really? Like the fact he’s batshit loopy isn’t a plausible enough reason?
Pfff, Russell Brand for British PM!
Yeah, I find it hard to believe that any Democrat would be afraid to vote against Carson (or Herman Cain, for that matter) just because of his skin color. It’s a big world, though… maybe they exist.
False equivalency.
I don’t like hypotheticals anyway, but this doesn’t work. Penn has some common sense (and some common decency). He’s not a tenth as “nutty” as what the Republicans spit up at us this year.
His being batshit loopy is *more than enough reason not to vote for him, and I’m probably overthinking this greatly. But it seems like some legitimate criticism of Palin elicited cries of misogyny from her supporters. If Carson were on the ticket I think we’d see some of his supporters attributing any criticism to racism.
But, yeah, in retrospect I find it really hard to believe that, given the number of perfectly good reasons to not vote for him anyone would take that seriously.
I’m just struggling here to come up with an alternative to Santorum. Because, you know, nobody really wants to get any Santorum on them.
Liked because I know you meant the GOP, but caveatting (?) because both parties do this. See ‘if necessary we will repeal Citizens United’ quote.
Obligatory link that no one will look at and that proves nothing but makes my post look authoritative:
Weren’t they also responsible for Chuck Tingle’s Hugo nomination? Or was that another group of haters?
I think I’d like to reframe this question a bit though. Suppose Penn was running in the primary. The question is less whether Democrats would support him in the election, and more whether they would:
And then support him.
Dude (is that gender neutral yet? can it just be?), I read that list and honestly thought you were talking about Bernie folks supporting HRC. Not trying to make a scene though, I am sleep deprived. (I also keep seeing a little green mouse skittering off in my peripheral vision at the moment, so, yeah). Time to go operate some heavy machinery.
I don’t think Clinton got “dangerously unqualified”.
But yeah, there are some similarities, though I think the difference between the rhetoric used against Clinton and Trump is there (Clinton is awful vs. Trump is a threat to humanity). Also, I think a lot of people who were hardcore against Clinton do appear to be sticking to that position, otherwise her numbers would be quite a bit better.
Plus, apparently about 56% of Clinton voters just don’t want Trump to win. The point of the comparison was whether people would line up behind a crazy Democrat rather than a sane Republican, not a crazy Democrat vs. an even crazier Republican.
And finally, I don’t mind anyone who genuinely has their opinion changed. Maybe they though Clinton was terrible but, having seen the Democratic platform think, “Hey, we won the platform, that’s great!” and so line up behind her. Look at Paul Ryan’s face when he talks about Trump. That guy is supporting Trump because he feels like he has to. His opinion that Trump is dangerous hasn’t changed.
Ultimately, though, I think the point that many Democrats would also stick with the party given a crazy candidate is fairly made. It’s just that Democrats would stick with their crazy candidate because their crazy candidate isn’t racist and Republicans are sticking with their crazy candidate because their crazy candidate is racist.
Excellent points, as always from you. I am way tired and not really processing very deeply.
My Trump-annoyance threshold is much higher now that the media has established a pattern of shock/outrage/endless shallow and obtuse analysis (and also because I don’t need any more convincing he is a dangerous shit-heel), but Trump’s recent snubbing of Paul Ryan was particularly obnoxious and telling and piqued my interest. This is a man so petty, insecure, and thin-skinned, he laboriously made it a point to non-endorse Paul Ryan with the same exact phrase as Mr. Ryan (the much more articulate dangerous shit-heel) used to non-endorse him.
Oh yeah, I noticed that.
At this point Paul Ryan has two options. He can say, “Look, I don’t support Trump, don’t vote for that maniac.” or he can roll over like the “servile puppy” that Ted Cruz refused to be.
Trump has overtly bullied him. He’s either going to take it or he isn’t.
That is indeed an excellent and thought-provoking way to look at it. My first thought (and one I still take comfort in) is that the Democratic Party has not, in fact, come to such a sorry pass, and doesn’t seem likely to. As you point out, though Clinton is the most reviled candidate in the history of the modern D party, there simply isn’t the widespread panic among even Bernie diehards about the possibly genocidal lethality of her candidacy as there is about Trump’s.
That’s where I am. I had pretty low expectations for Clinton, and I was genuinely pleased when the platform actually became an on-the-record approximation of things I want to see. I don’t imagine she’ll stick to it, but maybe in the end she’ll be not much worse than Obama ended up being (disappointing, but survivable).
I really don’t think Trump has a snowflake’s chance in hell, and he worsens his prospects by the day. But the GOP has led itself to this situation almost inevitably by not learning from 2006, 2008, or 2012, but instead doubling down every time they got spanked. Institutionally, the Dem party doesn’t seem capable of that kind of bloody-minded stubbornness.
I wish I agreed, but my estimation of Trump’s chance is around 30%.
It may seem silly to put too much stock in a 538 forecast, but I take the wisdom of Éric Grenier (Canada’s Nate Silver) who pointed out that the reason all the pundits got Trump wrong in the primary (people largely said he couldn’t win) was because they ignored the polls. The polls said he was winning the whole time, but people thought of reason after reason why that would turn around.
The polls don’t say Trump is winning now, but they say he has a real chance. Maybe his nasty comments and instability will catch up with him (just like it was supposed to in the primary) and maybe the specter of a Trump presidency will scare some third-party voters into Clinton’s camp (just like winnowing of the field was going to beat Trump in the primary). I really don’t know. For now, I believe he might win.
For me it was kinda easy to see why Trump rose in the GOP primary as he did: the GOP simply didn’t offer up anyone else with the least bit of charisma. Their candidates have been deeply mockable ever since McCain hung up his Presidential ambitions, and Trump was gleefully willing to mock them without feeling like he needed to apply any particular sense of decorum (an alien concept to him anyway). Times are tough, but for a lot of people they’re not much tougher (and indeed for many they’re considerably better) than they were in 2008. There’s definitely a huge slice of the electorate that genuinely thinks Obama has made the country worse, but they are in fact in the minority. Unless the GOP fielded a candidate with Reaganesque charisma, there’s no way they could win in 2016 barring the kind of catastrophe (a fresh war, another economic collapse, the wrong kind of terror attack, or an unusually huge Obama/Clinton scandal) that would pretty heavily tip the scales in their favor. Their bench simply ain’t deep enough to pull it off anymore without resorting to Mister Lowest Common Denominator of the Short Fingers. And I really don’t think he can come close to doing it. All the pundits (and the GOP) also thought the 2012 election was going to be much closer than it was, and you didn’t have sizable swaths of the GOP power brokers badmouthing and outright abandoning Romney.
In both elections, however, you have a really, really huge media industry that makes one hell of a lot of money from pretending these elections are neck-and-neck horse races. It’s nothing so sinister as a vast media conspiracy. It’s just that it’s apparently easier to keep viewers and readers interested if you have a high-stakes close election. The media were talking about Trump at least an order of magnitude more than they were talking about any other candidate for all of the past year. It’s been hugely profitable for them, and it’s simply not in their interest to say that Trump’s likely to end up with 38% of the vote.
As for the polls, I mean come on, look at this:
A week ago they were neck-and-neck, and now Clinton’s chances are (once again) more than double Trump’s? Are we truly to believe that that many people have actually been changing their mind back and forth over the past month? The “now-cast” (if the election were held today) shows Clinton with an 85% chance of winning. I don’t see that diminishing as we head into the fall.
As always, call me Pollyanna. 
