Trump's just gonna wing the debates

I expect Trump to take the ‘not even wrong’ approach, thus allowing him to simultaneously seed voter doubt of Clinton’s credibility while minimizing his own vulnerability to such attacks.

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The moderator looks up and says. “Oh, come on. At least when the bartender realizes he’s in a joke, he can drink himself stupid.”

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Or when they shake hands, she could say something like “Wow. Your hands really are tiny. Look at those things!”

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Sure, but, 1.) he had to share the stage with seven other candidates, so he wasn’t always on the spot, and 2.) those debates were only for the GOP primaries, where he still only got a third of the vote most of the time. This is a whole new ball game.

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Hillary really needs to think about an “I know you are but what am I?” defense.

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Clinton being bored/disapproving could easily turn into Clinton being an out-of-touch elitist who doesn’t think the problems of “real America” are worth listening to, if Trump manages to blunder into that argument somewhere in his rambling discourse.

Scorn and disengagement could backfire. She’ll do better if she sounds compassionate and confident in the face of his mania. I think she’s capable of that, but her media presence thus far has been heavy on the snark / FEAR TRUMP angle, so I’m not as confident as I’d like to be.

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Since this is Trump, we can also expect him to whine about the biased reporter’s unfair questions.

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I expect to see a lot of this.

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Please no. I’ve gone through so much popcorn this year already, I think I’m going to have to swear off the stuff.

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Well, the guy they had on The Nightly Show is obviously free now…

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Well in the UK we recently discovered that it was slightly more than half of the voters.
(OK, that was a low blow. But it still bothers me that it might be as much as 20%, and they are the ones who are highly motivated to vote in a scenario like this.)

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There are only four undecided voters at this time…


Via: The Last Four Undecided Voters - by Matt Bors

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Soon to be 3… The person on the bottom right is going to hear the litany of beloved icons who have died this year, and end up back in the coma until 2017.

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The way I am most frightened of is the “Lockbox” direction where an affable but incompetent opponent beats the stiff but qualified candidate. Watch Saturday Night Live Clip: Cold Opening: Gore / Bush First Debate - NBC.com

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Relevant quote from Roger Ailes’ wiki page:

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Let’s hope they fill the orchestra pit with something deadly. Vipers?

ETA: To prevent anyone diving in, of course.

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Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

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And this is t-Rump’s problem - if he goes off script, he alienates anyone reasonable, but if he’s half-way articulate and reasonable, he alienates his core fanbase. Then there are the arch-conservatives who really, really want any excuse that allows them to vote for him (“he’s not that bad!”), and the super-low information voters who can connect with his populist economic message but are turned off by his being a dumpster fire, so if he can walk anything close to some middle path, he might bring them on without alienating his existing supporters. The question is if he can hold it together long enough to do that - history suggests not.

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In my dreams, both candidates are surprised upon arrival at the debate to find that it will be conducted via the rules of debate as practiced in American High Schools. There is a panel of judges who will keep score and at the end, a winner will be announced.

Both candidates flail uselessly until they figure out that they need to actually use references and directly rebut each others remarks. The match barely goes to Hillary, but the High School level rules of debate cause mass boredom among the supporters of her opponent. A common complaint is that the debate was too long and boring and the candidates needed to “speak English.” At least, that’s how I remember it going when I was in High School.

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