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COMMENTS:
* Trumps percentage of support within the GOP will stay about the same while the next front runner will gradually sweep up the majority percentage as the field narrows. That will leave Trump out in the cold and he will fail to win the GOP nomination. He will then run as an Independent, splitting the GOP vote and handing the election to Hillary. Bernie is going to have a big impact on the DNC platform, pulling it farther to the left, but still well within the comfort zone of Democrats who will not be jumping ship for either the GOP candidate or the T(rump) party.
* Mr. Donald will split the GOP and eventually a new political party will emerge, and this is good news for America.
* For you folks that can't find the time in your busy lives to vote, don't think for a split second that Trump can't become President. Saint Ronald did, and here in Cali Arnold became our Governor. They were both disasters that had no idea what those jobs entailed. Heck Reagan did not even know how a bill became law. You better put aside your personal dislikes and prejudices and vote your best interests, not those that the big money plutocrats tell you will "make America great again". We have been getting trickled on for thirty-five years, and it is way past time for us to realize that the "voodoo economics" are poison for the middle class.
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New Poll Shakes Up GOP Race (Below Trump)
By Chris Weigant, August 10, 2015
The entire political punditry world has been holding its collective breath since last Thursday night, waiting for some polling numbers to interpret. As usual, polling takes longer than most people think. The first Republican debate, after all, was held Thursday night. Most pollsters take at least two days to conduct a poll, then maybe another day of number-crunching, before the results are made public. Due to this process, a lot of new polls will likely appear in the next two or three days. NBC beat them all to the punch, though, and released their first poll results over the weekend. The numbers -- if they prove to be valid, and not outliers -- show a remarkable shakeup happening in public opinion as a direct result of the debates, at least in the field right below the frontrunner. One question in particular from this poll seems to show some very bad news for the Republican Party, but before we get to that let's take a look at the whole field.
Before the debates, Donald Trump was in first place with 22 percent. After the debates, Trump is still in first place with 23 percent. But the standings just below Trump got shaken up in a fairly big way. Before the debates, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker were tied for second with 10 percent each. Tied for fourth were Ben Carson and Marco Rubio, each with 8 percent. Tied for sixth place were Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, both with 6 percent. None of the other candidates had even 5 percent support.
Post-debate, the only two first-tier candidates who held their position were Donald Trump (in the lead) and Marco Rubio (still tied for fourth). The closest to Trump's post-debate 23 percent was Ted Cruz, moving up from a sixth-place tie to claim second place with 13 percent. Ben Carson also got a boost, moving up from being tied for fourth place to sole possession of third place, with 11 percent. Behind these three were Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio, both at 8 percent support. The two big losers, however, were Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, who moved from being tied for second place down to being tied for sixth place, with only 7 percent support. That's a pretty big drop for both of them, neither of whom can now claim to be even close to "frontrunner" status. Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee both got 5 percent, and no other candidate got better than 2 percent.
Measured by standings alone, there were two clear winners of the first Republican debates: Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina. Cruz improved his standings from 6 to 13 percent, a whopping 7-point gain. Fiorina did almost as well, vaulting her way into the top tier with a 6-point improvement, moving from 2 to 8 percent. Fiorina, in one night, moved from eleventh place all the way up to fourth -- the biggest jump in standing of any candidate, by far. Ben Carson gained 3 points, and Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee both managed to climb by a single point. All the other candidates either stayed exactly the same (Rubio, Perry, Graham, Jindal, and Pataki), or saw their standings slip (Paul, Kasich, Santorum, Christie, Bush, and Walker) by anywhere from 1 to 3 points.
The poll asked a further two questions to see who people thought "won" and "lost" the debates. This provided some interesting context for the candidate rankings. Carly Fiorina was chosen as the debate winner by 22 percent of Republicans, followed by Donald Trump (18), Marco Rubio (13), Ted Cruz (12), Ben Carson (8), and Mike Huckabee (5). None of the others were named winners by even 4 percent of the respondents. The interesting anomaly in that data is Rubio, since he was chosen as debate winner by more people than anyone but Fiorina and Trump, but unlike all the others listed as winners, Rubio's voter support didn't budge an inch. Even Trump and Huckabee gained a point, but Rubio's perceived debate success didn't actually convince any voters to shift their support to him.
The data for who was perceived as the night's big loser was also interesting. By far, Donald Trump was picked as the loser of the debate, by 29 percent of people polled. This was more than double the showing of Rand Paul (the next on the list), who was named loser by 14 percent. Jeb Bush was next with 11 percent, followed by Chris Christie with 9 percent and Lindsey Graham with 8 percent. None of the other candidates was picked as the debate's big loser by more than 2 percent of Republicans. Obviously, this shows a big disconnect in the party ranks over Donald Trump, but I'll get to Trump in a moment. For the others, as could be expected, their overall voter support dropped as a result of their perceived loss in the debates. The only candidate in this list who didn't see a drop was Lindsey Graham, but that's not saying much because he went from polling at 1 percent to polling at 1 percent. There's not a whole lot of room for him to lose support, to put it politely (although Rick Santorum did manage to drop from 1 percent support clear down to zero).
What does all of this mean for the state of the Republican nomination race? Well, perhaps not much. This was a snap poll (obviously, since it came out before everyone else's). It may be inaccurate due to methodology, or it may merely be measuring people's momentary opinions. Give the voters a week, and they may rethink their positions. Of course, that can be said about just about any poll, but it is worth remembering that with the field in flux we're all going to have to wait a while to see how the dust settles.
Of course, what everyone's breathlessly waiting to see is whether (to twist a metaphor) the wooly mammoth at the elephant convention will lose support. Donald Trump followed the debate by unleashing lots of misogyny towards a Fox News personality, so the inside-the-Beltway consensus is that this is going to hurt him badly and his support is going to evaporate. This will likely turn out to be wrong, just as they were all wrong when Trump was insulting prisoners of war, or Mexico. This is because the punditocracy still can't manage to come to grips with Trump's appeal. Trump, love him or hate him, is at his core an entertainer. His entertainment value goes up when he says outrageous or offensive things, not down. He may be the most divisive candidate on the Republican side (and that's just measuring things among Republicans), but he has garnered a group of core supporters who literally do not care how offensive Trump is. They love it, in fact, whenever Trump verbally skewers someone -- even a Fox News personality.
Trump's divisiveness is obvious -- 18 percent of Republicans thought he won the debate, and 29 percent thought he lost. That's 47 percent who picked his name as either loser or winner, rather than the other 16 candidates available. Carly Fiorina only got a total of 24 percent (22 percent thought she won, 2 percent thought she lost) -- barely more than half of the attention Trump received. There are Republicans who love Trump and there are obviously Republican voters who don't think so highly of The Donald. Trump phoned in appearances on some of this week's Sunday morning political chatfests, and he made a boast that is probably pretty close to reality. He claimed that he was the sole reason 24 million people watched the debate, and if he hadn't been on stage, the audience would have been maybe two million. It's hard to contradict this, because whatever the numbers, Trump is right -- a whole bunch of people tuned in just to hear what he would say. Whatever percentage of these were liberals delighted with the whole Trump phenomenon and however many were actual Republican voters interested in vetting their party's candidates, that's still an impressive measure of Trump's personal draw when it comes to television and entertainment value.
But I saved the scariest part (for the Republican Party) for last. Due to Trump's refusal to commit to not running as a third-party candidate, the NBC poll asked a very direct question. This question was only asked to people who said they were going to vote for Trump, to try and gauge what his own supporters thought of an independent Trump run. The exact wording of the question: "If Donald Trump does not win the Republican nomination for president and runs as an independent candidate, for whom would you vote?"
Only 19 percent of Trump's supporters answered "the Republican candidate." Zero percent of Trump's supporters answered "the Democratic candidate" (no surprise there, really). A significant number of Trump supporters -- 21 percent -- answered with some flavor of "it would depend." But a whopping 54 percent of Trump voters would stick with him and vote for him as an independent candidate. This means that the Republican Party would win back one-fifth of Trump's voters if he went independent, and perhaps convince another one-fifth to come back to the party for the general election. But over half of those who now support Trump would stick with him and leave the Republican nominee in the lurch.
To me, this proves the Pollyannas inside the Beltway are missing the depth of Trump's support. Trump isn't going to fade away (like, say, Herman Cain did) and leave all his supporters milling about, deciding which Republican to now back. This "he'll fade away... somehow" conventional wisdom is nothing more than wishful thinking, in fact, from conservatives who are getting more and more worried about where this whole Trump road is leading. Again, over half of Trump's supporters are already poised to leave the party to follow Trump. Seeing as how he's polling at around one-fourth of the entire Republican electorate, that's a fairly sizeable chunk of the Republican base to lose.
Republican Party leaders are now desperately trying to convince themselves that Trump would never actually run as an independent, and that even if he did nobody would follow him. I look at it a different way. Do you really think Donald Trump would pass up a chance to appear on a general election debate stage with only (say) Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush standing next to him? Does anyone really think his ego wouldn't be delighted to be one of only three people on a presidential debate stage? Trump could easily convince himself that the bar for winning the White House would actually be lower if he ran as an independent (he could theoretically win with just 35 percent of the vote, after all). And with 54 percent of his voters already willing to follow him on such a run, it may indeed prove irresistible for Trump.
While the second-through-eighth places in the Republican horserace may be in the midst of a major post-debate reshuffling -- the first such shakeup that has so far happened in the 2016 race -- Donald Trump is not only still leading the Republican pack, but indeed he is still all anyone can even talk about. We'll see what all the other polls which come out this week have to say about Republican voters' opinions, but if the NBC poll is right, Trump is still dominating the field in a way no other GOP candidate yet has. Whether the inside-the-Beltway pundits want to admit it or not.
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