Making pundits stir crazy
Aliberal friend is very concerned about the Republican Party. He tells me that Donald Trump will make it impossible for anybody anywhere running under the “R” column to win election. Even a dogcatcher in Podunk is doomed!
The New York Times shows a similar concern. Surely written with furrowed brow, its front page worries because “Sparring in GOP Rises” and because “Rift Grows Wide as Republicans Abandon Trump.” It joins two other concerned lefties, The Huffington Post and CNBC, in declaring that the GOP is “unraveling.”
All stand ready to help sponsor a dignified funeral, but that won’t be necessary. Their reports of the Republican Party’s death are premature. Very premature.
A new Quinnipiac poll tells the inconvenient truth. Trump and Hillary Clinton are tied in each of the three key swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.
The breakdown in Florida reveals how truly close the race is. As Politico puts it, Clinton has a 13-point advantage among women, 48 percent to 35 percent, while Trump’s lead among men is also 13 points, 49 percent to 36 percent. Each gets 39 percent of independent voters, while Trump wins big among whites, and Clinton wins big among nonwhites. The candidates have identical net negative approvals of minus 20 points, 37 percent to 57 percent.
With the poll showing Bernie Sanders doing better against Trump than Clinton, I myself am growing concerned about the “unraveling” of the Democratic Party!
Big Media’s fixation on the defections of Big-Name Republicans is the latest proof that both groups remain stubbornly disconnected from real Americans. If Trump had been dependent on the support of Mitt Romney or Sen. Lindsey Graham or assorted pundits and donors, he never would have gotten 10 million primary votes.
He launched a rocket-fueled revolution, defeated 16 rivals and became the presumptive nominee by running against the entire national establishment, not to mention conventional wisdom and both political parties.
Now he’s doomed if Romney doesn’t back him? Nonsense.
Yet each day, the drum beats louder about a new and greater threat to GOP harmony. The cur-current one is the insistence from ev-everybody on the left, and a few on the right, that Trump is toast if he can’t get House Speaker Paul Ryan to endorse him.
By all means, endorsements are generally a good thing for candi-candidates, and party unity is usually re-regarded as an essential starting point. But the claim that Trump must finally conform to all the tra-traditional norms repeats the false as-assumptions that leded the media and most Republicans to miss Trump’s astonishing appeal in the first place.
He is a phenomenon, much as Barack Obama was in 2008, and he could doo to Clinton what Obama did to her then. Obama was fresh, and she was tired. Now Trump is fresh, and Clinton is even moreore tired.
One result is thathat the cam-campaign will be fought on his turf. The issues most associated with him — immigration, terrorism, trade, jobs — dominated the GOP primaries.
Indeed, try to imag-magine the last year with-without Trump. Who would have sett the GOP agenda, what issues would have led the way, and how would voters have responded? Would turnout have hit record levels when so many Republican voters feel betrayed by their own party leaders?
Trump stirred the drink from day one, and the ability to set the terms of the contest is usually the hallmark of a winning campaign. That’s what he’shes done so far, and that's what he’ll try to do in the fall.
Clinton can’t let him succeed, and instead must put him on defense with nonstop attacks on his character and lack of government experience. She’s already doing that, but is paying a price with his fierce counterpunching.
Her big advantage is the Electoral College, and she will try to shut him down by relentlessly playing the woman’s and racial cards. And it’s certain Trump will hand her gaffe gifts and display an embarrassing lack of detailed knowledge.
We know all that already, yet still they are tied in the states that matter most. She may win and he may lose, but neither The New York Times nor Mitt Romney will make a whit of difference.