Trump SC primary win

[tallslenderguy]

In the absence of gays on this site giving their reasons for voting for Trump (not just voting republican, but voting for Trump?), just read the results of this AP pole along with the article writers take:

"It isn’t just Trump’s margin of victory that shows his dominance of the party.

It’s that most Republican voters in South Carolina share his entire worldview.

The Associate Press’s “VoteCast” voter survey showed, at least in its early results, that around six in 10 GOP voters in the Palmetto State oppose continued U.S. aid to Ukraine. That was bad news for Haley, and striking in a state with a strong military tradition.

Around seven in 10 GOP voters in the state accept Trump’s argument that the various investigations into his conduct are attempts to undermine him, according to the survey.

Given those numbers, it’s no surprise that around 6 in 10 Republicans here consider themselves to be supporters of the MAGA movement.

The GOP, for good or ill, is Trump’s party now."

[think before following links] https://news.yahoo.com/five-takeaways-south-carolina-gop-032128253.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=0_00

The hardest part of me to wrap my brain around (and it's all hard) is Trumps comments about Putin and the Ukraine. Trumps recently reiterated comments that he'd actually encourage Putin to invade any country, let alone an ally, is just so categorically insane to me.  It also strikes me as un conservative and un republican? i can still hear Regan saying: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall."  It seems to me the new sentiment is to allow Putin to rebuild it.  It does remind me of another war in another era where Republicans were more isolationist, WW2. FDR had to be sideways in his efforts to support the efforts against Hitlers attempt possess and subjugate Europe. To me, Putin has from the beginning copied many of Hitlers strategies, almost like he has Hitlers play book in his back pocket for reference.  It wasn't until Japan devastated Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the US (because of Japan), that the US even ventured into the war.  

i do not understand the isolationist ideals that so many republicans hold. How would a Putin take over of Ukraine possibly benefit the US?  Pulling support from a country that wants independence and seems so contrary to American ideals,  but even if one takes an "America first' attitude, it still seems against our self interest to encourage dictators to have their way in the world. 

[hntnhole]

1 hour ago, tallslenderguy said:

i do not understand the isolationist ideals that so many republicans hold.

That's because there's no "understanding" to be had.  Isolationism has never proved fruitful; it only proves the incapacities of those who hold those notions.  

1 hour ago, tallslenderguy said:

Trumps comments about Putin and the Ukraine

Remember the brou-ha-ha about T building one of his gold-radiator-painted* hotels in Moscow?  That fell through for some reason, but once the notion of putting up a shoddy hotel and wringing money out of it enters T's syphilitic mind, he never turns his back on the prospect.  He's so desperate for validation, he'll sop up every false smile from the likes of Putin, or any other run-of-the-mill despot.  With that deeply-flawed man, there's always the money, the grift, buried somewhere in what's left of his mind.  He's probably still thinking he can pull off yet another con somehow.  And lately, with his breathtaking legal bills, plus the upcoming trials, he's grasping at any straw in the wind he can.  

*in the event some are unaware, disreputable dealers of antique, 'period' furniture paint artifacts of questionable merit with gold-colored 'radiator paint', which can resemble gilt, and thus pass off mediocre-yet-old furniture/whatever as "real".  Period art-frames, mirrors, etcetera are prime targets.  

 

1 hour ago, tallslenderguy said:

It seems to me the new sentiment is to allow Putin to rebuild it

Sure there is.  Build a new wall, on the WESTERN border of Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic countries, etc, etc.  I doubt Putin will try to swallow Finland at the same time though - those Finns are one tough bunch when they're invaded.  

1 hour ago, tallslenderguy said:

Putin has from the beginning copied many of Hitlers strategies

I don't think P. has the means to get much more adventurous these days.  Other than nukes (if he used them, he knows his country would be reduced to a smoldering pile of irradiating cinders for a thousand years).  Remember, The Austrian guy had an entrenched General Staff of long standing to deal with - Pukin doesn't.  

1 hour ago, tallslenderguy said:

i do not understand the isolationist ideals that so many republicans hold.

I don't believe there is any 'understanding" to be had.  These folks are pulling the covers over their heads, jettisoning any thoughtful behavior, and trusting that (their version of) "God" will appear and "save" them from their own dullness, which has yet to happen in all of recorded human history.  I rather doubt now is their time either.  Another way to put it, is there simply is no "understanding" to be had.  Isolationism has been proven to be a destructive behavior throughout human history, and this latest iteration is no different.  

[BootmanLA]

Separately, I'd like to point out something regarding media coverage of Trump's SC win.

Trump didn't quite break 60% of the primary vote - that's ALL Republicans, no Democrats - even after several of his opponents (DeSantis, Ramalamadingdong, the other dwarves) have dropped out weeks ago. About 2 in 5 Republicans in SC wanted someone other than Trump on the top of the Republican ballot in November. Granted, many of them will vote for him regardless, but still...

The New York Times headline: "South Carolina Primary: Trump Defeats Haley, Delivering a Crushing Blow in Her Home State"

The Guardian: "Trump soundly defeats Nikki Haley in South Carolina Republican primary"

and so on - even though Trump, as the last Republican president, is effectively campaigning as an incumbent and certainly has all the advantages of an incumbent.

If Joe Biden pulled less than 60% of the vote in a primary election, the media would be absolutely apoplectic about what a dire warning this was for the Democrats. In New Hampshire, where he wasn't even on the ballot (because the DNC wouldn't sanction any primaries before South Carolina's this year), Biden - as a WRITE-IN CANDIDATE - got 64% of the vote.

I'm a strong supporter of traditional media, because I believe in general they have much higher standards for news reporting than most of the garbage sites (both right and left, though the right is much, much worse), but this is typical of their inability to see reality. They're so wedded to the idea of a tight horse race that they feel the need to portray Trump as this unstoppable juggernaut and Biden as this guy who's one step away from being put into a memory care facility, all in order to justify their glowing stories about how dedicated Trump supporters are.

And yeah, I get it, a big chunk of Trump's support is unwavering, and there's a lot of people who will vote for him who aren't part of that unwavering support. But still, the 7 million vote margin by which Biden beat him in 2020 is pretty substantial, by recent historical standards. It's only a little smaller than 2008's margin, which was regarded as a blowout of Republicans by Barack Obama; it's only slightly smaller than Clinton's routing of Republicans in 1996, when it was widely feared that the GOP was on track for a "permanent majority".

This isn't to say I think Trump can't win, or that we shouldn't worry that he will. But I just do not believe polls that say Biden's behind, certainly not ones that show a big lead for Trump. 

[hntnhole]

On 2/25/2024 at 5:05 PM, BootmanLA said:

But I just do not believe polls that say Biden's behind

How many times have we got out of bed the morning after an election to screaming headlines saying "The Polls Were Wrong"? 

There are rather few Pollsters worth the time it takes to tell about them, and the only "poll" that counts is the one the day after election day. 

[BootmanLA]

On 2/28/2024 at 1:57 PM, hntnhole said:

How many times have we got out of bed the morning after an election to screaming headlines saying "The Polls Were Wrong"? 

There are rather few Pollsters worth the time it takes to tell about them, and the only "poll" that counts is the one the day after election day. 

Granted. And every time I look at the methodology behind any particular poll, but particularly those showing Trump ahead or right behind Biden, I see rather obvious flaws, either in the way the questions are framed or the way the participants were selected. The biggest problem with the latter, of course, is that most people below the age of, say, 45 won't answer a phone call from an unknown number, and a huge number of people no longer have a home phone at all. Pollsters constantly tell us they "correct" for such discrepancies, but the reality is, those changes have happened so rapidly that nobody knows how much "correction" to apply. 

[hntnhole]

3 hours ago, BootmanLA said:

nobody knows how much "correction" to apply

^ assuming these pollsters are conducting an actual, honest poll in the first place.  I don't believe that most of them are willfully "leading" responses via their phrasing, but then, I'm not a pollster either.  

[BootmanLA]

17 hours ago, hntnhole said:

^ assuming these pollsters are conducting an actual, honest poll in the first place.  I don't believe that most of them are willfully "leading" responses via their phrasing, but then, I'm not a pollster either.  

Certainly there are pollsters who ask leading questions - as Yes, Prime Minister demonstrated in the mid-1980's, you can get a lot of people to answer almost any poll question the way you want. Certainly enough to skew the result.

A pollster mentioned a couple of years back that when they conducted polls that year, the "uptake" rate - people who answered the phone and agreed to take the poll - was 0.4%. It can't have gotten any better. So you're already dealing with a very small segment of the population (those with a phone who'll take calls from an unknown number) and then filtering it by those who are willing to take the poll at all. I have no doubt those people skew heavily older.

Because people answering the phone and taking the poll used to be far more common, it was easy to figure out a "correction" factor - if people 55 to 65 were 12% of the population but only 9% of the respondents, you could weight the responses of that 9% slightly higher. You do the same for all age brackets, races, sex, income brackets, and so forth, by comparing them to the general population. But when the respondents are so few in number, it's virtually impossible to guess how much weight to boost, say, the 18 to 25 age group when you have only 2 out of 1,000 respondents in that age group, despite that group being much, much larger in the general population.

We're also in a far more polarized age than we were as recently as, say, 2008 or 2012. So there are fewer swing voters, for one thing. We have a huge population who are registered with neither major party, but the truth is that most of those people vote for one party or the other on a consistent basis; they just don't want to be officially affiliated with them. Yet gullible reporters breathlessly talk about the "growing number of independent voters" without realizing they're anything BUT independent in practice.

And finally, two other things were historically true: youth voter turnout always lagged older voters; and while young voters skewed liberal/Democratic, they often shifted more conservative as they hit their 30's. But in the last few elections, youth turnout has skyrocketed (at least compared with election cycles early in the century), and millennials are largely NOT changing their voting habits as they age. Demographers suspect this has to do with the fact that two major factors that used to coincide with a rightward shift - starting a family and buying a home - are increasingly out of reach for a lot of younger voters.

All of which is to say that there are no valid models for figuring how all these factors need to be weighted to "correct" a poll sample that is already small and out of balance with the population as a whole. But it's worth noting that Biden, and Democrats in general, have been outperforming the polls since right after Trump was elected, and Trump and the Republicans have been underperforming. Trump's gotten a smaller share of the primary vote than expected in every state so far, especially considering he's a virtual incumbent. He's clearly still popular with much of his base, and many of those who voted for DeSantis or Haley or anyone else will probably vote for him in the long run, but when you're actually only the second or third choice of many of your own party's rank and file, things aren't looking good. That often presages a turnout gap.