The perfect blend of Arrogance , Hubris and Stupidity.
Considers everything in terms of how it makes him feel/look in that moment , does not consider the implications or potential consequences of any of his actions - He needs the instant dopamine hit of feeling "awesome" so he takes it.
The only information/actions that he is capable of retaining and planning for long term is revenge
It really boggles the mind the block-headedness of some of the GOP (Donnie included natually). They could have used Roe v. Wade as a campaign point for years and years and years, and gleaned some good will from the Evangelical loons without actually doing anything about it.
But then they went and killed Roe, and gave the hillbilly States the rights to do whatever swivel-eyed nonsense they fancied with reproducive rights. Even then…they could have just left it alone…but instead many of them went full Catholic Ireland on women's reproductive rights…and so here we are. We even have the nitwits publically declairing plans to try to make their abortion bans Federal.
So they've gone and used up of an electoral carrot that they could have used until the end of time, and have now instead gifted the Dems a reason for people to vote Democrat.
Their greatest ally this year would have been voter apathy, and I feel that they've bought themselves a double whammy of people voting against Anti-Choice policies and hated champion of them: Donald The Proven Rapist Trump.
Once they got the SCOTUS Majority , their ability to string the evangelicals along was severely weakened.
They couldn't keep pretending that it was just out of reach any longer - They are the dog that finally caught the car - Chasing the car was fun , catching it not so much.
On top of that you had State level nutters proposing utterly crazy extreme legislation in recent years that the rest of the GOP went along with safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't matter as the Federal courts would block it so they could keep the evangelicals in line.
Then all of a sudden this stuff becomes law and they are scrambling as they have no idea what to do - They can't vote with Democrats to remove them because the hard right of the GOP would Primary them but they equally know they can't vocally support it either.
They are screwed.
What are the bookies basing this on?
According to the latest RealClear battleground polls, Trump is ahead in all but one of those states (Pennsylvania), where Biden leads by .1%.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/elections/president/2024/battleground-states
Now, most of the leads in the battlegrounds states are within typical margins of error, so it certainly is not as if those couldn't flip for Biden, but it's not an encouraging trend of numbers at this point.
There are people who say those numbers will change as more people in the US become politically aware as the election gets closer. Has that kind of reversal happened much before, and at what time in the election year does it typically happen? After the conventions?
At what point, if the numbers don't change, should people become concerned?
id imagine its based on here the money is going, but im no bookie so i dont have a clue.
while trump is leading in pretty much all of the swing states, the trend is that his lead is slipping as we get closer to November.
eg at one stage pennsylvania trump was up by about 9 points but now biden is trending by 2
i hope the closer to the election people get, the lesser we;ll see the "protest vote" polling and people will actually think seriously about the issues and what teh candidates are promising.
trump = scorched earth revenge
biden = keep the wheel turning
and unsuccessfully at that. Kari Lake tried to denounce the activation of the 1864 law except everyone was quick to point out she proudly and on the record touted the law as being activated if the Supreme Court overturned Roe and how it would be a wonderful thing.
And three of those other names would be potential democrat candidates. When they inevitably pull out and/or Biden is confirmed as the nominee, his odds will fall further.
yeah im sitting on a decent Biden bet at 9/4
A lot of polling I've seen so far is from a couple of weeks ago, since before Trump's attempt to fence-sit on Abortion while still trying to make himself the canditate of the Anti-Choice Party. It will be curious to see if there is any inpact on polling after this.
Still isn't great to see a confirmed rapist and known traitor poll at the same level as an incumbant who despite his failings isn't Donald Trump
The economic argument will obviously be very important for moderate voters who are moderate in the sense that they don't really care who's in power so long as they're more chance of making money.
Trump has erroneously claimed that he built the greatest economy in history (because of course he would), completely ignoring the work that the Obama administration did to rebalance the books after the 2008 economic crash. It's an easy rebuttal to make whenever Trump waffles on about this. But in regard of what Biden has done for the US economy, how much of the 2021 recovery can be attributed to places just reopening after lockdown? As to jobs created after that, what quality are they? I remember David Cameron crowing about what his party had done for the UK economy, but it turned out a lot of the jobs created were bullshít zero hours things. Is Biden's administration falling into the same kind of trap, or are they proper jobs with benefits and decent pay and something to build a life around?
I find the polling around trump very skewed and in every primary he's underperformed compared to his polled predictions
And I've seen this idea of the 'shy Biden voter' being mooted for states that would be considered red or Republican-leaning. It was definitely true that in the 2022 midterms, the Republicans were scuppered by voter pushback due to things like reproductive rights being on the ballot and the red wave was denied.
However, while the shy Biden voter may well be a thing, I don't think that it can be assumed that those people will turn out in November just because. If nothing else was learned from 2016, it's that complacency is a killer. Biden's campaign team must absolutely be pounding the pavement as if those swing state deficits are accurate.
it’s definitely a thing. OH won’t let us put up any political signage on our property because we live in the deep red and there is a nonzero chance of violent crazies. Sure the ex navy guy who rammed into the FBI building down in Atlanta lives in a town just 10-12 miles away from us. I had one guy in that same town threaten to blow my head off one morning one year because he was upset I got to the gas station air pump before he did, and that wasn’t even political other than I was driving a Prius and he was driving a pickup. Utter lunatics out this way.
Trump pretends to forget he had the RNC pull out of the commission on presidential debates after Biden whooped him senseless in the one and only debate in 2020
https://www.mediaite.com/news/bullsht-trump-rages-at-biden-with-baseless-crime-accusation-demands-debate-in-series-of-video-rants/
Re: complacency, tight polls may work in Biden's favour there.
Very much so, if those polls are considered to accurate, but less so if the assumption sets in that the polls are incorrect and there's actually a large latent Biden base out there.
He is just making noise. Like his claims that he would debate Bernie back in 2016. If he didn't bother showing up for any of the GOP debates, don't thinks he will for this year's general election. Particularly given his last two performances against Joe. He doesn't even have the recovering from Covid excuse this time around.
There's definitely a lot of "soft" voters out there that would prefer that Biden wasn't the Democrat candidate which is fair enough but as Biden is definitively confirmed as the nominee the majority of those will come to his side , few if any will switch to Trump and I think that issues like Abortion will prevent them from simply sitting it out as well.
iirc there seemed to be a fair few MAGA candidates under-performing in general elections versus their polling. Which would suggest a latent base that may be more inclined to Biden \ Dems than MAGA type Republican candidates such as Trump.
Gonna stick €200 on trump winning.
If he does, I'll make a few bob.
If he doesn't, I'd gladly lose the €200 to know he'll never be president again.
Jfc
Beau of the fifth column called the GOP the dog that caught the car. It's a good description. Beau's worth watching excellent commentary.
What sort of "both sides" nonsense is that??
The bookies are often wrong, as are the polls, well thats what I'm told whenever I post betting odds or a poll on here.
A week is a long time in politics and theres still 7 months to go to the election so alot can and will happen between now and then.
Alot of these states are hard to call, there are so many variables at play.
Trump needs to appeal more to the independent voter, but it looks like he wont change tack.
Absolutely - Polls now mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.
However if you are looking at how either candidate can win over the support of the undecided voters or indeed to get voters to switch preferences it is very hard indeed to see how Trump does that barring a massive shift in his behaviour and positions. Which carries the risk of losing support from other parts of his base.
At this juncture Biden certainly appears to have far greater "upside potential" than Trump in terms of positively impacting the polling.
Whether he can realise the potential of course remains to be seen.
"Trump needs to appeal more to the independent voter, but it looks like he wont change tack"
Agreed. Hell, he's even ostracizing the regular republicans (Haley voters included).
Well of course they wouldn't and that goes for pretty much any divisive issue, but Biden lines up far more solidly with 'mainstream' pro-choice opinion than Trump does with the 'pro-life' side.
How could any committed Anti-abortion activist trust a guy like that, you can never know what line he is going to take tomorrow morning. This new 'states rights' stance he is taking doesn't look like it'll stick either.
premiering next month at Cannes, starting Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/donald-trump-movie-the-apprentice-sebastian-stan-cannes-1235871795/amp/
Trumps "position" on this is "whatever gets him elected" after that he doesn't give a damn.
He was hoping that the "it's the States decision" position would take off the National election table but of course it actually has had the opposite effect.
I expect him now to flip flop repeatedly trying to find a way to avoid blame - He'll fail completely though as he won't be able to stop saying "I was the one that got Roe vs Wade repealed" while at the same time trying to placate the nutters.
An Iranian, who's worked for Disney before, has made a movie about Donnie. Doesn't take a lot of mental power to imagine how the MAGAs would react to this; espeically if the movie illustrates Donnie as a villain.
That's something I wonder too. How will the movie show him? As the self-important narcissist we know him as…or will they show him as a more sympatetic character, an awkward wierdo who's just despriate for Fred Trump's approval? Will it have any impact on the campaign?
I guess that's all moot, as it doesn't matter unless people actually watch it. Maybe it does show up Trump as the villain, prompting Donnie to loudly denounce the film, and thus gifting the film a tonne of viewers via the Streisand Effect.
