Thursday, July 7, 2016

Because he won the primary is a bad argument for why Trump can win the general

The degree of polarization in this country is totally out of control.  We have spoken about tribalism a lot here and definitely will again. Today, we are focusing on the answer to a single poll question: 29% of Americans, including 55% of Republicans, believe President Obama may sympathize with ISIS. https://twitter.com/pollreport/status/749672162185719808.

We don’t need to argue against the premise as it is on its face absurd. But the key point here is that Republicans and Republican primary voters believe/believed such a thing. That means in the primaries Trump needed only to convince these people to vote for him, not to change their beliefs. He now needs to convince people to vote for him who aren’t willing to believe such a ridiculous thing. This requires Trump to come up with a message that can persuade an entirely different group of people who believe a different set of things.

If Trump is content that he can be the same and win because he has won before misses the crucial point that he is trying to persuade people. We have not seen much evidence that this is happening but we will be keeping track. 
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The Scorecard is a political strategy and analysis blog. Our hope is to provide information and insight that can be found nowhere else into how and why things are happening in American politics. Unlike many political pundits, we will tell you who we think is going to win as an election approaches; we will tell you why; and we will give you a sense of our level of confidence. Ours is a holistic approach, one that takes in as many numbers as possible but is also willing to look past the numbers if need be. When we turn out to have been wrong, we will let you know. When we are right, we’ll let you know that too.

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Author Jason Paul is a longtime political operative who got his start as an intern in 2002. He has been a political forecaster for almost as long. He won the 2006 Swing State Project election prediction contest and has won two other local contests. He had the pulse of Obama-Clinton race in 2008 and has been as good as anyone at delegate math in the 2016 race. He looks forwards to providing quality coverage for the remainder of the 2016 race.