{"id":2880,"date":"2015-12-11T21:38:20","date_gmt":"2015-12-12T03:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=2880"},"modified":"2015-12-11T21:38:20","modified_gmt":"2015-12-12T03:38:20","slug":"race-2016-donald-trump-ctd-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2015\/12\/11\/race-2016-donald-trump-ctd-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Race 2016: Donald Trump, Ctd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once again, Republican pollster Frank Luntz<\/a> is investigating the Trump phenomenon<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Over three hours Wednesday in Alexandria, Luntz lobbed dozens of Trump-seeking missiles. All 29 in the group had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. All either supported Trump or had supported him earlier in the year. To Luntz\u2019s amazement, hearing negative information about the candidate made the voters, only a few of whom gave their full names to the press, hug the candidate tighter.<\/p>\n

\u201cNormally, if I did this for a campaign, I\u2019d have destroyed the candidate by this point,\u201d Luntz told a group of reporters when the session ended. \u201cAfter three hours of showing that stuff?\u201d<\/p>\n

With only two exceptions, the three hours of messaging, venting and friendly arguments revealed the roots of Trump\u2019s support. Participants derided the mainstream media, accusing reporters of covering snippets of Trump quotes when the full context would have validated him. They cited news sources they trusted \u2014 Breitbart News was one example \u2014 to refute what they were being told.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what Trump does?\u201d said Teresa Collier, a 65-year-old retiree. \u201cHe says something completely crazy, and I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh, my God!\u2019 Then he dials back and starts explaining it and saying how he\u2019d do it, and it makes sense.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Trump continues to lead:<\/p>\n

\"rcp-carson-fade\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Beating back the competition using an array of supporters who prefer to believe in their preconceptions to the point of disbelieving standard sources of information.\u00a0 He appears to have a hard core of supporters who are best described as fringe occupants.<\/p>\n

But, unlike Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, his lead is only relatively<\/em> commanding against his melange of challengers.\u00a0 The current polling numbers in Iowa are a somewhat different story, as a Monmouth University<\/strong><\/em> poll<\/a> reveals likely GOP voters in Iowa favor Cruz, 24% to 19% for Trump.<\/p>\n

So we’ve watched as the Republican rivals, with two exceptions, have remained in the race despite highly disappointing numbers.\u00a0 Steve Benen, commenting<\/a> on the Luntz story, may have stumbled across the reason why they’ve stuck around despite the hurdles they’ve yet to traverse:<\/p>\n

\n

But imagine you\u2019re a Republican consultant or a strategist for one of the 13 other GOP presidential candidates. Imagine you\u2019re looking at the calendar, worried about the polls, and looking for ways to bring Trump down a peg. After reading about the focus group\u2019s reactions to attacks on Trump, what in the world do you do?<\/p>\n

The answer, I suspect, is to wait and hope \u2013 for Trump to defeat himself, for his supporters to get bored, and for other candidates to drop out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Collect enough voters who’ve lost their favorite, and you catch up with Trump.\u00a0 The successful strategy will, of course, involve money, along with the preservation of capital until a sizable number of your rivals have dropped out and then you try to collect them.\u00a0 In the meantime, you must be their second or third choice, emphasizing your qualifications, while you hold your breath and suck up to your sponsors<\/del> donors.\u00a0 Communication skills will be critical, in some cases to clarify your achievements, and in others to obscure your lack of qualifications.\u00a0 In the former camp might be governors Bush and Christie, while in the latter camp might be Cruz and Rubio, neither of which have achievements, merely ideology.\u00a0 It is my personal belief that ideology is not the same as achievements or competency.\u00a0 Whether that’s true for GOP voters is unclear.<\/p>\n

In other news, both Trump and Carson have insinuated that they may leave the GOP<\/a> if any ‘dirty tricks’ keep them from winning the nomination.\u00a0 Does the GOP risk losing perhaps 30% of their base as they realize the leadership will do what’s necessary to save the party from a bad nominee?\u00a0 Is the GOP in a no-win position?\u00a0 They may be better served by letting the nomination process go its natural route and endorsing the winner – and thus their candidates for other offices will stand a good chance of winning.\u00a0 But if 30% of their base stays home out of despair at the treason of the leadership, it could lead to quite the trouncing of the Republicans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once again, Republican pollster Frank Luntz is investigating the Trump phenomenon: Over three hours Wednesday in Alexandria, Luntz lobbed dozens of Trump-seeking missiles. All 29 in the group had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. All either supported Trump or had supported him earlier in the year. To Luntz\u2019s amazement, \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2880"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2884,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2880\/revisions\/2884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}