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They don't have to be GOP voters with the current economic woes. But even without Trump the GOP has a realignment which will last beyond Trump (see DeSantis et al). The GOP post Trump is not the same as the GOP pre-Trump.
So you don't know of a single generic Republican who is currently ahead of Trump?
Oh yes, we got the primaries to see what the GOP would default to without Trump and that "generic Republican" would be far behind Trump. It would look a lot like the Senate, where despite Trump still in politics and having heavy effect (and threat), the Senate votes to fund wars, pass awful immigration bills, pass awful funding bills, etc.
DeSantis, perhaps with the best chance among them, would be trailing far behind Trump's numbers because he's uncharismatic and is unappealing in the battleground states. His stated chances on abortion in his train wreck in Iowa would be hard for him to outrun. If we can guess what a Trump-less DeSantis campaign would look like, we have that train wreck for guidance.
The GOP has a near zero GOTV operation despite spending a billion dollars on a system to do it. Without Trump, voters do not show up to the polls and a generic Republican would rely on groundgame to do that, but there is none.
Would you vote for this generic Republican like Nikki Haley over generic Democrat? How many generic Republicans have you voted for?
I'm a lifelong democrat voter who would vote Haley, but I do think it's up in the air how much better she'd do. Trump does energize Democrats too.
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I've never voted for a generic anybody, because they don't exist. They're a theoretical comparator. I have voted for both left and right wing actual candidates though, both at local and national levels.
Being behind Trump in a primary against Trump does not mean that you would run behind a Democrat in the general.
Most people vote for parties not candidates, the impact of charisma is not zero, but it is massively overrated in my opinion. Fundamentals and political coalitions are the building blocks of political success. Charisma is at best a tie breaker when fundamentals are balanced. Trump won in 2016 largely because he was a Republican following two Democratic terms with a not great economy. A generic Republican probably would have won, though with a different voter spread.
GOTV is also overrated in my opinion (and I say that as someone who has organized such things in the past). Even our best internal measures showed it had very little impact. But politicians and political consultants like myself (albeit retired now) are reluctant to stop them, because what if this is the one time it does make a difference. No-one wants to be the one who broke from tradition and got hammered because of it. Plus of course consultants and strategists can rake in big bucks for organizing them.
As an example Rishi Sunak's Tories got beaten by Kier Starmer's Labour, and would have if they were running a re-animated Maggie Thatcher, Tony Blair converted to the Tories or an Angelic Winston Churchill descended from Heaven (ok well maybe not the last one!) Because the economy was shot and the Tories were in charge at the time.
"It's the economy stupid" is the dominating factor. Candidates, GOTV, scandals, and the like are very secondary. In a bad economy (defined by how people feel, not actual measures) the incumbent party will be punished regardless of almost anything else. And inflation and living costs have been feeling very bad for large chunks of America right now.
Not-Democrat is going to be enough to get a lot of votes this electoral season, regardless of the candidates in question I think.
I don’t think this is true at all. Rishi Sunak lost because he was a useless man in a suit who talked tough while doing very little and firing everyone who tried to follow through on the rhetoric. He alienated centrists who split to Labour and right-wingers who split to Reform.
We’re talking about a man who thought that resurrecting David Cameron from corrupt ignominy and extending compulsory maths were political triumphs.
Kier Starmer was and remains an incredibly weak candidate: a proven liar who literally couldn’t open his mouth on policy without either scandalising his party or the nation.
Even dragged down by a decade of mismanagement, almost anyone could have followed the Johnson strategy of pushing for change, getting foiled, and using that to push for a bigger mandate. To put it frankly, Sunak didn’t have the guts and he spent two years fiddling, losing not only his chance to accomplish anything but his ability to credibly promise to do something next time round.
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I'm sorry I wasn't more clear, but what I meant to say is these generic Republicans, the many nameless candidates no one knows, are all running behind Trump and have been for months with that difference finally closing in the remaining weeks of the election. We can go down a list of every generic GOP running for Senate, House, etc., and we can see they're behind Trump in the same exact polls by significant margins.
I honestly don't understand how this is a defensible position. Were all the GOP registered voters voting for the party when they picked a 1990s Democrat reality TV star from NYC? Was the Obama wave in 2008 in primary voting for party? Was him winning a landslide in 2008 due to people just voting Democrat? Was him beating Romney despite 4 years of incredibly unpopular policies just people voting for party?
Kamala is a good counterexample, but I think she's the exception which proves the rule. As long as you have every institution, nearly every major media conglomerate, the government bureaucracy itself trying to win you an election, as well as those major media institutions essentially running your campaign while you hide, I agree that charisma is likely overrated.
Trump won in 2016 by ~50,000 votes across 5 states. The other primary candidates who would have likely been the alternatives would have lost badly because they would have picked the wrong topics to focus on and they weren't going to flip rustbelt states which were required to win the presidency for the first time in the generation with another Romney 2.0. A guy like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush wouldn't have even won in Ohio demonstrated by Romney loss there in 2012.
I honestly don't follow UK elections or know much about them at all. I barely know the parties, but didn't Reform UK, a party started in 2024, cannibalize much of the Tory vote? Do you think an uncharismatic rando would have been able to accomplish something like that? I doubt it.
Institutions and media are able to gaslight people into thinking pretty much anything within a wide band for long enough for the economy to not be the controlling factor.
Without GOTV, you just lose. Without registration machines, you just lose. In my experience, they're the necessary foundations to win at all. There are ways to substitute for them, like having a guy so charismatic he drives voters to the polls.
But would Romney have lost in 2016, after a two term Democratic president? That is the question. The pattern is that after two terms the leadership usually swings. So yes my contention is that Romney probably would have won Ohio in 2016. 2012 was a different election with different fundamentals.
My experience with being in politics is that people vastly overrate the ability of the media and politicians to gaslight the people. At best we hope to find something that resonates then run hard on it, but we have much less power to actually persuade people than is commonly believed. I know, it used to be my job. It isn't Trump's charisma that drove his win, because he inspires hate in about as many people as he does adoration. Look at Brexit, despite the media going hard, it still happened. The people have their own opinions formed by their social groupings much more than driven by the media or politicians in my direct experience.
Put it this way if we had two boring uncharismatic, candidates in this election, with the economy as it is, with Biden being dumped for Boring Dem 2.0, who would you put your money on? I submit the smart money would be on Republican 2.0 all else being equal. High inflation, low economic confidence, some push back on woke stuff like trans, a one term President who can't run for a second term because he can barely cope with a debate. Setting aside who is running, the fundamentals I think lean Republican.
Yes, Romney would have lost after a two term Democratic president. Fundamentals were worse for Democrats in 2012 than the were in 2016. The national registrations imbalances were worse. The economy was quite a bit worse with very unpopular policies still in recent memory. I agree people vote for parties when they don't know the candidates, but far more people know the top of the ticket than the down ballot. We're talking about the top of the ticket here.
we had a 3 year long 24/7 news cycle into a hoax about Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia to win 2016; the media is regularly engaging in a cycle of throwing stuff out to see if it lands with a portion of the population who want it to be true and then they run with it
if the media crunchdown doesn't work then they rely on goldfish memory to drop it and move on to the next accusation cycle
if you're trying to hit every ball, your batting average may plummet, but eventually you find something which has a sufficient amount of nugget of truth or interest group to hang onto and then use it to gaslight large portions of the population
you shred your credibility when you do this and we've seen that in hyperdrive for 8 or 9 years, and yet the media has incredible power in framing any discussion, controlling any perception of reality and we see that in the way the regime tries so hard to control information and places of discussion, and set the outside limits of acceptable beliefs
you see it in the collusion hoax to the covid hysteria to the BLM religious revival
At this point, I think this Great Alternative Generic Republican theory is functionally unfalsifiable; fundamentals were worse, the GOP in 2016 had an even worse policy on immigration until Trump showed up, their trade/industrial policy was to ship it to china and suck more money into wall street, the possible alternative candidates polled worse in must win states in the midwest, and more, and yet this belief survives.
I'm not saying this particular to you, but it's always funny to watch the cycle in these sorts of forums: Trump is an idiot and buffoon, he will fail miserably, and never succeed at anything, but also once he does win or do anything (win presidency, get SCOTUS picks, overturn Roe, etc., etc.,) actually it wasn't that difficult and also any nonTrump generic GOP would have done it anyway (and probably would have been more successful!).
Trump isn't an idiot and a buffoon at all. He's a narcissistic media personality (but that describes most politicians in my direct experience), but he isn't dumb by any stretch of the imagination. But his impact has been about realigning the Republican party, rather than being good at winning elections.
Almost every politician is inter-changeable when it comes to elections in general, Trump is just the one a lot of people either think is awful or great and so tend to either go in hard on how great he is, or go in hard on how terrible he is. I don't think he is either particularly, he has positive traits and negative ones, and they almost balance out.
I'll put it this way, there is basically no-one the Democrats could have run who could have won this election, and basically no-one the Republicans could have run who would have lost it. That's why I predicted a Trump win, and ignored all the polls and media.
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