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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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