Thursday, January 07, 2016

Magic Box Says that Donald Trump Could Win the Presidency Running as an Independent

By Nicholas Stix



2016 Electoral College Map

 

Gary Forbes thinks that putting specious claims in a box transforms them into wisdom. And he is not alone in that belief.

An independent run by Donald Trump would guarantee victory for Hillary Clinton. While Trump would get votes from Reagan Democrats and a few million disaffected, GOP-leaning voters, who sat out the last two, and possibly three presidential elections, most of his votes would come from Republican voters. In a three-way race, it is entirely possible that the Republican candidate would come in last. That is how weak the GOP presently is as a national party, from years of betraying its base, and being increasingly open about it. (Think of a bartender whipping out his Willie in front of a customer, peeing into a beer bug, and handing it to the customer.) In other words, although GOP leaders and pundits are doing everything possible to sabotage Trump’s candidacy—as an expression of their hatred of their own base—in reality, he is a lifesaver to the Party. Without him, the national GOP will drown.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s vote totals would be virtually immune to such a split. The numbers of voters who would be moved to consider jumping ship from voting for Clinton, to voting for Trump as a third-party candidate are either statistically negligible or non-existent.

Social media have no power of their own. They have become powerful because the MSM have promoted them, but MSM only do that when they spot a social media trend among racial socialists. Plus, I believe that certain pc social media businessmen, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, would sabotage Trump supporters in the general election, just as Zuckerberg is presently sabotaging reports coming out of Germany of Moslem sexual terror. Thus, an independent Trump candidacy would derive little benefit from social media.

Gary Forbes’ claim that Trump “is guarded by a savvy, formidable mass that viciously & relentlessly defends him” is so bizarre-sounding, that at first I thought he was a Trump opponent. Apparently, the hyperbole is because he is seeking business for his own social media strategy company.

One possible scenario with Trump running as a third-party candidate would be:
 

Popular vote:

Hillary Clinton: 37%
Donald Trump: 34%
GOP guy (Cruz or Rubio): 27%
Other 2%

I realize that the election is won or lost in the Electoral College, but I can’t begin to crunch the numbers in such an unusual situation.

It’s not the numbers, but where you get them. Hillary would win big numbers of electoral votes in California (55), New York (29), or Illinois (20). If Ted Cruz were the GOP standard-bearer, he would likely take Texas (38). Anything could happen in big battleground states like Florida (29), Ohio (18), Pennsylvania (20), New Jersey (14), Missouri (10) or Minnesota (10).

General impression: The race could be very close, in terms of the popular vote. However, because Trump and the GOP candidate would largely be splitting the same pool of votes, I see a three-way race as leading to an electoral college landslide for Hillary Clinton, and the end of the GOP as a national party.

The closest precedent to my scenario would be the 1912 election. President William Howard Taft, former president Teddy Roosevelt’s erstwhile protégé, was unpopular within his own party, and TR ran against him. Roosevelt would have won the nomination based on delegate totals, but Taft engaged in intra-party mischief, in a ploy to steal the nomination. This led Roosevelt to boycott the party convention, and found his own Progressive Party, known popularly as the Bull Moose Party.
The split between Republican voters guaranteed a landslide victory for Democrat candidate Woodrow Wilson.

The 1912 Election

Popular Vote:
Wilson 41.9%
Roosevelt 27.4%
Taft 23.1%
Eugene Debs (Socialist Party) 6%

Electoral Vote

Wilson 435
Roosevelt 88
Taft 8

Note, however, that the GOP was then a robust party, in a nation that was 90% white, and came back to win in 1920, 1924, and 1928. Today’s Republican Party, by contrast, in a nation that by 2020 may have a non-Hispanic white minority, is on life support.

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