Tag Archives: GOP Debate

Third GOP Presidential Debate: Who won, who lost?

October 29, 2015UncategorizedElection 2016, Election 2016, GOP DebateGreg Laden

The big loser in this debate was CNBC. The network chose to not let anyone who was not a subscriber see the debate live. Then, apparently, the moderators trivialized the debate and annoyed the debaters, who then attacked CNBC and the press in general. Then, today, when we look at the news stories about the debate, there are hardly any. Nobody seems to really care what happened last night.

Another loser was Ben Carson. I’ve come to think of the online unofficial polls as useful to indicate overall opinions, and to show how those opinions change (we can discuss another time why this is a valid consideration). If you look at a selection of online polls, which I’ve informally posted below, Carson is not winning, or even second. Other indicators had suggested Carson had surpassed Trump, or caught up. If these informal online polls continue to do a reasonable job of indicating overall opinions (as they have for several weeks now vis-a-vis presidential debates) then it appears that Carson’s rise over the last few weeks was a flash in the pan. This could be explained by the very strong social media push back against him as more has been learned about his background and strange thoughts.

People have been watching Carly Fiorina and Jeb Bush because, for various reasons, they could have taken off in this primary process. They didn’t. They lose too.

Who are the big winners? Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio had impressively large numbers in these informal polls, and given the brief snippets I’ve seen of them in the debate, they presented well (not that I agree with them on anything).

The real winner of course, is Donald Trump who trumped the others in these polls, and did so by continuing unwaveringly with his strategy. Every day that goes by we are more assured that Trump will be the heir apparent for this nomination entering the first primaries and caucuses.

Donald Trump Eats His Enemies

September 17, 2015UncategorizedDonald Trump, Election 2016, Election 2016, GOP DebateGreg Laden

Eating your enemies is a time honored method for winning. It is rarely used by American politicians or their supporters.

Here is how you eat your enemy. I’ll use a generalized example based on several events during the GOP debates.

Moderator: Mr. Trump, you’ve said ‘bla bla bla bla’. Alternate Candidate, what do you have to say to Mr. Trump about this?

Alternate: Yada yada yada.

Donald Trump: [smiling, nodding giving thumbs up] I agree with all that.

More typically, a politician in this situation would find a way to separate themselves form Alternate Candidate, playing off the moderator’s suggestion of a difference, even if there isn’t much of a difference. But Trump, instead, simply takes Alternate Candidate’s position and indicates, “That’s great.” Eating your enemy.

This might seem odd or counterproductive because it would seem to muddle Trump’s actual policies and make it easier to claim that he is being inconsistent. But that doesn’t matter, because Trump has a voracious appetite and he can eat that too.

Moderator: Mr. Trump, earlier you said ‘bla bla bla’ but when Alternate Candidate said ‘yada yada’ you agreed with him. How can that be?

Donald Trump: [nodding during question] That’s right, I agree with him, he’s a smart guy. What can I say?

See what he did there? He ate the moderator.

Now, take this whole theme and imagine it happening in the board room, with Trump as Chairman of the Board.

Board Member One: I totally disagree with Two. Two has it all wrong, and here’s why. Yada yada yada.

Donald Trump: Great idea, thanks for bringing that to the table.

Board Member Two: One is wrong, here’s what we should do. Bla bla bla.

Donald Trump: You’r totally right about that.

[one month later, at a second board meeting, Board Member One and Board Member Two are missing]

Donald Trump: [on being asked where One and Two are] Oh, I fired those guys.

Board Member Three: But you agreed with what they both were saying, even though they were saying opposite things.

Donald Trump: That was then, this is now, I can do that. What’s the next item on the agenda?

Board Member Three: [grimly] Mr. Trump, I think we should not move on until we’ve resolved this issue about One and Two and why they were fired even tough you …..

Donald Trump [interrupting] You’re fired.

This is not Trump the Chairman of the Board being random. It is Trump not taking sides or getting in a fight, but rather, eating his board members one by one. He’s not asking them to go along with his ideas, and he’s not really going along with any of their ideas. He’s just letting the conversation go and eventually making his own decisions. Meanwhile, he he munches on them for a while, then spits them out and lets them live (minus some juices and a bit of flesh). Then, when it comes time to make a decision, he just makes the decision, unencumbered by any prior positioning on his own part.

I have to say, it is a little like how an experienced professor operates a seminar. Don’t take a stand, let the seminar participants yammer on here and there, encourage everybody even if you are encouraging conflicting ideas. When a real conflict emerges, deflect and shift focus, and so on, letting ideas go and go. But then, at some point, near the end of the seminar, the professorial voice of wisdom emerges, perspective is imposed on the conversation, previously ignored or undervalued facts are foregrounded, and smart things are said. Since everybody got a chance to be both smart and stupid, less butthurt, and an interim quasi-consensus on the nature of reality is accepted, at least until the seminar adjourned to the Rathskeller, where things heat up again until everybody gets too drunk to remember what the heck they were arguing about.

So this is Trump’s modus operandus, but what is it for?

One of the main benefits in a debate format of eating your opponents, instead of merely trying to not let them touch you, or for you to seem like them, is the commission. The commission is the little percentage you get when your opponent says something, their supporters cheer and applaud, then you agree with it. You get a percentage.

On a stage with 11 antagonists, the one antagonist that gets to eat each opponent once or twice, maybe three times for some, gets a lot of small commission payments. If none of the other candidates are doing that, then there is one broker getting paid off with every transaction, regardless of how that transaction goes. Trump took a little piece of every one of those conversations. In the end, he went home with his pockets stuffed.

Also, eating your enemies while your enemies are busy eating their own young (the exact opposite strategy) may be pretty effective.

The conflict between Trump’s strategy and what usually happens, and what is expected, caused the post-debate pundits to “give” the debate to a wide range of different candidates, including but not exclusively Trump. After the first debate, informal on-line polls indicated that the majority of everybody else, everybody who is not a pundit, gave the debate to Trump. This is because the politically astute observers didn’t even know what they were looking at, since it is so unusual of a strategy. It turned out that these informal online polls accurately predicted the ensuing formal properly done polls. Trump moved forward in his lead after that debate.

It is too early to say if the same pattern will occur with the second debate, but there are early indications it is the case. Among the numerous commentaries by the usual pundits, Trump took the win for only a few. But among the few informal on-line polls I’ve seen, Trump may have actually done even better in this debate than he did during the first. We’ll wait and see what the formal polls show.

It isn’t really true that Trump is the only person out there who eats his opponents. I think he is the only one among the current crop of Gops running for the nomination. Bill Clinton could eat his opponent, and President Obama had been known to do it too. Neither is probably as good at it as Trump, though.

This is not, by the way, an endorsement of Trump. I’m merely placing some of what I’m seeing in an anthropological perspective. I actually think Trump could be a better president than most of the other Gops. This is partly because some of them are religious fanatics, the last thing we need running the US right now. Others are strong political ideologues, and the only ideologue I want to see in the White House among those running is Sanders (because we share most ideologies). Others are bought and paid for by various nefarious special interest groups. Many are combinations of the above. I can imagine Walker doing everything he can while in office trying to eliminate unions, because his main support structures seems to come from anti-union forces. I can see Trump sitting down and working with unions. Paul would be horrible on climate change because he doesn’t believe it exists, and if it does, there is no Libertarian answer to climate change. I can see Trump, not owned by the Koch Konsortium, perhaps (maybe) doing something about climate change because, after all, shifting to clean energy is a huge business opportunity (but see this).

By the way, being both a Democrat and a Republican (which is true for Trump) is also a way of eating your own young.

One final thought: The most poetic version of a Trump candidacy would be having Ross Perot as Vice-Chairman. I mean, Vice President. If you understand why that would be poetic, then you probably get Trump. If not, think about it.

The Beginning of The End of [Donald Trump/Tea Party/Fox News] UPDATED

August 8, 2015UncategorizedDonald Trump, Election 2016, Election 2016, Fauxbate, GOP Debate, Megyn Kelly, PoliticsGreg Laden

Select one and only one. Or two if you like.

— see down below for update —
Megyn Kelly of FOX news went after Donald Trump, the apparent winner of the FOX-GOP Fauxbate. Donald Trump at first declared that he has no time to be politically correct. Later he proved that he does have time to be politically incorrect, when he seemed to imply that Kelly was out of sorts during the debate because she was having female problems.

This led a conservative organization to dump Trump from a keynote speakers spot. We see a crack in the armor form as Erick Erickson, who had invited Trump to speak, disinvites him at the same time that he makes it clear that this is not because Trump was “politically incorrect.” Rather, it was because Trump failed to follow common decency. That is a crack in the armor because political correctness IS common decency.

The right wing has created several monsters. The Tea Party, the philosophical leaders such as Rush Limbaugh, and a gaggle of candidates and elected officials who are far beyond the pale of anything acceptable in terms of civil liberties. And, among those monsters is Donald Trump, who combines the worst of the philosophical leaders with the worst of those seeking office.

And now even some of the conservatives realize that Trump is too much. But not too too much, because one does not want to admit that being politically correct is the right thing to do. This is called tripping over one’s own dog whistle.

What has to be remembered here, I think, is that Trump is the same as all the others, just less polished, more in your face, more direct. But somehow he strikes a nerve with those who created him.

The real issue here is not what Trump said. He didn’t say anything worse during the debate or in the aftermath (his remarks about Megan Kelly’s menstrual status, for example) than any of the elected officials who have chastised women who have been raped for having a problem with being raped.

The real issue is that he offended his keepers, FOX news. He is not respecting his role. The philosophical leaders are supposed to bully and threaten and set the tone, FOX news is supposed to spread the rhetoric to the masses. The masses, the Tea Party asses, are supposed to vote for the Republicans, and the candidates are supposed to, and are paid to, maintain policies that shore up the 1%.

By going after one of the FOX personalities, he has violated the internal order. Now, they are turning on him. What remains to be seen is how the masses, who believe they are acting independently, will respond to this. Will they fall in line and do what FOX says, dumping The Donald? Or will they see FOX’s attack on Trump as an offense, and turn on FOX?

First Test Of Hypothesis

An NBC Poll taken right after the debate tested voter opinions of the various candidates. This is also an online polls. The poll asks about more candidates than were in the Big Boy debate, but shows very little movement for trump (a slight increase, from 22% to 23%). A few other candidates have much larger numbers (but still one digit) which takes away from Trump’s total percentage (recalculated for just those in the second debate, Trump has 28%). The overall order of the candidates remains roughly the same, with Trump way out in front, and then two tiers. Rubio, Carson and Cruz are still in the upper tier, the other candidates in the lower tier.

So, I’m calling it, so far, failed to disprove. The concept remains standing. Trump is the candidate that is actually winning, as indicated by both scientific on line polls and the NBC poll.

Unscientific polls rocket Trump to way top spot.

August 7, 2015UncategorizedElection 2016, Election 2016, GOP Debate, Politics, Polls, TrumpGreg Laden

Trump went into the GOP debate last night with a roughly 20% poll standing. Everyone will tell you to ignore polls early in this race, they never predict the outcome of a primary or a general election. That, however, is a non sequitur. We do not look at early polls to predict the distant future. We look at them to help understand the present, and to get a handle on what might happen over the next few weeks. The meaning of the polls shifts quite a bit before the first primaries, then they meaning of the polls has to be re-evaluated after every primary. At some point the re-evaluations start to return an end result like “Candidates A and B are in a horserace” or “Candidate A is the clear leader.” After that, you can get caught on a boat with your mistress, or you can be killed, and that can change things, but not much else does. Democrats believe in the Dark Horse but no one has ever captured one to my knowledge. But up until that point, polls are useful, and meaningful, if done scientifically, but no, the fact that they don’t predict an outcome over a year in advance is not a surprise and does not mean they don’t have interest or utility.

But what about unscientific polls?

Well, they are not scientific and thus not worthy. However, over the last few hours, several non-scientific polls, and in this case I mean internet polls where anybody who happens on a site can vote, have come out asking who won last night’s GOP primary.

If a bunch of unscientific polls that all return the same result become scientific, or at least, believable? That is a hypothesis I’d like to test with the current polling. It seems to me that if informal web based polls from across a spectrum of political orientation (of the site, not the poll clickers … we don’t know who the poll clickers are) all show similar results, then they might mean something. So, here is the hypothesis. If several informal polls show a very similar result, we expect to see that result reflected in the first scientific polls that come out.

I got poll results from the following sources (shown in order from left to right on the charts):

Slate
Right Scoop
Fox 5
Drudge
Palm Beach Post
News OK

Sadly MNSNBC had a poll but it was fairly useless in the way it was conducted. Also, HT Politics had a poll with similar results as those above, but I found it after I’d made the graphs.

Trump was a clear winner in these polls.

Trump’s numbers ranged over several points, but are always higher than everyone else, and approached or met 50%. One hypothesis predicts that formal, scientific polls should have Trump as the front runner. Another hypothesis predicts that Trump’s numbers in a scientific poll should be between about 40% and 50%, give or take a few points.

The gaggle of low numbers is difficult to even see on this graph, so I made a second graph with everybody but Trump:

Here we see what looks to me like two tiers. Walker, Christie, Bush, Huckabere and Paul are all really low, while Cruz, Kasich, Carson and Rubio are all relatively high. Note how variable Cruz’s numbers are. But aside from Cruz, just as is the case with Trump, the results are fairly similar across the polls.

One hypothesis would then be that Walker will be shown as dead last in upcoming proper post debate polls. One could produce a number of other hypotheses as well, but it could get messy. Let’s try this hypothesis. Upcoming proper post debate polls will have a rank order statistically like this:

Trump
Rubio
Carson
Kasich
Cruz
Paul
Huckabee
Bush
Christie
Walker

An additional hypothesis should probably be made, that the rank order for all the non-Trump candidates will be as shown. (This avoids the problem of having such a large magnitude of difference between the first and second rank).

There is one poll that I know of that was conducted by pollsters. It is by One America News Network, a conservative news agency that bills itself as “credible” (which is funny, why would you have to say that if you were that?)

If we take this poll by itself, most of the above suggested hypotheses are smashed. Here is the result of the poll questions “who won the debate” and “who lost the debate.”

This poll asked questions of “Republican poll participants.” It shows Ben Carson beating Trump, and a lot less spread between leader and others than the on line polls indicated. Also, very few people thought Scott Walker, who was a big looser in the on line polls, had lost the debate. Generally, the rank order between this poll and the on line polls is different.

Reading the reporting of this poll, it looks a lot like a shill for Ben Carson. Details of the methodology are as follows:

Gravis Marketing, a nonpartisan research firm, conducted a random survey of 904 registered Republican voters across the U.S. Questions included in the poll were focused only on the top ten GOP candidates that participated in the 9 PM ET debate. The poll has an overall margin of error of +/- 3%. The polls were conducted on August 6, immediately following the GOP debate using interactive voice response, IVR, technology. The poll was conducted exclusively for One America News Network.

I should add that the agency reporting the poll is owned by the company that commissioned the poll. Gravis, the pollsters, are used at Real Clear Politics. So I’m on the fence about the legitimacy of this poll and eagerly await other results.