Of all the pre-game debate analyses out there, Ross Douthat has the best one. I've been watching with amusement at how most of the media has been pushing the narrative that if Trump simply shows up and doesn't foam at the mouth, he wins. Douthat agrees.
The eve of the first presidential debate is a good time for that exercise, because there’s been so much gaming-out of how Trump might ambush Hillary Clinton, how he might manage expectations well enough to make a poor performance look like victory, that it’s easy to lose sight of the core truth: It will be ridiculous if Donald Trump wins these debates.
Yes, it would. Consider that this is the first time he has stood one on one with an opponent and will now have to get into specifics on policy points. No doubt his current supporters won't care what he does up there (most of them, anyway) but the undecideds (largely white, college educated voters) will most definitely care. He's going to completely tank on many answers and leave the audience wondering exactly why he was nominated given that he knows so little. This works in the GOP primary crowd where having zero intellectual capacity is a crowning achievement. It doesn't work in a general election debate.
Despite recent tightening polls, Trump is still losing this race and here's why.
Trump won't win unless he improves on these numbers.
And, as Douthat notes in his final two paragraphs, this isn't anything new.
This is not a hot take. It is a cold take, a boring take, a take that assumes that the political world, even now, is still relatively rule-bound and predictable.
And if I’m wrong, if Hillary manages to throw the debates and the election to Donald Trump, it will be the last such take I offer for many years to come.
I agree and will do the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment