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Sunday, June 19, 2016

Time For The GOP To Stop The Nonsense

If you follow the mainstream media, you would think that this past week has been really a bad one for Donald Trump.  The media is focused on the nonsense stories that the GOP is going to nominate someone else or that not a single Republican senator, governor or congressman will be left endorsing Trump (or something like that.)  Okay, I exaggerated that last line a bit, but the stories about Trump have been relentlessly negative.

So was the last week really terrible for Trump?  There aren't a lot of measures one can use to determine that.  One that works, however, is the tracking poll done by Reuters-Ipsos.  That organization polls many hundreds of voters each day to see where the electorate is trending.  The poll is released with the data for the preceding five days being lumped together.  That means that the data yesterday (Saturday) actually covered the polling for Monday to Friday added together.  If you look at the data from two weeks ago which was the week before the Orlando terrorist attack, you find Hillary with a lead of just under 12%.  One week later, after Trump's supposedly terrible week, that lead is now down to 8%.  Since the attack, Trump's numbers have climbed steadily and Hillary's have trended lower although they have bounced up and down a bit.

Now I don't particularly like the Reuters-Ipsos polling methodology.  I would never rely on the numbers the poll produces as an accurate measure for a moment in time.  On the other hand, the trend of the poll is much more revealing.  The individual result may be biased, but the same bias is built into each number and is unimportant for the trend.  So, it seems clear that Trump has picked up substantial support compared to a week ago.

Despite all this movement, we still see the spectacle of fearful GOP candidates running from Trump as quickly as they can.  These people are already ceding the presidential election to Hillary Clinton even before she is indicted....I mean nominated.  These fools need to develop a backbone.  When they get asked about something Trump did or said, they need to focus the answer on Clinton.  The Democrats all do that in reverse.  Democrats don't criticize Hillary.  She could have carried out the Orlando massacre and all they would have said about it is that she was showing just how lax the gun laws really are in the USA.  I mean, here's a woman who has endangered national security for her own paranoid and self-important reasons.  She's never accomplished anything that wasn't directly the result of her husband's career.  She's been involved with corruption and even a "foundation" that's more a political slush fund than anything else.  But the Democrats never say anything critical and the media never pushes it.  Were the Republicans to do the same in reverse with Trump, half of last week's stories would never have been written.

I wonder if these Republican will ever learn.  The next time some reporter asks about something Trump said, they should talk about something Hillary DID.

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