Dola: Looks like Manafort is on his way out.

People from Breitbart are now running Trump's campaign. I wish I could make this shit up.

Robert Costa on Twitter: "NEWS, first reported by @WSJ: Breitbart's Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway are now running the Trump campaign... Confirmed by WaPo"

Edit: The reason? Because he wants someone MORE combative to run the campaign:

Robert Costa on Twitter: "Trump is keeping on Manafort as chairman but wanted to bring on someone like Bannon who shares his populism & relishes combat"

I have a hard time imaging Trump getting more combative and populist, but more from Costa...

"Buckle up." Trump aide to WaPo in text just now

— Robert Costa (@costareports) August 17, 2016

Trump shakes up campaign, demotes top adviser - The Washington Post

"

So Trump found his scapegoat huh? God forbid he blame himself.

I agree with most of Trumps points here. If nothing else, at least it's bringing the discussion to the table.

Trump says Clinton, Democrats have 'failed and betrayed' African-Americans after Milwaukee riots | Fox News

Iraqi Information Minster offered a statement:

There is nothing wrong with the Trump campaign, we are winning in 45 of 50 states. Every successful presidential campaign has multiple managers and hires new advisors three months before the election.

AP: Trump chair routed Ukrainian money to D.C. lobbyists - POLITICO

This may be the story that explains everything that everyone was waiting for, Manafort routed 2.4 million to DC Lobbyists from a pro-Russian Ukranian group in a way that would hide where it came from.

Erickson hasn't exactly been a fan of Trump, but he takes it to another level this morning.


The Trump Campaign Jumps the Shark | The Resurgent

The GOP's hatred for Hillary Clinton is really an all-consuming fire that they need to get control of. It's going to destroy them if they let it.

I thought that too, but appointing a guy from Breitbart to head your campaign feels like doubling down on what's gotten you this far.

People are talking about Trump "pivoting" his campaign's message this week, mainly on the basis that he's given a couple of speeches in a row where he's stayed on-script. Well, perhaps. But it seems to me it would be more of a feat for him to stay "on-message" for another 80 days than to simply revert to what he's done for the past 365+.

Oh the irony. Erickson's pretty much the poster child for the small (fiscal) government, authoritarian (social) government, social southern conservative that took over the GOP from the far right in a far more effective fashion than his closest analog, Markos Moulitsas, ever did to the Democrats on the left.

Now Trump has come along, snagged the base of support Erickson spent a decade curating and taken them howling off into the abyss. Basically Erickson had delusions of becoming someone like Grover Norquist, and now Trump's taken it all away from him.

I almost feel bad.

Isn't that the same thing (but in reverse) of this thread? Essentially? I don't think anybody plans to let up on the bashing of each other's candidate.

But the Hillary bashers have been at it since the mid-90s. How many partisan investigations has she endured, yet none of them have been able to bring her down. Trump was largely ignored until his run for President. Hell, I even watched a season or two of The Apprentice.

She's a career politician, she can deal with it just like Trump can.

As much as people would like to speculate that the GOP is going to actually crumble and cease to exist there's no way that's going to happen. The base of the party is still incredibly strong. It'll be rebuilt and repackaged and it'll be back in the heat of the mix before you know it.

The Dems would be wise to look inward at their own divides and stabilize their own party or they'll be right there in time.

The most dangerous period for most things (corporations, countries, political parties, sports teams etc.) is when they're dominant - its at that point they tend to become over-confident and arrogant ...

The Dems keep broadening the tent while the GOP keeps adding security measures to theirs.

They do need to worry about over-confidence for sure, at least as far as the Presidential race is concerned.

What the Dems DO need to worry more about is winning more local and state contests.

Just spoke to someone who is close to Trump. Bannon has reportedly lit a fire with Trump...

— Robert Costa (@costareports) August 17, 2016

Bannon has convinced Trump that rest of campaign needs to be bare-knuckles brawl, w/ full-bore populism/movement politics

— Robert Costa (@costareports) August 17, 2016

Huge rallies. Gloves off. Brutal fights with Clinton. Heavy emphasis on nationalism and populism. That's the Bannon strategy.

— Robert Costa (@costareports) August 17, 2016

Oh boy, so now the gloves are coming off. :eek:

And then he went looking for more tweets from white supremacists.

There's nothing wrong with the 'gloves off' campaign. The problem is when your fighter keeps punching the referee rather than the guy he's actually fighting.

Or the judges.

That too. :)

I think it's still too early to predict that. There are too many variables. I suspect a lot of it depends on stuff that they can't control. Here are two scenarios that are quite plausible, but could have wildly varying results.

SCENARIO A: Trump goes off the rails completely by "Trump being Trump." Says something so out there that Establishment rejects Trump, pulls endorsements, etc. Republicans keep House. With HRC and a Republican House, HRC makes few/no major changes from Obama administration. Economy does well. No major terrorist attacks on American soil.

RESULT: The country didn't descend into the expected HRC chaos and anarchy from the TrumpRight's perspective. Trump's most ardent supporters are irritated over "4 more years of Obama," but over time the abject anger of 2015/2016 subsides because life is pretty good. GOP returns to business as usual.

SCENARIO B: Establishment continues to play the fence with Trump--not rejecting him, disagreeing with specific comments, but endorsements hold. He loses, and while HRC is President, we have more than one San Bernardino/Orlando type incidents.

RESULT: All Hell breaks loose in the GOP. Trumpers blame the establishment's and NeverTrumpers' lack of support for the deaths of Americans because "Trump wouldn't have let this happen." NeverTrumpers point out that, uh, Akbar who did that recent shooting was born and raised in America and wouldn't have been kept out of the country. GOP Establishment is forced to take a side, alienates one group or the other.

Those are just two plausible scenarios that I could easily see happening. There are plenty of others that are impossible to predict during the HRC Presidency, some of which the GOP Establishment has little/no control over.

I think it's still very much a roll of the dice what happens next in the GOP.

Well, let's not forget what I posted about earlier in the thread. In early 2013, the GOP's leadership came out with a we-have-been-humbled, well-reasoned strategy for moving forward. How to expand the tent. How to reach out to minorities. Etc. Etc. Etc.

And the plurality of their voters gave them Trump, whose policies pretty much directly contradicted point after point of the 2013 Post-Mortem.

My take?

They need to figure out a way that no candidate can win the nomination with such a low percentage of the overall vote. Trump had the nomination all but sewn up with barely over a third of the GOP voters in his corner at the time.

Well, that's easy. Get rid of winner take all, which is an incredibly stupid system, especially when you have so many candidates.

But isn't that really symptomatic of what the problem with the party is? There are so many fractions of it that find a certain plank of the platform as their hill to die on, while the others can all go to heck, that it makes it hard for the majority to solidify behind one candidate?

How many different views were really represented during the primary race? 4? 6? More?

I think we could see the GOP splinter-one side to perhaps a new party where the evangelical christians and far-righters hang out and a new GOP following like what Ben said "we have been humbled" strategy. They are not going to grab independents with a far right social view. Their last candidates for President have been a Mormon and a racist. They have to do better than that if they want to win back the White House.

I haven't done the math, so I could be off here, but I suspect that in *this* situation that wouldn't completely solve it. If Trump had gone into the convention leading with 939 (~.38*2472) delegates, they still have the issue of either having to accept him as the nominee or pissing off his supporters. No, they need to figure out a way to keep a candidate like that from the process, or if a terribly objectionable candidate gets momentum, convince all others but one or two to get out before Super Tuesday.

Or, heck, come up with a rule that only the top four in the polls get their names on the ballots to begin with.

Maine will be voting to move to ranked choice voting in November. It's a system that would prevent a guy like Trump (popular with a particular base, but not one of most people's top 3 options) from winning as it does a far better job of finding the candidate the majority prefers.

All they had to do was stop the angry anti-immigration white power talk and they could have peeled off some conservative Latino Catholics.

That's apparently too difficult and I don't know how they plan to get the genie back in the bottle now that everyone can see what the base is.

Primaries only have about 10% voter turnout of the general which is why you usual see the "pivot" in the summer

I think albion pointed this out in one of the primary threads, but as fractured as the GOP may seem nationally, they are still very strong locally. The control of state legislatures is really important for district setting as well as a host of legislative issues. It is tough to see that infrastructure cracking even though there's not a figurehead at the national level (other than maybe Ryan who seems fairly weak as a figurehead at this point, but may be very good governing in his current role).

Next election calling your opponent out as a Trump supporter will replace being called out as an Iraq war supporter.

That's the thing, she CAN deal with it, and has been for 20 odd years, and been Teflon. Trump can't handle the SLIGHTEST bit of "maybe it's not such a good idea", and overreacts. Constantly. Most of the trouble he's in was because of the behavior you see here, someone says something against him, he goes nuts and launches an all out blitz, like a berzerk boxer punching the ref (to use the comparison upthread), the fans, even himself.. and then when he calms down, you expect him to realize what he's done, and promise that he'll save his punches for his opponent.. then watch him decide the problem was that he didn't load his boxing gloves with horseshoes first, and go right back to punching.. everyone else but his target.

The funny thing is that the entire Republican primary was a big game of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the party couldn't figure out what they needed to do to keep from losing it all to Trump. It's actually very similar to corporate politics where each little fiefdom battles others with the company typically ending up suffering.

I don't even know what this term means any more to different people, but from my view, this demographic is very much split into two right now with the solo scriptura faction (the ones that I would call REAL evangelical Christians) leaning more toward "reduce/eliminate abortions and don't force our churches to perform gay weddings and we can work with you on the other stuff" while the "we love 'Murca and guns and speaking English and praying in schools and Jesus but let's not let any Scriptural teaching get in the way of my personal view of what Murca should be" crowd goes all-in on Trump.

I encounter MUCH more of the former group than the latter. I have over 2,000 FB friends, for example, and I only know of three people who supported Trump in the primaries or shortly thereafter, though I'm reasonably certain that the majority of my friend list votes Republican. To be fair, my experience is absolutely with a self-selecting group. Virtually all of the southern white evangelicals I know (and with whom I'd interact on social media) are the ones who were/are willing to attend churches or be involved in YoungLife where at least one black guy who has always been anti-confederate flag, will push them on race-related issues, and married a white girl has/had a prominent position of leadership. (What I wasn't on YL staff, I was an Elder in my church in Charleston, and I have a fairly significant lay-leader role in my church in GSO.) So, yeah, by nature my social circle is going to contain no overt racists, and very few closet racists.

Virtually every Southern white Evangelical that I know who indicated their preferences either on social media or in person in my presence was a Rubio supporter, felt uneasy about Cruz, and is extremely anti-Trump. Right *now*, that subgroup is split between "vote Trump and then take a bath in bleach, vinegar, and disinfectant because Supreme Court" and "#NeverTrump. A Savior who chose to give up *all* his rights as God and come live under a military dictatorship probably ain't all that concerned about his followers' 'rights' as Americans. I'm voting third party." The former group seems to be larger than the latter, but not by as many as most of y'all would probably think. But the more crazy Trump spouts, I think the more you'll see those in the former camp move to the latter. (Well, and especially those who now live in liberal states. There will be some who can't bear to see HRC win Georgia, but my Christian Biblical-conservative friends who have moved to liberal states are pretty much 100% "she's gonna win Oregon anyway; I'd rather be able to tell my kids and grandkids that I didn't vote for that jerk."

I don't know about this. I'm still not convinced that the House and the Senate won't go blue as well in the anti-Trump wave this November. The blame-assigning for that could put some serious cracks in it. Heck, if Ryan stays with his kinda-sorta-endorse-Trump position, it's not that hard to see both the NeverTrumpers ("if you and your ilk had denounced him we could have kept Congress") *and* the Trump supporters ("you didn't go all in and that's why we lost") attacking the fence-riders. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems "fence-rider" is accurate in describing a good 60-80% of the Republicans in the House and Senate right now. There's a small faction that's all in for the Donald, a small faction that's NeverTrump, but the good majority are "well, I gotta support the Republican, but every time a reporter asks me if I agree with any specific crazy thing Trump says, the answer is no."

Between us, we might possibly know every evangelical in at least the South ;)

Mine are probably 50 percent Trumptacular, another 45 percent planning to hold their nose, 3 percent split between HRC & Johnson and 2 percent planning to sit it out.

By and large the never-trumpers I see aren't what I'd call evangelicals particularly. (almost all seem to be Methodists, just to tell you the truth)

I mention this all strictly for the "well that's kinda interesting" aspect of how almost completely opposite our anecdotal experiences are, considering that we probably have one of the highest overall rates of saying "yep, same here" of any two people on the FOFC.

Polls only 538 has HRC ahead in AZ and GA. Now I don't think for a second that would actually would happen if the election was today and is even less likely to happen in November, and polls only is a pretty flawed measurement to begin with but still, holy crap. The last few weeks couldn't have gone worse for Trump.

I know everyone here hates Michael Moore, but he makes a relatively logical case here: Michael Moore: Trump Is Self-Sabotaging His Campaign Because He Never Really Wanted the Job in the First Place | Alternet

It's adding flesh to the idea that the Trump campaign was mainly a PR stunt that unexpectedly succeeded.

Key quote:

Name me a GOP career politician who has been under such unrelenting, partisan, scrutiny for 2+ decades.

You're not alone:

Polls show evangelicals support Trump. But the term ‘evangelical’ has become meaningless. - The Washington Post


Exit polls and the evangelical vote: A closer look | Pew Research Center

I agree on the Senate, but I think the House would be a tall task. I haven't looked into the contested races very closely, but there are so few that are truly in play. It would take something catastrophic, as you suggest.

I'd say that's an exceptionally good objection. The two terms don't even approach being the same thing afaic. One is basically a subset of the other more accurately.

(I think most all evangelicals would self-identify as "born again" but vice versa not nearly so much so)

I think it all boils down to whether or not this populist/nativist sentiment that Trump's ridden to victory (so far) is a new and powerful force in the GOP or not.

If it is and continues to play a major influence in the selection of GOP candidates on the national level then yes, the GOP is in real trouble as demographics will work heavily against them.

I think it isn't, however. It's been there for quite a while. Karl Rove perfected the art of dog-whistling just enough to keep this "base" on board while not having candidates be so overt as to ostracize the swing voters. Most national GOP politicians continue to follow this playbook, and it's likely what we would have seen if Trump hadn't won the nomination. And, honestly, it's what we'll probably see in 2020.

The nuance here is that national candidates who can't effectively wink at this part of the base (definitely Romney, arguably McCain, though this is why he picked Palin) will suffer in the General if they can't get this base out.

So, the GOP model (at least for national races) is George W. Bush. And why not? He won 2 terms. Run a guy who the base believes thinks like them, but is inoffensive enough that the swing voters won't walk away.

Forget the twitter idiocy, just look at his positions - anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, very pro gun. Maaaaaybe he could win a nomination in a low turnout Republican primary (especially with Mass having open primaries), but not a chance he'd even touch 40% in a general election. Schilling's always had a wildly inflated sense of how much he meant to Red Sox fans. Now, if Pedro has American citizenship...
I'm no fan of Manafort, but I don't get what's considered a smoking gun here. Yanukovich wasn't a nice guy, but Manafort ran a political campaign there, and his assertion that the ~$22m was for the whole campaign and not a direct payment to him rings true. Even with this revelation, unless that AP article is missing a big piece, it seems like the shadiness was on the part of the Podesta group & Mercury not registering under FARA despite the money clearly coming from Yanukovich's party.

Polls out today show:

9 point Clinton lead in Florida
6 point Trump lead in Texas
7 point Clinton lead in Virginia

These are single polls, so grain of salt, etc....

He'd also get hammered on his game studio costing the state of Rhode Island millions while going under, plus the fraud investigation that followed (even with there being no charges filed from it).

Maybe that'd be a plus in Massachusetts?

That implies you had a bunch of candidates going for the same slice of voters, while I think the idea of a highly fractured "base" makes more sense. Cruz, Carson & Fiorina were all divisive candidates targeting a much different slice than Trump. Bush and Christie were out well in advance of it mattering. Kasich or Rubio conceding to the other may have been enough to achieve a brokered convention, but I don't think either would've held up as the frontrunner (Rubio's inexperience, Kasich's actual record being much less centrist than his message), and as Ben points out you likely still would've had to deal with Donald having the most delegates heading in to the convention.

Maine's voter ranking initiative does intrigue me, though I have less confidence in the electorate than most & I'm not sure how much it would've hurt a candidate like Trump who has such high name recognition. I could easily see a large number of voters writing him in in that 2nd or 3rd slot just because they barely know the other candidates and feel obligated to list 3.

In the media yes. I think voters have shown they don't really care about bad business deals when there's no charges, let alone a conviction. (And that goes well past Trump.)