Here’s the Real Reason Everybody Thought Trump Would Lose
Why did almost everybody fail to predict Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries? Nate Silver blames the news media, disorganized Republican elites, and the surprising appeal of cultural grievance. Nate Cohn lists a number of factors, from the unusually large candidate field to the friendly calendar. Jim Rutenberg thinks journalism strayed too far from good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Justin Wolfers zeroes in on Condorcet’s paradox. Here’s the factor I think everybody missed: The Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots. Far more of them than anybody expected.
The 2006 movie Idiocracy depicts a future in which Americans have grown progressively dumber, and eventually elect as president of the United States a professional wrestler, who caters demagogically to their nationalistic impulses and ignorance of science. Only because the film took place in an imaginary world was it possible to straightforwardly equate a political choice with a lack of intelligence. In the actual world, the bounds of taste and deference to (small-d) democratic outcomes make it gauche to do so. But the dynamic imagined in Idiocracy has obviously transpired, down to the election of a figure from pro wrestling:
While it's impolite and politically counterproductive, if we want to accurately identify the analytic error that caused so many of us to dismiss Trump, we must return to the idiocy question. The particular idiocy involves both the party’s elites and its voters. The failures of the elites have been the source of analysis for months now. Republican insiders and donors failed to grasp the severity of the threat Trump posed to their party, many of them rallied behind obviously doomed legacy candidate Jeb Bush, or they used ineffectual messages when they did attack Trump. Or, most of all, they simply deluded themselves about the dangers he posed rather than face up to them. I never believed party insiders could fully dictate the outcome of the nomination, but I did expect them to be able to block a wildly unacceptable candidate, and they proved surprisingly inept even in the face of extreme peril to their collective self-interest.
Then there are the voters, whose behavior provided the largest surprise. It was simply impossible for me to believe that Republican voters would nominate an obvious buffoon. Everything about Trump is a joke. His orange makeup and ridiculous hair, his reality-television persona, his insult comedy and overt bragging — they are neon-bright signs that he is not (to use a widely employed term) “presidential.” Trump did not even seem to be an especially effective demagogue. He is not eloquent, not even in a homespun way. He stumbles on his phrases, repeats himself over and over, and his speeches consist of bragging and recitation of polling results so dull and digressive his audience often heads for the exits well before the conclusion.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/heres-the-real-reason-we-all-underrated-trump.html
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You're talking about Saint Ronnie here, and you won't get any of the Republican idiots to believe a word you say about taxes. Remember the Rob Corddry quote, "The facts have a well-known liberal bias."
It was so clearly rigged in advance. The Brooks Brothers riot is just one bizarre aspect of that rigging.
If someone had told me before that election that a major party candidate could so obviously steal an election and then have the Supreme Court support him in the theft, I never would have believed it.
but it would be of great value to make the same evaluation
apply to those who could be a heart beat away.
Hard to imagine such a thing, huh?
are, but it didn't happen overnight. Not only was Trump inevitable, all those other loons who ran were inevitable, too. The crazed theocrats. The anti-abortion nuts. The conspiracy-theory black guy with a good education. The clueless scion of a former President. The bootstrappers. Teh stoopid allowed them all to prosper.
Who else is there in the Republican Party? Some of the base has run for the exits and some of their politicians are now Dems, to our detriment. In fact, you could make a case for a deliberate or inadvertent stealth takeover of the Democratic Party by Republicans. It's easier than forming another whole party. Cheaper, too. And everybody gets to vote Republican no matter which party they vote for. Win/win! 
What was so, so, so unusual about the Republican primaries was that the anointed one, Jeb, turned out to be such a non-entity that everyone, not just Republicans, was aghast. How was Jeb even vetted? Did the big boys think, during the cat fight that was obviously coming up, that Jeb could possibly hold his own? Why?
Both Republican and Democratic voters can be forgiven for thinking that Trump seems like the best of the bunch. He is. He would be unlikely to rule as a theocrat, for example. For another example, it truly is impossible to discern whether he believes in his own bullshit, so you can't depend upon that. He's a total unknown, which may seem preferable to the 1% asslicker you KNOW is going to fuck you over and has said as such.
Add to that the complete disillusionment of the entire public in the whole election process -- hinky election antics (it's been 15 years--why hasn't this been fixed?); the crappy economy; the raping of the middle class and poor; etc., and you get an election where unusual candidates have a chance to shine. This has been that election.
that most of them dog-whistled their way in. And some of them dog-whistled their disdain for women, which unfortunately appeals to lots of those big manly men 
.
So, who out of the 16 or so candidates could they rationally vote for even if they tried to be rational? None of them. Which one is the candidate for the non-stupid voter?
