Many of us are terrified at the support Donald Trump is getting. He is an extremely dangerous man, apparently driven by the kind of attitudes normally associated with psychotic dictators, not potential leaders of a democratic country. The hope is that even if he won the Republican candidacy, he would lose very heavily in the actual election. You’ll note that few commentators will actually state that hope. Trump defies gravity.
Regardless of how far he goes, win or lose, he has already caused huge damage to the security of people in the western world, and continues to do so. His statements stoke the fires of extremism and provide terrorists with great recruiting material.
Every time Donald Trump opens his mouth, he swells the ranks of IS.
But there’s some hope in the numbers. His results so far have been as follows:
27.6%, 35.3%, 32.5%, 45.9%, giving him an average support of 35.3%. That tells us something very good to know.
Two thirds of Republican supporters do NOT want Mr Trump to win.
I feel better already!
The reason he’s winning is that there are so many other Republican candidates sharing the non-Trump votes out between them. If we take just the top three in each caucus or primary and pretend the two non-Trump candidates were a single candidate, that candidate would have scored as follows:
50.7%, 27.5%, 44.8%, 45.3%, giving this virtual candidate an average support of 42.1%, nearly 7% more than Donald Trump has garnered.
The field is beginning to thin, Jeb Bush being the most recent casualty. Ted Cruz is almost as undesirable as Donald Trump and he’s doing well enough that he’s not likely to quit any time soon. The good side of that is that he is splitting the anti-establishment, anti-immigrant, fear-driven vote so perhaps we should be grateful.
More importantly, the other main candidates not only have broad appeal, but they have overlapping appeal. If the supporters of Rubio, Kasich and Paul and all the others had a single candidate to back, this would be going a very different way.
The candidates standing up for sanity must choose a stand bearer and defeat Trump and Cruz.
My message to the Republican candidates opposing Trump and Cruz is simple. Stop them! They will destroy your party and any chance you have of electoral success for a very long time. Now is the time to put aside your personal ambitions and recognise that it is better to live to fight another day than lose a war of attrition between you. A war that will ultimately anoint a candidate you despise as victor.
Choose one of you, Rubio or Kasich perhaps, and put all of your resources behind that person. The rest of you tell your supporters why you must do this. Explain what this fight is about. Then encourage them to back your chosen ‘candidate for sanity’.
Lose this battle so that you have a chance to win the war.
Personally I hope that the Democrats win the presidential election, but politics requires balance, an opposition to hold the government to account. I hope that we will see the Trump and Cruz bandwagon crash off the road so that Americans can get a government that will take them forward, not backward.
Filed under: Politics & Religion
