Cruz’s move, however, appears to have backfired.
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Post-convention bounces are expected for a United States presidential candidate who has been in the media spotlight for a solid week. “You read that history, Rome wasn’t conquered from the outside”, King said. Bad news either way, but not quite the disaster noted in CNN’s write-up. Republican disunity was on display the previous night when Trump’s primary rival, Ted Cruz, stopped far short of endorsing Trump and drew loud boos. Voila – a decline in overall popularity.
The 70-year-old celebrity businessman’s acceptance of the Republican nomination caps his improbable takeover of the GOP, a party that plunges into the general election united in opposition to Clinton but still divided overTrump. “We are profoundly disappointed that on Wednesday night he chose to disregard this pledge”.
The GOP mood was on display at their national convention, where delegates in Cleveland erupted daily into chants of “Lock her up!” He said voters must ensure it’s Trump picking the justices.
This is the week in which Clinton could nail down the support of the nation’s Latino and African-American voters while sowing deep doubts about Trump among what is likely to be the election’s key target group: college-educated white voters.
To be sure, Trump is far from the candidate that gay rights advocates would have selected were the choice up to them. Ted Cruz, and establishment Republicans remain uneasy about their nominee. A President Hillary Clinton isn’t going to make it safer or greater. “But they cheapen the very real arguments that need to be made to the broader public against a Hillary Clinton presidency”. I think that’s perfectly in keeping the kind of campaign he’s run, in which he has doubled down on a lot of untrue statements and untrue characterizations of where the country’s at. If he’s a thorn in Trump’s side, all of the current annoyance at him for not being a team player will solidify. Mike Lee of Utah both have not endorsed Trump, and conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer has said he may have difficulty voting for Trump. That’s the lesson of the reaction to Cruz.
But on Monday, Trump cited polls following the Republican National Convention that show “the biggest bounce that anyone can remember”. Pre-convention, independents split 34% Clinton to 31% Trump, with sizable numbers behind Johnson (22%) and Stein (10%).
Neither the speech nor the reaction really surprised me. While those of us who maintain our policy views and principles, the Trump train is pathetic train wreck of sycophants voting for a liberal Clinton donor to beat a Clinton. For Clinton, it’s 44 percent.
A better approach, both for her candidacy and for the nation, would be to offer a realistic but upbeat assessment of where the country stands, along with a practical but ambitious plan for moving ahead.
Those are notable gains in a short time period, and they’re not the only ones. The number of Americans who say they would be proud to have him be president is up seven points to 39 percent and now 46 percent of Americans say he’s in touch with their problems in daily life.
The Clinton campaign is leaning heavily on attacking Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a strategy to try to bring disenchanted Bernie Sanders supporters on board. She’s at 38/60, down from 42/57.
But in a nod to a broader swath of Americans voting in November, he vowed to protect gays and lesbians from violence and oppression, and said he would ensure that young people in predominantly black cities “have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child in America”.
On Monday, Clinton said, “I believe he and all Americans prisoners of war are heroes and deserve the respect that that entails”.
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A new CNN/ORC national poll has Donald Trump in the lead by 5 points, a sign of a post-convention bump for the Republican nominee. I think the sense that he’s not up to the job intellectually is his only fatal weakness. “She made this as painful as she could”. It may be his election to lose now.
