We now return you to your regularly scheduled Megathread!
Today is July 15th and it’s the first day of the Republican National Convention where Donald J. Trump will be officially nominated as the Republican candidate for President of the United States.
The convention runs Mon-Thur, you can see the calendar of events here:
https://gopconvention2024.com/master-calendar/
For those who have never really watched a convention before, don’t expect a lot on day 1. Generally a lot of speech making and bloviating.
The expectation is Trump will announce his running mate on Tuesday, then more speeches on Wednesday, and the state by state nomination process on Thursday.
Of course, this is all up in the air given the assassination attempt. Nobody has seen a convention this close after an attempt on a candidate’s life, so nobody is 100% sure how it’s all going to go!
I’ll be breaking out each day into it’s own megathread, so if you’re looking for something specific on, say, Wednesday, you don’t have to wade through 2 other days worth of comments to find it!
“Nobody has seen” just about anything about this election. I want off this fucking ride, man.
Ok, so in the past two weeks alone, we’ve seen:
-
Biden completely collapse at a debate that he himself issued the challenge for, essentially scoring not one but two potentially fatal own goals at once, giving the RNC enough ammo to fuel months of attack ads while subsequently doing little to nothing to convince his own party he has a realistic chance to win now.
-
the Supreme Court enact significant power grabs for both the President and themselves by saying that Presidents are absolutely immune when committing official acts or anything even related to an official act, essentially saying that an “official act” is anything they say it is, while also implying that an official act is basically whatever the President says it is until they say otherwise.
-
One of Trump’s four cases dismissed, with the other three essentially on life support at best due to the above ruling, essentially allowing Trump to walk away scot-free.
-
Trump survive an assassination attempt, giving legitimacy to the conspiracy theories that fuel his campaign and allowing him to exponentially ratchet up his attacks on Democrats, knowing that Democrats are on the defensive and cannot really defend themselves without playing right into Trump’s hands and giving the appearance that they supported the attempt.
-
Trump not only survive the assassination attempt, but come out of it with a series of pictures that, objectively speaking, are so defiant and patriotic in the face of a real-time assassination attempt that those pictures alone would carry any other candidate to victory in a landslide. Seriously. Defiant look, fist pump in the air, blood splashed against one side of his face, perfect sky, American flag in the background. If you can’t get elected after that, your entire campaign staff should be fired, sued for neglegence, and be declared legally stupid.
And he’s carrying all that momentum and more into the RNC. At this point, this is really Trump’s election to lose. And none of this even counts all the GOP thumbs that are going to be on that scale in November.
If you think the first term was bad…
Fucking vote
Don’t just vote… Offer to take friends, neighbors, and family members to the polls if they have trouble. Help them apply for mail-in ballots. Make sure Mango Mussolini doesn’t get anywhere near the Oval Office ever again.
I’m from Massachusetts. One of the bluest states in the country. I can’t vote any harder.
Move to NH and vote harder! /s
-
Will they talk about the children that trump raped? Will his running mate also be a child rapist? Why is he running for president for a country he is trying to destroy?
Why is he running for president for a country he is trying to destroy?
To stay out of prison.
He’s doing a good job of that so far!
More on J.D. Vance, the VP pick:
https://www.vox.com/politics/360283/jd-vance-trump-vp-vice-president-authoritarian
I am not going to follow the convention. I’ll just declare that it’s bullshit, and that’s that. I’ll follow the next DNC convention if it comes up. At least Whitmer gets my attention.
Bets on Trumps post convention/ Post ass. bump?
Biden and Harris both saw a 6 point bump post conv in 2020. Trumps polling that cycle stayed about the same (his approval then was about the same as Bidens current approval, in the 30s).
Another big one was Gore’s 2000’ bounce. 16 points.
Then of course there is the famous Clinton bounce of upwards of 30 points.
Of course we also have to consider the layer in the current news. Reagan, after the assassination attempt, saw a 20 point bump in approval, which was fairly sustained, for almost 3 months.
Its not unrealistic to think that Trump might walk out of this week into a 15-20, maybe even 25 point bump in approval/ polling after this week. Prior to this weekend, the entire was one of appealing to independents, undecideds, less likely to vote.
Yeah, it’s hard to say. Convention bump + assassination bump, could be a crazy response!
Then the Democratic convention next month has a lot to live up to!
Yeah I think the most difficult aspect of this prediction would be how polarization has impacted the ability for anyone to cross, say, a 45% threshold?
I just don’t think it matters to any likely Democratic voter that Trump improves his image or is gaining sympathy. Likewise, I still don’t think any Trump voter is going to ever go vote for Biden.
Its still all about turnout, which is what the ABWD crowd has never been able to understand: that its not about what they think, its about if people are interested or not interested in showing up the polls. And, interestingly, that kind of information won’t show up in polls of “likely voters”, because the people who are responsible for the departure between polling and elections aren’t likely voters. So its bad enough that Biden is polling as abysmally as he is, but its also an imperfect metric in that it doesn’t predict enthusiasm/ likelihood to actually register and vote.
I have Biden at a less than 5% probability of winning based on my date dependent polling-probability which uses the under/over polling performance metrics from last cycle. I haven’t updated it to Biden’s new, lower polling data, but if people are interested I can get around to it some time this week.
I posted this over on the site that shall not be named, but the WH GiftShop sent an email at 2:06 saying the VP pick is JD Vance:
makes me wish I could temporarily subscribe to a thread
Watching Trump come out at the convention, he literally looks like a changed man. Humbled. Maybe a little bit sad. It’s an impressive change, it will be interesting to see if it carries over to his policies.
