General News Primary predictor of Trump support

Also racial/ethnic hostility and racism. Very interesting NYT piece on this a ways back.

His main appeal is to scared white folks, who feel that minorities have gone 'too far' in their liberties, and are all pissy about wanting 'their' country back.

Trump even supported Bundy and those Y'all Queda loons, out in Oregon...scary.

 

Isn't the scared white vote something that the GOP have been cultivating for years, rather than something that's appeared with Trump?

 

Not sure about cultivation. But certainly the Republicans have been getting the scared, white male vote for some time. Trump may merely make this fact more visible than it had been.

 

Romney was no where near focused on the scared white vote. He was a true moderate that lacked substance and conviction.

The reality is, the GOP as it is defined today is a dying party, completely out of touch with the real needs of this country. Trump recognises this and is redefining today's GOP based on rhetoric that I actually do not think he believes himself - he is a true liberal at heart. Go back before he honed his media skills and listen to what he said just a decade ago; you would have thought he was a democract.

But Trump has ambitions to be president, he has for decades. He is using the fractured GOP as his spring board to achieve his goals. And having honed his media skills, and understanding how elections work, he is manipulating the Republican Party and conforming his words to say what he knows a good portion of the party wants to hear - enough to get the delegates he needs.

As in most elections, as soon as he wins the primaries, he will shift to the centre and embrace some more left leaning viewpoints. But even though I believe he is more of a centrist than he is currently leading on, I also think that he has provoked so many lies at this point, that he probably does not know what he truly believes anymore.

But even so, Trump has done something special in American politics. He has damaged the traditional money-backed system. Whether it is Soros on the left or the Koch brothers on the right, the billionaire class is loosing influence. And it took another billionaire to make it happen.

The old GOP is a lost party, backed by billionares that hold themselves in high regard but who's personal interest are not aligned with the population. It will be interesting to see what the new GOP really stands for now that those billionares seemed to have lost control.