The chair of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, was biased against Donald Trump in the primaries. He failed in his bias and Donald Trump won the nomination. Nevertheless, Reince Priebus still has his job as head of the Republican National Committee.

The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was biased for Hillary Clinton in the primaries. She succeeded in her bias and Hillary Clinton won the nomination. Debbie Wasserman Schultz no longer has her job as head of the Democratic National Committee.

 

Newsflash – lots of chaos at the GOP convention. It is not turning out to be a scripted affair after all.

Duh oh

Donald Trump is riding a winning horse – why would he want to change it?

A huge part of his appeal is that he is unscripted. It works. It gets him tons of free media coverage. It lets regular folks identify with him. He is the guy with FU money that can say whatever he wants whenever he wants. The guy we all wish we were, if only we didn’t have to hold down two jobs to pay the rent/mortgage and have enough left over for a few weeks a year in Florida.

Can you imagine a scripted Donald Trump? One where the media has to manufacture controversy? It is almost impossible – as it should be.

Donald Trump will never win the presidency by playing the sedate statesman. His turf is chaos and spontaneity. And since it is his nomination, that is what the Republican convention and the rest of his campaign will show America.

It turns out that Brexit is really not a very accurate term. Scotland and Northern Ireland both voted to remain in the European Union. Holyrood may actually pull off remaining somehow, although it is difficult to see the inmates of Stormont coming together to effect the same thing.

Since it was only Wales and England that voted to pull out, maybe we should be writing about WExit instead?

First off, I was wrong predicting 55% would vote to remain. It was only 48%. The lesson to me is to stick to my day job.

I don’t think I was wrong in summing up the Brexit vote into the two gut emotions of ‘THEY are screwing us’ and the ‘OUTSIDERS are screwing us’. I just underestimated how much the good folks of England and Wales felt that THEY, the OUTSIDERS, were not just the Europeans and Muslims, but also the Londoners. The privileged class. The island within the island.

The rural voters of England and Wales felt that the Londoners were legging them over, and with good reason. Income inequality in the UK has been on the rise for at least the past 20 years. The latest economic boom sent property prices in London through the roof, but what has it done for the rest of the country? The City has done well, but where are all the new jobs everywhere else?

So when the London-based political class touts the virtues of European integration, the message really fails to resonate with the rest of the country. And that is the lesson for Hillary Clinton.

Like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have found a way to connect with the folks that feel like they are getting left behind economically and politically. Never mind that the the numbers may not pencil on their proposals – this is all about the gut feelings, not reason. People feel that the political and economic classes are legging them over and that they are disenfranchised from the country’s wealth.

Hillary does not have that gut connection with the disenfranchised and it is doubtful that she ever will. But she needs them on her side to win the election. It will be interesting to see how she approaches this. My advice (not that anyone is asking, mind you) is to use a lot of BS. Bernie Sanders.

 

As the Brexit vote nears it appears that there are two basic gut issues driving the discussion. The first one is the perception that THEY are screwing us.

This is not a new issue. In the UK, the Scots have felt this way for hundreds of years. THEY were the English. They finally got a chance to vote on it in 2014 and despite their gut feelings, 55% of the Scots decided they should stay in the political union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In the US, the Occupy movement of 2011 also focused on how THEY were screwing us. In that case, THEY were the 1%. The 1% waited the movement out, but Bernie Sanders tapped into it again. He was not going to take any money from THEM, only from you. (Hillary Clinton, who is not as discriminating in her funding sources, must profess to subscribe to the view made famous by a California politician:  “If you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and vote against ‘em anyway, you don’t belong in the Legislature”)

Donald Trump is also playing the “THEY are screwing us” pitch. It is resonating with the middle and working classes who have been impacted by technology and globalization for the past 20 years. Industrial and manufacturing jobs have been moving off shore, and the ones that are left are slowly being replaced by automation.

If you think about who THEY are, it is the 1% that is driving automation and globalization. But Trump is a self-proclaimed senior member of the 1%, so that really does not work for him. Therefore, Trump has added the second basic gut issue into the mix: The OUTSIDERS want to screw us.

To hear Trump tell it, THEY are the OUTSIDERS. The immigrants. The Mexicans. The Muslims.

Fear and distrust of OUTSIDERS is basic to the human condition, because after all, we are a tribal species. But when you have groups like ISIS randomly murdering people in the name of Islam (even if it is a false Islam) it is easier to elicit this emotion.

Which brings us to Brexit. The British have an islander mentality – they see themselves as semi-European. They insist on their quirks. Look how long it took them to joint the rest of Europe and implement the metric system – it was really not until the 2000s that the final steps were taken. Anything imposed by THEM (the Europeans) is probably trying to screw them. This is not a new sentiment.

And now the OUTSIDERS want to screw them too. The mostly Muslim refugees pouring into Europe due to the instability in the Middle East and Africa provoked by radical Islamists and the terrorism in Europe by ISIS is proof that the OUTSIDERS are dangerous. We are an island – let’s pull up the drawbridge.

Which is just what ISIS wants. Their strategy is to induce fear and paranoia and polarize Muslims from the societies they are living in and turn them into a Fifth Column. So the efforts by Trump and some Brexit supporters to play the OUTSIDER / Muslim card is a big win for ISIS.

BTW, my prediction for the Brexit vote it pretty much the same as the Scottish vote: 55% vote to stay in.

Has Donald Trump hit his high water mark in terms of his brand value? There is an old adage that says you should buy on the sizzle, sell on the steak.

So far, Trump’s efforts have been mostly sizzle. He really did not have to do anything but hype himself to win the primaries. Assuming he gets the nomination (hey, a lot of things could happen: Paul Ryan) he will have to start putting up some actual policies and those policies will be subject to a lot more scrutiny as they are the policies of the potential president.

Trump’s steak (!)  probably won’t stand up so well to the scrutiny. In addition, the publicity around Trump University and his many other ‘cons’ will likely only get worse. What if he gets beaten badly by Hillary Clinton? Even if he wins the election there is a good chance his approval rating will quickly fall to the dismal levels of George W’s.

Trump keeps telling his supporters (and investors) that he is a winner and that is one of the main reasons they line up behind him. Will he be able to maintain his support and brand value once he starts taking some real, sustained, hits? Or will his supporters turn around one day and tell him, “Donald, you’re fired!”.

John Oliver did a piece on his television show a while back about Donald Trump and suggested that people call him by his ancestral family name as it would diminish his prestige: Donald Drumph just doesn’t sound as great. That is amusing but it does not really get to the essence of what has made Trump so successful in the celebrity, business and political worlds.

The thing is, if you look around the internet for the characteristics of a successful con artist, you will find that Trump exhibits most of them. He constantly brags about his success, builds supporters up as part of the ‘in’ crowd, misstates the facts (California is not in drought) and steers people away from anything inconvenient (my finances are none of your business). To be sure, there is also a large element of bully in Trump, but his success is mostly due to his mastery of the con man’s tool set. It is too bad John Oliver did not go all the way and re-name him Conald Drumph.

Here’s an interesting graphic. It is basically saying that people searching for Bernie Sanders on Google end up clicking through to his official website more often than searchers for any other candidate. Searches relating to Sanders end up on his official site 4% of the time. The next closest is Trump, but he is far behind Sanders – searches about Trump only end up on his web site about half as often, or 2.3% of the time.

Why do more of the people interested in Bernie Sanders follow through and actually go to his website?

Maybe they can’t find enough info in the press so they have to go to his website to see what he is up to. Or maybe they are more wonkish, and actually care to read his positions on various issues. (But that would imply that Trump’s supporters are the second most wonkish. Hmm..)

Maybe they want to donate to him and find his site through Google. Sanders gets a high proportion of his funds through small donations.

It is probably a combination of these and other factors. In any event, you’ve gotta feel for some of the other candidates. They spent a lot of money on their web sites but they don’t seem to be getting much use.

The graphic, BTW, is from this site, a company that is analyzing search behavior.

By his own yardstick, Paul Ryan is over halfway there to getting the Republican nomination for president. When he fake non-ran for Speaker of House, he denied he was running or interested in the job 5 times before he finally accepted the will of the party and took the job.

As of mid April 2016, he has already denied running for president three times:

• Oct 30, 2015 to CNN
• March 16, 2016 to CNBC
• April 12, 2016 in a news conference

The convention is not until July, so there is plenty of time for two more Paul Ryan denials.

Who are the winners and losers in the 2016 presidential race?

As of early April 2016, here’s what we see

Winners

Trump: No matter what happens, he has already won hugely. He just put another few billion dollars onto the value of his brand.

Cruz: His peers think he’s a jerk, but they’re holding their noses and lining up behind him to stop Trump. Talk about being in the right place at the right time.

Kasich: Who ever thunk he’d still be around? Maybe he even becomes the new poster child of moderate Republicans

Bernie: Yeah it’s Quixotic, but hey, he’s having big time influence. Besides, who else is gonna mobilize the angry Democrats?

Carson: Should have a nice future on the lecture circuit

Losers

Bush: Wow, that didn’t take long. Complete flame out. The good news is that Pops and Mummsy don’t have to keep watching him get skewered for another six months.

Rubio: At least he hung around longer than Bush. But what a tanking in Florida. Is he starting to regret leaving the Senate?

Carly: Maybe she should try to run for an office that she can actually win, like school board.