What if Trump had won as a democrat?

[mvd10]

Democrats have Super Depegates and don't have winner take all primaries . If the dem rules were in place for the GOP, Hillary would be president right now

FTFY. All those Obama voters in the Great Lakes states wouldn't have switched over to Rubio like they did for Trump.

And all those white college-educated and/or wealthy voters who switched to Clinton probably would have remained Republican. Rubio wouldn't have channeled the hate towards Clinton in the way Trump did, but in the end someone with Clinton's baggage wouldn't have defeated a serious GOP candidate. The EC might have been closer (Trump really was tailormade for the EC...) but Rubio would have won the PV.

Anyway, no way someone as racist as Trump would have won the Democratic primary. I guess an "eat the rich" far-left conspiracy nutter might win the Democratic primaries under perfect circumstances (still not likely). The Democratic base probably still would like him, in the end muh medicare and muh social security probably are more important for them than having someone competent in the white house (I know that the GOP is no different here). The Republicans probably would go much harder after the whole Russia thing, which is a good thing.

[mvd10]

Democrats have Super Depegates and don't have winner take all primaries . If the dem rules were in place for the GOP, Hillary would be president right now

FTFY. All those Obama voters in the Great Lakes states wouldn't have switched over to Rubio like they did for Trump.

And all those white college-educated and/or wealthy voters who switched to Clinton probably would have remained Republican. Rubio wouldn't have channeled the hate towards Clinton in the way Trump did, but in the end someone with Clinton's baggage wouldn't have defeated a serious GOP candidate. The EC might have been closer (Trump really was tailormade for the EC...) but Rubio would have won the PV.

How did Bush Sr. win with his baggage?

By the way, Rubio ran to the right of Romney (and Trump) on both economic and social issues. He wanted to let billionaires pay no income taxes (abolish capital gains + dividends taxes). So, if you're a moderate Obama supporter who couldn't support Romney due to his stances on social or economic issues, you would support someone even more to his right (with Hillary being even more to the center than Obama)?

Democrats have Super Depegates and don't have winner take all primaries . If the dem rules were in place for the GOP, Hillary would be president right now

FTFY. All those Obama voters in the Great Lakes states wouldn't have switched over to Rubio like they did for Trump.

Rubio may not have won MI or PA but he keeps OH , FL , IA , and maybe  WI . Also he  adds NV , CO , NH and maybe VA to the GOP .

WI is not a populist state ever since Scott Walker moved the state significantly to the right and Rubio would capitalize on it .


2nd this is Rubio vs trump and Rubio basically wins all the bush 04 states against trump with the exception
of New Mexico while adding Wisconsin to his column .

Rubio lost non-Cuban Latinos in his senate race by the standard GOP margin. He could only get one-third (and lost latinos overall), so if you're expecting him to make in-roads in those states with Latinos, where is the evidence?

Hillary's strategy was based on courting anti-Trump republicans, she thought she didn't have to worry about WI, so she spent time in states like AZ. Consider that her AZ strategy did actually pay off in helping the Dem margin there. She wouldn't have done that normally. Consider that Walker won his recall election election in the same year that Obama easily carried the state.

Lee Atwater and Willie Horton.
Romney (a rather cold candidate) still got 47% against Obama (an amazing campaigner). In 2016 the roles were reversed, Rubio is relatively young and charismatic while Clinton is cold and awkward on the campaign trail. And if anything, Romney's tax plan was worse electorally than Rubio's. The only way Romney's tax plan would have worked was if he raised taxes on the bottom 90%. Most people didn't care.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-marco-rubios-tax-plan/full
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-donald-trumps-revised-tax-plan/full

Trump's tax plan would give the top 0.1% a 1 million dollar tax cut on average, Rubio's tax plan would give them a 900k tax cut on average. Rubio's tax plan wasn't more regressive than Trump's plan, and voters didn't care that much about the specifics of Trump's plan. Trump got only 49% of white college-educated voters, Romney got 56%. Romney also got 61% of non college-educated whites, Rubio probably wouldn't do much worse than Romney with them. And Rubio would do better with minorities (it's not hard to see Rubio doing better with minorities than Mr "Self-Deportation" and Mr "Build-That-Wall"). I just don't see how Clinton with her email scandal and the 9/11 memorial collapse could beat a young and relatively charismatic candidate after 8 years of Democratic rule. The electoral appeal of populism is overstated.

[mvd10]

Democrats have Super Depegates and don't have winner take all primaries . If the dem rules were in place for the GOP, Hillary would be president right now

FTFY. All those Obama voters in the Great Lakes states wouldn't have switched over to Rubio like they did for Trump.

And all those white college-educated and/or wealthy voters who switched to Clinton probably would have remained Republican. Rubio wouldn't have channeled the hate towards Clinton in the way Trump did, but in the end someone with Clinton's baggage wouldn't have defeated a serious GOP candidate. The EC might have been closer (Trump really was tailormade for the EC...) but Rubio would have won the PV.

How did Bush Sr. win with his baggage?

By the way, Rubio ran to the right of Romney (and Trump) on both economic and social issues. He wanted to let billionaires pay no income taxes (abolish capital gains + dividends taxes). So, if you're a moderate Obama supporter who couldn't support Romney due to his stances on social or economic issues, you would support someone even more to his right (with Hillary being even more to the center than Obama)?

Democrats have Super Depegates and don't have winner take all primaries . If the dem rules were in place for the GOP, Hillary would be president right now

FTFY. All those Obama voters in the Great Lakes states wouldn't have switched over to Rubio like they did for Trump.

Rubio may not have won MI or PA but he keeps OH , FL , IA , and maybe  WI . Also he  adds NV , CO , NH and maybe VA to the GOP .

WI is not a populist state ever since Scott Walker moved the state significantly to the right and Rubio would capitalize on it .


2nd this is Rubio vs trump and Rubio basically wins all the bush 04 states against trump with the exception
of New Mexico while adding Wisconsin to his column .

Rubio lost non-Cuban Latinos in his senate race by the standard GOP margin. He could only get one-third (and lost latinos overall), so if you're expecting him to make in-roads in those states with Latinos, where is the evidence?

Hillary's strategy was based on courting anti-Trump republicans, she thought she didn't have to worry about WI, so she spent time in states like AZ. Consider that her AZ strategy did actually pay off in helping the Dem margin there. She wouldn't have done that normally. Consider that Walker won his recall election election in the same year that Obama easily carried the state.

Lee Atwater and Willy Horton.
Romney (a rather cold candidate) still got 47% against Obama (an amazing campaigner). In 2016 the roles were reversed, Rubio is relatively young and charismatic while Clinton is cold and awkward on the campaign trail. And if anything, Romney's tax plan was worse electorally than Rubio's. The only way Romney's tax plan would have worked was if he raised taxes on the bottom 90%. Most people didn't care.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-marco-rubios-tax-plan/full
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-donald-trumps-revised-tax-plan/full

Trump's tax plan would give the top 0.1% a 1 million dollar tax cut on average, Rubio's tax plan would give them a 900k tax cut on average. Rubio's tax plan wasn't more regressive than Trump's plan, and voters didn't care that much about the specifics of Trump's plan. Trump got only 49% of white college-educated voters, Romney got 56%. Romney also got 61% of non college-educated whites, Rubio probably wouldn't do much worse than Romney with them. And Rubio would do better with minorities (it's not hard to see Rubio doing better with minorities than Mr "Self-Deportation" and Mr "Build-That-Wall"). I just don't see how Clinton with her email scandal and the 9/11 memorial collapse could beat a young and relatively charismatic candidate after 8 years of Democratic rule. The electoral appeal of populism is overstated.

Bush Sr. was cold and stiff, while Dewey and Dukakis were young and supposedly 'charming'. By the way, you're conflating the term 'charismatic', charismatic suggests a person who has a strong and loyal following, rubio was the exact opposite of that, his followers were the least loyal, he did not have a base. Going by that definition, Hillary was more charismatic. She had a loyal following with her diehard supporters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_authority#Characteristics

You're also forgetting that Clinton and Obama virtually tied in the '08 primary.

I know you want to make comparisons with Obama, but Obama ran a brutal ideological campaign on the back of grassroots support, the nature of rubio's campaign was something more along the lines of John Edwards, Dukakis or Dewey.

https://medium.com/soapbox-dc/marco-rubio-is-not-barack-obama-c98fda217e86

Ironically, the closest parallel to Obama on the GOP side was actually Cruz. If you want to talk about early polling, in early swing state polling Hillary actually outdid Obama in '08.


You're talking about the ordinary income tax and ignoring the elephant in the room. Rubio wanted no taxes at all for capital gains and dividend taxes, this is where most investors/businessmen earn their income from, not the marginal tax rates. His tax plan would result in people like Romney paying no taxes. Imagine the Dem ads (his senate race also proves his more limited appeal with Hispanics).

Comey's decision to go public was based on a Forged Russian intelligence document. Without Russian interference for the purposes of helping Trump, the DOJ would have simply closed the email probe quietly in the summer of 2016, and that situation would've ended there. Hillary would've been cleared. So, as you can see, even that scenario was nowhere near as bad as Iran-Contra where Reagan-Bush people were waiting to be sentenced to jail.

Both of their analyses included all taxes, and Trump's tax plan would have cut taxes for the top 0.1% slightly more than Rubio. Trump's plan included a 15 percent top rate on pass-through income which would have caused a lot of wealthy people to recategorize their income as pass-through income. If you're a hedge fund guy you'd be better off under Rubio's plan, if you're an extremely wealthy lawyer you'd be better off under Trump's plan. Bottom line is that both tax plans were roughly as regressive (just look at the analyses). And I'm not sure whether people really care about these things anymore. Trump's plan was regressive and completely unrealistic and Romney's plan only would have worked if he raised taxes on the middle class. They both lost the PV, but I don't think their tax plans played huge roles in it.

I agree that the comparison with Obama isn't perfect, but the main point was that Rubio is more personable than Clinton (like Obama was much more personable than Romney). Ultimately that's what most people care about.

As for Bush, Lee Atwater basically slaughtered Dukakis. Like he said: "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate". I don't think someone in the Clinton campaign could have done the same to Rubio.

If a Rubio nomination would have butterflied part of emailgate away that would have helped Clinton. But Republicans would have continued the witch hunt anyway. And the collapse at the 9/11 memorial likely wouldn't have been butterflied away.

Republicans almost always fall in line. Remember how 40% of Republicans considered Romney as an evil Taxachusetts liberal in late 2011 only to see him as a Reaganesque conservative savior in 2012? They would be treating Rubio as the second coming of JFK after the primaries, and as far as I know the media quite liked Rubio.

The main problem is that Rubio might have cracked under pressure like he did in the NH debate (like Shadows said).

Anyway, I'm not saying that it would have been a landslide for Rubio, but I just don't see how someone as flawed as Clinton defeats Rubio in anything but a squeaker (unless Rubio seriously crashes, which is possible). Rubio has some flaws (mainly his extremely outdated views on social issues and the fact that he might crack under pressure) but he also is a decent campaigner, has a compelling background and he could appeal to minorities. Compare that with Clinton's negative image (thanks to the right's witch hunt), her awkwardness on the campaign trail, the 9/11 collapse (which would look even worse with Rubio as GOP nominee) and 8 years of Democratic rule. Rubio wouldn't have done as well in the industrial states as Trump, but he doesn't need all of them. Romney 2012 + FL, OH, VA and CO would have been enough. Or Romney 2012 + FL, OH and PA.