I vote for Nathan and he wins in a landslide. Frankly, no other issue matters here - no candidate who utters the phrase "privatize social security" is going to ever step foot in the White House.
...George W. Bush already did! (Here's a source showing Republicans campaigning on the issue in the 2002 midterms: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/01/us/bush-renews-push-to-partly-privatize-social-security.html). The third rail is cuts to net benefits, but it's easy to show privatization wouldn't cause this (and even easier to just confidently assert it).
And the country's gotten significantly more fiscally conservative since then.
(But also I would try to center my campaign around criminal-justice issues, because I think that's where Nathan is most out-of-step with ordinary people).
I didn't know that Nathan had CJ views that were in any way stand out, all the moreso compared to what you've implied (not said) about your own views.
More just where my views most decisively 'beat' the views of a generic Democrat; even quite blue states like California have voted in favor of the death penalty, and by trying to raise the salience of lurid and exciting crimes and make the top question 'how can we best fight criminals' I can try to control the media narrative and prevent cracks which might harm my campaign (sort of similarly to the GHWB campaign of 1988). I expect us to have a successful Republican campaign over the next two decades or so to take this tack, actually.
Oh, okay. I had thought based on previous statements you were implying a heavily libertarian/anti-police view of criminal justice issues, and I was curious how you would differentiate or market that. This makes a lot more sense.
I have a pretty weird fundamental approach to criminal justice—explicitly Beccarian despite my allergy to utilitarianism in almost all other contexts, as well as the usual leftist rehabilitative focus—but I don't think my views On The Issues are that out-there. I don't think a complex society could literally abolish policing or incarceration and I think it's dishonest and politically suicidal to insist on pretending otherwise. It's probable that Vosem could successfully bait me into some sort of emotional outburst about the subject if it became a debate issue, but he could probably do that with other issues where his views are much further outside the Overton window too, so it might balance out depending on how the public responds to those.
I'm a fundamentally very calm person and I don't really have emotional outbursts, basically
ever (since the start of sophomore year of high school -- so summer 2012 -- I've lost my temper three times, each time in a one-on-one conversation, and I
think I've only been moved to tears by graveyard visits). I would feel bad and uncomfortable about baiting someone into an emotional outburst, and might worry that it would come across dickish in a campaign context, but then a world where we're both presidential candidates is one where we're staggeringly successful anyway, and as Al points out some media organizations backing me might be relatively unscrupulous. (Same would go for you, though).
(Not that relative emotionlessness is an unalloyed positive, either: Bloomberg was criticized for not responding sharply in a debate to personal attacks. My natural instinct to someone criticizing me who isn't a very close friend is just to laugh in their face, and I might have to rehearse 'righteous indignation'. Or for that matter 'Trumpian insults'.)
This thread is fascinating because it's honestly no less interesting to think about this question on the levels of personality and aesthetics than on the question of policy.
America is not ready for a male Liz Truss presidency.
Well, I have an example now of what not to do.
(Also, I don't think my administration would really be all
that different, on day-to-day questions, from Generic R. The main differences would be on the vision thing.)