Trump Stumps Vincente Fox: Trump's Muriel BoatLift Argument

Contrary to media spin, Trump never said Hispanics, Mexicans or legal migrants are "rapists." Instead, he accused the Mexican government of deliberately repeating Castro's tactics in the Muriel boat lift -- sending many of its criminals to the United States, including rapists. The idea that a government would do this deliberately is not so foreign -- Castro bragged he did exactly that with the Muriel boat lift in 1980, boasting he "flushed the sewers of Cuba" onto the United States, emptying prisons and sending the criminally insane in a lift later made famous by the film Scarface. Estimates place around 179,000 such criminals as illegal entries into the United States in the last decade. This is an argument over properly controlling border access; it isn't, and wasn't, an argument over how many migrants should be let in, and was never an attempt to bash Hispanic people, Mexican people, or legal immigrants. Trump's immigrant wife, Melania (potentially America's first multi-multi-lingual First Lady), made this exact point in a recent televised interview. 

The Hispanic GOP and Independent voters get this difference, even if the media doesn't. Indeed, for many Hispanic voters, particularly those that are 2nd generation or later (who often do not even speak Spanish nor follow Spanish television news) agree with many of Trump's position on immigration, as Pew research polls repeatedly reveal. That is why Trump crushed his two Hispanic opponents in Nevada, and continues to lead both of his Hispanic opponents in national GOP primary polls. It is also why Hispanic voters rate him as well or better than his GOP opponents on the issue of immigration. 

Of course, it helps Trump that Mexico's notoriously corrupt former presidents keep taking the bait and putting Trump in the news, prominently complaining they "won't pay for no "f******" wall", with Vicente Fox the most recent to take the bait, after the Pope before him, and another ex-president before him. All this does is remind Trump's voters both how authentic he is (real cages are being rattled in foreign places of power), and highlight an issue his positions are intensely popular with in the GOP, with immigration the number one issue for Texas voters in that incipient election Cruz must win to stay alive. Once again, Trump stumps the critics and Vicente Fox. 

Handicapping Rubio: Being a Republican Obama or Clinton is Not a Good Thing in the GOP

Author: Betting Bob

Marco "I sometimes choose to wear high heels" Rubio is the kind of candidate only the media and money-machine can love. Rubio marries the least envied personality and biographical traits of Obama and Clinton, exactly what GOP primary voters do NOT want in their presidential candidate after 16 years of Obama/Clinton rule over the last quarter-decade.  With the kind of lurking scandals that removed him from VP consideration by Mitt "Hide Your Money At The Same Address in the Cayman Islands So Any Schmuck Can Figure Out Its You" Romney, Rubio blends Obama's substance-less, identity-oriented, vague speechifying style with Clinton's scandal-scarred barely masked past. 

Remember this -- when voters experience an opposing party president for two elected terms, they, like someone who just got out of a bad divorce, want a candidate who is the OPPOSITE of what that incumbent two-term president reminds them of. Hence, Democrats chose JFK over LBJ after 8 years of I Like Ike. Hence, Democrats chose Jimmy "Sunday School Teacher" Carter after two elections of Richard Nixon. Hence, Democrats chose revenge-of-the-nerds technocrat Dukakis after two terms of smiling frat boy Hollywood celeb Reagan. Hence, Republicans chose good ole boy, C-student, not-so-slick Dubya after two terms of Oxford scholar, too-smart-for-you-and-too-slick-by-a-lot Clinton. Hence, Democrats chose cool, hip, uber-smart, politically correct, cautious metrosexual Obama after two terms of Dubya. Now, the Republicans want someone who reminds them of everything DIFFERENT from Obama. They want brash, bold, incorrect, old school, no-nonsense, throw-caution-to-the-wind, unscripted, reality tv in-the-moment. All the things Trump is and Rubio isn't.

Worse yet, Rubio emulates Obama, in style and personality. Like Obama, Rubio's all about branding, with his Gary Hart "where's the beef" lack of substance exposed by his own endorsers, who keep stammering hopelessly when asked a single question: name a single accomplishment of Rubio. This from the kind of no-show guy who skipped so many votes, hearings and teaching assignments, he should be an honoree employee of a mob-corrupted union.  All the while vapidly bragging he's the one with "foreign policy" experience and most "ready" to be President. (He read a lot of talking points from his staff, after all, and that should count for something, darn it.) His all-too-obvious anxiety problems -- sweating so bad in debates Trump thought Rubio might have just got out of a swimming pool, diving for a water bottle badly in his response to the state of the union in a moment of Mel Brooks film-worthy comedic anxiety, and his robotic freeze when Christie went all New Jersey on him -- along with that scarily plastic all-teeth smile, render Rubio much too much like a poor man's Obama for any GOP majority or plurality to ever give him the most primary votes over a primary campaign when they don't want anyone who reminds them of Obama in the first place, especially when unfavorably contrasted so often and so easily to Trump. 

But it gets worse. Then, you have Rubio's Clinton-esque rumor mill and investigative inquiries, such as Rubio's Clinton-esque history of dubious overlap between politics and self-enrichment beyond the "golly gee, I accidentally used the party card for my personal expenses again," such as sweetheart loan deals with corrupt bankers busted for fraud, slush-fund style overlap between politics and business, lobbyist ties to land deals while working as a representative, and no-show employment for billionaire backed university professorships, not to mention the part of the American dream he leaves out -- his family's financial rescue from his sister marrying one of the biggest drug dealers in Miami, an original founding member of the Cocaine Cowboys. This doesn't even dip into the documented arrest at a park in his teens for some form of "disorderly" conduct at a park with a dubious reputation and someone with him arrested years later for even more dubious activities, or a wide swath of other Clinton-esque whispers of the kind of activity you don't brag about on Sundays. Even if the money and media machine somehow elevated his chances over an uninformed electorate, it is highly unlikely they would stay uninformed long enough for him to steal a nomination voters have no interest in giving him in the first place. 

Bottom Line: The highest pair of heels can't raise Rubio high enough to win the nomination. 

Odds of a Nominee Rubio: Less than 10%

Betfair Odds: 25%

Recommendation: Sell, sell, sell. 

Trump Churches the Pundit Class and Cruz

Poor UK gamblers. 

They have to rely on the analytically inept mainstream American punditry for their forecasting and explications of American elections. Nitwits like Nate Silver and Nate Cohn of the New York Times, whose confirmation bias manipulation of data analytics (masking their subjective bias as objective analysis, exhibiting every form of analytical error one can make) forms a classic study of how not to analyze data. Or depending upon the billionaire-owned major media (New York Times, Wall Street Journal & Washington Post all owned by politically-oriented, Trump-hating fellow billionaires, so offended Trump has betrayed his class).

A few candidates and consultants mirror their errors. Both the press and the Cruz campaign still can't figure out that being "evangelical" doesn't mean you are a church-centric, ideological conservative, who spends your nights fretting over the next Supreme Court nominee, or still dreaming of the imaginary day abortion ends or gay marriage is undone. Saying your "evangelical" in the south is like saying you’re “Catholic" if you’re an Irishman from Boston — it’s a cultural statement for many, rather than a statement of religious devotion or church-centric orientation, much like the difference between those Catholics who go to mass every day and those who go for the holidays. Trump faces serious limitations with the church-centric Republican primary voter, especially the college-educated, middle-class, Sunday School is where you should meet your wife types. But newsflash to Cruz & the press: most evangelicals don't even go to church weekly, and many rarely go to church at all (even if they understate that in polls because, heck, you still tell your mama you go every Sunday). 

This is why Cruz can't understand how sixty-five-percent white evangelical voters could ignore his bonafides on the church-centric cultish issues of abortion, gay rights, the proper pronunciation of Second Corinthians, and their self-selective definition of a "true conservative." It's because most evangelicals, especially in dixieland, could care less about that. This isn't the 1992 GOP; this is the 2016 GOP, where working class populists who voted for Clinton in 1992 now flooded the GOP electorate, completing a GOP conversion commenced in 1996 and culminating in Trump's ascendance. The media -- with 'nare an evangelical amongst them, least of all blue-collar southern roots -- can't comprehend it either. 

Having grown up in the south, the biggest difference amongst Evangelical voters are the ones for whom church is a central institution as opposed to those for whom it is just a cultural statement. What is missed by many of the analysts is that about half of the evangelical vote are not church-centric voters; indeed, about half rarely or only occasionally go to church (much like Catholic voters). This biased thought process in the punditry and press is because the activists all come from the church-going crowd, but they don’t speak for half of the evangelical vote. The polls can further understate this phenomenon because a percentage of voters won’t admit in any poll they rarely go to church in a culture where you are “supposed to,” but deep analytics will reveal this data.

Precinct data reveals this. In the working class, lower-church going precincts in counties like Horry, Trump ran up huge advantages (of the kind Nevada previewed) with more than 2-1 margins and often exceeding 50% of the primary vote. In the middle-class, high-church attendance precincts, like Greenville's 27th and 28th precincts (home to Bob Jones University students and faculty), Trump barely managed 10% of the vote. In the upper-income climes of Charleston, where another dimwit from the New York Times "fivethirtyeight" site spent their time trying to "study" evangelical voters (and completely confused by no one saying they were voting for Trump because she was focusing on church-going, middle-class evangelicals, which compose only a 1/4 of the evangelical vote), Trump found similarly harsh and disparate losses. But just skip across to blue collar North Charleston, and Trump dominated like the populists of yesteryear, running up 50% margins in multiple precincts. 

Trump exceeds with working class voters due primarily to an economic appeal, not a religious one. For a majority of evangelicals, their concern is economy and security, not the pastor's concerns. If the media and courtier class of hangers-on remembered the south also proved hospitable to the likes of Huey Long and Big Jim Folsom, then they wouldn't, like Cruz, continue to have to learn this the hard way, while the media continues to buffoon their way through another electoral campaign. Leave it to a New York billionaire from Queens to get GOP voters better than the party's own consultants, activists and pundits. 

Trump stumps again.