I’ve been hearing for months that the Republicans would win this presidential election if only they hadn’t nominated Donald Trump. I’m not completely against this line of reasoning. I had hoped from last summer that that GOP base really had no ideological bearings and so would nominate him because I thought he would be a weak candidate. But I think this idea that “Hillary would be losing to any other candidate” is just a myth. I wrote about this back in May, John Kasich Would Not Beat Hillary Clinton. Remember: Kasich is about the most “reasonable” candidate the Republicans have.
One thing that bugs me about the whole “Hillary would be losing” game is that it is just that: a game. Although I think it is based on bad reporting over decades, Hillary Clinton has very low approval numbers. So what does it even say that if the Republicans had nominated someone more popular than she that they would win this election? It’s almost a tautology: Hillary would be losing if Hillary were losing. I think what we are really supposed to take away from this is that the country is really in a Republican mood. It’s a way for conservatives and (even more) moderates to whistle past the left turn the country is taking.
The Trump Tax
What most brought this all back up for me was Vox‘s Trump Tax. This is a very silly exercise where they look at six political science models, take a weighted average, and then decide where the race should be right now. Based upon this, they think it should be Generic Republican +1.8 percentage points. Also note: the range of the models is 8 percentage points (Generic Democrat +4.0 to Generic Republican +12.0).
Now, being as I’m a “fundamentals guy,” you might think I would like this approach. I do, after all, have my very own election model. Now my model is very simple. But there’s a reason for that. I’ve always thought that election models were mostly nonsense. The only thing you can really depend upon is the economic trend. The rest, I believe, is noise. It’s based upon the fact that these models are really nothing but correlations. And they are based on a very small sample size — in general, no one looks at elections before Eisenhower.
Professional “Hillary Would Be Losing”
If you really want to play the “Hillary would be losing” game, you can take it to the professional level. You can say, “If Trump weren’t so bad a candidate, the press would have spent more time picking over the Republican candidate instead of just shrugging and saying, ‘You know Trump!'” Or you can go back further and say, “If Democrats didn’t see the mess that was the Republican primary, they might have nominated someone other than Hillary.” You can play the “Hillary would be losing” game to the end of time. It means nothing.
Another thing that bugs me about all of this is exactly what a Generic Republican is. The models are based on elections when Republicans had better candidates. If it wasn’t Trump, it was going to be Ted Cruz — a man so vile even Republicans hate him. Or what about the much more likable Marco Rubio? I always thought that Hillary would have eaten him for lunch. So I’m not sure what Generic Republican tells us anymore. What my model tells us is that this election should give the Democrats a slight advantage.
So if conservatives and moderates want to make themselves feel better by playing the “Hillary would be losing” game, fine. But all it really says is that in a different universe, things would be different. And I think we can all agree on that.
I can’t complain about Page 31 of 
I was really struck by a line in David Cay Johnston’s excellent 
Today, we head to the heartland. On the docket are races in two Congressional districts: Iowa 03 and Illinois 10. Both of these districts are considered toss ups by 
In a surprising twist, Dold not only rejected Trump but was 
I thought I might not find anything I didn’t know on Page 30 of 
This is going to be something. I’m actually looking forward to this. I don’t think this debate can possibly matter in this election. And the two guys who are debating are actually pretty representative of their parties. Democrat Tim Kaine is hardly my kind of a politician, but he’s a standard Democrat at this point. And while Republican Mike Pence is a vile piece of garbage, he’s very much in keeping with his party. If the economy collapsed and 50 million people lost their jobs, Mike Pence would be against doing anything to help if a Democrat was in the White House, because, like virtually all Republicans, he places party above nation.
A few years back, the godfather of modern documentary filmmaking, Errol Morris, did some short features for ESPN. They’re all available on Grantland’s 
By that point it was pretty apparent by his actions that it was already his [Mitch McConnell] number one goal. He validated what I think most of this town knew. When I came into office, my working assumption was that because we were in crisis, and the crisis had begun on the Republicans’ watch, that there would be a window in which they would feel obliged to cooperate on a common effort to dig us out of this massive hole. Probably the moment in which I realized that the Republican leadership intended to take a different tack was actually as we were shaping the stimulus bill, and I vividly remember having prepared a basic proposal that had a variety of components. We had tax cuts; we had funding for the states so that teachers wouldn’t be laid off and firefighters and so forth; we had an infrastructure component. We felt, I think, that as an opening proposal, it was ambitious but needed and that we would begin negotiations with the Republicans and they would show us things that they thought also needed to happen. On the drive up to Capitol Hill to meet with the House Republican Caucus, John Boehner released a press statement saying that they were opposed to the stimulus. At that point we didn’t even actually have a stimulus bill drawn up, and we hadn’t meant to talk about it. And I think we realized at that point what proved to be the case in that first year and that second year was a calculation based on what turned out to be pretty smart politics but really bad for the country: If they cooperated with me, then that would validate our efforts. If they were able to maintain uniform opposition to whatever I proposed, that would send a signal to the public of gridlock, dysfunction, and that would help them win seats in the midterms. It was that second strategy that they pursued with great discipline. It established the dynamic for not just my presidency but for a much sharper party-line approach to managing both the House and the Senate that I think is going to have consequences for years to come.
There’s no doubt that I’d be a communist if I had even the smallest amount of faith in humanity. But I believe that regardless of the economic system that we create, the worst people will rise to the top. It’s because these are the people who care about rising to the top. That’s not to say that all people in the ruling class are equally horrible. But I do think they are mostly equally uncreative. What young man worth his salt thinks, “I know what I went to spend my life doing: I want to spend it making a lot of money!” His is a soul worthy of Dante’s Inferno
I look out on our capitalist system and I see unbelievable waste. Look at the internet! Have you noticed that every month someone comes up with some new and annoying way to shove advertisements at you. The button to close an annoying video commercial changes so you have to hunt around for it. A pop-up may not have a button; you may just have to click outside it to make it go away. It wastes your time. It angers you. And it even increases your blood pressure. I have no doubt that people die as a result of this nonsense.
And so we get another one! Page 28 of 
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