Debate Thread: The Donnybrook at Stony Brook

Yeah I know the debate's at Hofstra, not Stony Brook, but I've been sitting here trying to think of something that rhymes with Hofstra and the closest I've gotten is "Mothra."

And there are two problems with that: 1, it makes no sense, and 2, it also doesn't rhyme.

So I'm changing the debate locale, for the purposes of this post, to Stony Brook.

It's on all the cable news channels, and NBC. And CBS. And ABC.

My take: I have no take. This could go any which way. Trump could end his campaign in a single sentence. Hillary could do the same.

Joe Trippi's analysis struck me as dead-on: The swing demographic, now that non-college educated men have almost all defected to Trump, are college-educated white men who consider themselves too erudite and upper-crust to vote for the same guy the commoners do.

That suggests that Trump should be trying his level best to sound normal and informed, and Hillary should be trying like hell into baiting him to playing to his base. She wants him to turn off the college educated men; if she does, she'll probably win the election.

If Trump can win most of them back (Romney got a much higher fraction of them in 2012 than Trump has now), then Trump has almost sewn the whole thing up.

If Trump just does what he's done for 90% of this campaign -- playing for votes he's already had since June 2015 -- he loses. Or rather, he does himself no good. And if he plays to his base in a raucous way that offends the, um, more refined sensibilities of the college-educated set, he loses.

posted by Ace at 08:38 PM

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