Or, to put it another way, 47% of Americans don't vote on average (there's that number again)

On average 26% of registered voters don't vote in presidential elections

On average just 53% of the voting age population has voted for president since 1972

RNC fundraising in July 2016 is down 61% from July 2012: Donors exhausted about $750 million on 16 losers in the primaries

OpenSecrets has the RNC story here.

Stupid liberals blame this fundraising debacle on Trump when Republicans have only themselves to blame for throwing tons of good money after bad during the primaries, exhausting the donors. If the dopes at Politicus had just opened up OpenSecrets they'd have seen how.

Jeb! Bush burned through $152 million as of August 22nd, and won bupkis.

Lyin' Ted Cruz? $155 million spent.

Little Marco? $164 million (he's over $2 million in the hole, which is the real reason why he flip-flopped and decided to run for the Senate again).

John Kasich spent $40 million (and he's nearly $6 million in the hole, which is exactly what he deserves).

Chris Christie spent nearly $32 million.

Ben Carson, you won't believe it, spent nearly $79 million.

Scott Walker: almost $33 million.

Carly Fiorina: almost $26 million.

Rand Paul spent over $21 million.

Mike Huckabee spent $10.5 million and he's still $275,000 in the hole. 

Lindsey Grahamnesty: over $10 million.

Bobby Jindal blew nearly $6 million.

Rick Perry: over $17 million, also in the red by $111,000.

And Rick Santorum spent $2.5 million and he's in the red $412,000.

Pataki and Gilmore bring up the rear with relatively smaller sums.

Donald Trump has spent over $97 million and yet has over $40 million in the bank.

It's clear from the fundraising that there were only four or five real contenders here, not seventeen: Bush, Rubio, Cruz, Trump and Carson. And after four riveting televised debates before Thanksgiving 2015 polling showed the same thing, and arguably Bush no longer belonged up there. The RNC should have put its foot down at that point and cut the debate stage to four: You pull 10 points in the polls or you're out.

Things might have turned out very differently. Instead we had to listen to Kasich, Christie, Fiorina and Paul divert attention away from an in depth examination of the issues dividing the candidates attracting over 70% of Republican eyeballs. The candidate might have been better for it today, and the party more unified and flush.

Russell Kirk voted for the Roman Catholic in 1976

Democrats launder money for Hillary: Crooked maxed out donors to DNC give big to state parties who strip their names and send $ to DNC

Bloomberg reports here, calling it an "unprecedented workaround":

At least $7.3 million of the DNC’s July total originated with payments from hundreds of major donors who had already contributed the maximum $33,400 to the national committee, a review of Federal Election Commission filings shows. The contributions, many of which were made months earlier, were first bundled by the Hillary Victory Fund and then transferred to the state Democratic parties, which effectively stripped the donors’ names and sent the money to the DNC as a lump sum. ... Four state parties that received $2.8 million in transfers from the Hillary Victory Fund in July didn’t disclose the names of the donors who were the source of the funds, as FEC regulations require. In each case, the identical amount of incoming money was sent to the DNC the same day it was received.

Trump is imploding on deportation, delays speech again

The speech was supposed to happen this week in Colorado. The new manager Kellyanne Conway put a stop to that.

The speech was then delayed until next week in Arizona.

Now it's delayed maybe two weeks.

Story here.

Trump started his campaign A YEAR AGO centered on illegal immigration and he still needs more time to get his act together on deportation?

Biracial quarterback Kaepernick averages $19 million per year, protests his country for oppressing black people

Hey Colin! They could use your help in Milwaukee!

I guess he wants $20 million. Either that or he knows he's history with the 'Niners and is preparing to sue for racial discrimination.

Meanwhile the rest of us got a 50% pay cut during the Obama administration.

Somebody hand that guy a broom.

Story here.

One day after Rebekah Mercer, Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway took over the campaign, Trump started apologizing

They took over August 17th.

Here was Trump, August 18th:

“Sometimes, in the heat of the debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues." 

Not exactly the Trump of July 2015:


Moderator Frank Luntz asked Trump whether he has ever asked God for forgiveness for his actions. "I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don't think so," he said. "I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don't bring God into that picture. I don't."

Trump's new campaign manager as of Aug. 17, Kellyanne Conway, was all in with Zuckerberg's fwd.us in 2014

Kellyanne Conway participated in the fwd.us effort, here, which concludes:

There is a strong sentiment in the country that undocumented immigrants should not be granted amnesty; this immigration reform proposal addresses that issue by requiring that undocumented immigrants pay a fine, taxes owed, learn English and wait at least thirteen years until they can become citizens.

Americans across party lines believe this is not amnesty, but rather a fair and equitable way of dealing with the eleven million undocumented immigrants in the country. Hitting the 70 percent mark nationwide, this proposal wins broad support from the electorate.

Finally, this generates a more positive electoral environment for Republicans, as it creates an opening to a significant number of swing voters for GOP candidates.

Donald Trump: A bridge too far (you'll notice it doesn't say "Pence")

Mark Krikorian: Trump does Jeb Bush impersonation, throws away his only chance to win in November, spoils it for open-borders advocates

Here:

But Trump probably just threw away his only remaining chance to win in November with Wednesday’s Jeb Bush impersonation. He won the primaries with immigration control as his marquee issue; had he stuck to his guns, and still lost, the GOP Brain Trust, not to mention the Democrats, would more plausibly have been able to argue that opposition to their agenda was the reason. It still would have been a silly claim, since had he not grabbed hold of the immigration issue, the very idea of President Trump would have remained a Simpsons joke – if he’d remained consistent and still lost, it would have been despite his immigration position, not because of it. But now that he’s channeling Little Marco and Low-Energy Jeb on immigration, that story line has evaporated. Many of the voters who stuck with him through his various antics will start drifting away, so that in any state where the results are close in November could plausibly have been won if Trump hadn’t pulled a Schumer. It’s liberating, in a sense. ... His defeat will be on his head alone.

WaPo and The New York Times won't talk about Hillary's scandals, "conservative" media hide the anger over Trump's deportation flip flop

"If we don't report it, it doesn't exist".

The clueless sheeple bleat on their way to the slaughter.

Hard libertarian billionaire daughter Rebekah Mercer is behind Trump's shift to Bannon and Conway, away from deportation

The price of consensus for Mercer's "help" in retrospect was obviously that Trump soften his deportation stance. Bloomberg's story here in June completely misses the signficance of the Mercers' libertarianism.

The Hill had the story already on August 17, here, the day Trump shook up his campaign by hiring Stephen Bannon as CEO and Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager, detailing Mercer's links to Stanford, the Heritage Foundation, BREITBART, the Ted Cruz campaign and libertarian think tank CATO:

“The Mercers basically own this campaign,” said a source who has worked with Rebekah Mercer in her political activities. “They have installed their people. ... And now they’ve got their data firm in there.” ... Little has been written about the Mercers because they avoid the public spotlight, but conservative sources who know the family, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described them as “kind, civic-minded people and consensus-builders.” ... But that source, who has worked with Mercer in some of her other political ventures, said it was a surprise to some people that the Mercers had swung so forcefully behind Trump, given her ideological bent. “She identifies as a libertarian. At least she always did,” the source said, adding that Mercer was a big supporter of libertarian think tanks like the Goldwater Institute and Cato. “With Bekah you always had to prove your libertarian racing stripes,” the source added. “This seems really strange.”

Quinnipiac poll says 66% say Hillary's not honest, 53% say Trump's not, but Hillary still wins by 10 points

Poll here.

Calling Hillary crooked won't work when the voters are crooked, too. Sort of like promising to cut taxes of people who don't pay any.

Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon also needs to go out the door with Conway by his side

They never should have been hired in the first place . . . they're in for 8 days and Trump self-destructs over deportation. Bannon is as much at fault as Conway.

Ted Cruz' revenge: It took this woman only eight days to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump

What Trump just did on deportation is the same caliber mistake committed by Romney and McCain, only worse

John McCain suspended his campaign in 2008 . . . to go to Washington to vote for bailouts which Bush engineered and Obama also voted for at the height of the financial crisis, making himself abhorrent to his free-market base and indistinguishable from his opposition at the same time. But it wasn't his signature issue.

Mitt Romney was caught telling a fundraiser in 2012 that 47% of the country, "the takers", weren't going to vote for him anyway, so forget 'em, which simply reinforced his image as "not really one of us" among the base, many of whom were in fact part of the 47% and at the same time people whom Romney had fired. But it wasn't his signature issue.

Donald Trump's signature issues have been illegal immigration and law and order, and there's no way in HELL forgiving immigration lawbreaking can be combined with law and order. Either all the laws are enforced, or eventually none of them will be obeyed.

Trump should have such a comprehensive view of that by now, but obviously doesn't, which means there's no there there.

The damage done thereby to the perception of Trump as a strong leader is incalculable.

Donald Trump can't claim to be the law and order candidate if millions of illegals aren't eligible for deportation

We are not mindless followers, Donald.

You just lost the election, and we just lost the country.

Trump has lost Mark Krikorian, says Trump is now the 9th member of the Gang of Eight, so it's over

Link repaired 1/14/24.

 

Quoted here:

Trump has also infuriated some of his supporters. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, declared that Trump's latest remarks were the "last straw" for him, especially his statement that there would be "no amnesty," which he made just before saying that illegal immigrants will have to pay back taxes.

"Those are terms of art in the pro-amnesty, Gang of Eight crowd. Every politician pushing an amnesty says 'this version isn't really an amnesty because fill in the blank,'" Krikorian said, declaring Trump the "unofficial ninth member of the Gang of Eight."

"What he just did was make clear that even on his central issue, which is the only reason he's the nominee ... was immigration, and he now has shown that he can't be relied on, even on that," Krikorian said, who had previously considered himself a reluctant Trump supporter — until now.

"I'm done with Trump at this point," he said.