Lead This!

There was a piece in the NYT that seemed to suggest a "rainbow coalition" is supporting Trump.  Well, yes and no.  In the polls, there are more folks from a variety of segments of the GOP (or general) population indicating support for Trump than for anyone else in the rest of the GOP field:


What does lead mean?  It means having more people polled indicating support for Trump than for any of the alternatives.  Which, in the case of these polls, means getting something like 20-25% support from these various segments.  So, lead?  Yes.  But a rainbow coalition?  Even a bizarro rainbow coalition?  No.  That suggests something a bit more sustainable, a bit more popular.  A different way to pitch these polls is that an overwhelming majority of these segments either within the GOP or within the population at large prefer anybody else to Trump.

But the media love this story because it gets eyeballs, links, etc, and so they give Trump heaps of uncritical attention.  And, by the way, as others have shown, Trump's "popularity" is mostly a creature of media attention.

So, yeah, Trump "leads" but he is also widely opposed because he is, well, despicable.  That the most of the rest of the field are racing to the bottom, pandering to be dumber/more xenophobic is on them, as George Will nicely argued:

Most of Donald Trump’s normally loquacious rivals are swaggeringly eager to confront Vladimir Putin but are too invertebrate — Lindsey Graham is an honorable exception — to voice robust disgust with Trump and the spirit of, the police measures necessary for and the cruelties that would accompany his policy. The policy is: “They’ve got to go.”

Had to get that out of my system.  Just a reminder: one can lead but still be a loser.  And that is a word that Trump is very familiar with: loser.