Welcome to the weekly standard podcast. I'm your host, Michael Graham with us on the weekly standards. It's Jay Cost and Jay, you start off an incredibly passionate piece with a quote from Republican insider who says, we're riding the Donald Trump train all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or to oblivion. It's one of the two.
Yeah, it's really not. Uh, you know, look, I, I wrote the piece because of this pushback that we're getting now from a, from a lot of, I don't want to call them establishment republicans. We'll call them stalwarts, just sort of the party loyalists in the RNC, the people who are kind of in the convention system that are going to try and stop the dump Trump movement and, you know, the argument they're making, the arguments plural to me are just really specious. And, and one of the arguments that was laid out was that, you know, look, it's either Trump or, or, you know, disaster.
We're going to lose, we're going to win or lose with Trump is basically what they're saying. Um, and the point of my piece today was no, you're going to lose with Trump. You're not going to win with Trump. So it's either we dump Trump in Cleveland in four weeks or Hillary Clinton is the 45th president of the United States.
Now, Jay, I want to stop right there because you're going to, I want to hear your case for why it's certain oblivion, but can I just ask a question, am I wrong to think that it's kind of crazy for a political party to take that gamble? I mean, you know, the Democrats nominated McGovern, they knew he was going to struggle, but they didn't, they didn't believe that the life of their party was on the line. You know, maybe Bob Dole wasn't the greatest presidential history, but party, it wasn't an existential gamble to make him the nominee. I firmly agree with that Republican insider.
If Donald Trump wins, we'll have a forever different Republican party, but if Donald Trump loses, the party's just done does a sane political organization take that gamble in the first place. I don't think so. And look, I think that there's a huge difference between 2016 and you mentioned McGovern in 72 and Dolan 96, you know, neither of them were great candidates. McGovern was a pretty gush darn terrible candidate, but the Democrats were bound to lose that year, you know, all of the structural advantages favored Nixon's reelection that year.
And the same thing in 96 with Dole versus Clinton, you know, with Bob Dole, the ideal candidate to select, no, he was, and he wasn't a great candidate, but everything favored the Democrats that year. Now, this is a year where Alan Abramowitz, who is a professor of political science at Emory University and pretty sympathetic to the Democratic Party as a commentator, but he has a predictive model that shows a Republican's winning this year. And his response to the model is this, this predictor result is don't believe my model, because my model presumes a political party that has lost its marvel. It doesn't nominate somebody that, you know, three sets of the country to test.
And I think he's got a point, I don't really share any of Abramowitz's politics, but I think on this point, I think he's absolutely correct. So what is wrong? Why do you say that it's certain oblivion? Because I saw Paul Manafort on TV this weekend, he said the campaign hasn't really started.
They've got 16 states, he specifically said that they were going to have organizations on the ground. And no one has fired up the voters like Donald Trump. Why are you, Jake, also certain that it's oblivion? Look, I mean, you know, you always have to keep a caveat in there, you know, because, you know, just sort of, you never know anything to a third or two.
Something crazy can happen in blah, blah, blah, you know. But look, I think that beyond that, the polling data is just so that for Trump and his financing is just so bad. And as a candidate, he's just so bad. And, you know, if you're trying to make an argument for Trump winning this, I really have trouble seeing a data point that you can hang your hat on.
You know, just let's take him, run it down. You know, first of all, he's down by seven point nation, why did Hillary Clinton, which is a terrible position to be in? Second of all, he's under 40% of the polling averages, which is a terrible position to be in. And third of all, you know, he's universally known.
I mean, this is not like, you know, nominating Michael D. Caucus in 1988, where, you know, people didn't really get really didn't know him very well, you know, or even Al Gore in 2000, who was still at this point more or less under Clinton's shadow, you know, until the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, you know, Gore was still more or less under Clinton's shadow. You know, people didn't really have very close engagement with Al Gore. You know, some of Trump has been known commodity.
People know if people have known him for 30 years, he's been making headlines, usually that headline, but he said, make it headlines for 30 years. And when you look at his favorable rating, you know, his favorable rating is like 34% and his unfavorable rating is 60%. This is a terrible number. And that explains the polls.
And, and so, you know, the fact that he's losing, it's not like he's losing because people don't know him. It's he's losing because people know him and they really don't like him. But it doesn't matter because he's a brilliant businessman and he's going to raise all this money and brilliantly maximize the value of the money while Hillary Clinton is wastefully spending hers. Yeah, that's exactly.
That's the premise of the Trump campaign wants you to believe. But I don't believe it. You know, his fundraising, his fundraising numbers for the month of May were truly wretched. He raised $3 million in the month of May.
He has about a million dollars cash on him. These are truly appalling numbers, Michael, especially considering the fact that he had the primary wrapped up on May the third. So the entire month of May with the exception of just three days was really spent what should have been spent in an effort of unifying the party and donors coming in and getting getting this operation off the ground. He didn't do any of that.
He's so far Hillary Clinton on the other hand was still fighting off running standards for the entire month of May, but the end of the month had $40 million cash on him. Trump has had a million. So he doesn't have any money and moreover, you start, you know, like RNC after his wretched, mind-numbingly awful fundraising numbers came out. And the RNC started touting all this, you know, all the money they'd raised online in a couple days, which, you know, bought them a good story or two out of political and Washington Post.
But anybody who knows campaign finance knows that, you know, that's not how you that's not how you fund a presidential campaign, you know, you do it one or two ways, right? You get the big donors in and the funders that sort of do the things that, you know, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton did, you wrangle all these people in, or you spend a ton of time in efforts building a grassroots network of donors like Bernie Sanders did. And Barack Obama did both, which is why he was such a fundraising juggernaut, probably done nine.
Okay, Trump pulled in a couple million dollars, he's got a nice pop out of his first web blast or whatever, pulled in a nice pop on, you know, some online donations, but he doesn't have a nationwide fundraising infrastructure in place. And, you know, the donors in the Republican Party are lukewarm, it's best about him. And he has made any investment into a grassroots network of, you know, fund raising like Bernie Sanders or, you know, like Howard Dean did back in 2004, didn't have any of that, didn't have any of this, Michael. So where what, we're four months out from the general election, he's got a million dollars in the bank, his favorable rating is at 36%.
Hillary Clinton has literally, literally has 30 times the amount of money that he has right now in the bank. Okay. He is, he is done. And let, and let Hillary Clinton get indicted.
He is done. Well, Jay cause I know you're wrong because Donald Trump has the magic word Brexit doesn't Brexit prove that the world is just ready for change and to throw out the insiders and you can't trust the polls. It's funny you mentioned that, Michael, because the world, you know, our country is ready for change. As a matter of fact, the ABC News of Washington Post poll, you know, shows, shows the country overwhelmingly unhappy with the status quo in the country.
And when they asked people, do you think that we should present next presidential, continue the policies of Barack Obama? Or do you think they should go in a new direction? Overwhelmingly said new direction. And yet that very same poll showed Trump down, I mean, the average of polls has Trump down seven points.
I think that will have him down like 15 points or something like that, 11 points. Yeah. Right. So what that tell you, it tells you while the country is interested in a change, they are not interested in a change brought about by some too big commune who scanned his way into the Republican nomination.
So look, and this is the thing. This is why I wrote the paper piece because, you know, and you see this in these stories about the stalwart Republican delegates who were like, Oh, it's Trump or bust. Okay. It's but it's not, it's not Trump goes to White House or it's but it's, we dump this guy in Cleveland in July and we take our chances by that route and hope that we can, you know, we can win the White House that way or we lose to Hillary Clinton with Trump.
Those are our options. That's it. Trump is not going to be the 45th president of the United States are in some catastrophic event that happens that hits the Democrats, you know, like that's, that's where I think we are right now. I don't think any data, any hard evidence to suggest any other conclusion except that so delegates who are going to Cleveland in July should recognize that a vote on the floor of the convention in Cleveland for Donald Trump is a vote for Hillary Clinton.
It is a vote for a generation or more of liberal democratic dominance of the Supreme Court. It is a vote that taught this the Senate majority away and it is a vote that endangers the House majority. That's it. You know, somewhere Donald Trump is wearing a black mask and cape holding his fingers about an inch apart going, Jay, cause I find your lack of faith disturbing.
And then he uses his Jedi powers of the Sith to destroy you and win the election. Why don't you grasp that? He's just a magical political figure who makes magical things happen. Jay, cause I know because my Twitter feed tells me that every day.
Jay, cause thanks so much for your comments and I'm sure that once President Trump opens up his reeducation camp, you'll get your own wing. I'm sure I'm going to get audited up something awful. You've been listening to the weekly standard podcast. Please be sure to check weekly standard.com regularly for podcasts updates.
I'm your host, Michael Graham.