At the time there likely wasn't enough evidence for the republicans to be assured bush would win (especially since there were different factors in doing the recounts), so ending the recounts early would be the safest option.

Eta: here is a link to an article that discusses the recount in more detail.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/polit...ies/index.html

A message to McConnell?

McConnell's life dream is to stack the courts. Trump still thinks he can win the election.

McConnell doesn't appear to care if Trump loses.

I think Moscow Mitch would prefer that trump would be re-elected, but just realizes trump doesn't have a chance at winning.

Sent from my LM-X320 using Tapatalk

No, pragmatism. The only way he can possibly turn this around is by throwing cash at it, which he's only willing to do because it isn't his cash anyway.

$10k for everyone in a swing state ought to do it.

He may very well be right.

As much as I want to puke saying this, Trump's illness will do for him what 911 did for Dubya. Mark my words.

Have we already talked about President Trump’s #PlatinumPlan?

Are there people dumb enough to not see that this item (and all the rest) is a hollow last-ditch campaign promise that Trump would never, ever, ever work towards?

The people who would ostensibly benefit from the plan are not the targeted audience for the announcement of the plan.

Sent from my moto g(7) optimo maxx(XT1955DL) using Tapatalk

It looks so much like a random wish list that people just might perceive it that way.

Anyway, I wonder what the white supremacy advocates will think of treating the KKK like a terrorist group, making Juneteenth a national holiday etc.

And I think even some of the simpleminded realize there's a limit to what can be accomplished with an executive order. If he could do all that stuff, he would have done it already.

GWB's approval rating immediately shot up to 90% after the 9/11 attacks - in large part because he actually tried to, you know, lead the country. I'm guessing that, had his response been "I take no responsibility, the states should handle it", people would not have been so impressed.

Similarly, Dolt 45 would be in much less political trouble had he actually tried to lead the country at any point in time, rather than groveling before despots and winking fondly at violent white supremacists.

I don't think so.

A key appeal of Trump is that he is triggering the Libs with not following the rules.
And getting hospitalized for not following the rules is very much a vindication of what the Libs have been saying all along.

Except that since getting the diagnosis, he has continued to act to "trigger teh libz" by attending fundraisers, not wearing a mask and going for a drive to acknowledge the "patriots" lurking, unmasked, outside the hospital.

This is a man who not only took one for the team by failing to bow to the libs and change his behaviour, but who has bravely soldiered on, doing work and getting out (in stark contrast to Hidin' Biden).

I fear that this is what his base want and may sway some undecideds who will consider his actions as strength. :(

Throughout his term, Trump had an air of invulnerability: Mueller, Impeachment, tons of negative books and news, and nothing seemed to stick.

This definitely does, to a degree that his supporters must not only fear his resignation/removal, but his actual demise.

All Authoritarians have one thing in common: they are powerful as long as they seem powerful. Weakness brings out the sharks.
This makes Trump seem weak, literally so.

You can be sure that the GOP is working feverishly on a post-Trump scenario, starting with looking for ways to get their campaign money back.

I doubt it.

Opinion polls taken since Trump was diagnosed suggest that the majority of people think Trump had not done enough to protect himself against Covid19. Its hard to get sympathy when people think "you brought it on yourself".

Compare that to 9/11, where most people (apart from perhaps a few conspiracy theorists and the like) see the attacks as something that were unexpected. i.e. it was easier to see Bush as a sort of victim of circumstance who was put into a difficult situation through no fault of his own.

I'm not sure. They are already selling the narrative of him working through it - what a hero! They'll manage the usual logic disconnect of simultaneously holding in their heads two contradictory thoughts:

"What a warrior, carried on working through a vicious Chinese virus that has killed lesser men"

and

"It's all a hoax / no worse than the flu. Look at Trump - he had it and was fine."

Just like that stupid woman who posted to intimate that the democrats / deep state / liberal media had deliberately infected him via the mic and lectern during the debate (because he was fine before that) and then also posted what a warrior he was because he had whumped Biden in the debate, despite suffering from Covid.

Trump is a religion, immune to logic.

Latest Ladbroke odds, so democrats take total control:

Next US Presidential Election
Winning Party
Democrats
8/15
Republicans
6/4
Election Specials
Democrats to win control of House, Senate & White House
10/11
Republicans to win control of House, Senate and White House
4/1

Standard technique - as always with the modern GOP, these are meant to signal that Toupee Fiasco falls into the safe, "not a racist" bin. The dumber white supremacists will howl and rage, the smarter ones will figure it out immediately.

(And by "dumber", I mean folks that think he cares about the KKK, or that he knew what Juneteenth even was before this year. These moves reek of Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner - just pathetically obvious.)

What it seems to have done so far, based on FiveThirtyEight's poll numbers, is a small uptick in his approval rating which isn't reflected in election polls.

Yeah but the defining oddness (politically speaking) of Trump has always been that nothing ever affects his approval rating. From the moment he really gained steam as the Republican nominee to now he's maintained that weirdly consistent 40 to 45-ish approval rating across more crises then the run of your average soap opera.

People made up their minds about Trump quickly and stayed there.

Accepting Donald Trump as your personal Lord and Savior seems to be the terminal thought to end all thought processes.

I really struggle to imagine the voter who has been up until now undecided on Trump, but has now decided to vote for him because he caught the coronavirus.

Well, to be fair, I approve of him getting sick, because I think the bastard deserves some suffering, so there's that.

I'll bet you vast sums of cash. We just need to firm up the particulars.

Do it the Trump way. Bet vast sums of someone else's cash.

Lots of "concern" here, lots. Anyway, I would advice to check the main poll aggregators which really are the best actual data at the moment. The Biden lead is exceptionally big in these polarized times and remarkably stable, except that it has been slowly rising for weeks now. So maybe a bit less "concern" would be in order...

Personally, I'd say that the change that has shown thus far is insignificant - more or less swamped by random variation. The main thing about these aggregators is that they smooth out sudden spikes in this or that poll, unless they reflect *actual* shifts in public opinion - at which point they're reflected decently in every poll.

I struggle to imagine anyone who isn't decided on their position on President Trump but apparently they exist.

Whether they're stuck making a decision between President Trump and Joe Biden is a different matter - though they probably exist - IMO it's more a case of whether someone will actually bother to turn out and vote for him.

Either way, suddenly feeling sorry for him or thinking that he's bravely putting his own welfare to one side to work for the good of the country may be just enough to persuade that person to vote to re-elect the President.

"President Trump's re-election campaign is arguing that his COVID-19 diagnosis and subsequent hospitalization should be seen as advantages over his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, who has not contracted the coronavirus, in the lead up to the presidential election.

Erin Perrine, the Trump campaign's director of press communications, told Fox News on Monday that Trump's bout with the virus is just another addition to his list of "firsthand experiences" — which also includes his career as a businessman and the last several years in the Oval Office — that Biden does not have."

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/polit...?ocid=msedgdhp

Brilliant. There's no doubt Trump has lots of experience Biden hasn't. Has Biden ever paid off a porn star, even once?

Biden could've gone the extra mile and contracted H1N1 while he was VP, but did he? No. Because he doesn't care enough about the US of A.

I'm sold.

Biden could also have declared bankruptcy several times, cheated on his taxes, and cheated on his wives. I guess that would have given more of the same experience as Trump, too.

Has Biden ever had to run the country during a Trump Presidency? No only Trump has.

Checkmate libruls.

Really? From the way trump talks/campaigns I thought Biden was the incumbent any trump was the challenger.

Sent from my LM-X320 using Tapatalk

I just know Trump will recover and then downplay the virus even more. He'll be something like this:

"The doctors couldn't believe my recovery. They said, 'Sir, how did you beat it so fast?' and I said, 'I have a great immune system, one of the great immune systems of all time. You've never seen an immune system like mine, believe me.' And it was no big deal, really. They said 'Oh weren't you worried you'd die?' and I was like 'No, but I tell you what, Sleepy Joe should be worried. He should be worried because the Kung Flu will take him like that [makes slashing gesture]. Why do you think he always wears that mask? He's scared! He's scared and he's weak."

He just tweeted he'll be released today. This leads me to believe that it was all a political stunt

Could be, although, being a stunt would conflict a bit with the leaks about low blood oxygen levels and requiring steroids.

It leads me to believe he'll be readmitted back to the hospital within 24 hours in much worse condition. The man's a fool to himself, not just to the rest of us.

I think that is not unlikely, but I try not to get my hopes up, this is 2020 after all.

There's still some people at the White House he hasn't infected yet. He'll go back to the Hospital after he's licked all of them.

There was a discussion in the Trump and COVID thread about the side effects of the drug he was given, from someone who has taken it themselves.

"It is an upper; within just a few hours you feel smarter and believe you are thinking faster than ever. When on it I would make elaborate jokes that I thought were clever but most others didn’t get. You don’t need to sleep."

That's likely why he's babbling about how great he feels.

He really needs to go by the Senate on his way.

How is this different from how he normally behaves?