The Real Reason Trump Probably Will Get Re-Elected
Lots of liberals and Democrats are coming to the realization that defeating the most-hated president since George W. Bush isn’t going to be easy, and just as with W, might not happen at all. Most of them have identified the wrong reasons for that. It’s not the split in the Democratic Party, it’s not the Electoral College. It’s human psychology.
Researchers have known for some time now that when people are confronted with too many choices, they have great difficulty making a decision. For example, marketers have found that consumers can only process seven possible choices at a time. A greater number than that leads to indecision, unhappiness, and even suppresses purchases — some people cope by making no choice at all.
It’s not hard to see how that translates to the Democratic primary field. Some commenters have in the past few days mentioned the lack of enthusiasm for any of the dozen-plus contenders — exactly what researchers learned by studying the cereal and soft drink aisles in your grocery store.
As behavioral scientist Lilly Kofler pointed out in a Politico piece today, the situation is likely to lead to lower voter turnout.
We saw a demonstration of this so-called “cereal aisle effect” in the Chicago mayoral race, where a crowded, diverse, and qualified field of 14 candidates without prohibitive frontrunners coincided with almost the lowest turnout in city history at 33.4 percent. … An abundance of marginal candidates will make it harder for Democratic primary voters to comfortably evaluate the candidates with realistic chances of winning—and paradoxically that will reduce enthusiasm for the party’s eventual nominee.
She doesn’t bring it up, but I would argue that too many choices among similar candidates is why Donald Trump was able to vanquish the 16 actual politicians he ran against for the Republican nomination in 2016.
I can see this if there are still 420 dem candidates come November, but Trump’s win (primary and general) kind of disproves this.
Not if you read the link, it doesn’t. It shows why 16 more-or-less identical candidates lost. Trump won because he was the only one who stood out.
How many declared Republican candidates were there in 2016?
17. Trump and the 16 dwarves. Bernie is the Democratic equivalent.
Hmm. OK.
Enough so that there was a ‘kiddie table’ debate before the real one.
The rubes, bigots and religious nuts will be out in force to vote for the carnival barker.
There were only 63 million last time, and there will be no more than that this time. Only way the Democrats lose is low turnout, and unfortunately, too many candidates will lower turnout.
I do provide the links for a reason. I’m not going to give all her points here.
One of the reasons I was not for impeachment is that Trump remains a liability for the Republicans and will almost single handedly keep a sense of alarm going in the nation, it’s not over the manufactured “national emergency”, it’s over the nightmare in the White House. Candidates will start falling by the wayside, many are marginal and know it, when the money dries up their gone. Sure, there is no messiah in sight, not yet.
I find it somewhere between humorous and disheartening that despite all the comments, nobody has actually clicked on the link to read the entire story.
On April Fool’s Day in 2014, NPR’s web site ran a headline that read, “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?” If people clicked on it, they found a paragraph explaining that it was only posted to see how many people would comment without clicking through to the story. The number was in the thousands.