Given how Ailes negotiated their coverage of Trump with the campaign, wonder what deal was cut with Fiorina to be promoted as debate winner?
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) August 13, 2015
I raised this possibility yesterday: If the GOP had to choose its candidates tomorrow, I think we might be looking at a Walker/Fiorina ticket. JEB! was supposed to be the “serious” Repub establishment candidate, but his recent #speechfails have been an embarrassment to the Bush Crime Cartel’s reputation. They were never the best-spoken bunch of expensively-educated thugs, but at least you could count on them to campaign ferociously. Big gowk John Ellis Not-Bush is shuffling around acting like he doesn’t want to be entertaining roomfuls of rich donors and cheap gawkers in return for a figurehead position in the Oval Office, the ingrate.
Scott Walker — another mean dumb homely jamoke, but one who’s always happy to dance for his masters’ money on command — has long been considered the first choice of the Koch brother industrialists and their insurgent “Heartland” campaign to capture the Teahadi-blasted shell of the GOP from those effete East Coast financiers. Unfortunately, Scotty can’t even be trusted to memorize a do-not-take-these-calls list, or to get through a media avail without some idiot boast about how making Eagle Scout prepared him to be commander-in-chief. No way can Walker be trusted to make it through the post-con portion of the campaign without revealing, even to the less-than-picky standards of the low-info American voter, that he believes hiding from protestors at the State Capital means he could face down ISIS. Fiorina, on the other hand, is extremely palatable to the Wall Street/Silicon Valley “disruptopians”, but her one prior campaign made her a laughingstock, and there’s thousands of ex-employees and ex-business-acquaintances standing by to tell the world how much she sucks. (Also, a predictable core of the Republican Base-in-every-sense voters simply won’t vote for a candidate without a penis, because ethics in gaming political journalism.)
Now comes a data-driven post on “winners and losers” from Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight:
…[I]t’s been several days, and we have some post-debate polls to look at (seven as of this writing, to be exact). And there are a few clear winners and losers…
Winners
Carly Fiorina: She gained ground in every poll taken after the debate. In five of the seven polls, the gain was 6 percentage points or more. This shouldn’t be surprising given the initial reaction to her performance in Thursday’s earlier debate. Over 80 percent of Iowa Republicans, according to a Suffolk University poll, said she was the most impressive of the undercard debaters. We can’t be sure that she’ll be in the top tier for the next debate (on Sept. 16), but she has a good chance. And 93 percent of Iowa Republicans said she should be…Losers
Scott Walker: This one surprised me a little, but the polling is clear. Walker is the only candidate who lost ground in every single post-debate poll. In Iowa, where Walker had been leading, just 5 percent of voters said his performance was the most impressive of all the candidates. Walker’s debate night was bad enough that he has lost his edge in Iowa to Trump…
Vote for Scott Walker, America's sinister step dad. pic.twitter.com/oDjSKOQTZG
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) August 13, 2015
Hear me now and believe me later: We’re gonna see pundits floating WALKER/FIORINA ’16 trial balloons. After all, by the “right” standards, DUBYA/CHENEY was a big fvckin’ success!
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Apart from “Game of Thrones: Straw Poll Edition,” what’s on the agenda for the evening?