Media Loves Trump

If you ever doubted the media's love of the Donald Trump candidacy, this headline at Politico should disabuse you of that, How Donald Trump Defeats Hillary Clinton: Obama's black supporters are crucial to a Trump win, and pollsters say he has a chance with this bloc. Of course I had to click on that one to see what it was about. What candidate could possibly win the support of both White Nationalists and black voters? It didn't take long to find out that I had succumbed to click bait.

“If he were the Republican nominee he would get the highest percentage of black votes since Ronald Reagan in 1980,” said Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz, referring to the year Reagan won 14 percent of that bloc of voters. “They listen to him. They find him fascinating, and in all the groups I have done, I have found Obama voters, they could’ve voted for Obama twice, but if they’re African-American they would consider Trump.”

It turns out that the Politico reporter on this story, Ben Schreckinger, talked to white Republican pollster Frank Luntz - who has done a few focus groups with Trump supporters. In those, he has found a couple of black people who "find him fascinating." Armed with that information, he predicts that Trump will best Reagan's whopping 14% with black voters. And that leads to a headline about how he "has a chance with this bloc." It's hard to escape the question, "how stupid do they think we are?"

But wait...it gets better. Schreckinger goes on to talk about how that "manly man" Donald Trump can appeal to women voters with sexist attacks against Hillary Clinton for her husband's infidelities. And here's the clincher:

Another longtime Republican pollster and veteran of multiple presidential campaigns has tested Trump’s appeal to blacks and Hispanics and come to the same conclusion. “He behaves in a way that most minorities would not expect a billionaire to behave,” explained the pollster, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships within the party. “He’s not a white-bread socialite kind of guy.”

The candidate who has been trashing Mexicans and immigrants can win over Hispanics because "he's not a white-bread socialite." Really?! No wonder this pollster wanted to stay anonymous. It has nothing to do with protecting his relationship with the party and everything to do with the fact that he just said something monumentally stupid. Next thing you know, they'll be telling us about all the Muslims who support Donald Trump.

Let me be clear. I'm not saying this to diminish the threat posed by a Trump candidacy. There are women, African Americans and Hispanics who will vote for him - on the margins. All you have to do to recognize that is to think: Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. But a headline that says, "he has a chance with this bloc" is intimating something much more than that. My challenge to people like Frank Luntz: find me an African American woman who supports Donald Trump. All this article has is wishful thinking and conjecture. But it made me click...so there's that.