Trump hasn’t moved the needle for Nobel laureates

by philg

One of my Facebook friends referenced “70 Nobel Laureates Endorse Hillary Clinton” (nytimes) to support his beliefs that Trump is (1) the candidate favored by stupid people, (2) a Hitler-grade threat to American democracy, world peace, etc. The original letter seems to be tough to find (Twitter version), but it seems to be signed by American academics who are prospering under the status quo of government funding for university research. Thus it would be in their interest to vote for a candidate promising to preserve the status quo. What was more interesting to me was a section towards the end of the nytimes story:

In 2012, 68 winners of the prize backed President Obama over Mitt Romney. Four years earlier, 76 winners supported Mr. Obama over Senator John McCain.

In other words, previous Republican candidates were equally unpalatable to America’s Nobel laureates.

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8 thoughts on “Trump hasn’t moved the needle for Nobel laureates”

  1. My lefty friends sometimes bring up the “the more education you have, the more likely you are to vote Democrat” thing as a way to imply that only stupid people are conservative. I think it makes more sense that the more education you have, the more likely you are to get your paycheck from the government (either directly or indirectly).

  2. In other words, previous Republican candidates were equally unpalatable to America’s Nobel laureates.

    So the problem is with the party, not this year’s candidate. The party needs to address its fundamental flaws, which may take a few years.

  3. It’s not surprising. McCain, Romney, and Trump were all flawed candidates with unpopular policy positions. Millions of highly educated people will vote Republican, but that won’t be nearly enough.If the Republicans want to appeal to the majority of voters in the populous states (which happens to be the actual goal of presidential politics), they need to come up with policy provisions that are more popular than basting private equity moguls with tax benefits.

    They also love, love, love to talk about overturning Roe and giving states the right to outlaw abortions. Another loser. Millions want to overturn Roe, but millions more want it to remain the law.

    I could go on. It’s not magic. In a democracy, you have to at least say things that are popular in order to get elected President. The Republicans do the opposite.

    The Republican Party is the best organization in the world for getting about 40% of the electoral vote. And, if it can maintain its unholy alliance between the country club capitalists and the low income afflictees of “what’s the matter with Kansas” syndrome, that’s what it’s going to keep doing. (Although the most supportable position its current candidate is “The cyber is so big now.” So he probably won’t get 40% of the electoral vote.)

    When it comes to presidential politics, the Republican Party is kind of like Pluto. It hangs around all the time, but no one is really sure that it’s a political party.

    .

  4. Do the signers of that letter include Democratic Party propagandist Paul Krugman, who got the Nobel Prize for Criticizing Bush, and Democratic Party politician Barack Obama, who got the Nobel Prize for Not Being Bush?

  5. Since Twitter has been widely used for longer than 1 presidential election season, you can easily search for “romney hitler” and find that Trump apparently assumed the mantle of hitlerism from Romney. Not sure how all that works, I would guess it would be similar to Frodo and Sam both carrying the Ring at different times, in the book Lord of the Rings.

  7. Sam, Note the term “presidential politics.” Makes all the difference.

    As to legislative politics, the Republicans’ long term prospects are not as strong as the numbers would indicate. Due to some brilliant gaming of the local redistricting process, states like NC are mostly Democratic, yet send mostly Republicans to Congress.

    When the gerrymandering worm turns, the Republican ranks will be diminished. However that may not occur in 2020 because they knew what they were doing in 2010.

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