There’s Stupid and Then There’s Primary Season Stupid

So let’s dispense with the Rand Paul has arrived narrative. First, because I’m tired of his family getting my hopes up. Second, because they run such undisciplined campaigns that no single poll (which happens to disagree with dozens of other polls) is even capable of getting my hopes up. This poll sampled 465 voters nationwide with a margin of error of 4.5%. Rand Paul got 5% of the vote. So we can safely deduce that he is actually polling somewhere between .5% and 9.5%. I don’t know how, on the basis of 465 people spread across 57 50 States, we can think anything about anyone. All we really know from this poll is that Trump and Carson are polling well.
On the Trump article, however, we actually get some factual red meat. Yes, all the facts did prevent the authors from writing an article about those facts, but the facts were there nonetheless.

Reviewing the third quarter presidential campaign filings, one finds that Donald Trump runs his presidential campaign much like he ran his casinos – in the red.

The Trump campaign ended the third quarter with $254,772.88 of cash on-hand, which is about 48 percent less than the $487,736.16 with which it started the quarter. Trump is therefore spending money at a faster clip than he’s raising it. Moreover, the campaign also has incurred more than $1.8 million of debts and obligations – no doubt, many of them to Trump himself (he’s billed the campaign $700,000 for the use of his jet). That leaves the campaign with negative cash, which should be a familiar position for the real estate magnate whose companies have declared bankruptcy four times.

Donald Trump, broke, and so bad at running his businesses that he’s only worth over a billion dollars, is running his fledging campaign, mired in campaign appearances with thousands and tens of thousands of supporters and leading everyone (democrats included) in the polls, into the ground. It’s obvious that Donald Trump has no shot! He’s broke!

Look, I don’t like Trump, and I’ve taken endless heat here at Virginia Right for my criticism of Trump – but no matter how much I dislike the candidate, I could never be ignorant enough to post an article about a broke Trump campaign as evidence that my candidate is really doing so much better.

My candidate is really doing so much better.

OK, not better than The Donald (aka He Who Shall Not Be Named), but better than most everyone else. If you really want to look at who is building viable Presidential Campaigns capable of competing with Donald Trumps’ Goliath, his MEGALEG, his radical pro-America insurgency, read this stupid article about Trump being broke.

Look at these numbers. Ted Cruz is clearly running the tightest and most organized campaign; but Marco Rubio, Ben Carson and Jeb Bush are right there. Yes, Jeb Bush has almost half a million dollars in debt against his $10,000,000 raised in small donations, but Jeb also has $96,000,000 in SuperPAC bank. What these two charts tell me is that Donald Trump has competition. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Jeb Bush are for real. They’ll never have to drop out if they don’t want to. They are running aggressive, thrifty campaigns.

However, Donald Trump is A’OK. What middle class American Family is sitting around the dinning room table, balancing their budgets, watching this chaotic Republican Primary unfold on FOXNEWS, and pondering – “Honey, after fun money, tithes, bills, and college fund, we still have $200 left over at the end of the month. Let’s give it to Donald Trump, because he’s our guy, and that billionaire needs our money”? Is that really happening? OK – yes, it is happening. Someone somewhere is sending Donald Trump money. Some middle class family probably read this article and thought to themselves, “OMG Donald Trump is broke! I need to send him money!”. But those people are weird; and we can’t form intelligent opinions on the basis of weird people.

Donald Trump is not broke and you don’t need to send him money. All this article demonstrates is that Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Marco Rubio are in this thing until the end. They are serious candidates, running serious campaigns, with lots of supporters behind them. But those are facts – and this article wasn’t supposed to be about facts. Let’s just get back to the narratives that Rand Paul is on the verge of winning the GOP Nomination and Donald Trumps’ campaign is broke.

Have at it!

Originally published on VAright.com