For anybody (like me) who still has a few nagging doubts about whether the Trump vote is soft, the man himself has answered them! If anybody is unfamiliar with Trump's M.O. incidentally, this obsessive rattling out of approval ratings (sales figures) is typical of the man. All to often he confuses opinion with fact. I'm still non-plused by his assertion that he has a 93% approval rating in Aberdeen (someone omitted the decimal point surely?)
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/01/23/trump_i_could_stand_in_the_middle_of_fifth_avenue_and_shoot_somebody_and_i_wouldnt_lose_any_voters.html
I suspect Trump is actually wrong though when he says he could shoot someone in New York and his vote wouldn't be affected. It would probably go up!
I've also been playing about with the four early states this evening for half an hour, and it's apparent since about October that there's a clear relationship between the 3 extreme right wing candidates and the rest of the field.
Cruz's vote rose as Carsons fell. Trump showed a small increase at the same time but his profile was generally speaking flatter. Now that Cruz's vote is coming under a bit pressure (it hasn't dropped on the same scale that Carsons did) Trumps is rising again.
Why is this significant? Well if you take the three candidates from about October onwards and add their totals up across the four states, they're nearly always hitting about 60% between them. The only thing that's changing is the distribution. Basically, the voters are changing horses, but critically, they aren't migrating to the moderates. The core vote for the rightists is always about 60%. Even if a moderate did come to the fore as an establishment candidate, and everyone got behind them, they could only muster 40% at the moment. They need to persuade those currently risiding in the Trump, Cruz, Carson, cadre to migrate, to win. This isn't happening yet though.
Basically as Carson supporters lost faith in their man, they continued to travel to the further reaches of the solar system and landed on the planet Cruz. As planet Cruz started to become less inhabitable they've boldly gone further out to the Kuiper belt and found that the planet Trump can support life forms. Planet Earth is through, and there's nothing I can do
This hasn't always been the case though. A check of the national polling suggests that in the summer of 2015 the moderates had the collective 60/40 advantage, so it would indicate that there's been a 10% swing to the extreme right. The three horsemen of the apocalypse have probably been cross pollenating each other, as until recently they were more reluctant to scrap amongst themselves. The moderates by contrast played silly buggers and addressed themselves rather than the perceived needs (fears) of the voters with the combined effect of mutually assured destruction
We might conclude that there is a soft underbelly to the GOP vote, but its narrowing and needs just about all of it to shift back on an eliptical orbit like a comet to affect the outcome. At the moment it looks like the horse has bolted and one of the right wingers will win the game of musical chairs.
Cruz has been able to attract Carson voters, and now Trump is seemingly proving he can attract Cruz voters, albeit not quite to the same degree. The moderates just don't seem to be capable of bringing the right wingers back. It's as if once they've ridden the storm front onto the extreme, they've completed the journey and undergone some kind of evangelical conversion to the dark side. Once there, they aren't returning. So the pool continues to expand with the variable factor being which camp they head to
