Van Jones to Democrats: Don't Underestimate 'Trumpzilla'

While the sore losers on the Republican side are now openly advocating sabotaging the GOP candidate in the fall election, so long as his name is Donald J. Trump, the smarter Democrats are exhorting their troops not to stay home because they think Trump has no chance. Take, for example, former Obama administration official Van Jones:

CNN contributor and former Obama aide Van Jones put out a warning to his fellow Democrats on Friday: Donald Trump is probably going to win the White House. In the Facebook video, Jones credited Trump’s ability to understand and use social media and reality television as well as his appeal to black voters as reasons he will likely win the White House in November.

Jones likened Trump to Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama in the sense that they all excelled in a new medium that no other politician could easily master.

He continued to detail how Trump has been able to use his celebrity to appeal to parts of the Democratic base, especially black voters.

“70 percent of African Americans have a horrible view of Donald Trump,” Jones continued. “In order for the Democrats to win the White House they don’t have to get 50 percent of the black vote or 60, or 70, or 80, or 90, Democrats in order to win historically need 90 to 92 percent of the black vote.”

“If only 70 percent don’t like Donald Trump, that means 30 percent are open to his argument, if he gets half of those, he’s president,” Jones said.

A Public Policy Polling report released on Monday showed Jones might be correct in his opinion that Trump is winning over large segments of the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting bloc. The poll showed that in the swing state of Ohio, Trump would garner 15 percent of the African American vote against Clinton, with another 11 percent undecided.

Really, how hard is this to understand? In 1980, the widely disparaged “cowboy,” Ronald Reagan, won 14 percent of the black vote as he thumped the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, by ten points overall. (People forget that Reagan was also running against a renegade Republican third-party candidate, John Anderson — and still won an absolute majority of the electorate.) The Democrats traditionally view their near-monlithic share of the black vote as a positive good, but the flip side is that if they lose even a bit of it, their path to the White House gets exponentially more difficult.

Watch it on the nest page: you might learn something.