Donald Trump Goes 'All-In' — And He's Got a Realistic Chance of Becoming President

Following-up from Cathleen Decker's analysis, "Donald Trump Accepts Nomination, Depicts Grim Times Under Obama and Clinton."

Check out Nate Silver, at 538, "Donald Trump Goes ‘All-In.’ How Will Clinton Respond?":

Don't think people are really grasping how plausible it is that Trump could become president. It's a close election right now.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 23, 2016

Donald Trump goes "all-in." How will Clinton respond? https://t.co/VsXRRbJfH7 pic.twitter.com/DoVm79AD1I

— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) July 22, 2016

CLEVELAND — No matter what happens between now and the election on Nov. 8, Donald Trump’s dark and defiant acceptance speech on Thursday will probably be remembered as a pivotal moment in American political history. If Trump wins the election — an increasing possibility based on recent polls — the speech will serve as proof that he did so as an explicitly nationalist and populist candidate, having stirred up support in a country that has historically resisted such movements. If Trump loses to Hillary Clinton, especially by a wide margin, the speech will probably be seen as an historic debacle, the hallmark of a convention that went wrong from start to finish. Either way, the Republican Party might never be the same.

Trump delivered a long and loud address that violated most of the normal rules of acceptance speeches. The speech, and the Republican convention overall, made only perfunctory efforts to appeal to voters who weren’t already aboard the Trump train. It had no magnanimous gestures to Trump’s vanquished Republican rivals. It contained a fair bit of bragging, but not much autobiographical detail. It contained no laundry list of policy positions. Most strikingly, it was unrelentingly pessimistic, whereas acceptance speeches usually aim to soften the blow.

But Trump has broken a lot of rules and gotten away with it, and it will be a few days before we’ll have a sense of Trump’s convention bounce and a few weeks before we can reliably say how the conventions have affected the election overall. Given what Trump accomplished in the primaries, it’s probably prudent to avoid making too many assumptions in the meantime.

However, Trump is at a potential tactical disadvantage because he’s now committed to a strategy, whereas Democrats get to make the next move at their convention next week...

Still more.