[hotpotamus]

> women didn’t generally have the vote for more than a century of that time,

Yes, I consider that a significant weakness.

You keep differentiating between the primaries and general, but to quote you above "Yes, well, getting the right votes are part of campaign performance." In the US, part of being a strong candidate means not only winning the Electoral College, but also winning a major party primary prior to that. That is the system.

And yes, I do not have future sight, so I cannot tell you for sure that Trump will be the nominee, but I see no evidence that he's particularly weak in this primary, indictment or no. He's polling well in the lead and I think is up to 10 Senate endorsements and 50-odd house endorsements for whatever those are worth.

[dragonwriter]

> Yes, I consider that a significant weakness

How can a cobdition which no longer exists be a current weakness in anything except your attempt to generalize from it to current reality?

> In the US, part of being a strong candidate means not only winning the Electoral College, but also winning a major party primary prior to that.

Obviously, winning a nominating contest is part of being a successful candidate, and there are contexts where that is relevant, and being a strog general election candidate is a subset of that.

However, when the context is general election strength, no, ability to win preceding nominating contests is immaterial.

[hotpotamus]

> How can a cobdition which no longer exists be a current weakness in anything except your attempt to generalize from it to current reality?

Let's say that's my way of saying that I think that the misogyny that gave rise to those policies might not be completely gone from the country.

> However, when the context is general election strength, no, ability to win preceding nominating contests is immaterial.

I have to disagree. As far as I know, there is no rule that says that you have to win any kind of primary to run in the general election (I'm told getting onto all state ballots is quite a feat though). And also as far as I know, no one has ever won without the backing of one of the major parties. To be fair, I suppose my thinking isn't so much that any of them are just great candidates, it's more that they suck the least out of any of the options. Perhaps we just don't have any really good candidates any more.