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Originally Posted by Buster
You find his bombast relevant, but his policies irrelevant.
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Not what I said.
I find his personality fair game and I'm not interested in talking about his policies.
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What I find strange about this, is that it is exactly how he is gaining his supporters.
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Nothing strange about it. The GOP front-runner is going to have about the numbers Trump has pretty much regardless of anything, so Trumps achievement is winning the primary.
Conservatives love to antagonize liberals even more than the other way around. Trump set himself up as the guy that the liberals hate the most. It was a good strategy in the primary, especially against bad competition that didn't really excite anyone. However in the process he alienated large parts of GOP and huge voter blocks that might never bother to listen to him anymore.
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What's also interesting is that Clinton didn't start really climbing in the polls relative to Trump until she also stopped talking about policy, and switched to more superficial criticisms. To my ear, it just sounds like people having the political version of a Kim vs Chloe Kardashian argument.
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I would simply say that Clinton is looking like the much better campaigner at this point. Being "boring and reasonable" was a winning strategy against Sanders, as his biggest weakness was being seen as unrealistic. She didn't need to charm the Democratic base, they like her just fine as the primary showed.
Plus it set her apart as "the reasonable one" without antagonizing anyone.
Now that the real campaign has started, Clinton has that back-catalog of boring policy speeches that people want to know exist. They might not care about policies, but they want to think a candidate can handle that stuff. Clinton can now focus on being more likeable (or less hateable) than Donald Trump. Trump on the other hand still needs to prove that he's a credible politician AND that he's more likeable than Hillary Clinton. Advantage Clinton, obviously.
(Plus Clinton did a great job in stealing US exceptionalism from Trump.)