Short on Morons..

Sabermetrics pioneer: There aren’t enough 'morons' to elect Trump

By NICK GASS

The father of Sabermetrics is clearly not a fan of Donald Trump, and he is using his own statistical analysis to explain why the Republican front-runner will not be the 45th president of the United States.

In a post published this week to his website titled "Trump, as in Rump," author Bill James, who is known as one of the pioneers of the analysis of baseball and in-game statistics, broke down his reasoning in a variety of ways.

"I don’t think that Trump can win, frankly, because I don’t think there are enough morons to elect him. A certain percentage of the American public is just morons; that’s the way it is," James wrote in one section. "When you divide the public in two then divide the voters in one of those halves among five candidates or more, a candidate can win by dominating the moron vote because it only takes about one-seventh of the total population to take the 'lead' under those circumstances."

But in a general election situation, James posited, "when you’re talking about needing 51 percent of the whole population, rather than needing 30 percent of half of the population, you run out of morons. I hope we will."

"I hope Trump will lose, because I hope he runs out of morons to vote for him. Again, I stress that I am not trying to tell you what you should think about Donald Trump. I am merely telling you what I think about him," he said. (In his Tuesday night victory speech, Trump noted his support among Americans without college degrees, remarking, "I love the poorly educated.")

At the same time, James said he believed Trump to be on to something, namely that some of what the blustery Manhattan billionaire is pushing for is "courage."

"The responsibility of our elected officials is to stand up for America, and we have had many failings in this regard," he said, turning to a baseball analogy: "It is the responsibility of the New York Yankees to do what is best for the New York Yankees, and not to worry about whether the Boston Red Sox fans are annoyed by this."

"I believe in the old phrase 'tough s---' or, as we used to say to our kids about 14 times a day, 'tough bananas,'" he explained. "You don’t like Guantanamo? Tough s---. The rest of the world doesn’t approve of water boarding? Tough s---."

James concluded by saying that he would vote for anyone other than Trump but remarking that he also did not think everything the candidate says "is untrue or is without merit."

"He’s on to something," James wrote of Trump. "Hopefully somebody who isn’t The Donald will be smart enough to pick up on it."