The argument that Trump’s rise was enabled by basic cable and the networks that have raked in millions in badly needed advertising cash (while giving Trump an unmediated platform to spout whatever ooze he chooses) is a core contention of many media analysts and many of Trump’s defeated foes. Ted Cruz and his staff, in particular, are enamored of the idea that the GOP nominee secured the nomination as a result of $2 billion or so in unmediated “earned” free media.But John Dickerson, the fair-haired host of the stubbornly civil, traditional and very much mediated “Face the Nation” program on CBS, believes that presidential politics is a Darwinian process. Trump, he argues, has simply out-primate-ed the competition on a level evolutionary playing field by taking advantage of the open microphone — and now he’s refusing to evolve and being eaten alive, fair and square.

Trump has been a naive or deluded bidder for POTUS, winning however regretfully the GOP primaries, but the voting base, as the alienated LIV base is a mass market for losing, hence the underbidding of their success, especially as religiosity of a conservative kind declines by generation. Their sense of losing can be seen in the extremism of their messaging.

If the value of a commodity is unknown, a prospective buyer must realize that a bid based on an overestimate of its value is likely to be accepted.

In this situation, merely finding out that one’s bid is accepted may cause one to reduce the estimate of a commodity’s value, so winning an auction can bring a feeling of regret.

Acceptance of a bid is an informative event, and failure to incorporate this contingent information into the bidding strategy can lead to excessive bids and subsequent losses, a result widely known as the “winner’s curse.”

There is considerable anecdotal evidence that bidders for a prize of uncertain value fall prey to the winner’s curse, and persistent overbidding has also been observed in laboratory experiments.

There is a second factor that can also induce overbidding: the thrill of winning. This raises the possibility that overbidding is due to a “utility of winning” instead of being the result of an irrational failure to anticipate the informational content of a bid’s acceptance.

One way to distinguish these explanations is to examine a situation in which the winner’s curse effect is neutralized, to see if bids are still too high.

In order to neutralize the winner’s curse, we identify an opposing bias: a situation in which a failure to anticipate the informational content of a bid’s acceptance will cause one to bid below the optimal bid, resulting in a “loser’s curse.”

Since the loser’s curse produces underbidding, its effect is the opposite of that arising from the winner’s curse (Holt & Sherman 2005, Massey & Thaler 2005)

In the context of applying a loser’s curse model to Trump one can see that the last pick rather than the first in the top round actually brings more net benefit to a team choosing draft picks, but tehDonald is not a rookie in football even as he has revealed himself to be one politically. Voting for him in November will reveal suboptimal bidding in an electoral college. SAD!

Trump seems obsessed by losers and ultimately confronted by losing or rather trying to negate its inevitability, hence delivering a Milwaukee speech written for a Black audience to an actual White one. As a result, the speech was less about racial problems and more about cheering on the police.

RedState’s Erick Erickson is a total loser who “has a history of supporting establishment losers in failed campaigns,” according to Donald Trump, who didn’t want to go to Erickson’s stupid meeting anyway and is probably glad he got banned, just as he’s glad that Macy’s ended its relationship with him.

Trump has no time for losers like Erickson, and like the thousands of other losers he has identified over the last few years.

Like Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie O’Donnell is a true loser and a total loser. George Will is also a loser. Beauty queen Sheen Monnin is a loser. People without egos are losers. Seriously. The online magazine Salon is a loser, as is the Huffington Post and the Patch.  www.washingtonpost.com/…

And yet avoiding losing is precisely not the same as winning, as the poor get poorer and the rich get surplus value.

Trump is playing to one of the most powerful emotions in our economic life—what behavioral economists call loss aversion. The basic idea, which was pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is that people feel the pain of losses much more than they feel the pleasure of gains. Empirical studies suggest that, in general, losing is twice as painful as winning is enjoyable. So people will go to great lengths to avoid losses, and to recover what they’ve lost.

Trump’s emphasis on losing is unusual: even in bleak times, American Presidential candidates tend to offer optimistic messages. But it has worked for him, because it resonates with what many Republican voters already feel. A study by the Pew Research Center last fall found that seventy-nine per cent of those who lean Republican believe that their side is losing politically. A Rand survey in January found that voters who believed that “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does” were 86.5 per cent more likely to prefer Trump. Trump supporters feel that they, and the country, are losing economically, too. In the Rand survey, Trump did better with the people who were the most dissatisfied with their economic situation, and exit polls from the Republican primaries show that almost seventy per cent of those who voted for Trump said that they were “very worried” about the state of the economy—as against only forty-five per cent of all voters in Democratic primaries…

As one study puts it, “People are willing to run huge risks to avert or recover losses.” In the real world, this is why people hold falling stocks, hoping for a rebound rather than cutting their losses, and it’s why they double down after losing a bet. For Trump’s voters, the Obama years have felt like a disaster. Taking a flyer on Trump actually starts to feel sensible

However, it may be too late, as bidders defect and the GOP has started to cut Trump’s funding and reassert control. But wasn’t that the Trump hat’s premise anyway, that America had lost “greatness”, but such Reaganist fantasy has always been fleeting. Trump has just been grifting to prep his bunker, and if others imitate that losing proposition, then let’s make some money…

Those who have studied presidential campaigns since 1952 — the advent of modern polling and TV — aren’t writing off Trump yet. But they say that time is running short for Trump to reverse the trajectory of the race before voters’ preferences become locked in.

There are only a handful of opportunities left for Trump to impact the race, including the three general-election debates, in which Trump has indicated he intends to participate, though he wants to negotiate some of the details. But some pollsters caution that there is a significant risk that, even by the first debate in late September, the race will be locked in against Trump, who would be on an inexorable path to defeat regardless of how he performs…

Among those voters who’ve committed, though, Clinton has a clear lead: Her margin in most national polls is in the high-single-digits, according to most polling averages. And she leads in all 11 swing states that comprise POLITICO’s Battleground States project — including 5 states where Clinton’s lead is 7 percentage points are greater. Trump would have to sweep the remaining six states — where Clinton leads, but by smaller margins — just to force an Electoral College tie.

Some of these Clinton advantages already appear virtually impenetrable. A CBS News/YouGov poll last week in New Hampshire gave Clinton a 9-point lead, 45 percent to 36 percent.

But as CBS News Elections Director Anthony Salvanto explained on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, many of the voters Trump would need to win over in order to come back aren’t open to voting for him.

“So, we asked people who aren’t voting for Donald Trump, would you consider voting for him? And among women, with whom he is down almost 20 points anyway, women who are not voting for him, the number who say, yes, they would consider it is zero. And the number who say maybe is 9 percent,” Salvanto said.

“So, if you’re at zero in the number of people who will consider you going forward, that just emphasizes what a tough hill it is.”