2016 US Presidential Elections Thread [Trump Wins]

[Netto Azure]

Best thing Sanders can do is try to push for Warren as VP :P

Anyway Kasich just dropped out. Trump is now the presumptive nominee for the GOP. Republicans just committed seppuku I think.

 

[Kanzler]

Amidst all the hubbub the continued disintegration of the American middle class goes unnoticed.

 

[Ivysaur]

I dunno, there was that poll last week that showed Trump ahead by 2 points. Probably an anomaly, but Democrats shouldn't be complacent just because Trump is all but the nominee now.

If I were Trump, I'd be more concerned by the poll saying he's losing Florida by 13 points to Clinton, because the "Solid Democratic" states that have gone blue in every election since 1992 add up to 242 electoral votes. And Florida has 29. And 242 + 29 = 271. So, if Trump loses Florida, he would absolutely need to claw back some state that has been voting democratic in every election for two decades or else he's lost before starting. And that's going to be hard when the polling average puts him 7 points behind her nationally, including 7 points behind her in Arizona, of all places.

And yes, one single poll out of two dozen, especially if it's one from Rasmussen Reports, the lone pollster that predicted a Romney win in almost all swing states in 2012, isn't anything worth being considered so far. After all, if you consider that, according to 538's pollster ratings, Rasmussen has an average bias of R+2.3, actually... Clinton was still leading in that poll, by 0.3%.

Anyway, the topic shouldn't be "can Trump win?" but rather "What the hell is Trump doing as the presidential candidate of an US party?", "What is wrong with the US political system, since it's pretty clear something is pretty wrong?" and "Can the Republican Party be saved, or has the rot gone way too far and it's now just a political machine for racists, demagogues and radicals?", and finally "Should actual bona-fide conservatives -like say, Kasich- just run away and build their own party?". That is the actual topic on hand.

Because the media machine can just act like Donald J. Trump is normal, valid presidential candidate and treat this race like every previous one but this is not normal and Donald J. Trump should not be the president of anything under any circumstance- let alone the United States.

 

[Esper]

I highly, highly doubt it will happen. I can't imagine a case where half the superdelegates are going to switch for the side with the less popular votes. As things currently stand in California, Clinton has a pretty sizeable lead there (and in New Jersey, as well), and that really doesnt seem to have favored Bernie all that much. Unless Clinton spontaneously combusts at some point or is abducted by aliens, the superdelegates seem to be pretty firm in their position.

Also, Indiana wasn't really a huge upset. For Bernie to win California enough to impress superdelegates, there has to be a MASSIVE win. Like, I'm talking around 70-30. For Clinton to lose that badly in a state so diverse, she'd have to drop every racial slur and offensive word in the book on a speech and end it by flipping the bird, but otherwise not happening.

It especially doesn't help that some of these superdelegates are getting harassed by Bernie supporters about their positions, further solidifying them as it is. Generally speaking, most (I'd argue a good number) of superdelegates that support Clinton arent a huge fan of Bernie, so it'd take a devastation of abnormal proportions for them to change their mind.

I'll agree that Bernie has only the slimmest of slim chances, but there are plenty of officials, especially those in blue and purple states states that Bernie won, who will have to be careful because they'll be up for election this cycle or the next and this primary has been a big turn-off for a lot of people because of all the irregularities and shady stuff with voter registration and general dislike for the status quo.

 

[Kanzler]

Anyway, the topic shouldn't be "can Trump win?" but rather "What the hell is Trump doing as the presidential candidate of an US party?", "What is wrong with the US political system, since it's pretty clear something is pretty wrong?" and "Can the Republican Party be saved, or has the rot gone way too far and it's now just a political machine for racists, demagogues and radicals?", and finally "Should actual bona-fide conservatives -like say, Kasich- just run away and build their own party?". That is the actual topic on hand.

I think that might be too much of a generalization. The Republican party is just a wealthier, whiter, party.

 

[Ivysaur]

I'll agree that Bernie has only the slimmest of slim chances, but there are plenty of officials, especially those in blue and purple states states that Bernie won, who will have to be careful because they'll be up for election this cycle or the next and this primary has been a big turn-off for a lot of people because of all the irregularities and shady stuff with voter registration and general dislike for the status quo.

Superdelegates only exist to ensure the winning candidate gets enough votes to go over the top. With a purely proportional system to approportion delegates by primary results, you could end up with, say, the equivalent of Trump being permanently locked out of a majority of delegates at this point even though he has clearly won. The republicans get around this by making a "winner-takes-most" system in which the delegates are skewed in favour of whoever wins more states. The Democrats get over this by offering the great and the good from the party all over a free trip to the convention to cast the final vote.

But if Clinton wins more delegates, more votes and more states -including the top 10 that look more like the overall electorate of the party-, then Sanders has basically 0% legitimacy to claim they should override the will of the voters and give him the nomination anyway.

Like... I donated money to Sanders. I would vote for him if I lived there. But you need to know when you have to fold, you know? I know it sucks, but... she's not winning by 0.1% or exclusively because she won a landslide in Mississippi.

I think that might be too much of a generalization. The Republican party is just a wealthier, whiter, party.

Well, I was using the words of... Romney's deputy campaign manager.

"If we nominate Trump, [the party] is lost beyond this cycle. I think we lose women for a generation, in big numbers," said Katie Packer, who served as Romney's deputy campaign manager and now leads Our Principles super PAC, which spent $10 million in an effort to stop Trump.

"There's a feeling among Republican women that I talk to that the people who would nominate this guy don't have any real respect for us as women — especially professional women. They would rather see us in a "Mad Men" era, where women knew their place and catered to their husband, cooked dinner and met their sexual obligations and didn't have any other role in society. And there are other people who are supporting him because the guy's a blatant racist and they identify with that.

"So there's a sense that, if this is who my party is, I don't really identify with it anymore."

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/republicans-clinton-trump-indiana-222778#ixzz47j9k2Ijh

Also, the Republican party is no longer "a whiter, richer party". It has legitimately become a radical party unwilling to compromise and whose only motto is "my way or the highway", with no desire to govern in any meaningful way, and which out-primaries any candidate trying to negotiate anything at all with the opposition. Just look at the SC blockade, or the utterly useless Congress which can't save Puerto Rico from collapse because they are too busy voting to repeal Obamacare for the 68th time. Please do read the book "It's even worse than it looks", it explains it terrifingly accurately.

 

[Esper]

Like... I donated money to Sanders. I would vote for him if I lived there. But you need to know when you have to fold, you know? I know it sucks, but... she's not winning by 0.1% or exclusively because she won a landslide in Mississippi.

If I'm being perfectly honest, I feel like this primary has been a sham. It's no secret that the DNC has been behind Clinton from the beginning. There have been all manner of voter suppression and irregularities and most of the people in government, politics, and media that we should be able to rely on to stop it or fix it or call people out on it have been complicit or turned a blind eye. The fact that Sanders can still technically win within the rules makes me feel like his continuing is the least that can be done regardless of how small his chances are. While he does it he is a voice for a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have their views heard and his presence is a reminder that a lot of people still support him and the views he stands for. And, practically if he drops out the media will just sweep him under the rug like they've been trying to do since the beginning.

 

[Kanzler]

Also, the Republican party is no longer "a whiter, richer party". It has legitimately become a radical party unwilling to compromise and whose only motto is "my way or the highway", with no desire to govern in any meaningful way, and which out-primaries any candidate trying to negotiate anything at all with the opposition. Just look at the SC blockade, or the utterly useless Congress which can't save Puerto Rico from collapse because they are too busy voting to repeal Obamacare for the 68th time. Please do read the book "It's even worse than it looks", it explains it terrifingly accurately.

But enough of the population is willing to vote for them. They continue to reflect the interests of many Americans who don't agree with the ways of the Democratic party. Obstructionism isn't extremism. The SC bathroom bill isn't something that's supported by most Republicans, heck, the Republican governor came out against it. I'm not too familiar with what's going on with Puerto Rico, but its debt situation has a history which is probably more complicated than "Republicans". A lot of Americans just don't want change but want lower taxes. It looks like there's so much division, but the two main parties are a lot closer than they would be if they were in other countries.

 

[Kanzler]

https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/03/28/divide-muslim-neighborhood-patrols/

OH MY GOD ITS HAPPENING

 

[gimmepie]

That is just painful to look at, but it speaks greatly to the power of fear mongering as a political tool. I doubt that such a law would ever actually go through though since it directly violates the US constitution.

 

[Nah]

yo that's kinda fucked up

 

[Ivysaur]

But enough of the population is willing to vote for them. They continue to reflect the interests of many Americans who don't agree with the ways of the Democratic party. Obstructionism isn't extremism. The SC bathroom bill isn't something that's supported by most Republicans, heck, the Republican governor came out against it. I'm not too familiar with what's going on with Puerto Rico, but its debt situation has a history which is probably more complicated than "Republicans". A lot of Americans just don't want change but want lower taxes. It looks like there's so much division, but the two main parties are a lot closer than they would be if they were in other countries.

You don't seem to understand what I'm saying. It's obstructionism if you can't pass any law unless you control the House, the Senate (with a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority) and the presidency because the Republicans will just vote no to anything endorsed by Obama, even if it's something they were for before he endorsed it, and when anybody willing to compromise with any Democrat to get anything passed it's declared a RINO and primaried out. And it's not a case of "both sides!!!1!!11!": the Republicans are now twice as right-wing as the Democrats are left wing. One of the sides is getting absurdly more radical than the other.

And you are mixing up what I said. The "bathroom ban" has actually been signed into law in North Carolina, which is unbelievable, and similar laws have easily passed through several other state legislatures- that one Governor vetoed it doesn't deny the fact that tens of R representatives and senators voted it up to his desk first.

The SC blockade doesn't mean "South Carolina" but "Supreme Court", in which the Republicans are, for the first time in history, refusing to hold a confirmation vote for a candidate they have nothing against other than "we hope to win the presidency and nominate someone who is as staunchly right-wing as Scalia". In doing so, they'll keep the SC essentially unable to function for an entire year, which sounds like your textbook definition of "reasonable government".

Finally, Puerto Rico has a long story of issues (starting with a racist SC ruling that decided that hispanics were mentally inferior to anglo-saxons and didn't deserve full constitutional protections nor statehood), but the truth is: the (half) state is about to collapse because of several legislative quirks that are banning them from being able to renegotiate their debt like any other bankrup state/city/corporation/whatever other entity not called "Puerto Rico", and instead of passing some sort of emergency stopgap measure to avoid the absolute collapse of the territory's administration (including schools, hospitals and police), they are just fighting and letting the bill draft die in some desk- and the deadline was on May 2nd. They had months to do something about it- but they were too busy not doing anything. That IS their fault.

 

[Kanzler]

You don't seem to understand what I'm saying. It's obstructionism if you can't pass any law unless you control the House, the Senate (with a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority) and the presidency because the Republicans will just vote no to anything endorsed by Obama, even if it's something they were for before he endorsed it, and when anybody willing to compromise with any Democrat to get anything passed it's declared a RINO and primaried out. And it's not a case of "both sides!!!1!!11!": the Republicans are now twice as right-wing as the Democrats are left wing. One of the sides is getting absurdly more radical than the other.

They might be radical in procedure, but I don't think they're ideologically extreme. How else do they have majorities in Congress if they're a radical party? How can we say that 40%+ or so of American voters vote for a radical party?

My understanding of the NOMINATE statistics system that they used to construct this:

focuses on the similarity or the dissimilarity of voting records. So Republicans have a high "conservative score", because they vote alike, and they vote alike more often than Democrats do in the opposite direction. But that's not to say that the right and the left in Congress are very distant ideologically from one another - all that data shows is that the two parties tend to gravitate around the poles (Republicans more so) regardless of any information about how ideologically distant the poles are.

I acknowledge that there's a high degree of polarization in Congress and the voting patterns of Republicans are responsible for that, but I hesitate to call the Republicans radical or extreme if the distance between the right pole and the left pole isn't extreme to begin with.

 

[Netto Azure]

It depends, I think it is more accurate to say that Congress has become more parliamentary in that the parties whip members into party line votes. There is also the 2010 redistricting that further entrenched incumbents into districts that result in a 90%+ re-election rate. Further pressures from a more ideologically purist primary system where the electoral turnout is in the midling 20% encourages a more ideologically pure vote.

Anyway it seems an intra-party civil war has broken out again for the GOP 3 days after Trump's call for unity.

 

[Esper]

So Trump says he's okay with having the US go bankrupt so that he could "get a better deal" after. Like, I dunno what to say about that. Who would ever trust the US dollar after that? Who'd do business with the US?

 

[Netto Azure]

So Trump says he's okay with having the US go bankrupt so that he could "get a better deal" after. Like, I dunno what to say about that. Who would ever trust the US dollar after that? Who'd do business with the US?

Remember that Ted Cruz literally tried to do this with our federal debt. Got a credit downgrade afterwards.

 

[Nah]

dying @ trump's speech at the NRA convention holy crap

What'd he say now? I cba to look for it I'm a lazy shit

 

[Esper]

So I went to a Bernie Sanders rally on Wednesday. It was mostly the same speech he gives at each rally. I've seen a few recordings of them. But I suppose if you're not like me and don't follow that sort of thing it could be pretty new sounding. The crowd certainly was all enthused by it. The crowd was large. I don't know if how many, but it was easily 5000 from where I was standing, and might be more. Quite a diverse crowd, too. One of the candidates for California's Senate seat was there, Steve Stokes, who described himself as a Berniecrat. I do wish him well and I'll be voting for him. Even if Bernie doesn't win the nomination I can still hope that others will win seats in the House and Senate.

 

[Netto Azure]

I used to live right around that area too o-o

 

[OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire]

Trump's catched up to Hillary since wrapping up the nomination. I wonder if Clinton wrapping her nomination up will see her get a bounce back.
Democrats are starting to split while my party comes together around Trump.