I will keep doing, but not worth it! The 2016 Presidential Primary Voting Thread

trump is a wildcard who i could also easily believe moving to the center after winning the republican nom. it's hard to know exactly how good or bad he'll be (tho he certainly doesn't have imo the character to be potus). cruz seems nixonian and might just win from force of political will alone.

this seems important: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/voter-id-study-minorities-liberals

Voter ID laws adversely affected the turnout of minorities, and particularly that of Latinos, the paper found. The study also revealed that turnout among Democrats was disproportionately affected, backing up claims of a political motivation behind the laws, which have been overwhelmingly championed by GOP legislators.

...In general elections, states with strict photo ID laws show a Latino turnout 10.3 points lower than in states without them. The law also affected turnout in primary elections, where Latino turnout decreased by 6.3 points and Black turnout by 1.6 points.

More revealing, however, is its comparison in how the laws affect the turnout gap between minorities and white voters, who were largely unimpeded by the laws.

In primary elections, the gap between Latino and white turnout tripled in states with the restriction, from 5.0 points to 13.3 points. The gap between black and white turnout doubled in primaries -- from 4.8 points to 8.5 points. The effect on Latinos also carried over to general elections, where the turnout gap doubled 5.3 points to 11.9 points.

y'all do know facebook lets you unfollow people you don't want to see stuff from, it's kind of totally unusable otherwise

― the thirteenth floorior (Doctor Casino), Thursday, February 11, 2016 10:15 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah the prob is i do want to see other stuff from a lot of them

i just want the to dial it down like a notch or two

sanders people really do remind me of nader people. i keep thinking if people really wanted to be realistic they would just rally around their clinton and get it over with.

the thing about sanders supporters that bothers me the most is that it isn't sufficient that they prefer sanders to hillary but they seem compelled to present hillary in the worst, least good faith light as possible.

one of my Facebook friends just changed his profile picture to this:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ca8k2ffUYAENVYo.png

honestly i might have to quit facebook over sanders, i mean i'd love for him to be prez but i cannot fucking take these dudes' and their multiparagraph posts day after day after fucking day

― uptown garfunkel (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, February 11, 2016 11:13 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea it is ridiculous

the thing about sanders supporters that bothers me the most is that it isn't sufficient that they prefer sanders to hillary but they seem compelled to present hillary in the worst, least good faith light as possible.

― Mordy, Thursday, February 11, 2016 11:26 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like a good percentage of Sanders support comes from Hillary distrust. Also, Sanders comes off as no BS to supporters and this is that much more enhanced in contrast to a very stiff and scripted looking Hillary.

HRC has earned all the bad faith.

cruz seems nixonian and might just win from force of political will alone

"Dick Nixon" says Cruz, Clinton and Trump are not Nixonian.

Cruz’s politics are close to the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, which Nixon vocally opposed all his life. The difference was more than ideological: Nixon knew in the early 1960s that embracing “kooks” who “don’t give a damn about people” would “create the first major all-white political party” and doom them in general elections.

In comparing Cruz to Nixon, Rich Lowry credits him for “intelligence” and “willpower”—as though any politician could be effective without them. Sure, he has enough of these qualities to be a primary contender, but where are Nixon’s populist and realistic tendencies? What about his drive to build coalitions and create a lasting center-right majority? Nixon would likely judge Cruz as he did Barry Goldwater: rigid, shortsighted and destructive, an amateur who’d take a win today over five in the future.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/richard-nixon-clinton-cruz-trump-2016-213558

he thing about sanders supporters that bothers me the most is that it isn't sufficient that they prefer sanders to hillary but they seem compelled to present hillary in the worst, least good faith light as possible.

― Mordy, Thursday, February 11, 2016 11:26 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

very much so, it grosses me out

i'm not crazy about hillary but i'd happily vote for her in the general, im well aware she is not this progressive miracle but im in favor of a woman president who is a democrat

bernie-is-cool memes are weird because they're kinda all making fun of him on some level for being a dull old dude. I don't think you can't run a national campaign on the so-uncool-it's-cool hipster aesthetic. there's something kinda defeatist about the whole thing.

don't think you can't = don't think you can

typos galore

im in favor of a woman president who is a democrat

your needs are few

@thenation
How did we end up in a world where Donald Trump can actually win a GOP primary? It all starts with Richard Nixon: http://bit.ly/1Q9bmyp

@dick_nixon
Richard M. Nixon Retweeted The Nation
Typically stupid. I'll tell you what it is: 35 years of getting people to vote against their wallets.

We always kept an eye on the pocketbook. Reagan and the others, they didn't care. That's where Trump comes from.

I know this is boring but I am a registered Democrat who thinks Obama has been a terrific president and who thinks both HRC and Sanders would be great presidents and I am going to enthusiastically campaign for and give money to whichever of them is nominated. I never post on FB about this though. But to be honest I think that for every Democrat who thinks HRC is a corporate stooge or who thinks BS is an unelectable loon, there are 5 who are more like me.

i feel the same way except i probably will be unenthusiastically campaigning for either

never good to extrapolate from your own positions to other people ime

xp

but but the silent majority

i can hear them silently agreeing with me

most people know that the process is fucking bullshit. which ius why half of them stay home.

it's a catch 22 tho bc a big part of the reason why the process is bullshit is bc half of them stay home (and way more than half stay home during midterm elections)

Mordy sorta otm

but really how many totally ignorant, disengaged misinformed voters do we want voting anyway, what would Hamilton say lol etc.

im in favor of a woman president who is a democrat

your needs are few

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Thursday, February 11, 2016 11:41 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah i just have low expectations for any presidency and at the same time think it would be a good thing if a woman from the country's more liberal/progressive party wins, its not very complicated

interesting analysis by Sam Wang, Nate Silver's very best friend, which might give pause to those that think that trump's 30-35% ceiling of support could never carry him to the nomination: http://prospect.org/article/gop-nomination-rules-tilt-playing-field-toward-donald-trump

Pundits have assured us that the support for Donald Trump is so limited that he can’t possibly get the GOP presidential nomination. Last week in The New York Times, Ross Douthat argued that Trump has a ceiling around 30 percent of Republican voters and consequently will be defeated. To put this numerical claim to the test, I have created a detailed state-by-state simulation of the nomination rules. My conclusion may surprise you: Trump’s current level of support may be enough to deliver him the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in July.

no i get that, but the Small Expectations stopped comforting me after Mondale won Massachusetts

xp

trump's 30-35% ceiling of support could never carry him to the nomination

it could carry him to the nomination but there's no way it would carry him through the general. Latinos and other minorities absolutely hate this fucking guy, with good reason, and there aren't enough angry white people to win the general.

bernie-is-cool memes are weird because they're kinda all making fun of him on some level for being a dull old dude. I don't think you can't run a national campaign on the so-uncool-it's-cool hipster aesthetic. there's something kinda defeatist about the whole thing.

― iatee, Thursday, 11 February 2016 16:37 (11 minutes ago) Permalink

I thought this at first too, but it's almost like he rode the meme train until he could reach escape velocity and now he's starting to get a serious look.

is this a space train?

249k dem votes is about 87.6% of the 284K republican votes, so the blue bar should be 87.6% of the height of the red. this is what it would look like if it were proportionately presented, since 438 pixels is 87% of 500 pixels:

Pedantry alert, but actually the red bar, the way it's labeled, doesn't represent all of the votes in the Republican primary, just the 35% of them that went to Trump (likewise the blue bar represents the 60% of the Democratic votes that went to Sanders). Since 60% of 249k is 149k votes for Bernie, vs. 35% of 284k or 99k votes for Trump, so the blue bar should be 1.5x taller than the red bar.

what would 'Trump in the center' sound like? the shockjock volume and let's-be-great mantras would be the same. and you'd assume the bigotry would leak out weekly if not daily. The electorate's stupidity has limits (there, that's my optimism).

Most voting decisions aren't driven by online memes, esp in old people who turn out the most.

you're optimistic in all the wrong ways. no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the american public

ordinary GOP primary dog whistling can maybe be walked back but "keep out the Muslims and deport illegals" is gonna stay stuck to you.

yeah he's been too explicitly racist, there's no "take backsies" about that shit

bernie-is-cool memes are weird because they're kinda all making fun of him on some level for being a dull old dude. I don't think you can't run a national campaign on the so-uncool-it's-cool hipster aesthetic. there's something kinda defeatist about the whole thing.

― iatee, Thursday, 11 February 2016 16:37 (11 minutes ago) Permalink

I thought this at first too, but it's almost like he rode the meme train until he could reach escape velocity and now he's starting to get a serious look.

LOL Sanders came perilously close to a Dean Scream moment in his NH acceptance speech. MSNBC uses it constantly but it doesn't have the full wacko factor

that wang article is interesting but a bit goofy - - he goes to all the trouble of developing a state-by-state model of the delegate rules, and then turns immediately to national polls to declare that everyone but trump will fail to meet the minimum thresholds and thus get "cut off at the knees." so far that wouldn't matter - nobody but trump got above 20% in new hampshire. but if the field narrows even just a little, that's not going to be true anymore - even just allowing for the 11% that christie and fiorina got, that has to go somewhere.

anyway then he says that, if the rivals drop out, trump will need to get up to around 40%. but he doesn't give any reason to think that that will happen, which is the whole point of the "ceiling" argument he's discussing. last i checked (and maybe this has changed) trump was not the second-choice of the people who support the likely-to-drop-outs. trump is trump, if you like him at all you probably are voting for him already.

if one of jeb, rubio or kasich actually calls it quits after another round or two, then the whole model's out the window. he does make an interesting argument for why each of those three are unlikely to drop out specifically before super tuesday, but i think it's undercooked - kasich hoping to be the favorite son in ohio is like, okay, fine, but if he doesn't see a wider map than that one state would he really keep going? would he have been able to make a good donor sales pitch in the interim for it to be plausible that he's fielding new hampshire like numbers in all those other states? (his national numbers, not included here, are around 2% right now, though of course it's possible new hampshire will boost his profile. but he could be an effective dropout in most of the country without actually dropping out.)

south carolina could turn out to be bush or carson's time to bail - if they can't make it in iowa, new hampshire, or there, they're running out of core constituencies (basically, rustbelt and far west still remain). most likely, if rubio repeats his really awful new hampshire results i think there'll be a consensus that this once-great-hope is actually a big ol' loser; i can see him quitting before bush who in a way has more on the line despite obviously wanting it way less. oliver stone should get on that. anyway, amazingly imho, there's been no polling in either state in the last three weeks, which is way more than enough time for someone to be running up a surge, for trump to have deflated after iowa, for rubio to have flatlined after his debate, for jeb to have mounted a kasich-like creep up into second, god knows. there is a lot more reason to expect some kind of big shift (especially in such a big field) in the late days leading up to a primary, than to expect that there won't be, though maybe 538 or wang could data-fy that claim.

what was it? xp

w/ Trump we're not talking about cynicism toward the lowbrows, but the inability to fake anything else ("I could shoot somebody" etc).

oliver stone should get on that.

lol

we're getting into the "crazy reverend says what" part already, yaaay

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/cruz-campaign-defends-controversial-pastor-who-says-god-sent-hitler-hunt-jews

Pedantry alert, but actually the red bar, the way it's labeled, doesn't represent all of the votes in the Republican primary, just the 35% of them that went to Trump (likewise the blue bar represents the 60% of the Democratic votes that went to Sanders). Since 60% of 249k is 149k votes for Bernie, vs. 35% of 284k or 99k votes for Trump, so the blue bar should be 1.5x taller than the red bar.

it's a stacked column bar chart, so each bar does represent all of the votes for each respective party. each bar adds up to ~100% (the write-in votes/"other" make up the remaining portion). it's above the fold now, so i know everyone will love if i re-post this image:

http://i.imgur.com/8vl5K3i.jpg

you're correct that bernie's portion of the bar should be ~1.5x taller than trumps portion of the bar, since he received roughly 1.5x the votes of trump. but the overall height of the republican bar should be taller than the democrat bar, because more votes were cast overall for republicans.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-swing-the-election/ <<< despite its many flaws and overdeterminations of the relevant variables, this is still 538's most interesting widget/contribution this election. it suggests, maybe wrongly, that trump's core groups, by themselves, just can't win an election in the america that we currently have, even assuming good turnout, IF we also assume that trump turns so many people off so much that some of his "anti" groups shift their allegiances a little bit blue-wards. i really can't imagine the hispanic vote being only ("only") 71% democratic if trump was the republican nominee. or that college-educated whites would still tilt narrowly republican.

it's a stacked column bar chart

I guess you're right, but then I'd say the choice of that type of chart is deeply misleading to begin with, because Trump gets to be so much higher than Bernie despite receiving fewer votes.

o.nate, i think you're viewing it as a 3D column chart, where (for example) it's displaying sanders' 60% and then it's just layering Clinton's in front of it to show the difference. if that were the case, clinton's portion of the bar should be 2/3 of sanders', since she received ~2/3 of the votes that he did. but if you look at the image, her portion is only a little less than half of bernie's. that's because it's a stacked column graph, where each bar adds up to 100%, so bernie's 60% gives him 60% of the space of the column, and clinton's 39% gives her the other 39% of the space.

(to everyone else, i am sorry)

Good point.

we're getting into the "crazy reverend says what" part already, yaaay

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/cruz-campaign-defends-controversial-pastor-who-says-god-sent-hitler-hunt-jews

I bet IHoP is thrilled that this guy is starting to get headlines

the thing about sanders supporters that bothers me the most is that it isn't sufficient that they prefer sanders to hillary but they seem compelled to present hillary in the worst, least good faith light as possible.

Which will make it a difficult pivot for them if she wins the nomination.

In contrast Bernie's kept his messaging positive, and refrained from capitalizing on her liabilities (cf. "we're sick of hearing about your damn emails"). Possibly because attacking Hillary can backfire with dem constituencies that he'd need later. (plus, for some, having the perception out there of being mean to a woman can be nagl)

Maybe my memory is rosy in retrospect, but I don't recall Obama negging Hillary much in 2008. He damned her with faint praise ("likeable enough") but most of his messaging was mostly around a positive future vision. So it may be that Sanders is working from the playbook of a strategy that has been proven - by the only dude who has beaten her in an election before.

Nah, Hillary took on the majority of the negging, iirc.

Right, not disputing that she can get nasty. Just pointing out that (a) There is a contrast in tone between Sanders's supporters and Sanders himself, and (b) Both Obama and Sanders have generally avoided attacking Clinton. Is this because they're such standup gentlemensches? Or because they've made a calculation that it won't work and may possibly backfire.

it would totally backfire

It would massively backfire