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

He'll resign when he finds out what the President's annual salary is. Or attempt to double it via executive order, and be impeached.

sorry i missed this debate, it sounds like a giant clusterfuck and seems to have actually convinced on of my (soft) republican friends to go democrat .

One of the funniest things last night was Rubio wondering how Cruz even understood him on Univision, followed by Cruz turning towards him and snapping off some Spanish. And I like this description of Carson from the New Republic: "a strange wraith-like figure sleepily indifferent to everyone else on stage."

http://newrepublic.com/article/129918/republican-primary-now-giant-kindergarten-spat

it really was a mess. tons of cross-talk, tons of insults and defenses, and carson and kasich off on the sides trying to play the above-it-all conciliatory roles (easy since nobody was attacking them). jeb vs. trump, cruz vs. trump, rubio vs. cruz. ugly, loud, and exhausting.

And now a Yougov-poll from SC, this time with only a 19 point lead to Clinton, 47 points among african americans. That sounds more likely. Remarkably close to their last poll, pre Iowa and NH.

Trump has 42% of the vote on the republican side.

and then yeah the stuff about george w. was pretty amazing. like the 9/11 comments are what will grab the headlines but trump went hard after the iraq and afghanistan wars with "we've been in the middle east for fifteen years and we haven't won AN-Y-THING." by all accounts this is not what republicans want to hear since apparently the iraq war is still really popular with 2/3 of them. which makes me wonder if the 1/3 that supports trump is that other 1/3 or if there's some overlap since this hasn't really been the major feature of his campaign (except i guess beyond "winning" being something we need to do more).

a thing of beauty, really. a debate for the ages.

xpost

yeah, pretty curious to see if all these things Trump said last night, which are supposedly big GOP no-nos, will help or hurt him. Not at all convinced they will hurt.

also what was trump talking about when he said we have to take the oil? i almost forgot about that until just now.

Xp and not just no-no for the GOP.

re: SC polls - "remarkably close" might be pushing it a bit? so the new one is clinton 60, sanders 38. yougov's last SC poll (dec. 13-17) was clinton 67, sanders 31; the one before that (nov. 15-19) was clinton 72, sanders 25. so close in the sense that all of those describe clinton landslides, but it's not like the needle hasn't moved.

but, yes, sanders's share of the african-american vote across those goes only from 14% to 19% to 22%. so he has been making progress but not nearly enough. we'll see i guess. seems like the real deluge of polls will be starting up this week, so we'll have a better sense of what's an outlier. i still don't really have a good sense of how to view something like yougov, with their online-only method - - - okay, gets you around the cell phone problem sorta, but would other groups of people slip through the cracks? i'm sure there's writing on this though.

"take the oil" has been trump's standard line in previous debates, re: ISIS and syrian oil resources. it's not really clear what that would involve, sounds kinda like a major ground engagement in the midst of a 3-4 way war to me, but IIRC he usually hedges it by suggesting "bomb the oil" as a complementary tactic.

Well at least we've heard Kissinger and Bush called out as "destructive" and liar, respectively, within a two day span, on prime time TV.

even though it was probably a bad move to tell the truth to a bunch of republicans I wonder if trump's bush stuff might actually help break the taboo associated w/ blaming bush for 9/11.

as the bush admin slowly shifts from being contemporary politics into historical record this is gonna keep creeping up. like, you're not 'politicizing a tragedy' anymore, you are just stating exactly what happened during a period of american history. while there will always be debate around how much blame he deserves, clearly in 50 years nobody is gonna look back at the bush presidency with the words 'well, at least he kept us safe'.

Yeah I was thinking that even now it doesn't have the same impact, starting to feel like pointing fingers over Vietnam

Doctor Casino: I think you're looking at the poll from January. New one is 59-40. Very close to the one from january. African-american vote up to 26%.

I don't really think there's anything Trump can say that's off limits, he called McCain a loser for being a POW! It's not like he even has an agenda and ppl are like well he's an asshole but he's got a plan, his whole appeal is shit talking and clowning these lames, why do pundits think oh well NOW he's really done it, he's over

tbh, the theme of this campaign seems to be ridin' the straight talk express or whatever, just blurting out all the stuff people have quietly kept to themselves for years. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, thieves, liars, wimps, war criminals. You (all) are right, though, that it is strange that in such an environment no one has (literally) told Trump to fuck himself, because there would be nothing to lose with such a crass gambit.

If Trump cursed on TV, who gets fined, him or the network? Network, right?

yeah, FCC fines the station/network

Frederik - Oh, you're right, sorry about that. Not sure how exactly I was squinting to end up where I did.

So could Trump just get on TV and more or less literally fuck up the network if he wanted?

Far be it for me to question Trump's tactics, but I'll be honest: I can't figure out why he did what he did last night. He had a solid lead in SC going into the debate, and if he wins SC, at the very least that will seriously hurt Cruz. Maybe, figuring everyone would be coming after him, he calculated that offense was better than defense. Maybe he's got internal polling that says, no matter how much he gets booed in the hall, going after W. and 9/11 helps him with anyone open to voting for him. But if it was just his hatred of Jeb that was guiding him, you're into a kind of Corleone/Nixon pathology: I don't feel I have to destroy everyone--just my enemies.

Read somewhere that the crowd booing was RNC plants which could be b.s. but who knows

I think there would be other obscenity laws that would be violated (and if he did it willfully and repeatedly I'm sure something would be figured out).

xp I'm pretty sure it was not bs. I think Trump has calculated that not calculating to much before opening his mouth is a strong tactic and playing it safe is always a weak one.

(xxpost) I don't doubt that--it makes more sense to me than Trump's lobbyist/donor explanation. I would think that such (moneyed) people would care a little about decorum in a public setting, and probably wouldn't be attending debates anyway.

Yeah, if Trump is actually calculating anything I think his math is, it's a divided field and he can win this primary no matter what the breakdown of the people coming in 2nd/3rd/4th/whatever. His fans will eat up the very stuff he was saying last night, and interpret the booing the way he suggested: Jeb plants, lobbyists, insiders and elites trying to shut down a common sense guy telling it like it is. Just fine for everybody else to be in chaos. And beating up on Jeb is just his whole steez at this point, he can't not do it, and even when Jeb makes a less-perfect sponge for it than usual, he still doesn't really "win" those exchanges. The self-defeating thing is that he's pummeled Jeb so hard and so long; he would have made the perfect foil in a three-man race (Trump/Cruz/Bush) which is maybe the only scenario where I'd say, yup, Trump has this in the bag - 35% plurality wins, state by state, and Jeb unwilling to give up and endorse Cruz.

Still have a dream of Trump getting fucked out of the nomination and running independent

The self-defeating thing is that he's pummeled Jeb so hard and so long; he would have made the perfect foil in a three-man race (Trump/Cruz/Bush) which is maybe the only scenario where I'd say, yup, Trump has this in the bag

I hadn't thought it through that specifically, but yeah, that makes sense--having Bush around helps Trump, so why possibly hasten his departure? Unless (and I agree it's very likely that Trump is pure id, and doesn't calculate any of this) the idea is that constantly belittling Bush actually makes him want to stick around longer than he might otherwise.

haha that works both ways - bush not wanting to look like a loser and flee, trump actually thinking "god i'm going to get bored of this without the regular opportunities to keep antagonizing this dork."

for related reasons, feel like third-party trump run would only make sense in a universe where jeb was actually the republican nominee. just an irresistible chance to keep humiliating him even if it guarantees a huge margin for clinton.

The frightening thing is, the stuff he was saying last night would actually play better in the general election campaign.

I still can't wrap my head around the idea that Trump might enter the Republican convention with more delegates than any other candidate. His winning on the first ballot still seems too unreasonable to contemplate, but a brokered convention now seems possible. In which case, if Cruz is second in delegates, it's hard to imagine how the chips would fall, except I'd expect Cruz to make any and every promise he can think of, including ambassadorships or ponies for the delegate's kids, in order to win.

it is really really hard to imagine any of the spare delegates from the other candidates going "oh well, trump, he's our man." it's pretty hard to think that about cruz too, but somehow less hard.

So could Trump just get on TV and more or less literally fuck up the network if he wanted?
― Josh in Chicago

theres prolly a broadcast delay so they can bleep that shit out live

as I understand it, live broadcasts are routinely put on five second delay in order to bleep out words the FCC deems too nasty to put on the air. these days there are considerable penalties for broadcasters who allow shit to be spoken on air.

$300K max for radio!

and yes, they have delays

I don't think CNN got busted when Biden whispered "This is a big fucking deal" to the president.

cnn is cable, though, i think they can technically do whatever the fuck they want? but dont bc they dont want to lose advertisers.

Excellent point.

They coould charge people to watch an uncensored live stream. PPV is probably the way this is going anyway.

would seriously consider paying money to see a debate where everyone could swear

Last night, when Trump called Iraq a "big fat mistake" and stretched the words out a bit, you know it killed him not to change one of them.

i think the networks would be very happy to pay fines in exchange for madcap trump action during debates.

I'd bet Trump would even make a little show out of donating to the swear jar.

Honestly, the 9/11 stuff was fun, but the real moment of glory was this:

BUSH: My mom is the strongest woman I know.
TRUMP: She should be running.

nothing tops "That's very United Nationsclear" and nothing ever will

otm

Tough call, but I'll go with this:

RUBIO: Well, first of all, I don't know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn't speak Spanish. And second of all, the other point that I would make...

CRUZ: (SPEAKING SPANISH).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/13/the-cbs-republican-debate-transcript-annotated/

This whole thing of Trump and Bush playing Connery and Trebek has been my favorite part of the GOP season.

oh man, perfect analogy