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

"We need a voice of the people, not some dirty Socialist!" <-- America in a nutshell

That's the irony of the thing- that a big-shot, New York businessman is the messenger of this outsider message. But Trump has rather brilliantly courted media outrage to position himself as the authentic scourge of the elites.

otm. it's very frustrating watching people (itt and elsewhere) fall back on the experienced comfort of comedy redneck words and joy at hill's supposedly inevitable victory. i'm p sure hillary's got it too but sorry i'm just not chill enough to remain sanguine at the sight of a right-wing populist who's anti-iraq, anti-bush, anti-nafta, anti-muslim, anti-black, anti-immigrant, and pro-domination running against the brittle, intervention-loving face of neoliberalism. this idea that the gop is doubling down on 2012-style dog-whistle-ornamented plutocratic paternalism just isn't true. trump is building a new american right and it's gonna last a long time unless people fight it and mocking its troops as stupid or demographically doomed is the opposite of fighting it. hard to satirize a guy in shiny boots.

that's a lot of hyphenates.

that otm was for o nate

"mocking its troops as stupid or demographically doomed is the opposite of fighting it"

otm

this is good http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dont-assume-conservatives-will-rally-behind-trump/

Feel like this article makes a good case for "significant numbers of Republicans may reject Trump" but ignores the possibility that significant numbers of Democrats may vote for Trump.

which Democrats?

angry, economically fucked white ones

I agree with dlh that it's going to take more than just sitting back and enjoying the demographic tailwind... more than just figuring people are going to wise up.

That said, it's still kind of LOLWUT that there's a bunch of people out there saying "Stick it to the snobbish Eastern one-percenter elites by voting for the billionaire Manhattanite who went to Wharton!"

the extra dumb ones

that's a lot of hyphenates.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, February 29, 2016 11:50 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

technically i'm still a music critic

new Reagan Democrats xxxxp

I don't think any Democrat is gonna sit back and laugh IN November at the Trump Army, despite what despairing white Sanders supporters say.

lol hey

Is it hyperbole to say that anyone who self-identifies as a Democrat and votes for Trump in the GE should be euthanized? Asking for a friend.

november's prob gonna be fine but there will be lots of months after that

His very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats. It’s a coalition that’s concentrated in the South, Appalachia and the industrial North, according to data provided to The Upshot by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/donald-trumps-strongest-supporters-a-certain-kind-of-democrat.html

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNTk1ODI3MTM5N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTgzMTY2Mw@@._V1_SX640_SY720_.jpg

"o.nate, you're going to find many things depend upon a certain kind of Democrat."

That said, it's still kind of LOLWUT that there's a bunch of people out there saying "Stick it to the snobbish Eastern one-percenter elites by voting for the billionaire Manhattanite who went to Wharton!"

― carry me a laser down the road that i must travel (Ye Mad Puffin)

ya'll need to get over this already there's a lot more to signifying class in America than where you went to school or how much money you have

I stand with dlh. There is much in Trump's message that is allealing to economically marginalized white democrats, especially compared to Clinton. It's very hard to predict who will come out ahead in that matchup, especially since we haven't seen how Trump is going to change his message in the general election.

dlh makes a lot of solid points.

trump is building a new american right

eh. it looks a lot like the old Reagan right coalition to me, except for the anti-Bush and anti-Iraq part, which seems to me more like a recapture of working class people who were firmly in the Reagan coalition, but who were arrogantly abused by Bush and the neo-cons in Iraq, but also abused by NAFTA and deregulation, which makes them just as rabidly anti-Clinton as anti-Bush.

Trump is (rhetorically) rejecting the oligarchic heart of the Republican party, which makes him wildly popular with the voters who've been shat on by those oligarchs for decades, but if he were in office it is more than likely he'll serve them by throwing them chunks of red-meat populist rhetoric, rather than by dismantling most of the oligarchic privileges that have been implemented since 1981.

Panicking isn't useful and it doesn't look cool, granted, but I am panicking a little bit

white guys with graduate degrees will be ok

My dad being a Trump supporter is the saddest thing (mom thinks he's insane). Idk maybe he thinks Trump can help him repay the 7k he owes me

Still don't want to be in a country that's beholden to whatever voting bloc Trump is half-intentionally forming

xp to kev

This "Is Trump the new right?" is reminiscent of 2008 debates where "is Nixon or Reagan the ideological ancester of the current GOP?" was the quesiton.

Yeah the tea party was scary, but this new thing is weirder and scarier potentially.

eh I don't know. Tea Party folks control my state legislature and lots of others. They've done more horrible shit than use orange rinse in their hair and yell at a Cuban American whelp in Papi's Brooks Brothers suit

The tea party succeeded in pushing Congress to shut down the government over nonsense budget nonsense

Yeah they've had a pernicious effect for sure. It's hard to tell what *this* will wnd up being. Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's a major shift in the Republican Party

btw, it worth remembering that Reagan was given a free pass by evangelicals, even though it was transparently obvious that, like Trump, his faith consisted entirely of lip service and his true convictions were wholly secular. Trump needn't fear that many of the Cruz/Carson voters will defect from him in the general.

I have Brooks Brothers glasses. Can I still be a progressive?

i think the tea party has peaked tbh, so much of their anger was so focused on such a non-existent problem and was so obviously formed because Obama won in 2008 (long before he destroyed america with--oh wait) that i think people are generally done with them. trump's success i think is a little bit of that leftover, a little bit of the weak republican field, and a lot of his celebrity power. not 100% worried it's enough to carry him to victory in November, not 100% worried that if he does win it does anything more than potentially be even more destructive for the republican party than a loss, not 100% convinced on either of the previous points though.

Yeah, one of the ironies of 1980 was evangelicals went for a Hollywood actor over a Sunday-school teaching born-again. xxp

The gradual process of a successful Trump campaign has been a horrifying development, but I'm trying to imagine how shocked I'd be if I somehow missed everything between his escalator-ride announcement and his current standing. It was supposed to be a joke. Like if Gary Busey ran or something.

xpost i thought reagan was a superchristian? i remembered reading anecdotes about how how he truly believed armageddon would take place in his lifetime (chilling considering the us/ussr nuclear stuff going on at the time), and then he had this quote in People in 1983:

"Theologians had been studying the ancient prophecies-what would portend the coming of Armageddon?-and have said that never, in the time between the prophecies up until now, has there ever been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this.

...I think whichever generation and at whatever time, when the time comes, the generation that is there, I think will have to go on doing what they believe is right."

i dunno, i guess that could just be lip service too, but he seemed to be a believer

yes i think he believed all that but w/out running off to church.

white guys with graduate degrees will be ok

well i don't have a grad degree but i DO have cancer, so eager to see what Trumpcare will look like!

Tea Party has also peaked partly because the label is now perceived, by those the right, to have been coopted by opportunistic rent-seekers.

it's a boy: can we at least say that it's a trifle odd to have someone who travels in a private plane with his name written on the fuselage in 7-foot-high letters presented as a "champion of the downtrodden little guy"?

i think the tea party has peaked tbh, so much of their anger was so focused on such a non-existent problem and was so obviously formed because Obama won in 2008

I don't think the tea party was ever a movement, it was just convenient for the media to frame it like one. there are just a lot of crazy people out there. nothing to peak, they're not going away. this kinda reactionary nationalism started bubbling up thanks to dubya. obama was a catalyst but the america love it or leave it tough guy president stuff started post-9/11.

I don't doubt that Reagan took seriously ancient Biblical prophecies. He and Nancy also famously consulted astrologers. Probably his personal beliefs were a very Hollywood-esque melange of New Age beliefs and idiosyncratic theology.

Reagan was so Christian that he never went to church

The tea party was specifically obsessed with the budget though, I thought, and this idea that people who couldn't pay their mortgages should suffer for it. Seems like a very different message than Trump, although I assume it involves many of the same people

Reagan's religious allegiances showed themselves with the Bob Jones shit and hiring James Watt and the cult of lachrymose masculinity that worked at Pentagon and NSC.

a very Hollywood-esque melange of New Age beliefs and idiosyncratic theology.

yeah this is about right afaict. hardly disingenuous tho.

Tea Partiers were proportionally drawn more from the wealthier end of the GOP, which would be kind of the opposite of Trump's core demographic. xxp

That describes a lot of American Christianity honestly

Xp to dll.

Should probably get zing so this doesn't keep happening

And yeah, you're right o.nate. The original "tea party" was supposed to be a rebellion of bond traders rebelling against Obama's debt relief program lol