Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

and i think i saw that hillary won white male voters in southern states too (and plenty even in strong bernie states) so it's not like she's remotely toxic to dem voters. ppl who see bernie's challenge as a repudiation of hillary are, i think unfairly, underselling the attractiveness of him as a candidate + his policies.

For a lot of southern/midwestern democrats, voting for a woman may be more difficult than voting for a black man.

Maybe Southern, but: Tammy Baldwin, Amy Klobuchar, Heidi Heitkamp, Claire McCaskill, Debbie Stabenow etc. suggest midwestern Dems are fine with voting for women

based on what's happening this year I will be legit surprised if Ted Nugent and a bunch of radio and tv hosts don't run for the 2020 GOP nomination

Not at the debate, hope still survives, announcement on Friday... please please please be that's he's announcing he's Trump's VP.

Like, not with Trump's knowledge, because he didn't realise you have to ask.

Hey history-heads: who was the last presidential candidate to win their party's nomination without any prior political experience whatsoever?

eisenhower?

Eisenhower? GWB had very limited obv.

D'oh, beat to it. Twice.

of the two major parties, yeah Eisenhower

otoh eisenhower was governor of 1/4th of germany a while

depends how wide your definition of party is

did Morbz just go archie bunker on me

GWB was governor of Texas that's not exactly a spot on the local school board

what about grant? (I may be missing some major pre-presidency political career but iirc he just went from army to president)

question was about the last one

george washington?

grant, zachary taylor, and uh arguably washington all had no pre-presidential political experience

wilson also had very little experience -- he was only governor of new jersey for two years

Richard Nixon was a congressman and Veep when he was nominated in 1960 but the wraith-slug who took over his body in 1967 had little political experience outside of phone bank work.

Being the highest ranking general during a civil war is a political position.

so the CEO of a major corporation but i assume we mean "civil politics"

Maybe it’s too early for this, but given that Trump and Clinton are most likely going to be the nominees, I'm curious about which of 2012 Obama states Trump could plausibly flip to beat Clinton.

I guess Ohio, Virginia, and Florida are the ones he’d go for, but even if he took all three of those he'd still have to win one of the three Mountain West states or Iowa, which seems challenging, given his rhetoric. With things as they stand right now, the electoral math for a presidency is pretty tough for him. Which is not to say impossible, he's obviously gotten this far.

But for all the talk of Reagan Dems, the Upper Midwest (Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois) and Pennsylvania are diverse states with large urban centers that haven't gone Republican in a presidential campaign since 1988. They’re obviously the type of states that can and do elect Republican governors, particularly in off-year elections, but they’ve been really consistent in presidential elections. If Trump wins those states, then this would be a major realignment election or some incredible crisis or scandal will have occurred.

Which, again, is totally possible! But I'm a little skeptical that consistently winning an incredibly divided GOP field with 40% of the vote is necessarily a harbinger of the type of political power that will realign some of these states.

Anyway, I hope I'm right. Not trying to downplay a serious threat, just interested in trying to realistically figure out how he actually gets to the presidency. Feel like it will take a major economic downturn or serious Clinton scandal for it to happen.

i know that there are issues with using voter turnout in primaries/caucuses to predict voter turnout in the general, but this is concerning:

Last night, more than 8.5 million Republicans turned out to vote in the 11 GOP Super Tuesday states that reported results. That suggests far more enthusiasm than the last time Republicans picked a nominee. In those same 11 states in 2012, turnout only totaled around 4.7 million.

That makes this year's turnout in those 11 states 81 percent higher than four years ago.

Contrast that to the Democrat side. In the Dems' 11 states reporting results from last night, turnout only totaled around 5.9 million — that's around 2.6 million fewer people than came out in those states 2008, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were in the middle of what would would be a long, hard-fought race.

http://www.npr.org/2016/03/02/468918065/republican-super-tuesday-turnout

Being the highest ranking general during a civil war is a political position.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Wednesday, March 2, 2016 7:53 PM (2 minutes ago)

well yeah, and obv the guy who commanded allied forces in europe was better prepared to lead a country than donald fuckin' trump

Last night, more than 8.5 million Republicans turned out to vote in the 11 GOP Super Tuesday states that reported results. That suggests far more enthusiasm than the last time Republicans picked a nominee. In those same 11 states in 2012, turnout only totaled around 4.7 million.

A large part of this can be attributed to "We've really got a shot this time - let's go!" vs. "OK, so who wants to run against the incredibly popular incumbent who the media thinks changed the whole country by his very presence?"

I miss Carson already. Damn.

from what i've seen most liberals are taking trump pretty seriously at this point

Yeah see the Sargent WaPo thing posted earlier.

more seriously than the republicans did 8 months before crunch-time

I recall righties in both '08 and '12 saying a ham sandwich could beat the obviously unqualified lightweight Obama.

I'm concerned about this too, but is there evidence that primary turnout has a serious impact on general election results? Jamelle Bouie was tweeting about this last night. https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/704773596158230528

disbelievingrove.gif

A large part of this can be attributed to "We've really got a shot this time - let's go!" vs. "OK, so who wants to run against the incredibly popular incumbent who the media thinks changed the whole country by his very presence?"

i don't know, weren't republicans pretty stoked to take obama down in 2012? and didn't they believe, up until election night, even past the time when the election was called, in karl rove's case, that they were surely going to win?

i think w/r/t the dem primaries in 1988, they were similar to the republican primary this year in that there were half a dozen candidates who were vv popular with their particular bases and were all also very big personalities in a way. was gary hart still running at that point? beyond him, you had dukakis, jesse jackson, paul simon, gephardt, gore...

acc to 538 there's is no correlation between primary numbers and general election numbers, when i get the chance i'll try to dig up the post where they discuss it

xpost There's a 1000+ page book about that election if you want to brush up

Harry Reid:

Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republican Party," Reid said from the Senate floor Wednesday.
- yes

...Republicans created him by spending seven years appealing to some of the darkest forces in America.
- yesss

...Now it's up to the Republicans to try and undo what they have done by denouncing Donald Trump.
- sure, yessssss

...It's time for the Republicans to stop the Frankenstein they created.
- godDAMMIT harry reid, frankenstein was the CREATOR of the monster, you don't create frankenstein, only frankenstein's mother could create frankenstein, this is a basic fact, FUCK

trump is frankenstein. his voters are frankenstein's monster.

http://www.npr.org/2016/02/26/468152317/will-high-tide-of-primary-voter-turnout-float-republicans-in-november

According to Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who tracks voter turnout at his blog ElectProject.org, it's too early to tell whether Republicans will have a general election advantage just yet.

"There are some tea leaves to be read here, but I don't think there's enough information here to project into the outcome or the levels of enthusiasm in November," McDonald said.

McDonald pointed out that in 2000, Republican primary turnout was much heavier than it was for Democrats — and that election between George W. Bush and Al Gore ended up essentially deadlocked until the Supreme Court intervened.

One reason there's more perceived enthusiasm for Republicans right now is that there were simply more candidates for a long time — a field that started out with 17 has now winnowed to five. They've spent more money, commanded more media attention and had more twists and turns than the Democratic battle between Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

"Just from sort of a logistical standpoint, there's a greater level of competition on the GOP side, coupled with all of the resources that have been spent," McDonald said. "We should expect that Republicans would be more engaged simply for that reason."

McDonald also argues that Republicans are more engaged in the primary process by their nature — they're the ones most likely to show up in drop-off elections in midterm and off-year contests and are historically more engaged.

the other article i saw that i can't easily locate right now compared a bunch of primary numbers to general election numbers and found no correlation

I had a hard time not reading those quotes from Michael McDonald as song lyrics.

Glad to see you have the same reaction as I to Frankenstein-ing, Karl.

harry reid prob not making mordy's point there but mordy otm

also haha

Republicans created him by spending seven years appealing to some of the darkest forces in America.

very diplomatic

If all of this leads to Trump immolating himself on an ice floe in the Arctic, they can call him whatever they want.

I would like to say definitively that people who choose to vote in a Democratic primary over a Republican primary are already repudiating the overtly racist themes that is powering Trump through the Republican primaries but I don't know people's true hearts so it would be speculation. I strongly, strongly suspect that the audience Trump is appealing to with his bluntness has a plurality of support within the Republican party and I don't think he can modulate enough to salve the people within that party who have rejected him outright so far, let alone voters who are actively choosing someone to compete against him.

The wild card in this are spiteful Bernie supporters who are convinced that Hillary Clinton is a mewling she-devil and that voting for her is directly equivalent to voting for Ted Cruz, so they will either not vote if she's the nominee or, in more puzzling logic, vote for Trump because somehow currently being an unrepentant bigot bully is better than having advocated for things that hurt minorities in the past and saying "Based on how all of that turned out, I would not advocate those positions today."

If only Jon Stewart were around to clip together this "dark forces" talking point, with Reid and Rahm so far.

(Just so we are clear, I am emphatically NOT saying no one has anything to worry about; what I am saying is that if people actually do their jobs, Trump will not be President.)

obv the guy who commanded allied forces in europe was better prepared to lead a country than donald fuckin' trump

"(Clemenceau) once said that war is too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he may have been right...but now, war is too important to be left to the politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought...And I can no longer, sit around and allow Communist subversion, Communist corruption, and Communist infiltration of our precious bodily fluids."

woah go joe

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/joe-biden-donald-trump-racism-220076?cmpid=sf#ixzz41hr6oJuz

The wild card in this are spiteful Bernie supporters who are convinced that Hillary Clinton is a mewling she-devil and that voting for her is directly equivalent to voting for Ted Cruz, so they will either not vote if she's the nominee or, in more puzzling logic, vote for Trump because somehow currently being an unrepentant bigot bully is better than having advocated for things that hurt minorities in the past and saying "Based on how all of that turned out, I would not advocate those positions today."

I do not believe these people actually exist, any more than I believed the "PUMA" people who were supposedly rabidly pro-Hillary and militantly anti-Obama were real, outside the realm of Internet bullshit.

i agree - i think bernie supporters are going to fall in line. he is going to lose by a lot more delegates than hillary did in 2008 so it's not even like they'll have a legitimate narrative of "we were screwed." and i sincerely hope they aren't going to vote for trump, esp after all the strong principled stands they've associated their with their support of bernie.

yeah i think bernie-to-trump crossover (jesus) is just the standard crisis-time wavering of the angry white working class between socialism and fascism. i'm sure these people exist; they always do.

if and i suppose WHEN more likely that Bernie drops out, I suspect there will be a lot of people who will be in touch telling him to give a strong statement in support of Hillary. probably saying to him, look we know she's not ideal but we've got to keep them out of the white house.