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

Morbs otm (re being short of delegates)

he's technically correct in that the party has the leeway to do what they want but he's wrong in that keeping the person w/ the most votes from winning the nomination is clearly a subversion of the base's popular will and will fracture the party.

1976:

Going into the convention, Ford had won more primary delegates than Reagan, as well as a plurality in popular vote. However, Ford did not have enough to secure the nomination, and as the convention opened both candidates were seen as having a chance to win. Because of this, both Ford and Reagan arrived in Kansas City before the convention opened to woo the remaining uncommitted delegates in an effort to secure the nomination. Reagan benefited from his highly committed delegates, notably "Reagan's Raiders" of the Texas delegation. They and other conservative Western and Southern delegates particularly faulted the Ford Administration's foreign policy of détente towards the Soviet Union, criticizing his signing of the Helsinki Accords and indirectly blaming him for the April 1975 Fall of Saigon. The pro-Reagan Texas delegates worked hard to persuade delegates from other states to support Reagan. Ford, meanwhile, used all of the perks and patronage of the Presidency to win over wavering delegates, including trips aboard Air Force One and personal meetings with the President himself.

Trump could take wavering delegates on his plane and if they don't yield he'll toss them out.

it's not like we're talking about a constitution here. technically speaking couldn't the party change the entire nomination process to a closed behind doors vote for all elected republican senators + congressmen and guarantee who they want? if they do it'll piss their voters off, but so will keeping trump from the nomination. xp

party is fractured either way; it's mutually assured destruction and the only positive thing to get outta this experience

This, on Rubio, comes from a blogger I disagree with about 75% of the time (less than two months ago he was saying if Rubio was the nominee, he'd crush Clinton in the general - like, he literally typed the word "landslide"):

If he never gets back into politics, he'll find himself on a lot of corporate boards, and he'll show up on a lot of political talk shows. At worst, he'll be a Republican Harold Ford, a moderately ethnic, moderately telegenic corporatist who plays a savant on TV. He'll land on his feet. So shed no tears for him after he loses today.

with friends like these

if they do try to deny trump the nomination i wonder how far he'd try to leverage supporter violence (and/or himself as the only nominee that could prevent violence at the convention).

so many delightful scenarios

p sure Trump will go peacemaker if it ever looks like he could be prosecuted

my father puts the odds of trump in a federal prison by 2017 at roughly 1/1

"Harold Ford"

i was not aware til this morning that Rubio told his Ohio supporters to vote for Kasich

what ohio supporters

what ohio supporters

Not true, as every Cuban American Republican I know is voting in droves for the cubanito to stop Trump.

i was not aware til this morning that Rubio told his Ohio supporters to vote for Kasich

Kasich just kind of smiled and shrugged when asked why he wasn't returning the favor in Florida on Meet the Press.

it turns out that ppl who write for NRO do not constitute a sufficient base

@DennisThePerrin
Being a Hillary apologist these days is a form of performance art.

uhhh
https://twitter.com/BrandyLJensen/status/709710528424321024

Ned linked to Rod Dreher's most nuanced post ever.

@ManTheAlive
Being Dennis Perrin these days is a form of performance fart.

labored over that for 4 minutes huh

re: rubio's 'best states' - this is just going back to early-race conventional wisdom, which always sort of imagined rubio having to take some baths in the early states (though certainly not as badly as he has done) and then going on to win some of the winner-take-all stuff later in the race - the places where romney finally put santorum away. but this was back when cruz was not doing nearly so well, and it seemed like rubio could gain the mantle of the one clear 'establishment' guy. as bullshitty as that may have been, that was the logic, and if rubio still has people telling him that, then who the fuck knows. i agree that he looks like a man waiting for the moment when he can throw in the towel, much as jeb did by the end.

kasich throwing to rubio in florida would be pointless because rubio is/was doing so badly there that it wouldn't actually ensure him a win without cruz also being on board (fat chance). i still think kasich is playing for VP, but for all i know at this point he could believe that if he does well enough (and rubio gets crushed badly enough), he's actually in a position to win further states (by plurality) and present himself as the compromise brokered nominee that nobody really hates. throw in rubio's delegates, some wheeling and dealing... i dunno. that is a crazy scenario for a guy who's currently in fourth-place and super behind in delegates. he'd have to be quite the optimist but he could be thinking it: say he does win ohio's 99, and if the map is running out of really good cruz states, then with a little luck he wins pennsylvania, with a big push he wins california, while trump and cruz split the rest... it's the longest of long shots but hey he's still hanging around for some reason.

i don't know anyone who went to farflung beaches for spring break, i thought that was only something that happened in movies

yeah i think it mostly happens to people that have someone else (parents) footing all their bills. i worked part time to pay for school so my spring break was picking up extra shifts.

Katich knows that rubio is toast and that no one likes liar Cruz, so i don't think he's being totally unrealistic (though he's being extremely, extremely optimistic.)

imo Kasich has no realistic hope of the nomination, but he could become a powerful figure in a brokered convention, esp if he could somehow pull 25% of the delegates. That would probably mean winning CA and I have no idea how he's polling there.

I haven't looked at any polls or anything but I would assume Trump is leading in CA?

The most recent Landslide Communications (wtf) poll has Trump +16.

california primary is three months away so god only knows, but 538 polling average (of, basically, two polls) has it as:

Trump 30.7
Cruz 20.6
Kasich 16.8
Rubio 13.6

a detached third-party observer might say "this is basically meaningless and it could look totally different by june" but kasich or a kasich sycophant would be saying, rubio plus kasich effectively ties with trump. you put in the legwork and boost those numbers just a bit and who knows...! better stay in this thing! (it's also winner-take-all on a district-by-district basis, so it's not actually the 172-delegate plum it may appear to be. still....)

i don't know anyone who went to farflung beaches for spring break, i thought that was only something that happened in movies

Ha, I used to wonder if American schools were really like that.

idk i definitely knew a lot of kids in college that booked trips to florida for spring break, varied from budget road trips to cheap motels to richer kids flying down to pricey oceanfront condos

i went to ft lauderdale once during spring break with my brother and my dad, but i was in junior high so it didn't really count and it wasn't a spring break!! trip, just visiting some friends. i just remember driving around listening to boyz II men on my headphones and marveling at all the teal cars with purple neon under the chassis. my memory is that it was a hellish place and time.

Student spring break trips are not a thing on the west coast ime

i hung out w/ a bunch of activist kids though so of course we did "alternative spring breaks" to places like chiapas, mexico or cuba which were obv just as expensive

i don't know a single person who did this in the early 90's.

(I went to berkeley). maybe kids in SoCal go to tijuana

my only college spring break trip was to Burlington VT so i went in the opposite direction. drank a lot of beer and jammed some tunes and listened to a bunch of phish and widespread with my high school homies. hempiest week of my life.

I went to college in texas so we went to South Padre one year for spring break, wasn't super far, but there were a bazillion college kids there from all over the midwest, and it was pretty much as wild as the movies suggest. needless to say I don't remember a whole lot. was in 1994 I think?

i went to Tampa/St Pete in senior year to go to spring training ballgames with my 66-year-old uncle. I haven't returned to Florida, partly bcz i saw Kissinger in the Salvador Dali Museum.

I did choir tours during spring break, which meant partying in places like scenic Wichita.

Imagine how pissed I was that the group did a SoCal tour the year before I joined and a Florida tour the year after I graduated.

Ft Lauderdale banned spring break more than 25 years ago iirc. Rich gays prefer their twinks a little quieter.

I haven't returned to Florida, partly bcz i saw Kissinger in the Salvador Dali Museum.

surrealism is dead

i think you just saw Dali's "face of war" painting, morbs

http://webneel.com/daily/sites/default/files/images/daily/09-2013/18-the-face-of-war-paintings-by-salvador-dali.jpg

that Dali museum is world class imo

(All of my complaints are nullified by three international summer tours, though)

Kriston Capps
‏@kristoncapps
Cleveland prepares for possibly unprecedented violence at the Republican National Convention in July: http://bit.ly/1U21dVB

@pareene
again, given America's actual political history, it seems like they're preparing for very very precedented violence

(Cops also have been preparing for conventions exactly in this manner since 2004)

lol that's an amazing story.

intercoastal Florida is def the kind of weird place where i would imagine randomly seeing Kissinger

or nude wrestling with a croc in Gatorland

a friend texted me last year to swear kissinger was in a neighboring toilet stall

btw from a Yelp review:

What made me love the park was the surprises of the staff. Unlike many parks, where they are super reserved and concerned about getting sued, I saw a few different times when the staff would see a couple kids looking at a giant gator and they would actually let the kids inside the exhibits to feed them or take pictures. It was entertaining for everyone as well because we thought we might see a child get eaten alive.