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

American presidential elections usually amount to a series of overcorrections: Clinton begat Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump.

riiiight

is it too much to hope for an actual trump/cruz duel

With pistols or rapiers?

Or, given their level of decorum, matching pairs of BBQ tongs?

dude you are making me take the side of tucker carlson.

did you actually read the article? he's a horrible asshole who supports trump.

Poor old USA, this campaign is one of the most repulsive and embarrassing spectacles I've ever witnessed (at a safe distance, thank God).

is it too much to hope for an actual trump/cruz duel

a sword fight, if you know what i mean

Drumpf wants us to know all about his sex life. He doesn’t regard sex as a private activity. It’s something he broadcasts to demonstrate his dominance, of both women and men. In his view, treating women like meat is a necessary precondition for winning, and winning is all that matters in his world. By winning, Drumpf means asserting superiority. And since life is a zero-sum game, superiority can only be achieved at someone else’s expense.

otm

lol cruz's "call out" of trump complete with pointing, what a nerd

God damn it Cruz, tell the public that you will never support that yammering asswipe's presidential campaign in a million years. Don't let the GOP do you like that.

keep in mind that most of the GOP is going to support nominating a guy who has publicly mocked his opponent's wife's mental illness on social media.

truly the expression "i can't even" has never been more apt

so can someone explain the Polls-Plus method on 538 for me? cos it's now updated Cruz has a 45% chance to win Cali, and yet the only new poll that came out was one that ended before Rubio dropped out and still shows Trump ahead. I realize it's meant to show a range of possibilities, but it seems weird that this model forecasts him as a slight frontrunner when not a single CA poll from 2016 has him closer than a 5 point deficit. are they possibly doing the math of Rubio-transfer?

"polls plus" attempts to model the effect of endorsements as well as polls, and cruz has had a ton of these.

presumably the modeling is based on data from 2012, etc., when an endorsement was a good thing for a GOP candidate

got it - thanks!

I have a feeling the Convention is going to be one of the most hilarious spectacles that I nonetheless have no desire to be within a 50 mile radius of

i think "polls plus" uses state demographics too, in the sense that it incorporates results from demographically similar primaries earlier in the cycle?

but endorsements are probably the big effect in CA. they'll dominate the polls plus in states with very little polling like CA.

i feel really bad for cleveland right now. can they back out of the convention and give to, i dunno, the bahamas?

move it to guantanamo bay

is this a tipping point for Trump?

the latest polling showing him at like a 70% unfavorable rating among women voters might be. i am becoming more and more doubtful of trump being nominated. i think they'll find a way to push him out at the convention, assuming they can keep him short of the 1237 delegates on the first ballot. been reading a lot of stories indicating that trump's people aren't organized w/r/t who is selected as a delegate and procedures at the convention

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ted-cruz-gains-in-louisiana-after-loss-there-to-donald-trump-1458861959

While Mr. Trump leads in winning primary and caucus elections, and has won more delegates, the Cruz campaign is proving superior at the arcane game of picking the people who will be the actual delegates to the convention, where they will help write the rules and ultimately choose the nominee.

i agree, not nominating Trump is the lesser disaster. if they can keep him short and don't fuck it up...

The republican front runner too busy chasing tail and defending his hands and throwing mentally ill women under the bus to waste time figuring out how this whole 'delegate' thing works.

Trump always reminds me of the Onion article about the alternate universe James Hetfield being named Taco Bell employee of the month. Without his daddy's cash, dude would probably be some anonymous slob throwing back Natty Lights in his dank basement apartment right now.

One of the front-pagers at LGM:

Donald Trump is that kid who shows up in your basement and wants to play your electric guitar even though he doesn’t know a single chord. He insists that he’s awesome and can totally rock out better than anyone ever, “better than Jimmy Hendrix, even” — and when he says the name you know he’s thinking “Jimmy” and not “Jimi,” because that’s how goddamn dumb he is. But he won’t shut up about your guitar — seriously, he goes on about it for, like, two hours.

Finally, you roll your eyes and placate the mulleted intruder, because he’s eating all your cereal right out of the box with his gross little hands, and you have no idea where they’ve been (but really you do, you just can’t think about it anymore), and you realize it’s only a matter of time before he gets bored and tries to fuck your sister again or your mom or something worse. So you give him the guitar, show him a couple of power chords, and tell him to “take it easy” as you plug him into the amp.

He ignores you, of course, and attacks the guitar like it owes him $20 and a handjob. The breakfast sausages that pass for fingers bend the strings unreasonably, and he’s got that white guy Blues Face going on, and his hair is bobbing like a worn 7-11 mop, and you can’t even look because you’re suddenly embarrassed for the entire human race. Meanwhile, your amp is spitting out black clots of noise that sound like what self-loathing would sound like, or like the audio track to a crush fetish video. You don’t know it yet, but upstairs, your dog is shitting on the kitchen floor.

Trump, the stupid dicknose, actually does a windmill and totally misses the strings, and the pick goes flying across the room, but he’s like, “Nah, fuck it, I meant to do that,” so he drops down to his knees and shoves his fist in the air and screams “Yeah!” like he’s that guy from Metallica and not the absolute worst person in the world at that moment and most moments bracketing either end of that moment. The feedback scrapes the basement walls for another ten seconds or so, and upstairs, another dog turd drops.

Trump stands up as you’re reaching for the bleach bottle, swoops his pig knuckles through his hair, and grunts, “Heh. Fucking awesome, I’ve gotta get one of these,” as you drop the cap and take your first swig.

Trump would be a PUA men's rights neckbeard

did you actually read the article? he's a horrible asshole who supports trump.

“If I can’t make it — and we’re going to try as hard as we can until the last vote is cast — we want to completely revitalize the Democratic Party and make it a party of the people rather than one of large campaign contributors,” Sanders said in an interview on the progressive Web show “The Young Turks.”

Sanders also listed policy demands he would make of Clinton, including a single-payer health care system, a $15 an hour minimum wage, tougher regulation of the finance industry, closing corporate tax loopholes and “a vigorous effort to address climate change.”

“I am very worried. I mean, I talk to these scientists. This planet is in serious danger. You can’t cuddle up to the fossil fuel industry — you’ve got to take them on,” Sanders said, alluding to Clinton’s ties to oil and gas companies.

He also expressed concern about Clinton’s consistency on policy issues.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-endorsement_us_56f45bf0e4b014d3fe22b4a7

i think "polls plus" uses state demographics too, in the sense that it incorporates results from demographically similar primaries earlier in the cycle?

i think this is actually a totally separate gizmo they have somewhere else, the demographic-based model.

trump and cruz and cruz's wife is so... i mean, if cruz's responses weren't so disorganized and unconvincing i'd really be convinced at this point that this was the real conspiracy all along: trump and cruz making a pact, where trump thins the field out and then at the end plays heel to cruz's face, just piling on the over-the-top shenanigans to give cruz chances to put his hand on his heart, shed a tear for the bald eagle, and defend the honor of his wife and decent old american values. but cruz isn't really so good at that part.

they're such weird guys

cruz is like something from a david lynch movie and trump is like something from a david cronenberg movie.

Nah Cruz's face is more "body horror" than Trump

If they can somehow keep the nomination from Trump, how will that dude go out? Because he will not go quietly.

something roughly sort of like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z-LXnDGgek

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQJ8WrKnLUs

Trump's been going on the last couple of months about how badly Romney "choked" in 2012. I think there's some truth to that--that election could have been won--but if, hypothetically, Trump loses this nomination because of something like last-minute backlash from women, that would have to go down as one of the most spectacular political choke-jobs ever. He had the nomination pretty much locked up, all he had to do was tone it down a little bit, and he just couldn't.

#TedCruzSexScandal

I know! A Cruz sex scandal will be a big problem, less because of the blatant hypocrisy and more because it forces people to think about Ted Cruz having sex.

Worth it to go back to Nate Silver's checklist for assessing damage:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/electric-minor-political-scandal-acid/

If true, #1, 2, and 3 are serious problems (#3: "Lyin' Ted"); they're okay on #4, because Trump obviously can't be beat here; #5, would depend on the timing if confirmed.

If Ted Cruz were brought down by a sex scandal, I'd be okay with that.

http://www.theroot.com/content/dam/theroot/articles/politics/2014/02/katrina_pierson_challenges_gop_incumbent_pete_sessions/katrina_pierson_far.jpg.CROP.rtstoryvar-large.jpg

Reportedly one of the five women, Katrina Pierson. She's on CNN all the time--she's with Trump right now. That intuitively makes me think it's not true with regards to her. Why wouldn't she have spoken up by now? Maybe that was something Trump was keeping in reserve.

The "beans" Trump thinks he has to spill is the rumor that Heidi was a call girl...

that woman is too pretty for me to imagine cruz touching her

She is also batshit crazy, so don't count anything out just yet: http://gawker.com/search?q=katrina+pierson

Maybe he found skidmarked undies

ugh, this is going to be very ugly for everyone on both sides, isn't it

Why wouldn't she have spoken up by now?

You had sex with Ted Cruz. Would YOU want anyone to find out?

We hadn’t been airborne long when Trump decided to watch a movie. He’d brought along “Michael,” a recent release, but twenty minutes after popping it into the VCR he got bored and switched to an old favorite, a Jean Claude Van Damme slugfest called “Bloodsport,” which he pronounced “an incredible, fantastic movie.”

a Jean Claude Van Damme slugfest called “Bloodsport,” which he pronounced “an incredible, fantastic movie.”

Fuck it, he's got my vote.

Wonder if some people will hear "Katrina Pierson" and think of the B-52's.

OTM about Bloodsport.

ted doesn't seem particularly loyal to the republican party, certainly not when it conflicts with his own goals. so presumably he thinks refusing to back trump-as-nominee would be a political misstep

what does he have to lose by saying 'fuck that guy, he insulted my wife, i will never support him'?