Buttload of Faith: the 2016 Presidential Primary Thread (Pt 2)

i lose and i rim yr ass in the middle of the APPLE Store

i just got a crazy idea about what might derail trump's campaign

All I wanted was a new iPhone....

i lose and i rim yr ass in the middle of the APPLE Store

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Thursday, December 10, 2015 3:55 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in other words, we all lose

man if they "steal" the nom from Trump he will run third party and they can kiss the election goodbye. otoh if Trump wins they can also kiss the election goodbye. Conclusion: they're fucked

This is good. Very good. USA! USA!

On the other hand, a 3rd party run resulting in a Clinton victory would leave two of the three parties feeling cheated, and those happen to be the two parties that own all the guns and reaaaaaaaaaaally want to have to use them

I don't see a brokered convention because I'm a pessimist.

I welcome a civil war, the army would crush them

xp

stopped watch etc.: https://www.yahoo.com/politics/ted-cruz-says-middle-east-was-safer-with-saddam-181023443.html

I welcome a civil war, the army would crush them

xp

― Οὖτις

Seriously dude?

if we're gaming out apocalyptic scenarios of armed insurrections in red states, sure why not. I've somewhat sarcastically noted in the gun threads that I would welcome all these gun nuts rising up against a tyrannical state - they get to live out their action movie fantasy, the military gets to indiscriminately lay waste to bad guys, it's a win-win!

As an unarmed individual living in the middle of a heavily armed civilian population, that doesn't sound very appealing

yeah. that plus it would suck to see the army kill my dad and uncle and a bunch of people i grew up with, even i think they're so rong on everything

anyway, no need to worry about anything because Trump is going to flame out(tm) any second here..

if we're gaming out apocalyptic scenarios of armed insurrections in red states, sure why not. I've somewhat sarcastically noted in the gun threads that I would welcome all these gun nuts rising up against a tyrannical state - they get to live out their action movie fantasy, the military gets to indiscriminately lay waste to bad guys, it's a win-win!

― Οὖτις, Thursday, December 10, 2015 4:51 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've tried to carefully stay out of getting into pissing contests on ILX, but... you're being an asshole on the internet, man. take a step back. a few steps, in fact.

i mean your own scenario is just as crazy and vile as anything you impute to your bogeymen

i assume you know better, so i'm appealing to your better nature

uh I would hope you guys realize I'm not really being serious here. this is a totally unrealistic/unlikely/nightmare apocalypse scenario that I am addressing with what is typically identified as "gallows humor"

in the future, make sure you bracket all putatively funnystatements with the "/humor" tag.

www.nightmareapocalypse.humor

As a result, it now looks more like the old, semi-dysfunctional democratic party, able to win elections, but frequently threatening to fracture due to the extreme differences within its coalition.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless)

this is driving me crazy, because i don't see what the big differences are, i see a fight over how far to take anti-government, free market, pro-militarism principles to their logical conclusions

yeah at this point I think the differences within the coalition are more about where someone falls on the crazy spectrum than any given policy belief. like, when 50% of the party was backing trump+carson, what does that say about the big tent republican party? nothing really. the gop is not hustling to convince the isolationists and hawks to be friends, it's busy trying to convince people to vote for any...any...person who's held political office instead of a racist reality tv star who spends half the time on camera bragging about how smart and rich he is.

half?

Another worthwhile David Roberts re: GOP & climate change

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/2/9836566/republican-climate-denial-why

Basically, every country has has conservatives who deny the stuff, only in America we still use a beta version of a party system, so without a parliamentary set up allowing for the right wingers to congregate into their own corner, they can take over one of the major parties.

As for the psych rationalization of denial, that's a different post.

i lose and i rim yr ass in the middle of the APPLE Store

well, my GIS for "think different butt" didn't yield the Apple-ad parody I wanted; however,

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/wp-content/blogs.dir/445/files/2012/04/i-568fafca7901a82b582cee0829b4e9ba-points.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/3e/e3/e8/3ee3e88d56a3c867ae9c723902d66816.jpg

I don't see why a brokered convention is more of a possibility this time than any other time. Delegates have to vote for the primary winner on the first ballot, right?

yeah I have no idea why today was the day media decided to get excited about a split convention. I guess we're at some kind of news equinox between debates or something

I went into this with pretty low expectations but nevermind it's hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU_Jdts5rL0

time for another unintentionally long delegate nerd speculation post. don't mind me.

fwiw, i think a brokered convention remains suuuuper unlikely, but just for clarification's sake, the republicans have a range of different delegate rules varying by state. this time article remains pretty useful for getting a sense of how tangled it is or could be. some delegates are 'bound' (must vote for 'their' candidate on the first ballot), some aren't. the pseudo-superdelegates aren't bound for example, and though as we've discussed before they are wayyyyyy less of a factor than they are for the democrats, they could come into play. in some of the caucus states, none of the delegates are bound. meanwhile, some states are winner-take-all, some states are proportional, some states are proportional with high thresholds. all this means that it's possible to reach the convention without one candidate having a majority, and for a fair number of delegates to have been pledged to candidates who did not stay in the race, who will become free agents after the first ballot.

again, i don't see that happening, at all. but if people are taking it more as a possibility, it is probably because of, yes, news equinox, but also because of two things:

(1) the current front-runner, in many interpretations, has a sort of fundamental ceiling on his support, and that ceiling is well shy of a majority in any state

(2) versus a typical race, it seems sorta plausible that a lot of people will stay in this one past the point where things usually consolidate to a two-person deal. that is, assuming trump actually stays in and actually gets votes, you might also go on to assume that neither bush nor rubio, nor cruz probably, is going to do what people normally do in races and say "well, it looks like it's not my year, there's a frontrunner and a second place person fighting it out and neither one of them is me." because everybody assumes that at some point the trump thing is over and they could be the one to reap the benefit. so where usually the race thins out a lot after the first few primaries, it's possible this one keeps grinding along and all these guys are getting delegates. the thinking is, what if this is like 2012, except there's not a romney actually soaking up those big juicy states? (see this summary chart for a refresher) what if the field is so evenly matched that those plums are flying every which way?

but even then, i don't really see it. there are just too many what-ifs to get us there - mainly, counting on the polls to not change too much between now and voting (seems like a stretch, given how much they've shifted in even the last two weeks), counting on all those polls to really be predictive of votes, and counting on ALL these characters to have the mindset i've outlined where staying in the game of chicken continues to make sense for them. the weird kind of equilibrium that could lead towards a brokered convention is way more plausible with four leading candidates than three. if carson quits soon, or just slips down to bush numbers (3.6%!) we get closer and closer to a situation where one remaining person can be convinced they need to step down for the good of the party, so there's one clear anti-trump person who can start racking up delegates.

meanwhile the pressure from the 'establishment' is going to be VERY high on the little dinky candidates to pack it in. they can't win and there are too many threshold-based primaries where they can't even hope to grab a few delegates and make themselves useful/relevant that way. and (counting bush), these jokers currently total nearly 15% of the polling average! make up the equivalent of an entire additional candidate in this race. in honor of the source candidates' initials (BCPFKHS) i'll be calling this globular composite entity "Bocephus." Bocephus, with 14.8%, is polling in the vicinity of Cruz (15.6), Rubio (13.6% and rising) and Carson (13.6% and falling). while some of bocephus's composite elements could plausibly swing Trump or Cruz, i think mostly it's rubio material: fiscally-minded, 'moderate' republicans, not interested in revved-up rhetoric or border wars, looking for "someone who can beat hillary in november," maybe they've even read the pundits pointing out that all this stuff about immigration is the kiss of death electorally. and while i think the establishment would take cruz over trump, they'd really, really rather have rubio. if rubio has the support of bocephus, and plenty of ad-buying money, then trump and cruz trading second or even first place finishes in some of the primaries is just fine. no brokerage required.

this hasn't happened yet because things have been so chaotic, and because the assumption is that you need to let the primaries play out a bit to make sure you don't end up with a supposedly electable conservative that the party just completely hates or who is utterly inept on stage (like if they'd just decided on bush day one). but eventually it will happen, imo.

guys i know trainwrecks are exciting but maybe we can hold off on the "brokered convention" talk until after iowa?

yeah sorry the tl;dr of my post was basically "it's not going to happen, because nobody besides internet nerds wants it to happen."

i only brought it up because of the headline article in the washington post about the gop power brokers discussing a brokered convention. i guess i really fell for it

cue 100000000000 internet people 4 months ago talking about how the inevitable trump flameout by the end of july

will be

recorded

penis

mmmm

but yes, all of this is insane. the top news in 2015, according to facebook, was the 2016 election. i'm willing to admit that my thoughts on this are biased by my rewatching game of thrones season 1 over the past 48 hours, but the 2016 presidential election in many ways is like...game of thrones

well it's reasonable to want to try and predict things long term rather than just talking about today's poll numbers, and i'm certainly not ruling out a brokered convention, but at this point the republican primary is utterly unpredictable even by people with advanced understandings of psychopathology.

as for all those armed right-wing would-be insurgents, i find them to be nearly as intimidating as anonymous.

but what about THIS

http://a5.img.talkingpointsmemo.com/image/upload/w_652/heyjbbfunkk0uflog7tz.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Z0yuGaG.jpg

well he's got my vote

brokered-convention talk is like the stories about 'what happens if everyone ties?' at the end of the baseball season

The party's coalition-ness is important as regards when people turn out to vote for that party's candidate in the Presidential election, are they likely to look at the other contests also being voted that day and think "I know nothing about this person except the party name next to them, that's good enough for me"? The Democrats seem to have that still together, the Republicans not so much, as evidenced by the fact that their leading candidate is a pretty shit republican.

https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/silver-gop-five-ring-circus-jindal.png

this is driving me crazy, because i don't see what the big differences are, i see a fight over how far to take anti-government, free market, pro-militarism principles to their logical conclusions

yeah at this point I think the differences within the coalition are more about where someone falls on the crazy spectrum than any given policy belief. like, when 50% of the party was backing trump+carson, what does that say about the big tent republican party?

WTF? It says that the evangelicals aren't getting nearly enough love from the big tent GOP recently, which is, you know, kind of big news for the GOP. Maybe only 3rd or 4th on the list of "why we're fucked", but still.

Yeah but what's a tangible evangelical principle they don't have covered? I mean the GOP has been anti-abortion for as long as I can remember. If we're talking about something like "faith in God" I'd argue that's basically an empty principle and something too complex for 538 to really measure anyway

the Republicans not so much, as evidenced by the fact that their leading candidate is a pretty shit republican.

otoh, the Dems' leading candidate is a quality Republican.

xp that's a problem for 538 though (I don't think this election's being very kind to a site whose thing it is to start a sentence in every article with "statistically speaking..") - it's not an empty principle (more a "you know it when you see it") to the Carson supporters, and if they won't fall in line behind another candidate then that's a problem. And if that candidate is Cruz, that may still be a problem.

mookieproof otm on brokered-convention talk. It came up last time when Teahadis were deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about Romney, it will come up now because large segments of the party can't stand the polling leaders. It hasn't happened since the days of mutton-chop side-whiskers and it won't happen now.

Dr. C.: "the 2016 presidential election in many ways is like...game of thrones"

Needs more tits, imo.

evangelicals love carson and cruz and have come out for candidates they were more lukewarm about than trump

For those interested, I found this interactive online tool for sorting out the delegate situation. Looks like it'll be super helpful for me because I'm super ignorant about that stuff.

Dr. C.: "the 2016 presidential election in many ways is like...game of thrones"

just for the record, this was Karl Malone. i know nothing about game of thrones.

my bad sorry