I DON'T KNOW WHERE THE BOTTOM IS • US presidential elections part VIII

There hasn't been a primary challenge to an incumbent president, on either side, since the 70s. It's highly unlikely to happen in 2020.

Just you wait and see :)

You aren't eligible to run Fred

Oh, dang. Forget that I said anything, then...

(xposts) Buchanan didn't win any primaries, but he won about a quarter of the vote in '92, caused a bit of panic when he got 40% in New Hampshire, and did well enough to deliver his cultural-war speech at the convention.

What the fuck is it with NH voters anyway

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrYkfz_VUAA27Lv.jpg

so i have questions for people doubting HRC's chances in 2020. which voting blocs are the GOP going to pick up? latinxs have been trending democratic since 2004 and while i think trump will represent the GOP's nadir, i expect romney's 2012 showing is closer to "normal". the electorate will be even less white than now, and unless the gop makes some fundamental policy and presentation changes (and risk alienating their base), they're not going to gain enough ground to have a majority coalition.

wtf you guys are so bored with this, the greatest election shitshow in living memory that you feel the need to jump to 2020 now?
http://img.pandawhale.com/95468-is-this-not-why-you-are-here-g-7gL5.gif

I think the GOP will need their own Barack Obama to flip states that have voted blue in the last 3 or 4 elections, otherwise it's Dem presidents from here on out.

lol remember when mccain 'suspended' his campaign

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrY4mPpWEAARy-X.jpg:small

is that patrick bateman?

y

but why

the original

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrYv6hhXEAAh9wv.jpg:small

adbusters is barely trying. come on people!
http://gaia.adage.com/images/bin/image/jumbo/Adbusters_Trump_Cool_Fascismo2016081532.jpg

idk seems ok except for the font

I want to live in the world where the trump kids are considered cool

weird to me that don jr. doesn't have a manbun

if the gop were smart, they'd drop all the social/culture wars stuff and just stick with "fiscal conservatism" and "drill baby drill"

idk just a semblance of a thought

The base doesn't care about fiscal conservatism tho, as this election finally laid bare.

yeah it's basically all about bald nationalism, white identity shit, and get rich quick schemes at this point

If you think there's credence to the idea that Trump doesn't actually want to win, more fodder:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/09/02/trump-launches-new-personal-attacks-against-morning-joe-co-host-mika-brzezinski/

Here he is having--by the historically low bar he's set for himself--a good few days. The polls have crept a little back in his direction. So he resurrects this. Not that it hurts him with anyone already voting for him, but it's a bizarre and pointless media distraction three weeks before the debates.

also "drill baby drill" IS a culture war thing

The conversation has passed but I just want to throw out there that Carly Fiorina is so uniquely terrible that they couldn't find a single person on her donor list who worked for Hewlett Packard. She is/was so bad that no one who worked for her was willing to contribute to her campaign.

donald trump was so bad that the entire GOP donor class has rejected him and pretty much anyone who has done business with him is going on the record to say what a terrible experience it is. he's the nominee. no reason why fiorina couldn't be.

What's funny is that Trump has clearly always been an asshole, but him running for President and setting himself up for the ultimate failure has finally freed people to call him out without fear of serious reprisal. Like here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/05/liz-smiths-reporting-on-donald-trump

I remain really interested in how he'll be treated after the election. Ostracized like Nader? Marginalized as a speciality hate-filled talking head, a la Buchanan?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/how-fox-news-women-took-down-roger-ailes.html

Many people I spoke with believe that the current management arrangement is just a stopgap until the election. “As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox,” predicts one host. “After the election, the prime-time lineup could be eviscerated. O’Reilly’s been talking about retirement. Megyn could go to another network. And Hannity will go to Trump TV.”

The prospect of Trump TV is a source of real anxiety for some inside Fox. The candidate took the wedge issues that Ailes used to build a loyal audience at Fox News — especially race and class — and used them to stoke barely containable outrage among a downtrodden faction of conservatives. Where that outrage is channeled after the election — assuming, as polls now suggest, Trump doesn’t make it to the White House — is a big question for the Republican Party and for Fox News. Trump had a complicated relationship with Fox even when his good friend Ailes was in charge; without Ailes, it’s plausible that he will try to monetize the movement he has galvanized in competition with the network rather than in concert with it. Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, chairman of Breitbart, the digital-media upstart that has by some measures already surpassed Fox News as the locus of conservative energy, to run his campaign suggests a new right-wing news network of some kind is a real possibility. One prominent media executive told me that if Trump loses, Fox will need to try to damage him in the eyes of its viewers by blaming him for the defeat.

Trump TV would be awesome, for all sorts of reasons.

Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it
You be a pundit on the Trump TV
That ain't workin' that's the way you do it
Money for nothin' and clicks for free

See the little hand maggot with the tan and the combover
Yeah buddy that's his oan hair
That little hand maggot got his own jet airplane
That little hand maggot thinks he's a billionaire

donald trump was so bad that the entire GOP donor class has rejected him and pretty much anyone who has done business with him is going on the record to say what a terrible experience it is. he's the nominee. no reason why fiorina couldn't be.

Her disastrous gubernatorial run is also a pretty big reason.

Bear in mind that the main reasons why the unthinkable happened re: Trump's candidacy was because a) he was willing to baldly state the abhorrent principles that are the bedrock positions of a plurality of Republican voters (and that a majority are willing to hold their nose over if they think they can use the messenger to enact other parts of their agenda) and b) every single person he was running against was a fucking disaster of a politician. The ONLY people who ran who weren't automatically disqualifiable from the get-go out of the 800K who ran for the Republican nomination were Jeb, who was only credible because he was a political legacy, Kasich, because no one knew who he was, and Graham, because no one knew who he was. Everyone else was either patently unfit or had done something previously in their political careers to torpedo the electorate's ability to take them seriously as a candidate. The one piece of Trump's strategy that made sense was mocking and denigrating everyone he ran against because they were all gigantic fucking clowns. The problem with doing this to Clinton is that it is manifestly obvious even with her history of minor to moderate political gaffes that she is not a fucking clown and has had more success than failure; the only person who was consistently in the conversation on the Republican side you could say this about was Kasich, and he was a complete non-entity outside of Ohio, where a significant number of his constituents hate him.

Fiorina does not have the temperament or the desire to run Trump's playbook. She will never be a serious candidate for anything except maybe comptroller of a medium-sized California city.

i missed the speculation about 'Trump TV' back in june, but apparently it's worrying a lot of people at fox:

Many people I spoke with believe that the current management arrangement is just a stopgap until the election. “As of November 9, there will be a bloodbath at Fox,” predicts one host. “After the election, the prime-time lineup could be eviscerated. O’Reilly’s been talking about retirement. Megyn could go to another network. And Hannity will go to Trump TV.”

The prospect of Trump TV is a source of real anxiety for some inside Fox. The candidate took the wedge issues that Ailes used to build a loyal audience at Fox News — especially race and class — and used them to stoke barely containable outrage among a downtrodden faction of conservatives. Where that outrage is channeled after the election — assuming, as polls now suggest, Trump doesn’t make it to the White House — is a big question for the Republican Party and for Fox News. Trump had a complicated relationship with Fox even when his good friend Ailes was in charge; without Ailes, it’s plausible that he will try to monetize the movement he has galvanized in competition with the network rather than in concert with it. Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, chairman of Breitbart, the digital-media upstart that has by some measures already surpassed Fox News as the locus of conservative energy, to run his campaign suggests a new right-wing news network of some kind is a real possibility. One prominent media executive told me that if Trump loses, Fox will need to try to damage him in the eyes of its viewers by blaming him for the defeat.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/how-fox-news-women-took-down-roger-ailes.html

Her disastrous gubernatorial run is also a pretty big reason.

Senatorial, but yeah there is no reason to assume that she'd get any traction four years from now. It's an interesting though experiment to imagine what would have happened had Trump not run, but I'm inclined to think that it would still have been a mess on GOP side and Clinton'd still be ahead (albeit perhaps by less). Too many cooks and an unpopular overall message, etc.

Everyone else was either patently unfit or had done something previously in their political careers to torpedo the electorate's ability to take them seriously as a candidate.

This also disqualifies Trump, though - he brought an extra factor to make up for it, which was widespread name recognition. Carly Fiorina may have picked up some from arguments with him, but only as the loser.

Kasich, and he was a complete non-entity outside of Ohio, where a significant number of his constituents hate him.

agree that he was a nonentity outside of Ohio, but FWIW he's a fairly popular governor. I wouldn't be surprised if the GOP party apparatus puts their weight behind him in 2020.

Not that I'm saying that would guarantee his success in the nomination, it might just be Jeb 2.0

The most convincing explanation of Kasich's 2016 run (or its continuation once it became clear that it was a clown car and he was going nowhere) is that he was positioning himself to be the grown-up MOR "normal Republican" that they should have nominated. I can see a lot of people arguing that it was a "safe" year up against Clinton's unpopularity, and that they blew a big chance big time by going with an untested version of the party when they had Steady John right there.

At the time, I also though Kasich could have been playing some very long-odds chances of a convention win or Cruz/Kasich ticket or something, but his very clear hands-off stance with Trump since the contest wound up is telling. He's doing the not-gonna-say-I-told-you-so move: sit by, watch this thing go down in flames, and hope everybody comes to the right conclusions.

Found his behavior at the convention very telling in particular. Right there in his home state and he carefully avoided it.

i missed the speculation about 'Trump TV' back in june, but apparently it's worrying a lot of people at fox:

zach i posted these exact two paragraphs from that article like 3 posts ago. we are so alike you and i.

djp you make good points. i don't want to give the impression i'm particularly hung up on fiorina. my broader point is that someone similarly bad could win the nomination and beat clinton, not that fiorina in particular is going to do it.

Many anti-Trump conservative sites cling ti tbe fiction that Kasich would've trounced Clinton.

Ned's too much of a gentleman to point out that he posted that article yesterday :)

xpost whoooops sorry! I'm getting too old for this shit, I can't even keep up.

the GOP party apparatus puts their weight behind him in 2020.

What is the "GOP party apparatus" in 2020? Who is in it? Who pays for it?

koch bros; koch bros; koch bros

i don't see them going away any time soon

I don't see them supporting the Trumpist agenda any time soon - so what role they have in the future of the actual GOP seems questionable