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

Delicious: Carson threatening to leave GOP

It would be in such horrifically bad taste to make an analogy where the GOP is acting like Brer Rabbit begging Carson to throw it into the briar patch, and yet

Assuming Cruz, Carson, and Rubio don't quit and Cruz (who's ahead of the other two) gets the entirety of the Paul/Bush/Huckabee/Kasich/Christie/Fiorina vote, he's still behind Trump.

And Cruz's unlikability is twofold: first, he has burned enough bridges with his fellow congresscritters (e.g., McCain) to ensure he's anathema to party leadership. Second, his fatal charisma deficit keeps him out of the running with the general electorate. Even if parliamentary shrewdness and college-debater skillz get him past the first obstacle, the second looms before him like a glacial wall. Worry about Cruz? I refuz.

Here's a thing that makes me a little less scared about scary manbabies leading in the polls: they will likely tantrum themselves out of contention. Even if it doesn't happen, I hope the whispers about a brokered convention are enough to spur some of these children to take their balls and go independent.

DJP: hahaha

What is the path for Rubio or Cruz to actually win primaries?

My short take: Trump isn't going to win Iowa because he can't get the evangelical vote. My bet would be on Cruz at the moment (Rubio doesn't have the same pull w evangelicals as the Tedster). Trump might win New Hampshire but it's hard to tell, I could see it maybe going for Christie too. My guess based on the current situation is that the party establishment's gonna throw it's weight behind Rubio - the only candidate Clinton thinks presents a real challenge, party insiders like him, he's a young fresh latino face that they have delusions may appeal to other non-Cuban latinos, etc. I can see him actually winning primaries, glad-handling superdelegates, doing the political horse-trading necessary to cement party support, avoiding saying too much that's insane and/or crassly offensive. He's the safe bet. Cruz's path is more tortuous given how much the establishment hates him, but dude is methodical and his whole modus operandi is to figure out and exploit the rules of the game (which is why, for example, he has set up shop in places like Puerto Rico that other candidates don't even bother with). He knows it's about racking up numbers, no matter how, and if he can pull off an early primary win like in Iowa he will perhaps start to gather steam.

he's still behind Trump.

no. if Cruz wins Iowa he's AHEAD of Trump.

it's important to remember this is about delegates and not about poll numbers

"The party establishment throws its weight behind Rubio": I agree that this is likely. Rubio is seen by nativists as squishy on immigration and an amnesty supporter. The Trumpoids will never move to Rubio, but they can and will move to Cruz.

in short they are all fucked

it's important to remember this is about delegates and not about poll numbers

Obviously, but you're arguing for either somewhat of a tidal shift toward another candidate or some means of party establishment exerting an influence that I'm not at all sure that they have.

Cruz wins Iowa he's ahead of Trump until Trump wins New Hampshire and maybe Nevada and South Carolina.

impt iowa factoids: evangelical macher Bob Vader Plaats has endorsed Ted Cruz

and i see on twitter that Trump has started to shittalk Cruz, so, truce over i guess. here we go.

what fascinates me is that i've lived in america all my life. for more than two decades clinton has been one of the most hated people in america. that's her major electoral flaw, is that people hate her with such fervor and intensity that it's hard to imagine her possibly getting elected. and then the year she finally comes up for election, the moment the republican party has been preparing for for decades, for their leading candidate they drag up somebody even more hate-able than clinton. that's phenomental to me, simply phenomenal.

that said i don't think we're potentially looking at a mondale, mcgovern, or goldwater-level rout, at least assuming a two-party race. anybody with an (r) next to their name will win in kentucky, and their recent electoral history proves it. there are surely other states where this is the case, but i don't know them very well offhand. on the other hand, trump would by no means be a guaranteed winner in indiana- the donnelly/mourdock senate race is reasonably indicate of their political character.

trump's ability to take office is less than zero. clinton can just run ad council ads filled with rainbow coalition cast-offs. do one with the rainbow coalition reading the pledge of allegiance. (get a jewish guy to do the "under god" bit.) you probably don't even need a super pac, though if you do you could make it genuinely non-partisan.

as much as we like to carp about the obvious faults of the "winner-take-all" american democratic model, in this case it is clearly a huge asset. under a parliamentary system, the republicans would have to caucus with this scum. instead, his fascism achieves denunciation from pretty much everyone in a position of power. the only "victory" trump can achieve is to torpedo the fourth party system. there are way more safeguards against his taking power than there are against, say, le pen in france.

i mean, absolute worst case scenario, isis summons cthulhu and destroys half of new york the week before the election, everybody panics and votes for trump and... what? the day he takes the oath of office the democrats and republicans team up to impeach him. (technically you have to commit a crime to be impeached, but no president has ever been impeached in the us for other than base political reasons.) he has no military or paramilitary support, no organized base of power. he can't even make it as a warlord.

This is anecdotal evidence but every rational Republican/conservative I have spoken to has said that they will be voting for Clinton if Trump is the Republican nominee. Every single one.

yea you live in MA though they are different from other republicans

it's important to remember this is about delegates and not about poll numbers

― Οὖτις, Friday, December 11, 2015 2:40 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but if poll numbers (or the underlying voting intentions they represent) continue as they are it's not obvious winning iowa or new hampshire would do much. someone other than trump winning early on gives non-trumpists much needed coordination though.

He knows it's about racking up numbers, no matter how, and if he can pull off an early primary win like in Iowa he will perhaps start to gather steam.

how is this not something they all know?? are you saying some ppl just cross their fingers and hope that pumping up their poll numbers will convince delegates / party machinery to go for them?

Interesting NY Times editorial on the business consequences of Trump's racist blather. I had not read this before posting earlier.

Cruz wins Iowa he's ahead of Trump until Trump wins New Hampshire and maybe Nevada and South Carolina.

the x factor here is that Trump loses something. What does Trump do when he loses and how does that affect his chances elsewhere? this is not a minor question.

yea you live in MA though they are different from other republicans

Only a couple of these Republicans live in MA

Is Massachusetts so different?

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/ma/massachusetts_republican_presidential_primary-5205.html

no president has ever been impeached in the us for other than base political reasons

Nixon was prison-bound

nixon was never actually impeached.

jesus, just had the thought that there could be a Trump/Carson independent ticket and almost vomited

true it didn't make it to the Senate

xp

rushomancy, you say "destroys half of New York" like that would be a bad thing. Yes I know Trump is an NY creature - but I think his constituency is decidedly not so.

(I try hard not to over-conflate Trump's current support with yr standard exurban ammosexual Tea Party doodz. Also with Norquistian anti-taxers, and with those who loved the Gingrich Contract for America (remember that?). I admit that the Venn diagram of those folks is not entirely contiguous, but I am sure it overlaps quite a lot.)

And about the third-party option: big nope out of the gate. As was posted earlier, sore loser provisions prohibit Trump/Carson from appearing on the ballot in a number of states, including (and most especially) Ohio. No modern _Republican_ can win without Ohio - let alone an insurgent conservative. No way no how. Of course as a Democrat I would love for them to try, it is a non-starter electorally speaking.

lol @ "ammosexual"

I think it would be awesome if Trump ran as an independent, and then every other candidate was like, me too, I want to be an independent, too! And then there was Clinton, Jeb!, and 15 independents.

Trump running third-party is best-case scenario for the country imo

I live in Texas and even the Tea Party types I know think Trump is a nutter. The obvious teabaggers still seem pro-Cruz, others are backing Rubio out of electability beliefs.

He's at 35%. What is the path for Rubio or Cruz to actually win primaries? That it requires lots of others to quit the race?

He's not, fwiw. Of the five polls RCP is using, he's at 35-36 in two of them, and a solid 27 in all three of the others. The polling average, which puts him at 30.4, is a (kludgey) way to try and cancel out weird house effects or other tendencies in the polling. When we get to the general, we can expect 538 to step up with a more sophisticated model of rating the polling houses' relative accuracy, but for now I think that's probably more accurate than just picking the highest number and going with that.

For Rubio or Cruz to win primaries - this isn't so hard to comprehend. "It requires lots of others to quit the race" is sort of like saying "it requires what happens every time to happen." Those 3% people are not going to still be running in February, or if they are, they're not still going to be even that high - their voters are going to be wooed away. This is a thing that happens, and as outlined above, phantom candidate Bocephus is representing a lot of people whose voters are not going to go over to Trump. Mostly Rubio I'd say though obviously Bush is hoping to wrangle them and pull some kind of late surge which could certainly delay the race consolidating. As Carson continues collapsing I would guess his voters swing mostly Cruz on evangelism, partly Trump on outsider-to-politics-ism. But we're talking about large pieces of the pie that aren't Trump's at all. So yeah these other guys can win primaries, and once any of them start securing some of the winner-take-all primaries, the distribution of the 20%, 15% of delegates from proportional states will quickly be forgotten. It might be a longer race than it sometimes is, it might look like a real three- or four-way fight for a long while, but Trump is just laden with enormous disadvantages once you get beyond his polling lead.

I'd also be curious how good his ground game is in terms of getting people registered to vote in primaries (an easily-forgotten chore, especially if you're not a regular voter), getting them to turn out to vote, etc. This is something the politicians in the room have a lot of experience and staff ready to roll on - it's how Cruz and Rubio have their current jobs.

how good his ground game is in terms of getting people registered to vote in primaries

I haven't seen any detailed analysis of this and would be curious as well. I've read Trump boasting about it but y'know pillar of salt and all that. I would guess his organization is pretty shitty at this given that most must be new to it.

considering he was hiring former Apprentice contestants to run portions of his campaign, I am surprised that his campaign offices haven't all caught on fire yet

"Oh, oops, when you said 'you're fired,' I thought you meant..."

again that's the type of thing that seems like it should take down a campaign but to someone already supporting trump it's probably just common sense. why wouldn't you want the best workers in America running your campaign?

running third party for president doesn't make sense if you actually want to be president, sure. but first, that hasn't stopped people wiser than trump from doing exactly that in the past. second, i am not convinced that his primary goal is to become president. trump, even more than being a fascist, is an egomaniacal sociopath. he will do or say absolutely anything to keep people talking about him. he has absolutely zero reason, should he lose the primary, to not run as an independent.

Yeah, I don't know. Kasich, Rand Paul, Christie, Fiorina, Huckabee drop out before Super Tuesday?

and as outlined above, phantom candidate Bocephus is representing a lot of people whose voters are not going to go over to Trump. Mostly Rubio I'd say though obviously Bush is hoping to wrangle them and pull some kind of late surge which could certainly delay the race consolidating. As Carson continues collapsing...

This seems extremely speculative to me. Rubio has no traction I can see, Bush obviously much less. Carson's collapse may have already reached its bottom floor.

nah Carson's goin all the way down

Rubio has no traction I can see

he's the only establishment guy polling double digits

We'll see. He's at 13% at some distance from all the negative media attention.

xp re. Carson

Yeah, double digits for Rubio. He has a shot. I'm not as convinced that a lot of those voting for the others will not end up with Trump, Carson, or Cruz.

his campaign is reminiscent of Fiorina + all those other one-time poll-toppers from last time around - ppl had a brief flirtation with him, he got some good zingers in, then everyone realized he's a moron (except for evangelicals, who are being wooed away by Teddboy)

his = Carson there

anybody with an (r) next to their name will win in kentucky, and their recent electoral history fraud proves it.

fixed

Did you guys see the S.E. Cupp interview with the Trump campaign person who said, "Who cares? They're Muslims." this morning???

This seems extremely speculative to me. Rubio has no traction I can see, Bush obviously much less. Carson's collapse may have already reached its bottom floor.

That's all speculative too, though! And again - those characters don't have to all drop out before Super Tuesday for their supporters to abandon them. Carson's collapse is as new as Rubio and Cruz's rise, so if we can speculate that he's reached his floor (why?), we can also speculate that Rubio hasn't reached his ceiling. I mean, just looking at it on paper, would it be so surprising that the inexperienced candidate who only says crazy things would woo the evangelicals for a while and then burn out completely? Cruz offers them so much more, except those in the real hard core of late-night-radio-fantasy-pyramid-theory believers. We're still nearly two months out from Iowa so assuming the current polling will hold true then just seems odd to me, since it's changed so much even since the last debate or so.

Yeah, Rubio might or might not be the one. We'll see. He has the advantage of being the candidate the party establishment would most like to see win it, and that is a huge advantage. It might turn out that in hindsight, the whole 2015 phase of the race amounted to the GOP determining that Bush was simply not adequate to filling that role, but Rubio was. But again, even if Rubio doesn't work out, the party would still prefer Cruz to Trump.

I'm not as convinced that a lot of those voting for the others will not end up with Trump, Carson, or Cruz.

Really? We are talking here about people whose first choice is Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Rand Paul or Chris Christie. I can imagine that for some of them Trump isn't totally off the list, but probably not many, and surely not their second choice. I'll give you the Fiorina people since she got a lot of "not from the establishment" wind early on. Huckabee's people I feel like would swing Carson if still in the race, Cruz if not, maybe a splash of Trump but either way it'd be slicing up what's currently 1.8% of the pie, not just handing it to the Trump column.

I don't know, Carson has a certain je ne sais quoi? If the 13% who support him didn't abandon ship already, I'm not sure why they would.

because some other religious nutter demonstrates a better chance at winning ie Cruz

well you coulda said that when he was at 20% too. it's not like his numbers have stabilized, they're in free fall xp