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

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

So Cruzmentum after Iowa? Because I don't see that he's got it now.

so much of this stuff involves snowball effects of self-fulfilling prophecies, if primary voters realize there's someone with a better chance of winning who says more or less the same kinds of things as the person they initially supported, then they switch over to the one with the better chance of winning. This happens all the time.

xp

conversely if you start to lose - as in, you can't win Iowa or New Hampshire - people desert you

I hope somebody is doing an documentary about the jeb bush campaign cause I would love to see what it's like there right now

Santorum was winning states as late as March 24th last time. In April, you get a string of east coast states - that looks like the point where Romney took it.

A reminder that most people aren't as glued to this as we are, news about crazy stuff that people say gets around at conversational speed.

xp some Cruzmentum if he wins it, a lot obviously if Trump flames out shortly after his first loss - but he's expected to get at least second in Iowa, if he gets that position in New Hampshire then he's on fire.

Also this doesn't look like Cruzmentum?

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html

wait who do you think is like Santorum here, Carson...?

xp

all these fuckers are santorum imo

in the colloquial sense

No, I don't think there's a Santorum, really. Trump makes the whole thing different.

I mean, there's no Romney either!

any updates on the trump / cruz shittalk campaign? i could see cruz staring down any trump insult with those beady eyes of his

and then deflecting it using his "brilliant" oratory skillz or some kind of nerd humor

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/11/politics/ted-cruz-donald-trump-leaked-audio/index.html

less than an hour ago Trump retweeted:

Ted Cruz ‏@tedcruz · 5h5 hours ago
The Establishment's only hope: Trump & me in a cage match.

Sorry to disappoint -- @realDonaldTrump is terrific. #DealWithIt

i don't understand why people saying 'the establishment doesn't like cruz' is necessarily bad thing for him

strategic piece of kissassery, so gross

Cruz's obvious hope is that his lack of appeal to the establishment can be used to endear him to the voting populace, who will then hand him a big enough margin of victory that the establishment bends to their will thus allowing him to claim a true populist mantle

sounds like a better plan than most of these guys have

well insofar as it's an actual plan, yeah

Seems to me that the best plan is Trump's - explicit racism, bulldoze truth.