I will keep doing, but not worth it! The 2016 Presidential Primary Voting Thread

she is the most transparent windchecking pol i can ever, ever recall.

I predict DNC institutional power shenanigans here. Sanders performs strong due to an unexpected upswell of support around the country (unexpected since the media doesn't bother to talk to Average Joe Slob except when a dead body shows up in a river), Hillary wins on bullshit institutional politics (or enough of an appearance of), Bernie supporters boycott the election, and we get ourselves a President Trump/Cruz. I'll throw $20 on that.

she is the most transparent windchecking pol i can ever, ever recall.

Sanders on electoral reform (from his "Getting Big Money Out of Politics and Restoring Democracy" page, which, like his stump speeches, focuses mainly on the big-money stuff):

Getting big money out of politics is vital, but much more needs to be done to restore our democracy. Notably, we must ensure that all Americans are guaranteed an effective right to vote. Campaign finance reform must be accompanied by efforts to strengthen voting rights – restoring the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, expanding early voting and vote-by-mail, implementing automatic voter registration, ending gerrymandering and making Election Day a national holiday, among others. When nearly two-thirds of the electorate did not vote in 2014 midterm elections, it is clear we need radical change to bring more people into the political system. Our democracy cannot be truly representative unless elected officials hear from all of their constituents, not just the wealthy and the powerful.

A start, anyway! I think we need much more - instant-runoff voting and ultimately some form of proportional representation - but those would be long, very long campaigns that currently don't have much of a groundswell behind them, and I think Sanders is positing this as a spree of pull-us-back-from-the-brink emergency measures. Punting Columbus Day in favor of a federal Election Day holiday - which could be done by ordinary legislation, no constitution-amending required - could do wonders by itself. I do think financially penalizing non-voters would be pretty fucked though in a lot of ways.

btw i totally support what sanders is doing and will vote for him as i've said many times but man i cannot wait to collect that $20

I do think financially penalizing non-voters would be pretty fucked though in a lot of ways.

That might be too extreme (although they do it in Australia, something like $26 for not voting, unless you request an exemption), but as you pointed out, there's a lot more we could be doing to encourage voting even without that.

i still refuse to believe Trump or Cruz can/will be nominated. The Republicans may be incompetent national campaigners, but they've avoided downballot suicide so far. Kasich by default?

yeah i mean to me the main problems would be (a) for it to be remotely fair we'd have to already have the world where nobody faces any penalties for voting, plus it's like, y'know, if you get strep throat or something i think it's pretty cool to stay the fuck home. and maybe more importantly, it seems like choosing not to vote is a legitimate form of speech and being compelled to vote would appear to be another way in which the panoptic state draws you in with its greedy administrative tentacles and denies any outside to itself, etc.

"I think she could afford to move a bit to the left to hopefully peel off some of Sanders support in the primary, without moving so far so as to endanger her chances in the general, but it would be a delicate balancing act."

Yes if this primary season has proven anything it's that people are desperate for triangulating politicians.

just mail everyone a ballot

just mail everyone a ballot

feel like we have to get through at least a couple more primaries before we actually give kasich any shot at the big prize - afaict he actually personally visited something like 75% of new hampshire voters at their front doors and presented them with small gift bags containing homemade fudge and a maze on the back for the kids. he definitely benefited from rubio flaming out horribly in the last debate, and of course bush spent over an absolute fortune in new hampshire and still came in fourth ... but i'll believe kasich has suddenly become the favored nominee of non-lunatic asshole fans when he actually repeats this stunt somewhere else. it's not impossible but it strikes me as a real longshot. he has got to have the worst name recognition of any of these guys except jim gilmore.

mailed-ballot scheme strikes me as even more vulnerable to schemes and dirty tricks than the system we have now - - - - just imagine the phony balony ballot done up to LOOK like one but described in tiny print at the bottom as a "pre-election preference survey" or whatever. god help us.

Yes if this primary season has proven anything it's that people are desperate for triangulating politicians.

I don't know. Trump is about as nakedly calculating as you can get, and he seems to be doing just fine.

Trump doesn't triangulate: he decapitates.

If by some horrible twist of fate, he actually gets the nom, I expect him to swing to the center so fast it will make heads spin.

Oh and just for some extra doomsayin' if you thought the gross insubordination and other general bullshit from our boys in uniform has been disgusting under Obama, hoo boy are we in for a treat under HC

― Sith Dog (El Tomboto), Wednesday, February 10, 2016 9:02 PM

really? i mean yeah she's a broad and too smart etc. but is that worse than being black/HUSSEIN/secretly hating america?

here they all are at the Swinging Center

http://a.abcnews.com/images/Politics/GTY_trump_wedding_clintons_jef_150806_16x9_992.jpg

I know that the Sanders camp believes they can turn out people who’ve become alienated from the political process. As long as I’ve been following politics, it has been a left-wing fantasy that legions of disconnected non-voters will suddenly flood the polls if they’re offered a sufficiently progressive candidate. I’ve never seen anything save wishful thinking to back it up.

tbh i mostly believe this. left-wingers like to imagine that there’s this huge demographic of disaffected people who are natural progressives but just don’t realize it yet. i have a lot less faith in people than these folks, i guess.

So what I just said is that this really is going to suck no matter who wins. Lesser of two evils indeed, possibly like I've never experienced.
― Sith Dog (El Tomboto), Wednesday, February 10, 2016 7:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup. i’m already gearing up for the most depressing general presidential election since i started voting.

btw, thought experiment: if term limits weren’t a thing, obama would win a third term, wouldn’t he? even though his numbers are kind of low right now.

^^^
possibly!

wow, david mamet has endorsed cruz? i knew he had passed through the looking glass, but wow.

seems fitting that most of trump's celebrity support comes from other megalomaniacal, macho types.

you know i rly used to think this

It's not just that he uses the term "socialist". I think his specific policies, as a whole, are just too far left to be viable in a national election. I think that does by default make HRC a better candidate. Her policy goals are more realistic.

― o. nate, Wednesday, February 10, 2016 8:22 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but the gop is literally throwing up donald fucking trump and ted cruz, a man unloved in all his life's endeavors. at this point the winner of the dem nomination is the likely winning candidate. i know that his far leftism will get trashed but cruz and trump are such fucking easy targets! it doesnt even matter! this is a weird election! embrace this shit! the gop is not going to nominate a "safe" choice this year, so rolling the dice with bernie is a worthwhile bet.

like cruz is repulsive on a molecular level and the anti-trump animus is so strong that no amount of centrist pivoting will work, the gop brand is so fucked

this. the most mystifying thing to me in this whole campaign is the assumption (even by sanders! at least publicly) that hillary clinton is this extremely accomplished, long-serving politician. she was barely in the senate longer than obama (and never held elected office before that, unlike him), she was a shitty cabinet member, what else...? i guess her just being in the public eye for so long has fooled people into thinking that amounts to something more than it does.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Wednesday, February 10, 2016 5:12 PM

c'mon now. she lived in the fucking white house for eight years, she's been a senator and a secretary of state, and no one has ever accused her of being dumb. you can argue that she was no good at those roles and you can argue that that experience does not necessarily translate to being a good 'decider-in-chief', but tbph she knows more about the way the federal government works than basically any non-incumbent ever

there are plenty of reasons not to vote for her, but disdaining her qualifications is bullshit

most of Sanders' Big Ideas were advocated somewhere on the mainstream political spectrum in 1966-76. I know you ppl who weren't alive don't quite believe it even tho you've read books about it, but it's true.

which is why I don't consider him a socialist!

i know, youre ok

i think you could recognize that living in the white house and being a senator give you a lot of insight into how the federal government works, and also believe, fairly, that someone could have done those things and still not be an "extremely accomplished, long-serving politician."

Could Eleanor Roosevelt have made a good president? Who knows.

Yeah, he doesn't want to socialize the means of production. Is it basically a strategic move on his part? "Own it before they try to tar you with it"?

3xp

he calls himself a democratic socialist

This is basically how I understand democratic socialism and it's pretty far from what Sanders is advocating. I might call him a social democrat, which isn't the same thing imo.

I think a social democrat is more literally what Sanders is but I also don't know that the order of the two words is super important except for pedants.

"Democratic socialist" definitely sounds a lot edgier than "social democrat" in the context of American politics, where anything "socialist" has historically been a no-go. God bless Bernie for rehabilitating the term. Gives me hope for the future.

Yeah, tbc, I'm not worked up about the accuracy of his usage. I'm just curious about/interested in why he made the choice. It seems intentionally edgy, as you say.

surely it's just a legacy of the cold war, when he presumably first started using it - - - i'm a socialist yes but don't confuse me with an autocratic command-economy guy, i'm a DEMOCRATIC socialist. that sounds dumb but in a weird way i get it - it at least hints at what the politics might be although still leaving a huge range of what policies you might be advocating for. conceptually speaking it may actually be a better description of the position than "social democrat," notwithstanding that the latter has a conventional definition understood by millions and millions of people (a few thousand of whom live in the US but nevermind).

Couldn't remember who won Nevada in 2008, only that there was some dust-up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Democratic_caucuses,_2008#Casino_Caucus_Lawsuit

Clinton won the vote by about 5%, Obama won a few more delegates. Large Latino vote. I would think Sanders could win it coming off New Hampshire, but I don't know.

I'm pretty sure the GOP is getting 10% with Latinos in the general so they're kinda fucked

ok, so clinton is a massive political opportunist and will go whichever way the prevailing political winds blow. my question is, is this really the worst possible outcome?

obviously this has bad features. if somebody runs on opposing a canadian oil pipeline and then decides to do a volte-face because the energy lobby gave them a lot of money, sure, that sucks.

on the other hand, let's talk gay marriage. clinton was all in favor of the "traditional family" or whatever until the gay rights movement really turned up the heat, and then she starts quoting macklemore or whatever. so yes, she refused to stand by her principles, but those principles were crap principles and weren't worth standing by. and then you have everybody on the republican side still chanting "adam and eve, not adam and steve".

so clinton is a politicians' politician, an untrustworthy snake, but one that gives much more power to the will of the people than the rabid ideologues who control the republican party. if we want change, isn't it better to have a president who's amenable to it, under the right conditions, than one who will close down the schools rather than integrate them?

"my question is, is this really the worst possible outcome?"

Considering who is running on the Republican side obv the answer to this question is a resounding no.

so clinton is a politicians' politician, an untrustworthy snake, but one that gives much more power to the will of the people than the rabid ideologues who control the republican party. if we want change, isn't it better to have a president who's amenable to it, under the right conditions, than one who will close down the schools rather than integrate them?

no one on this thread's arguing in favor of the GOP.

their presidents are the only ones who get Democrats marching

"Could Eleanor Roosevelt have made a good president? Who knows."

Lady Bird could have done it. She was a smart cookie.

As long as I’ve been following politics, it has been a left-wing fantasy that legions of disconnected non-voters will suddenly flood the polls if they’re offered a sufficiently progressive candidate

left-wingers like to imagine that there’s this huge demographic of disaffected people who are natural progressives but just don’t realize it yet

tbh many right-wingers also have similar fantasies - about there being a silent majority of conservatives who will vote when offered a sufficiently conservative candidate. Also that lots of nonvoters are natural conservatives who don't realize it yet, and if limited government / freedom were sold correctly it is a path to certain victory.

Dem debate in WI tonight, tune in for HRC 112.0

a friend of mine posted this on facebook, the front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch:

http://i.imgur.com/0tQoS7a.jpg

something seems misleading about the way they're presenting the results, but i can't quite put my finger on it...

As long as I’ve been following politics, it has been a left-wing fantasy that legions of disconnected non-voters will suddenly flood the polls if they’re offered a sufficiently progressive candidate

was cool when that actually happened with obama tho

Karl, there were 284K rep votes and 249k dem votes - so the rep bar would be taller - perhaps not that much taller, it's hard to tell. Or do you mean something else?

It makes it look like Trump got more votes than Sanders did.

xp that line was probably the most OTM thing in the Goldberg piece. OTOH I don't think that's the only component of the "revolution" Sanders is talking about -- it's also about reenergizing the voting left and encouraging other progressive candidates to run, particularly on small donations.

This raises another question for me though, re the economics of small donations. I gave money to the Sanders campaign and it was the first campaign contribution I've ever made. But I don't know how many different progressive candidates I could contribute to, year after year, and more importantly I'm not sure how much people less well off can do that and how much total money it can produce. Like I don't know if this is sustainable vs just a momentary burst of excitement.