USA Presidential Election 2016 Hype Train

[The Edge]

I can't believe Trump won another one. Are the voters really ignorant?
What is it about his (rather flimsy, IMO) policies that attracts them to him? Or is it just because he has a big mouth and likes to stir things up with minorities?

I guess I'm asking, what is the attraction of the man, that makes the voting public flock to him?

[Lightspeed]

Different states have different election methods for the primaries. My guess is more open election processes will favour Trump, more restriction favouring genuine GOP members.

[Ab]

Couple of insightfuls I've read this week:

http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/02/22/trumped/

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2016/...goddamned.html

[pxpx]

Originally Posted by Deadmeat

Obligatory.. https://xkcd.com/1122/

So true. American punditry is awful, bizarre and awesome all at once.

[pxpx]

Originally Posted by The Edge

I can't believe Trump won another one. Are the voters really ignorant?
What is it about his (rather flimsy, IMO) policies that attracts them to him? Or is it just because he has a big mouth and likes to stir things up with minorities?

I guess I'm asking, what is the attraction of the man, that makes the voting public flock to him?

Remember that these are primaries, so it's republicans voting for a republican. Referring to "voters" suggests that you're talking about the wider American voting public? If that's the case I doubt he can beat Clinton (which is who I'd vote for tbh)

Side thought though: I've got a feeling that Trump is a closet Agnostic.

[blynk]

I think Trump was expected to do well in Nevada, and New York.

[Cyberbob]

Originally Posted by Ab

No Republican candidate who has won in New Hampshire and South Carolina has ever failed to win the nomination.

https://xkcd.com/1122/

and a repost, wow.

[Cyberbob]

doublepost somehow.

and a repost. that's like a super combo or something.

[pxpx]

go home cyberbob, you're drunk (look a few posts up)

[Nothing]

Originally Posted by pxpx

If that's the case I doubt he can beat Clinton (which is who I'd vote for tbh)

I don't know, but I have a sneaky suspicion that Trump might have an easier time winning against Clinton than he would against Sanders. Some polls taken recently in Nevada said sixty-something percent of voters don't want to elect an establishment candidate. I think those polls were, admittedly, polls of republican voters, but I also think that the anti-establishment sentiment has a pretty strong foothold amongst democrats as well. As far as I can recall one of the major differences in voter behaviour between democrats and republicans is that democrats don't bother to turn up and vote if there isn't a candidate that they like, whereas republicans will turn up and vote out of a sense of duty even if they don't like the candidate. Clinton is a very establishment candidate. If the democrats have a choice between Clinton and Trump, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of them just don't bother to turn up to the election.

As I say, I don't know, but I suspect that if Hillary wins the nomination it will make things a lot easier for Trump than if Bernie had won.

[blynk]

Originally Posted by Nothing

I don't know, but I have a sneaky suspicion that Trump might have an easier time winning against Clinton than he would against Sanders. Some polls taken recently in Nevada said sixty-something percent of voters don't want to elect an establishment candidate. I think those polls were, admittedly, polls of republican voters, but I also think that the anti-establishment sentiment has a pretty strong foothold amongst democrats as well. As far as I can recall one of the major differences in voter behaviour between democrats and republicans is that democrats don't bother to turn up and vote if there isn't a candidate that they like, whereas republicans will turn up and vote out of a sense of duty even if they don't like the candidate. Clinton is a very establishment candidate. If the democrats have a choice between Clinton and Trump, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of them just don't bother to turn up to the election.

As I say, I don't know, but I suspect that if Hillary wins the nomination it will make things a lot easier for Trump than if Bernie had won.

If Clinton struggles to beat Sanders - especially if she only gets there by the super delegates - then she might really struggle against Trump.

[Caesar]

Donald Trump is fun to watch...

[pxpx]

Originally Posted by blynk

If Clinton struggles to beat Sanders - especially if she only gets there by the super delegates - then she might really struggle against Trump.

How do you compare struggling against Sanders to struggling against Trump though? Seems like apples and oranges to me? I'm not saying she won't struggle - I just don't see how the comparison works.

[Nothing]

Originally Posted by Caesar

Donald Trump is fun to watch...

Yup. Posted last page C.

[Caesar]

Originally Posted by Nothing

Yup. Posted last page C.

OMG... I remember that's where I got it from too..
Gah!, fuck.. getting old...

[The Edge]

Originally Posted by pxpx

Remember that these are primaries, so it's republicans voting for a republican. Referring to "voters" suggests that you're talking about the wider American voting public? If that's the case I doubt he can beat Clinton (which is who I'd vote for tbh)

Side thought though: I've got a feeling that Trump is a closet Agnostic.

I know, but it's worrying that people are (I believe) voting for him because he rarks them up. He's all talk and no trousers. I see America going backwards if he (somehow) wins the nomination and the election.

[Nothing]

http://static.currentaffairs.org/201...ump-presidency

[Cyberbob]

I can't stand the guy, but when you look at his agenda, it's so strongly anti-establishment that it's primed to smash Clinton's rigid performance out of the water.

He wants lower/middle clas tax cuts, he's focused on American jobs, he wants to audit the feds, has huge national pride, high energy, and his campaign can't be bought.

At the moment you've got just as many "Democrat" voters that are anti-Clinton as you do that are pro-Clinton.

If it's a Trump v Clinton primary, who's voting where. You've got Republican anti-Clinton's, and you've got Democrat anti-establishment's looking for a new home.
You have very little Pro-Clinton's in this election, and any Anti-Trump Republicans will certainly not vote for a Democrat legacy nominee.

[Ab]

Republicans struggling to come to terms with this shitstorm they've created

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/repu...rontrunner-now

[Cyberbob]

To be fair, the RNC still has final say. They can be absolute dicks and choose whoever they please, they just happen to have enough candidates pull out due to funding cuts etc based on those early voting state results, that there ever is only one or two left at the end of it all anyway.

If Cruz/Rubio can sustain funding, the RNC can still go with them.

[fixed_truth]

I reckon Cruz/Rubio need to beat Trump in the polls. If they choose Cruz/Rubio when Trump is clearly the most popular candidate then Trump could run as an independent (hasn't he speculated this?) and fuck the Republicans over.

[The Edge]

If that ends up happening, I doubt Trump would make it. Closest in recent times was Ross Perot, and while he captured almost 20 million votes in 1992, he still didn't win any Electoral College votes.

[Ab]

If you're not sick of reading about Donald Trump yet – Can you believe it's only February and we have to do this for almost nine more months? – Matt Taibbi has a typically strong take on his appeal and why the Republican Party is getting everything it deserves this year. He isn't saying anything that readers here don't understand already, most likely, but he lays out the argument effectively: the image of the GOP as the party of the bankers and of the country club (clurb) set is inaccurate. Sure, those folks are Republicans. But they would be a tiny minority in American politics if not for armies of angry, resentful, not terribly bright, and aging white people. That's the GOP. That's the bread and butter right there.

For every suburban Republican who loves tax cuts and the National Review there are a half-dozen of the people you see at a Trump rally. No matter how many times Republican elected officials and opinion leaders have tried to convince themselves otherwise, these people do not give one shit about Conservative Values or the principle of small government. They're angry and they've been convinced that government is to blame. That is about the extent to which they have opinions that could be called "political." The rest is simply nativism, the politics of blood. They just hate everyone different. It sounds like I'm oversimplifying that to insult them, but unfortunately that's all there is to it. They hate the gays, the liberals, the environmentalists and their "science", the Pope, the Jews, the blacks, the Mexicans, the Mormons, the young, the poor, and anything remotely "foreign" or unfamiliar (including, from the looks of his crowds, fruit and occasional exercise):

Yes, millions of people responded to (conservative) rhetoric for years. But that wasn't because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame. For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.

Stupid people are short-sighted and for years nobody in the GOP appeared smart enough, or perhaps confident enough, to wonder aloud if leading the literal Mob around by throwing chunks of red meat toward it at regular intervals was going to become problematic. Ignorant rabble are not known for their logic, after all. It was inevitable that someone who has truly mastered the art of pandering to the lowest common denominator – America wooooo! Fuck the Mexicans! Let's bomb the hell out of everything! – would come along and upstage them. No matter how expensive their suits look or how many Cato Institute quasi-intellectuals appear on Sunday talk shows spouting the tired right-wing talking points we can all recite by heart, what Trump is doing right now is exactly what the GOP has been doing for thirty years now. He's just much better at it than they are, and now they don't know what to do.

http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/02/24/simple-formula/

[Ab]

That Taibbi piece linked above is brilliant, you read now.

The pundits don't want to admit it, but it's sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won:

President Donald Trump.

A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.

It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.

And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He's way better than average.

[fixed_truth]

You have created a monster ...

So what to do now? The Republicans' creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.

[Macca@Work]

Trump scares me.I'm hoping Hillary will win.She is the lesser of the 2 evils
and not such a nut job as Trump.He still thinks he's doing celebrity apprentice by the way he's acting.

[Ab]

Because it works. Quoting Taibbi in the Rolling Stone piece:

Trump is no intellectual. He's not bringing Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn't learn a thing about physics. Hawking would come out on Day 365 talking about models and football.

But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business.

That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?

But they've all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.

[Lightspeed]

Good thing there's no looming global catastrophe demanding our attention.

...

Fuck.

[Caesar]

Originally Posted by Macca@Work

Trump scares me.I'm hoping Hillary will win.She is the lesser of the 2 evils
and not such a nut job as Trump.He still thinks he's doing celebrity apprentice by the way he's acting.

Don't think Bernie has a chance?

[The Edge]

He does have a chance, but it remains to be seen if he can topple Hillary. Mind you, we'll all have a better idea in about a week or so.

[Lightspeed]

It will be interesting to see in the super delegates support Hillary, or someone who can beat Trump.

[smudge]

Originally Posted by The Edge

He does have a chance, but it remains to be seen if he can topple Hillary. Mind you, we'll all have a better idea in about a week or so.

All the pundits are saying super tuesday is going to be the low point for Bernie. After that it will mostly go his way. Will be incredibly sad to see the most genuine american politician in decades come so close but not quite get there, if he doesnt make it.

[?>Superman]

Originally Posted by Macca@Work

Trump scares me.I'm hoping Hillary will win.She is the lesser of the 2 evils
and not such a nut job as Trump.He still thinks he's doing celebrity apprentice by the way he's acting.

Fuck Hilary Clinton.

[CCS]

Boy, a lot of people are going to be blubbering when Bernie Sanders fails to get nominated.

[Nothing]

Originally Posted by CCS

Boy, a lot of people are going to be blubbering when Bernie Sanders fails to get nominated.

Even more people will be blubbering when Trump gets elected.

[CCS]

I don't know if you think it's a certainty that Trump will get elected, but I think it's a certainty that Sanders will fail to get the Democratic nomination.

[Nothing]

I think that Sanders failing to get the Democratic nomination will massively increase Trump's chances of winning. I think Hilary is very poorly suited to run against Trump.

[Lightspeed]

Whatever the case, these are some fucking times we live in.

[CCS]

This is what happens when mainstream politicians jump the shark. The deadbeat also-rans start to seem appealing.

[Cyberbob]

Is this too simplified?

Sanders can beat Trump.

Trump can beat Clinton.

Clinton can beat Sanders.