a clown car full of millionaires: the 2016 presidential primary thread

he is currently searching for bed bath and beyond online coupons online, but none of them seem to work

Rubio won't get anywhere near the nomination. This fight will eventually come down to J.E. Bush and Scott (My Own Worst Enema) Walker.

Carly Fiona will stay in the race until she eventually has spent $488 of her own money for each primary vote she gets.

Rand Paul will hang on to his 62 pledged delegates to the last moment and try to use them to broker the convention.

Trump will act like he's still running after New Hampshire, but stop scheduling any campaign events.

Trump will file lawsuits against all the other candidates

but yeah, jeb will take it, then lose. then the gop will finally learn that they need to nominate a TRUE conservative in 2020, and there will be at least 35 candidates

― 1992 ball boy (Karl Malone), Wednesday, July 1, 2015 5:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

surely some huge swath of GOP primary voters is already thinking this way, right? after mccain and romney? no reason this can't be their goldwater moment.

not so sure that Jeb! will take it over walker

Walker seems like an unknown quantity to the rest of the country (he certainly is to me, at least moreso than a lot of these other bozos), dunno if he can capitalize on that sufficiently to counter the JE establishment backing

J. Establishment Backing Bush.

"of the new hampshire Establishment Backings"

I dunno, Walker vs. public unions was pretty widely covered (esp. via Facebook memes.) Many of my friends are teachers, so he's kind of the personification of evil in the upper Midwest.

yeah but how many GOP primary voters, to the extent that they followed that, came away thinking of him as their new superhero?

(18% of them, based on that chart above. j.e.b. hasn't exactly got that crowd cornered.)

again, even most of the primary voters are scarcely paying attention yet

Chris Christie will hire Donald Segretti to sabotage the campaigns of all the other candidates, but Segretti will actually be a mole for the Bush campaign.

Rick Santorum will be puzzled when his fund-raising phone calls consistently get very bad connections, causing the party at the other end to sound like they are hissing or gargling, then are suddenly cut off. Changing phones or carriers doesn't seem to help at all.

Surprised to see Trump implode so quickly--so immediately. I was looking forward to him gumming up all the debates, but--and maybe I'm completely wrong here--I don't think he'll get anywhere near them after the last few days. In any event, enjoying his ordeal thoroughly.

implode? he's number two!

I know, I know, but there are the polls, and there's what the party will allow. Wasn't Cain still pretty high in the polling as his campaign was falling apart (don't remember the exact timing)?

Trump/Cain '16

I just think that, after the freak show of all those debates in 2012, which clearly didn't do party any good, the people who put the debates together will do whatever they can and whatever they have to to keep Trump away.

Cain peaked and then bombed out when the sexual harassment stuff surfaced

Trump getting to be at the debates and the others having to shut up and act like they're listening while he's talking is not in itself sillier than steve forbes getting the same pass in two elections. different kind of kajillionaire vanity campaign (and trump is much richer and more ridiculous than nerdy old steve forbes) but still. it's not really some kind of unprecedent illusion-shattering twist. trump himself might be disappointed to realize that.

and lest we forget:

http://i.usatoday.net/_common/_notches/c4994cd9-d303-4b6b-8796-2999ae70cee2-2perotmanual.jpg

Yeah, just checked that. Maybe Trump will slide in the next few days, I don't know. I know his antics will only cause wingnuts to dig in, but I would think he'd see a general slide in support.

The thing with Forbes is that he wasn't a ticking time-bomb ready to say just about anything--he was just kind of stodgy, as I remember him.

Trump is more of a wildcard than Forbes or Perot - he's wildly irresponsible and completely fucking moronic, who knows what he will do. But there's no way that unpredictability gets converted into actual support, he's too incoherent and offensive; at some point he's going to say things way beyond the pale of what anybody will accept.

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump comes out of this whole thing seriously damaged - either disgraced, broke, or in jail

he's wildly irresponsible and completely fucking moronic

i.e. like the rest of the GOP candidates

agree most primary voters aren't paying much attention
most candidates still unknown quantity to most of them (but trump is known celebrity)
& those paying most attention are prob those most angry at establishment (e.g. for being, in their view, cowardly compromisers)
that's why trump & his wild rhetoric seemingly gets early traction (same thing happened in last election iirc)
but it's just mirage imo

Axelrod otm: “Every Republican candidate now has to calculate how they deal with him, particularly in the debates. If he says something outrageous and no one challenges him, that’s bad for them and bad for the Republican Party.”

maybe mirage, maybe not. trump could totally soak up that buchanan/bachman/palin wing, that 12-15% of the electorate that is just really and truly bonkers. that's probably not enough to win all or even many primaries, but it's enough to screw things up for somebody else, or drag things out. cain was done in by his scandal, not by just being a blowhard with crazy ideas. however tbh what's most likely imo is that him staying in saps strength from the other wingnuts and further enables your JEBs. walker has the most to lose to trump.

xpost yeah actually that may also be another way this plays out - - - first really dumbass outrageous thing said by trump is opportunity for everyone else on the stage to shun him, symbolically turn their backs (and pat themselves on them while they're at it). trump's numbers collapse to nothing as the viewers at home learn that he is Not Presidential, and that's that.

Trump's not gonna win any primaries

(xxpost) That's exactly why I think they'll keep him out of the debates under some pretext--they don't even want to have to deal with figuring out how to respond to what he's already said and what he might say during a debate.

Trump would need to invest in actual ground operations, get people to polls, buy ads effectively etc. I don't think he has any actual interest or capacity for the nuts and bolts of running a campaign, he just wants to show up and shoot his mouth off.

Plus I'd say the odds of him getting into some malfeasance/misuse of funds is really high

is trump kind of a gop working class hero?

uh in what way is trump working class

I'm sure he's an aspirational figure for the terminally stupid portion of the electorate

pat buchanan won four, steve forbes and gingrich each won two (in '96 and '12), huckabee won eight, santorum won eleven. fifty states leaves plenty of room for wingnuts to win some states here and there and have it not matter in the slightest, ultimately.

i think a lot of americans do like the idea of a loud guy who tells people off. we have versions of this in our cultural mythology - the plainspoken, unspoken, badly-dressed guy, in this case with extremely tacky and materialistic tastes, ridiculed by elites, who speaks truth to power, who cuts off their pontificating BS with some straight talk -- you tell 'em, trump! whether or not the person was born into hundreds of millions of dollars may not actually be relevant to "working class" appeal and signifiers. i mean, lots of people would like to get themselves some marble columns and gold-plated ashtrays.

his basic appeal is alger-esque tho right? his views seem like the kinds of things lower-middle whites will have believed in as the things to believe in in order to get ahead in this country.

wait was trump born rich? know very little about him / don't want to google.

yeah there is no surprise to Trump's rise in the polls. He's part of a tradition. What's remarkable is that a man with his hair is allowed a place.

he looks kinda like a fat edgar winter. is he camp?

*dreams of john waters biopic*

ridiculed by elites, who speaks truth to power, who cuts off their pontificating BS with some straight talk -- you tell 'em, trump!

For these reasons and others, Trump definitely has great appeal to people who otherwise--materially--might have nothing in common with him. And yes also, he's an old story Perot had that too--he might have been even richer than Trump, I don't know.

Trump comes from money.

He's lost his fortune at least once, though.

real estate magnates are uniformly terrible, aren't they.

trump comes from very big money - his daddy built huge swaths of the outer boroughs. daddy was the son of immigrants -- originally the drumpfs -- who i do not think were particularly wealthy. wiki says they ran a restaurant during the klondike gold rush. huh. i would guess fred had tens of millions in the bank by the time young donald set out to learn 'the art of the deal' but maybe way more than that (adjusted for inflation) - not sure.

the donald today is slightly richer than ross perot (4 vs. 3.7 billion according to very quick searches) and thus about sixteen times richer than mitt romney's supposed net worth ($250 million), which is a hundred times poppy bush's. old money ain't worth what it used to be. hillary's just below the h.w. level. bloomberg, america's eighth-richest person, is worth $35.4 billion dollars. mark zuckerberg (#7) will be eligible to run for president in 2020. look out world.

dudes, walker is not gonna get close to the nomination.

xpost

holy christ bloomberg is rich. couldn't he just solve NYC's problems by giving away his cash (yes, i know he's a big philanthropist)

amazingly, even that would not really be enough. even just talking transit, the unfunded budgetary hole in the MTA's capital plan for just the next five years is fifteen billion. and most of that is just to bring things to a state of good repair and implement a new farecard system, with very little in the way of new track, etc. cities are expensive.

We should all move to seasteads!

I don't think he has any actual interest or capacity for the nuts and bolts of running a campaign, he just wants to show up and shoot his mouth off

yes, & afaict (though tbh haven't bothered to check it out) trump has no thought-out set of policies he's presenting; he's just bloviating clickbait

which at this stage might seem, to some, blunt speaking truth to power (or just provides audience with entertainment value; trump knows reality show after all)

btw DC otm upthread that walker vs public unions not necessarily political handicap, not in the primaries

v improbable he'll get nomination, but it's within realm of possibility at least

Trump couldn't carry Perot's jock.

His aggressive racism and misogyny is more compelling electorally than the flat tax was for Forbes tho.

it is shocking to me how many of my friends are throwing in for Sanders, who I'd consider a sure loss against generic (R)