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

Fiorina is going nowhere bc of her history at HP. debate was a stalemate. I'm almost sure Rubio will be the nominee. he didn't distinguish himself last night but he's trying not to peak early.

Dude peaked years ago

Radio Shack should offer Fiorina its CEO position imo

I don't think her history at HP will matter at all. She laid off a lot of people, but HP employs a lot of people. Romney put people out of business for a living and it barely stuck as a campaign issue.

someone should cut an attack ad of a couple people just trying to get an HP printer to work

yea people don't care if the businesses failed all they care about is that they are "businessmen" or "entrepreneurs"

I don't care if a biz fails so long as my dot matrix printer works

Romney put people out of business for a living and it barely stuck as a campaign issue

haha waht, his whole oblivious rich dude persona was precisely what sunk him

i think it was more the stuff he said (47%) and strapping his dog to his car (and that he's a mormon)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-n3WPAYIVHBs/VfsD6i-d7dI/AAAAAAAAbfo/P9cWfDXlUQA/s640/Screenshot%2B2015-09-17%2Bat%2B11.17.23%2BAM.png

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/presidential-candidates-dashboard.html

"prediction markets" are such a joke. bored white collars seeing what they want to see and betting accordingly.

Yeah, Romney went down on out-of-touch rich-guy stuff generally. There was shockingly little populist "This guy, this specific guy on the stage with me, made his hundreds of millions of dollars by closing factories and moving numbers around in Wall Street shark merger transactions."

RE Romney's failure:

Obama Romney
Popular vote 65,915,796 60,933,500
Percentage 51.1% 47.2%

Dude straight up called 47% of the country parasites and still lost the popular vote by 4 percentage points.

It was pretty depressing to hear the crowd cheer so loudly when Jeb delivered the 'He kept us safe' line. What a crock.

prediction markets just turn conventional wisdom into a number. conventional wisdom is that despite trump having good poll numbers, he still is far from being the likely candidate, and despite bush having terrible numbers, he's still a soft favorite due to lack of credible alternatives.

I think a lot of people would learn more about the state of the race from looking at prediction markets than they would from looking at today's poll numbers. so I don't think it would hurt the media to incorporate this kinda stuff instead of just pushing the "donald trump - all the polls say he's still #1!" narrative.

xp to goole

I don't think Jeb! can pull it off honestly, he has the charisma of a footstool, can't deliver his lines etc.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/files/2015/09/7-23-2015-1-55-09-PM.png

I think it's gonna look like this w/ bush as the new romney

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hnhI6-fxOGU/TwtKuSKLYUI/AAAAAAAAAa4/wlNLDCi8AnA/s1600/poll+collapse.png

Basically the only way Trump can win is if everybody else stays in the race forever, letting him win every primary by a plurality. And that's assuming his support never actually goes down, and that the backroom actors never sit down and come up with a "stop Trump" plan. None of it seems likely whatsoever. Comes down to it, the establishment would rather ensure the losing footstool guy carries the standard and says some stuff in Spanish and maintains a good turnout for the Congressional races, than to have Trump get within a hundred miles of the nomination.

One of 538's most 538-ish pieces so far this cycle still holds I think: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/

to be more specific i think jeb at a low #1 is fine but rubio at #2 is ridiculous

The audience was really cheering Dubya's massive tax cuts for the rich and the TARP program when the financial sector collapsed. They remember him very fondly.

the establishment would rather ensure the losing footstool guy carries the standard and says some stuff in Spanish and maintains a good turnout for the Congressional races

yeah I can see this too

rubio's number 2 is still only 17% so the market is suggesting he has the same chance as a batshit insane reality tv star

ok honestly i just can't understand why rubio has any kind of a career at all

Can plausibly envision a Bush-Fiorina, Bush-Rubio, Rubio-Fiorina, Fiorina-Rubio or Reagan-Bush ticket.

ok honestly i just can't understand why rubio has any kind of a career at all

― goole,

I've mentioned that a close friend covered Tallahassee for years when Rubio was speaker and insists that the guy is sharp and can move an audience to tears when he yaps about Cuba and mojitos and the bartender dad, but so far I haven't seen a single gesture that suggests spontaneity or independent thought. The guy is like Olive Garden olive bread.

zero-laugh gag about the water bottle last night was cringey as fuck

only Rand Paul for the whole debate chilled the room to greater effect.

I think republican political consultant types genuinely think that non-republicans have pretty base voting behavior and only voted for obama because he was black etc.

w/ that mindset nominating a hispanic guy would be a slam dunk as hispanic people across america are not interested in policy just in ensuring that a hispanic man becomes president

stageful of greg stillsons, plus one or two randall flaggs

it's still not too late for Nugent-Norris.

DebateBoy looks like a standard fraternity villain.

i had to google Greg Stillson bcz i forgot the name of that character.

ok honestly i just can't understand why rubio has any kind of a career at all

He was the Republican Of The Future back when Cuba was still the Eternal Enemy. Now that Cuba is gonna be the site of the next Disney resort, Rubio's entire reason for being has pretty much evaporated.

also conveniently papers over the sharp political divisions between cuban-Americans and p much all other latinos

Also: Cuba as an issue and as source of power for my local satraps is gone. One of Obama's shrewder political strokes, I gotta say.

it took long enough

Nah. He took a look at 2012's election results showing that Cuban Americans broke for Dems for the first time.

so, finger to the wind, just like s-s marriage

at least when pols test the political wind direction they are paying some attention to the wishes of voters instead of just the wishes of the 1%

it's not what leaders do, however. which is why POTUSes should not be confused with them.

that awful FDR, putting his finger to the wind each time he made a decision

i knew you were goin' there!

1) You had to go back 70 years

2) Howbout racially exclusive New Deal 'reforms' because nondiscrimination was politically untenable?

i'm talkin' about the modern SuperPAC presidency mostly tho. Few profiles in couurage there.

heh Boxer twistin the knife

Barbara Boxer ‏@BarbaraBoxer 19h19 hours ago

As @CarlyFiorina attacked Iran tonight she failed to mention that while she was CEO she sold them computer parts, which was against the law.

Bush - Rubio sounds like a winner

haha wish we were losing feinstein instead of boxer

me too

although we'll get Harris, which is good

re lessig:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/how-money-runs-our-politics/

Also unhelpful are the activities and proposals by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. A prominent specialist in copyright law, Lessig took on the problem of money in politics just a few years ago and has since pushed various proposals. At first he called for a Constitutional Convention, which would be a disaster since it could lead to all sorts of other proposals. When this idea came under attack from, among others, law professors, Lessig retreated and encouraged people in the Occupy Wall Street movement to think they could overcome Citizens United through political pressure to amend the First Amendment.

After that movement fizzled out—at least in its initial form—Lessig formed his own Super PAC, called Mayday, to raise funds to fight the Super PACs. He selected eight candidates to back in the 2014 midterms, on the grounds that they would support campaign finance reform. All but two of his selections lost, and the candidates who won had been expected to anyway.

Now Lessig has a new proposal for 2016: it involves a complicated process by which his followers would identify members of Congress who are leaders on campaign finance reform—though there’s really no mystery about who they are. In addition his followers would campaign in the primaries on the side of the candidate most interested in such reforms. His followers also would discourage contributions to a candidate in the primary who wasn’t backing campaign finance reform.

The problems with Lessig’s proposals are several: he’s leading people, from whom he now receives contributions, to believe that their efforts will be able to transform Congress into a body that’s ready to back campaign finance reform, election by election, which means that even if his scheme worked his younger followers would be very old by the time such a transformation occurred. Second, his funds will always be overwhelmed by the corporations that are raising money for their own political interests. There are no shortcuts.