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

Well I live with three Fox News junkies, so I guess I should know better.

45% would be a pretty disastrous loss (and there's no way they would carry the electoral college with that percentage cuz it wouldn't include certain states they would need to win)

Whoever gets the republican nomination, including Carson, Trump, or Cruz, would soften their delivery of whatever the heck is considered to be True Conservatism today. The whole "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" approach was thumped badly in 1964 that no one will venture onto that scorched earth again. This is not to say they would soften their actual positions, but only that the message will be made as innocuous sounding as possible, as with "compassionate conservatism".

After losing again, the fire-breathers will certainly blame the messenger once more.

I dont want a disastrous loss I want a public humiliation thats unspinnable

everything is spinnable in a fact-free zone

I mean, there's no electoral outcome that will eradicate a strain of American politics that's been around forever

Because no one who gets as close to the presidency as occupying the nomination of a major party is knowingly going to create a humiliating disaster, you'll need the most reckless and willfully blind and stupid nominee among the crowd. Trump is easily the most reckless, but Carson now seems to score highest when you average out all three of these qualities. Cruz is much less likely to fly straight into the mountainside.

everything is spinnable in a fact-free zone

― Οὖτις, Monday, November 9, 2015 10:31 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seriously, these guys will never admit defeat, they'll just keep whining about media bias and shit

Pretty sure the new crop of nominees in waiting doesn't give a shot about Goldwater analogies.

they'll just keep whining about media bias and shit

millions of "illegals" voting

"It is just the opinion of the 'experts' that I 'lost' the election."

if only that obama didn't hand out all those free obamaphones and welfare foods we wouldnt be in this mess

obamaphones are really just cases containing fake voter ID cards and instructions on performing abortions

Best headline ever: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/ben-carson-may-have-never-stabbed-anyone.html

or it was until this

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeb-bush-baby-hitler?utm_content=buffer594e0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

More Carson shenanigans: http://gawker.com/is-ben-carson-lying-about-reading-psychology-today-as-a-1741482781

That's it, I'm voting Jeb!

xp it's really great, for a guy who honestly needed no embellishment to fill out his win column, that it's all of these little inconsequential absurdities that he's getting caught up in.

really enjoying this.

The Bush headline made me think of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJJYVORSP_w

I'm hoping that tomorrow Bush interrupts himself mid-thought somewhere and suddenly screams out "The ice is gonna break!"

Which really wouldn't be a bad description of what's happening on the Republican side of things.

I've posted this years back, but I still can't remember where I first heard. The deepest of deep vote for many of these folks is that "Conservatism can never fail; it can only be failed."

Deep core, rather. Stupid autocorrect.

"I mean otherwise I can't fathom what Christie is still doing in this race."

He was an early leader, and while Dr Morbius is right about how much that 'objectively' means, it probably felt real good - he may be hoping for the Romney position (though as we were saying yesterday, that analogy is past its snapping point), or he may just be assuming that the indictment is coming down the track or it isn't, either way go big or go home.

https://whatimg.com/i/G5roZ3.jpg

for a second i read that as a campaign promise, rather than a response to a hypothetical opportunity

maybe he knows something we don't know

"if you elect me, time travel will be a reality!"

"If you elect me, I will go through every maternity ward in the country until I find the next Hitler."

Would vote for a time traveler.

maybe we already have...

LOL at nickn!

What kind of time traveler doesn't run on the platform of HEY GUYS I'M A FRIGGIN' TIME TRAVELER?

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/08/02/Arnie-460x276.jpg

hey guys carson cleared up the whole fake test story - https://www.facebook.com/realbencarson/photos/a.143829065783568.1073741825.138691142964027/551604265006044/?type=3&theater

thanks for clearing that up Ben!

So a weakened Germany after WWI falls even weaker without any sort of leadership. Joseph Stalin notices this in the Fall of 1938, and invades Poland - his sights set on Western Europe by the end of Winter 1939. Nine million Europeans, including seven-million Jews and...

Nah, that's great that we've got a guy running for president who doesn't give a damn about what repercussions may come from traveling back in time and klling a baby. Maybe, as pro-life as he is, he should kidnap the baby, adopt it, take it back to Florida, and...

No, that one wouldn't work either. Janet Reno would bust into the closet where Bush and Baby Hitler were hiding and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX4qZcjiv5U

Christie is still in the race because most of his potential backers signed on with Jeb and sees blood in that water

this feels right to me and is for me the most interesting/compelling narrative in the race right now. christie was as good as counted out not long ago but I think he's playing a "these guys are knocking themselves down" game

christie's still in it because a) do we seriously believe that carson or trump are going to win the nomination? and if not, then why not him i guess and b) that 538 article pointed out that there are a lot of gop delegates in blue states, some of whom may be looking for a less batshit nominee, so yeah why not him

i mean rick santorum runs because he likes to feel important, and he finished second last time. christie surely does too, and he hasn't been out of office for a decade after losing by 18 points in his home state

Pretty much any president we vote for is going to kill some babies in the future.

Basically, yeah.

I basically buy that, but I think Andrew Farrell is also kinda right re: Christie's own personal timeline and his scandals and so on. It doesn't look like Bridgegate is ever going to sink him, but he can't run for reelection in 2018 (NJ doesn't have term limits but does prohibit more than two consecutive terms), his reputation there is in bad shape, and it's hard to imagine where else he goes once he leaves the governor's mansion. He must have figured, starting the campaign, that even with his star not shining as bright as a few years back, he wasn't going to get a better chance. And now that he's in it, he might as well ride it out and hope for a lucky break somewhere; what else is he gonna do?

At the current moment, things look kinda bleak. Even New Jersey Republicans aren't enthused about voting for him and he's been demoted to the secondary debate tomorrow night. It's possible he could turn out to shine there, with more time to speak and a rather pathetic trio of opponents in Huckabee, Jindal and Santorum. But it's not like "winning" the undercard debate has necessarily been a ticket to the big leagues, and even his seemingly lauded fantasy-football line from the last debate apparently didn't do him any good because here he is. Right now, further floundering from Bush benefits Rubio, unless both flounder, at which point their donors/supporters strike me as more likely to go Kasich than Christie. IMHO all four of those guys are playing a separate, parallel primary: assume Trump and Carson are overhyped paper tigers who will collapse on their own.... one of these days.... and focus instead on looking grown-up, common-sense, and electable enough to be the natural recipient of each other's currently slim percentages. Those don't add up to much but they would make for a very solid front runner if the Trump and Carson people were to just quit and never show up to vote.

Here's the thing I can't figure out: where exactly are the evangelicals this time around? It's easy to say that that's Carson's wing - but before he became a relevant force, where were they? Were they really all thinking "Trump's our man"? Trump just seems like an odd fit for your old-school fire-and-brimstone Moral Majority types, and anyway, Carson and Trump's numbers have generally risen and fallen together - Carson's surge came at the expense of everybody else in the race. So... are the fundamentalists just all too damned old now? Is the combined Huckabee/Santorum vote (3.2%) really all that's left of them? Were they actually on the Jeb train, back when he peaked at 16-18%? Does Fiorina's remaining 3% represent people still stoked about her Planned Parenthood bullshit? Or did the evangelicals start the race evenly spread around all the candidates, waiting for someone to really ring their bell, finally coalescing around Carson?

RCP's averages at this moment, btw:

24.8 Trump
24.4 Carson
11.8 Rubio
9.6 Cruz
6.0 Bush
3.0 Paul
3.0 Kasich
3.0 Fiorina
2.4 Huckabee
2.2 Christie
0.8 Jindal
0.8 Santorum
0.3 Pataki
0.0 Graham

Sometimes I get really tempted to treat these like parliamentary seats in a coalition government and imagine what kind of weird pluralities you could put together by combining X, Y, and Z. I'm sure at least some of the lower-tier people keep themselves going like that: well, if X keeps declining, I'm sure to rise! But in reality those tiny slices just get subdivided and spread around and it affects nothing.

dang, bush is tumbling. is he at a point of no return or is it still fathomable he could ride out shit and come away with some support from uh "conventional" republicans?

who are these 0.3 for pataki? i really want to know

poor lindsey

Carly Fiorina's moment passed so fast I forgot to notice it passing.

allowing for margins of error, pataki could actually have a negative percentage of republicans voting for him. actually so could most of these jokers. statistical noise.

i wonder at what point they'll pull the plug on the whole junior/senior debate business and just cut loose anybody who can't actually find two or three in a hundred republicans who say "you're my first choice." or, like, suppose jindal and santorum just quit, or came down with bronchitis - surely they wouldn't run a junior debate of just two people? i suppose they'd just move the threshold around to make it work but at a certain point it's sort of ridiculous.

So why is Lindsay graham wasting everyone's time

no fucking clue. i wonder if rick perry regrets not waiting around a little longer or is just glad to be shed of the headache.

fiorina's actually right back where she was before her big surge ever happened, at the 3% mark. she's still ahead of where she was before the first debate put her on the map. debate #3 gave her the real rise, and then there's a slow erosion in the weeks following; she seems to have not gotten anybody to actually stay interested in her long enough that the trump/carson show doesn't take up all the airtime and cancel out any momentary boosts. over the same time frame, rubio gained a similar amount of support, but held on to it and then boosted it again after the most recent debate.

there are so many of these damn things though and the polling obviously lags a bit behind them so it's very hard to judge what's causing anything to happen. would be nice if those RCP charts could be overlaid with events like the debates. it would also be sensible to just tune out, unbookmark thread, and not read these sites for a while because really some of the 'rules' of this race are a bit locked-in: until we hit actual primaries, it's totally unclear what kind of turnout the trump and carson numbers actually represent (i.e. how much are they "likely voters"), and how much either of them plans to actually spend money doing campaign-y things. as has been mentioned before it's hard to imagine trump wanting to squander his fortune on this, or seriously wanting the job of being president. if neither of them actually stays in past iowa/NH then all of the time spent on them has been a phantasmal non-primary - though with real effects, like drawing out jeb's wobbling-jello-like constitution for all to see.

So why is Lindsay graham wasting everyone's time

I wondering if the non-crazy 3% or under group are hoping to get a veep nod.