Conventional Mealy Mouths: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 5

http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/04/michael-stipe-and-bernie-sanders-ate-hot-dogs-together-at-coney-island/

https://consequenceofsound.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/screen-shot-2016-04-10-at-11-13-21-pm.png?w=807

Everybody Berns

Swan, Swan, Hummingbern

Hurrah

Old Man Bernie, wants to be a president

This one Berns out to the Bern I Bern
This one Berns out to the Bern I've Berned... behind
A simple Bern to occupy my Ber
This Bern Berns out Bern Bern Bern I Bern

i am superbern
and i want those delegates

feel the bernstein

A Hundred Million Berns Fly Away

(King of Berns obv)

Disbernance at the hot dog house ok i'm out

what if we give it away? (a free college education)

@mtaibbi
Gotta love the "the system was never intended to be democratic" excuse in the superdelegate debate. A fave!

's true though

Laura Bush hints she'd rather see Hillary as president. No one is surprised, are they?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/08/laura-bush-hints-shed-rather-see-hillary-as-president-than-repub/

tbh i feel like the really perfect, deep-cut version of this joke is going to hit me in like eight months when i'm on an r.e.m. jag, so it goes

eevvverryybody berrrrnnns

Sometimes.

Dr. C: no matter when, you should still post it. I know I, at least, will laugh, also empathizing majorly with l'esprit de l'escalier type stuff.

"Laura Bush, the former first lady, has hinted she would rather vote for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump, saying she wants the next American president to be someone who cares about women in Afghanistan."

yes, i can read. I'm sure the rest of HRC's political profile passes muster with her, too.

you know, like this shit from 2010

Sounding almost exasperated, Clinton indicated that Africa's arguments for the redress of economic imbalances left by colonialism were beginning to wear a little thin -- at least in Washington.

"For goodness sakes, this is the 21st century. We've got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago and let's make money for everybody. That's the best way to try to create some new energy and some new growth in Africa," she said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-africa-usa-idUSTRE65D61920100614

it's amazing + sad that you're probably among the more educated + intelligent US voters

so, thirty-second version of bernie's erica garner spot is now, finally, in circulation - just got it on youtube before "back in the new york groove" by ace frehley. it's an all-right edit though i sincerely miss the parts that were more clearly about erica garner's own turn to activism which i found very powerful.

Meanwhile.

Trump's path to a general-election win has been assumed to be energized white voters (particularly the white voters variously categorized as non-college-educated / blue-collar / "downscale"). There is some polling that suggests that works only if the angry white people are all dudes. See the third chart here.

Trump is actually performing just below Romney’s 2012 totals among non-college whites. He does get a better margin than Romney among white non-college men, but that’s offset by the fact that he’s running behind Romney’s margin among white non-college women... Trump’s hopes of running up huge margins among blue collar whites might be complicated if he alienates white non-college women.

Meanwhile, as noted above, engagement is rising substantially among white non-college women (a potential problem for Trump) and among college women (who seem even more likely to be alienated by him), perhaps partly due to the seeming omnipresence of Trump’s sexism. Engagement is also rising substantially among nonwhites (if Trump under-performs among them, he’d have to drive his white vote margins even higher). And nearly half of Republican women (per Gallup) view him unfavorably.

Angry white men: If it weren't for that pesky 19th Amendment, they'd be unstoppable.

As rigged and weird as they can seem, the primaries have overall gotten considerably more democratic rather than less since their inception.

It is my sense that Mr Trump probably can't win the Presidency - but I still would like your view on the question, will he win the GOP nomination?

Only about a fortnight ago, everyone seemed to say he would.

Re: Trump's candidacy, I think we're in the third act of The Producers at this point.

"Kill the delegates..."

Cokie Roberts (I know, I know) made the obvious case this morning for why superdelegates mostly ain't gonna Bern -- they are by definition Democratic Party functionaries and office-holders, and unlike Bernie they're heavily invested in maintaining the party infrastructure. Bernie has basically not done anything for them. He hasn't campaigned or fund-raised for them, and he's not even actually a Democrat. There are a lot of weirdnesses in the way our political system revolves so heavily around the two parties, and legitimate things for reformers to protest against. But if we're going to have parties, they will look out for their own institutional interest and mostly nominate people who are committed not only to their platforms but to the whole party structure.

yup. so after the 19th, i am done with the POTUS election. hope the rest of you have enough Circus Peanuts!

xpost

And I think Bernie understands that, fwiw. But a lot of Bernie supporters seem to want to be able to essentially run a third-party campaign with the trappings and resources of a major party. (Trump supporters too, for that matter.)

because it's the only way to have the illusion of a prayer of winning?

(the usual 'other' elections thread has not been started yet, cuz notsexy)

yup. so after the 19th, i am done with the POTUS election. hope the rest of you have enough Circus Peanuts!

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius),

I just set a reminder to log back in to my mod account and threadban you from POTUS politics threads — no need to thank me.

it's possible to do that threadspecifically?

I think so, I'm not really sure.

yup. so after the 19th, i am done with the POTUS election. hope the rest of you have enough Circus Peanuts!

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Monday, April 11, 2016 12:25 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dude come on you are going to posting here in these threads on the regular every day for the rest of the year

How dare you suggest such a thing. Bye.

Well, maybe not 'bye' in the traditional sense of the word. It's a soft 'bye'.

I'm expecting some great new Hillary nicknames when you return

I still would like your view on the question, will he win the GOP nomination?

When Trump lost Wisconsin it strongly undercut his ability to gain sufficient delegates for a first ballot win. It also worked against his narrative that he alone was a 'winner', while everyone else was a 'loser'. Whether these will translate into his losing the nomination seems to me to be mostly wishful thinking promulgated by an aghast party leadership.

Right now, no one in the media wants to commit to a story line other than "nobody knows what will happen", but in order to deny Trump there are a limited number of scenarios, all of which are more improbable than Trump picking up the extra 50 or so delegates he might need for a second ballot win. So, if I were betting, I'd bet cautiously on Trump, as much as that prospect disgusts me.

I do find it encouraging that the anti-Trump megaphones are getting louder and more coordinated and that since Wisconsin Trump himself seems more discombobulated and unsure of himself. If Trump comes to the convention around 100 delegates shy of a first ballot victory, I'd rate the chances of his losing much higher than I do now. He'd be wobbling into the home stretch and would look much weaker than he has looked up until now.

Idk, on a second ballot he'd need not only to have wheeled and dealed those extra 50 or 100 or however many, but also *held onto* whichever of his delegates that, per whichever state rules, are freed up after first ballot. I imagine he has a ton of die-hards in those slots but maybe some of them are in fact not (as with that story a while back of Cruz people getting themselves seated as Trump delegates). If there's a well-organized idk Cruz/Kasich ticket being floated, and those guys plus the kind of people who were backing Bush and Rubio had been doing the organizational legwork for months, I can imagine a scenario where more Trump delegates driift to Cruz than vice versa. I could be wrong but it just seems like the exact kind of thing that Trump's team sucks at.

Btw re: conversation above, I don't think anybody two weeks ago thought it was a certainty Trump would be President, but certainly there were and are plenty of people pretty sure he'll be the *nominee* which is pretty different.

if anyone can wheel + deal the delegates tho to come into the convention w/ the # needed you'd think it would be trump. i would not put bribery beyond him.

lol 'wheel and deal' jinx :p xp

NBC had a high/low projection for him yesterday. If everything worked out optimally (all of New York, all of California, etc.), they had him at 1,245, more than half. If everything goes wrong, 1,165.

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-april-10-2016-n553716

And now, let's bring on Glenn Beck.

I think the counter there is that Cruz is way ahead of courting delegates and understanding the rules than Trump is. Trump's campaign has been really shittily coordinated on that front, they don't understand the rules the way Cruz invariably does.

xp

They also speculated that if there's 100 delegates to be won over, put Trump in that room and put Cruz in there, Trump has the better chance, just because Cruz is so odious. Not sure about that. (That Trump would win them over, I mean, not whether Cruz is odious or not.)

if there's 100 delegates to be won over, put Trump in that room and put Cruz in there, Trump has the better chance

but it won't be like that. most of the wooing will be done by waves of surrogates, canvassing out on the floor or cajoling in private rooms, with selected delegates getting the personal treatment from the candidates, who traditionally never appear on the convention floor at all.

given Cruz's facility with exploiting rules I'm inclined to think that if Trump doesn't win on the first ballot he's not gonna get it. Assuming Cruz wins a few more states from here on out.

All of this is of course tea-leafy, but: Trump's early successes were at least partly due to the large candidate field; the picture is different now.

Secondly, his canned lines are growing stale (we don't win anymore, I'll get the best people, trust me, you'll see, it'll be awesome). Thirdly, those canned lines have not changed a bit, while a counter-narrative of embarrassments and missteps has arisen, undermining Trump's competency/staffing argument. Fourthly, a related narrative has arisen that he has failed to do some pretty basic homework on delegates and convention maneuvering, and this failure could come back to bite his tiny, um, hands.

While certainly entertaining, all this is inconsequential if you believe that demographic headwinds doom any and all GOPers from the outset. Doubly so if they're intent on serving up a cocktail of virulent racism and blatant sexism.

Insult a significant chunk of Latinx voters with anti-immigrant talk? No prob, one might say; energizing the xenophobia of disaffected anglos will be enough. Insult a significant chunk of black voters with racially coded makers/takers/welfare talk? No prob, you might say; energizing the anti-PC feelings of downscale whites will be enough. Insult a significant chunk of women voters with not-even-veiled misogyny? No prob, you might say; energizing angry male backlashers will be enough. Except it won't, especially not if you double down on all three.

And no other Republican nominee is able to follow a significantly different rhetorical course. Even without Trump's particular brand of noxiousness, the fundamentals of the general election race are set and seem unlikely to change.

Aimless: another person on the panel refuted the 100-person-room idea the same way, that it all happens out on the floor.

I wrote about this elsewhere: I think the biggest factor in Trump's recent slide was less specific events (Cruz's wife, abortion, the manager getting charged--all of which were ugly, but not necessarily uglier than earlier stuff) than the timing, which was during a two-week layover between primaries. With no chance to win a couple of primaries and push all that other stuff to the side, it was nothing but bad news.