The Gaming Den

Prak wrote:Oh, so he's just the republican candidate that is the least spectacle? ...why do I still feel that's preferable to, like, any of the other candidates? I'm not saying I'm going to vote for him, I'm just saying I'm tired of the children and would prefer a candidate that at least sounds like an adult.

You humanocentric bigot! RubioBot for Republican Nominee 2016.

Kaelik wrote:

Prak wrote:Oh, so he's just the republican candidate that is the least spectacle? ...why do I still feel that's preferable to, like, any of the other candidates? I'm not saying I'm going to vote for him, I'm just saying I'm tired of the children and would prefer a candidate that at least sounds like an adult.

You humanocentric bigot! RubioBot for Republican Nominee 2016.

Now Cruz is after the robot vote.

Occluded Sun wrote: He's willing to talk about turning the sacred cows into hamburger, even if nothing ever comes of it. That interests people... much moreso than an endless parade of candidates who won't acknowledge the cows exist.

Which sacred cows do you mean?

RobbyPants wrote:

Occluded Sun wrote: He's willing to talk about turning the sacred cows into hamburger, even if nothing ever comes of it. That interests people... much moreso than an endless parade of candidates who won't acknowledge the cows exist.

Which sacred cows do you mean?

Sacred cows like:

• Not conflating Islam with terrorism
• Not being racist
• Not being sexist

Little things, mostly.

RobbyPants wrote:Which sacred cows do you mean?

Immigration, immigration, immigration. It doesn't matter how silly his ideas are, if he's willing to publicly claim immigration is bad, he'll attract the charge of anti-immigration feeling like a lightning rod.

I'm reasonably confident he's used immigrant labor to change his hotels' sheets and mow his laws, and I'd bet he wasn't particularly concerned about its legality. But he's picking up the hundred dollar bill in the center of the room that everyone else had a gentlemen's agreement not to notice or look at, and it's already had a major effect on the campaign - even if he's not nominated.

This is *highly* entertaining.

TIL that in the bizarro world that OS lives in, *immigration* is a taboo subject that nobody has mentioned before Trump.

There are significant differences in how Trump has addressed immigration compared to the other Republican candidates. Critically, Trump is not obsessed with the illegal/legal distinction, he's against both of them. This is in contrast to how pro-business establishment Republicans are (or were pre-Trump) very careful to make a distinction between the two and also to avoid sounding like nativists when talking about immigration by claiming its about the rule of law.

Trump simply thinks immigration is bad and immigrants themselves are bad and is willing to espouse extreme (and generally nonsensical) positions regarding both things, and his base supports him. The reality is a large portion of the American populace is aggressively anti-immigration in pretty much all forms in a way neither of the major parties had been. This sentiment is most prominent among the white working class, which is Trump's biggest support group.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/rick-santoru ... mmigration

Trump wasn't the only one to go full nativist. He wasn't even the first. And that's just in this election. I bet if you looked in the 2012 clown car you'd turn up another one or two.

So, Super Tuesday is more or less in the books at this point (not waiting up on Alaska) and the results are...mixed.

On the Democratic side, not a good night for Bernie Sanders. Though he notched some key wins, particularly the late Minnesota caucus - which suggests he can do very well in the remaining upper Midwest states of Michigan and Wisconsin - the very high margins for Hillary Clinton all across the south means that the delegate math hits him really hard. By the end of the night it looks like he'll be down ~200 delegates overall (not counting the superdelegates) which is a really tough margin to overcome especially with a relatively small number of states looking like big wins for him. His failure to win Massachusetts suggests that states with even modestly high minority voter levels won't allow him to notch the kind of big wins he'd need to overcome the deficit in states like Ohio or Pennsylvania.

Bernie's victories give him every reason to stay in the race, but it's become much more mathematically difficult for him to pull off the upset, and the margin is only likely to widen with the next set of primaries, particularly the 5 mid to big states voting on March 15, none of which are very favorable to him.

As for the Republicans, well, Trump obviously had a very good night, winning a pile of states all over the map, but his margins were generally quite modest and he didn't top 50% anywhere (though to be fair, neither did anyone else). Cruz won Texas convincingly, giving him a pile of delegates, and had a number of second-place finishes over Rubio. Rubio generally did pretty bad - he fell below the critical 20% threshold in several states - but pulled off a late night comeback in Minnesota while Kasich won nothing, so he's sticking around.

For now, Trump's got just over 50% of the total awarded delegates, but that basically means there's a lot more riding on who wins the big winner-take-all states stacked towards the end of the calendar. I don't see either Cruz or Rubio managing to pull a clean win at this point - just over a third of the delegates are winner take all and neither of those two is winning all those states - but the 'brokered convention' scenario where no one manages to hit 50% is very possible if Trump stumbles in just a few big states, particularly California and New York.

The next big Republican test is also March 15, in Florida. Rubio absolutely has to win those delegates to hang on, while if Trump wins them, the nomination is his.

I think I want Rubio to hang on - a convention fight by the Republicans would be both certainly hilarious and hopefully greatly demoralizing for the party.

On the Republican side, I'm super happy that the delegate math is so close that the super delegates can veto trump and send them in a brokered convention. I'm even happier that there are several scenarios where the seven delegates already awarded to dropped candidates could end up being decisive in that brokered convention. We'll get a better picture tomorrow, but it looks like Trump retained a commanding lead while having his margin of victory shrink. A few more wins like that and he gets to the coveted "more than 40% but less than 50%" of the delegates where the convention is decided on the floor by treachery on national television. The FiveThirtyEight projection is that Rubio and Cruz together are going to get 40 more delegates than Trump out of Super Tuesday, with Trump getting the most overall. Limping into the convention with Trump #1, Cruz #2, and Rubio #3 and none of them having a majority is both hilarious and awesome.

On the Democratic side, Sanders won 4 of the races. He was spending to try to win five. That's not a poor enough showing to make him pack it in, but it's well short of what he needed to be on track to win the nomination. Demographically, he needed to win 6 of the states (winning all of Vermont's delegates doesn't make up for losing Texas), and his campaign was making a genuine play for five of them. And in the contests she won, Clinton often ran up the score kind of a lot. Clinton's demographic target in purple Virginia was to win by more than 9 points and she won by 19.

Honestly, I couldn't have asked for a better Super Tuesday result. Trump is on track to derail into a brokered convention, and Hillary is on track to a convincing win but the campaign isn't over and well still get Democrats discussing important issues on national television. The relative lack of acrimony on the Democratic side makes this campaign good for our side as long as it goes on (provided that it is settled decisively in time for the convention), while the Republican side is a clown show and pissing contest and the longer it grinds on the worse it gets for those assholes. Especially if it ends with an undecided result and huffy recriminations at the convention itself.

-Username17

Looking at the Dem results on Google just makes me pissed off at the idea of superdelegates...

Prak wrote:Looking at the Dem results on Google just makes me pissed off at the idea of superdelegates...

Yeah, this year's primary is possibly the most disgusting in decades. On the one hand, the Republican establishment appears to be aiming for a brokered convention so they can simply declare the popular vote null and void and then choose whoever the fuck they want, while the Democratic establishment has been waving their dick around in a blatant attempt to intimidate voters since the word go. The disdain for democracy is both transparent and - for once - bipartisan.

Prak wrote:Looking at the Dem results on Google just makes me pissed off at the idea of superdelegates...

The Democratic Party has a lot of superdelegates, but those superdelegates aren't unelected. For example, one of the superdelegates from Vermont is Patrick Leahy, senior senator from Vermont. Now, Sanders won Vermont by such a significant margin that Clinton failed to meet the viability threshold and Bernie gets all of Vermont's pledged delegates. However, it's important to remember that primary elections have low turnouts compared to general elections. Bernie Sanders got about 106,000 votes in this primary election. But Patrick Leahy won a general election in 2010 and picked up 151,000 votes. One of the jobs of a Democratic Party senator is to go to the convention and cast a vote for the party's presidential candidate. And literally more Vermonters voted for Leahy to do that than voted for Sanders in the primary. Almost fifty percent more.

So the people who say that Patrick Leahy is shitting all over the will of the people by declaring for Clinton when his state voted overwhelmingly for Sanders have a point. But when Patrick Leahy says that that is bullshit and more people voted for him to make a decision than voted for Sanders he also has a point.

Things get murkier when we talk about committee chairs and shit. They are also elected by Democratic Party members, but they often run unopposed and I have genuinely no idea when their elections are held. Turnout in those things is crazy low, and I think I've only cast an informed ballot on that kind of thing like twice in my whole life. However, those "extremely obscure" superdelegates generally switch sides to whoever is winning the pledged delegate vote. In 2008, there were mass defections from Clinton to Obama when he started winning the pledged delegate votes, and there's every reason to believe that if Sanders mobilized the party behind him and started winning the primary that they'd do the same this year.

The Democratic Party's delegate structure is really weird and full of strange compromises and horse trading. Many of the clauses are leftovers from deals worked out around demographic and political realities that a generation out of date. But it's important to remember that Hillary is winning because she is winning, not because she is cheating. And it's also important to note that if Trump or something similar was running in the Democratic primary that he'd be being blown out. Bernie is still in this because he isn't Trump and you could imagine Senator Leahy voting for him if he won the popular vote. Someone who was actually offensive and unqualified like Trump would not only fail to benefit from the Republican Party's bullshit winner take all shenanigans but have to face up to getting few if any superdelegates.

If Trump was getting exactly the vote share he's getting now but was running as a Democrat, he'd be 33 points short of his nomination target. And honestly, I think that's probably a good thing. The media is constantly looking for false equivalence and loves to draw parallels between Sanders and Trump. But Sanders is nothing like Trump and the Democratic Party is nothing like the Republican Party. Sanders is a viable candidate in the Democratic Party because he isn't doing anything remotely similar to Trump. His equivalent on the Right is probably closest to Ted Cruz.

-Username17

I am willing to bet that exactly zero of the people who voted for Leahy even briefly remembered that that would make him a superdelegate. I am even more willing to bet that exactly zero of the people who voted for Leahy in 2010 even knew who the Democratic candidates would be in 2016, let alone what Leahy's opinions on them would be, and as such it was literally impossible for them to make an informed decision on that issue. I am yet even more willing still to bet that had enough voters showed up to push Sanders up to 150,000 (allowing him to match the number of votes Leahy received in a general), Clinton still wouldn't have scrounged enough up votes from the higher turnout to qualify for a single delegate.

There is a time for representative democracy, and honestly that time is "most of the time." But "who should the next president of the United States be?" is - very critically - not most of the time. When the president takes his seat in the oval office, the people on the other side of that quid pro quo need to be the American people, and not a handful of senators and DNC chairs.

DSMatticus wrote:But "who should the next president of the United States be?" is - very critically - not most of the time.

Wait? It isn't? And I don't mean this in the sense of "it's most of the time, so it's time for representative democracy!" I mean it in the sense "It really just seems to be happening most of the fucking time".

Seriously. You guys need to cut your election season down. The election stuff itself takes long enough but your primary season/s thing is a fucking debacle.

I mean, even aside from our own standard federal election seasons frequently being measured in weeks rather than, what is it for you guys with primaries it FEELS like years, even aside from that fuck it we can and regularly do just wake up some mornings and find we have a new prime minister and/or state premier and no one even had to vote at all hell we turn over entire cabinets/front benches like that.

You guys are slooooow.

DSM wrote:There is a time for representative democracy, and honestly that time is "most of the time." But "who should the next president of the United States be?" is - very critically - not most of the time. When the president takes his seat in the oval office, the people on the other side of that quid pro quo need to be the American people, and not a handful of senators and DNC chairs.

I broadly agree. But considering what's happening right now on the Republican side, the argument for the Democratic Party system as presently constituted is stronger than it has been in decades. Trump wouldn't get within 30 points of where he needs to be in the Democratic Party. Given the knuckle whitening terror that Trump is filling half the country with because of his "unstoppable" 36% plurality, I submit that you will get exactly nowhere arguing against the Superdelegate system today.

The Electoral College actually flipped an election in 2000 and we didn't get rid of the fucking thing. Right now, the multilayer Democratic system just looks like Trump insurance.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:The Electoral College actually flipped an election in 2000 and we didn't get rid of the fucking thing.

Popular support for getting rid of the electoral college has been consistently high for a fairly long time. Not as high as support for background checks for gun purchases, which would also be procedurally much less strenuous to accomplish and yet still hasn't happened, but still high. What the U.S. government does and does not do has very little to do with what the people actually want it to do. Between all the gerrymandered districts, uncontested primaries, certain offices' lack of term limits and lengthy terms (cough cough fuck the senate), and the straight-up undemocratic nature of certain institutions (cough cough fuck the senate), the accountability of U.S. politicians to the public that elects them is pretty fucking god awful.

FrankTrollman wrote: I broadly agree. But considering what's happening right now on the Republican side, the argument for the Democratic Party system as presently constituted is stronger than it has been in decades. Trump wouldn't get within 30 points of where he needs to be in the Democratic Party. Given the knuckle whitening terror that Trump is filling half the country with because of his "unstoppable" 36% plurality, I submit that you will get exactly nowhere arguing against the Superdelegate system today.

The Electoral College actually flipped an election in 2000 and we didn't get rid of the fucking thing. Right now, the multilayer Democratic system just looks like Trump insurance.

It seems to me there are way better methods to achieve the goal of "don't let crazy candidates win" while not taking a shit all over democracy. A preferential voting system could do wonders. At least in Trump's case, he seems to be everyone's first choice, or last choice, and not much in the middle. So, once the votes are cast and no one has 50+%, you start dropping the last candidate and checking the second-place votes (and so on), applying them, and repeating the process. It would seem that someone like Trump would start with a particular percentage, and barely move from that point as the second and third picks consolidate around other candidates.

DSMatticus wrote:What the U.S. government does and does not do has very little to do with what the people actually want it to do. Between all the gerrymandered districts, uncontested primaries, certain offices' lack of term limits and lengthy terms (cough cough fuck the senate), and the straight-up undemocratic nature of certain institutions (cough cough fuck the senate), the accountability of U.S. politicians to the public that elects them is pretty fucking god awful.

It's really sad how effective the roadblocks to democracy are at preventing the removal of roadblocks to democracy.

RobbyPants wrote:A preferential voting system could do wonders.

True. It's been pretty good for Australia, and has never resulted in us having a crazy, villainous asshole in charge.



Oh god fucking damn it.

Fine. It has rarely resulted in that. Honestly, if Trump does indeed end up as the Republican nominee, this will let me refine my research on exactly how much of a crazy asshole you can be and still win power. Similar to how Rupert Murdoch has shown he can buy an Australian leader, but can't buy an American one (Abbott vs Kitten Mittens).

Just remember, Koumei, how much of a crazy asshole you can be is sharply impacted by your gender.

RobbyPants wrote:It seems to me there are way better methods to achieve the goal of "don't let crazy candidates win" while not taking a shit all over democracy.

I don't even see the Democratic Party system as taking a shit over democracy. It's a series of staggered elections over a period of years. This gives disproportionate power to people who show up for every election and almost totally disenfranchises the people who vote only for the big elections. But it's still democracy. I would actually say that in abstract if you were going to bias your electoral rules towards one group, that biasing them in favor of people who care enough about the process to cast votes in committee chair elections in odd numbered years isn't a bad one.

It's still vulnerable to insurgency, but it has to be a sustained insurgency. Taking over the Democratic Party would take years. Long enough that you could imagine the Democratic electorate noticing that you were doing it and put up some kind of resistance. People weren't absolutely certain that Donald Trump was a real thing until two months ago and he could plausibly seize control of the party nomination within six weeks.

Having the things people vote for in the past have lasting consequences is a limitation on what people can vote for right now, but it's not inherently undemocratic. The fact that Obama gets to appoint a supreme court justice now isn't undemocratic, it's not flaunting the will of the people, it's a consequence of a real election that really happened three and a half years ago.

-Username17

So, the republican voters are turning out to the polls in higher numbers than usual, while democrat voters are turning out in lower numbers than 2008.

We can shout at people online to go vote all we want, we can have celebrities of varying levels of celebrity tell people to vote, and all that, but what could we realistically do to get people more engaged and more involved and overall just showing the fuck up to vote.

Prak wrote:So, the republican voters are turning out to the polls in higher numbers than usual, while democrat voters are turning out in lower numbers than 2008.

We can shout at people online to go vote all we want, we can have celebrities of varying levels of celebrity tell people to vote, and all that, but what could we realistically do to get people more engaged and more involved and overall just showing the fuck up to vote.

Well, voting should be compulsory and held over a couple of days and those days should be public holidays. But so long as voting is a thing that is unpaid and you don't get time off work for, people mostly come to the polls when they are angry or afraid. Right now the Democratic primary is between two left wing Democrats with long lists of accomplishments. I am a Hillary supporter and I am in no way afraid of a Bernie presidency. I think a Bernie presidency would be pretty OK. In 2008 there were huge spikes in primary voting because people were angry at the Bush legacy. And right now there are Republicans streaming to the polls because they are angry at the Obama legacy. And because lots of them are afraid of what kind of damage a talentless schmuck like Rubio or an uncompromising douche like Cruz or a grossly unqualified asshole like Trump could do when given the most powerful pen in the world.

When one of those frightening assholes goes to the general and comes within striking distance of the presidency, lots more people will go vote. Because fear leads to anger and all that.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: When one of those frightening assholes goes to the general and comes within striking distance of the presidency, lots more people will go vote. Because fear leads to anger and all that.

How many more times do I have to vote before I get sweet lightning powers?

Huh. Compulsory voting would be interesting. And a hard sell, I'm sure...

Anyway.


Carson's Out