It's going to be cruz, because he's the only one crazy enough to appeal to the base.
But if he won, he'd be immediately impeached for the Zodiac killings. They want a President who won't kill people without legal authority until they're head of DoD.
So in the event of a brokered Republican convention, who would they nominate? Cause they hate Trump, but Cruz is next closest and he's just as awful.
It's an interesting question, but the honest answer is that it's totally up in the air. Trump, Cruz, Kasich, and Ryan all have the potential to win a contested convention.
Cruz has strong support from the base (as evidenced and legitimized by some solid results in the primaries), and he also has the advantage that heavy ideologues are willing to get behind him.
Kasich, on the other hand, has the significant advantage that he has (or appears to have) a much better shot than the others at beating Hillary. He also has at least been involved in the whole primary process.
Paul Ryan has the advantage that he could garner support both from heavily ideological conservatives, as well as the donor class and/or "establishment". However, he is also viewed as a traitor by the racist faction of the Republican coalition.
Finally, it's also important to note that while the GOP delegates may be free to pick whoever they want if Trump fails to get a majority, there are significant risks in doing so. Going against a candidate who has the plurality (and a near-majority) of primary voters behind him will definitely cause backlash. Maybe it wouldn't be too bad for a switch from Trump to Cruz, because many of the racist faction would be OK with a Cruz nomination. However, a Kasich or Ryan nomination would definitely be seen as the GOP establishment "stealing" the nomination away from Trump, with potentially disastrous results for the GOP.
As bad as it may be for the Republican party to have Trump as their nominee, denying him the nomination could be worse. That said, both outcomes have a significant chance of splitting the GOP.
Also don't forget that they'll have to augment their own rules to put someone up who wasn't already in the current running. They can easily do it - no problems in the procedure - but it could very easy blow up in their faces in the media.
GOP BROKE THE RULES TO APPOINT UNELECTED PRESIDENT WARGARBLE!
I put 60/40 odds toward Trump forming his own party if he's stripped of the nomination.
I give it much higher odds than that, at least 80%. But I was thinking about this this morning, what the Republicans should do instead of doubling down on their crazy base with someone like Cruz, they should nominate a moderate that has a chance against Clinton. A few weeks ago Paul Ryan had a speech where he softened his position on how the government should help the poor rather than just shun them for not working hard enough. I kinda wonder if this has been the plan all along, to shed their crazy base to Trump and get back into moderate politics in one swing.
Moderate Republicans can't exist in the district ecosystem the GOP has created. The base of their power in the House stems almost entirely from a core of safe rural districts that will never support moderation.
The GOP is a minority party in terms of the voting-eligible US population. It has been for a long long time. Its success comes from deep party discipline and the fact that it's cobbled together a coalition of social conservatism, religion, libertarian anti-government ideology, and the wealthy.
They've fostered the extremism to bolster their voter roles as demographics have turned starkly against them. Losing even one part of the coalition practically guarantees that they lose the house and senate.
They've fostered the extremism to bolster their voter roles as demographics have turned starkly against them. Losing even one part of the coalition practically guarantees that they lose the house and senate.
Losing them this cycle is almost assured with the democratic turnout for the election. If they take the white house and lose the house and senate they can re emerge in 2016 with more moderate candidates for all the seats they lost.
I give it much higher odds than that, at least 80%. But I was thinking about this this morning, what the Republicans should do instead of doubling down on their crazy base with someone like Cruz, they should nominate a moderate that has a chance against Clinton. A few weeks ago Paul Ryan had a speech where he softened his position on how the government should help the poor rather than just shun them for not working hard enough. I kinda wonder if this has been the plan all along, to shed their crazy base to Trump and get back into moderate politics in one swing.
Since when do "Paul Ryan" and "moderate" belong in the same sentence?
They've fostered the extremism to bolster their voter roles as demographics have turned starkly against them. Losing even one part of the coalition practically guarantees that they lose the house and senate.
Losing them this cycle is almost assured with the democratic turnout for the election. If they take the white house and lose the house and senate they can re emerge in 2016 with more moderate candidates for all the seats they lost.
While a Trump nomination would hurt the Republicans in the Senate and the House, I don't think it's "almost assured" it would be enough to cost them the majority in both. I'd say the Democrats have pretty good odds in the Senate, but they're still going to have a very hard time taking the House. Also, a scenario in which the Republicans take the white house but lose both the Senate and House is rather unlikely, given that their demographic issues are at their worst when it comes to the presidency.
Attempting to beat Hillary with a genuine moderate would cost the GOP far too much in terms of turnout. This, in turn, means that a moderate candidate doesn't do much for them with respect to their chances at the presidency, while hurting them in the Senate and House.
There's another question here. What do you mean by "moderate?"
There is no moderate, middle position on issues like abortion rights, LGBT rights, civil rights, etc... The GOP has energizes a good chunk of its base by being uncompromising on the issues they have abhorrent positions on.
Even if he's short of the majority clinch, enough delegates might vote for him to end it rather than risk the fallout of nominating someone who clearly got few fewer actual votes. Trump is holding a proverbial gun to the rest of the GOP electorate: he can make a strong claim to have "won" the primary, and it is basically impossible for anyone to have more delegates or votes than him no matter what happens in the next couple months.
Even if he's short of the majority clinch, enough delegates might vote for him to end it rather than risk the fallout of nominating someone who clearly got few fewer actual votes. Trump is holding a proverbial gun to the rest of the GOP electorate: he can make a strong claim to have "won" the primary, and it is basically impossible for anyone to have more delegates or votes than him no matter what happens in the next couple months.
I forget which podcast it was, whether it was FiveThirtyEight's, Slate's, or NPR's, but the hosts were discussing what John Kasich was doing. They said that if he was trying stop Trump from getting enough delegates to win the nomination outright, he was doing a terrible job. But, they said that if you examined everything that Kasich was doing as him trying to get enough delegates himself so that his delates plus Trump's was enough to win the nomination, and he becomes Trump's VP pick, it makes perfect sense. I haven't seen any news articles pick up on this, but if Kasich offers Trump his delegates in return for being the VP, I think Trump would jump at the chance.
Looks like Sanders v Clinton has entered the fake outrage phase...
Something to get genuinely angry about - Sanders Campaign manager accusing Clinton of being "Too Ambitious", specifically, saying that she must be careful not to “destroy the Democratic party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions to become president.”
She responded pretty much perfectly to that claim - by bursting out laughing for a solid four or five seconds.
"Wisconsin Republicans might have scored the biggest win of the night by keeping the state Supreme Court ideologically divided in favor of conservatives. This is no small thing in a state that an ultra-conservative governor has spent the last few years turning into the Koch brothers’ wet dream. Bradley’s term is for 10 years, so assuming she serves all of it, she’ll outlast a Sanders or Clinton presidency."
"But even beyond that, there is another point that has always been the flaw in the Sanders model: It does liberals no good to turn out all these voters for a presidential election if they are not going to educate themselves about who else on the ballot they need to vote for."
The practice of governance in a democracy of competing ideologies is about making deals, it's about compromise, and the complicit understanding that getting half a loaf today and fighting for more tomorrow is better than going hungry. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and the good is better than nothing. Getting a law passed is harder than trying to herd cats, and is made impossible when your own constituency does not appreciate statesmanship. Bernie Sanders doesn't compromise. He just keeps yelling and yelling and eventually his legislation dies and doesn't get passed. Yay for ideological purity! In order to pass successful legislation, you need to have allies in Congress, you have to make deals and play the quid pro quo game. It is a long game with an infinite score and to play you need to let all the players occasionally have something to go home with. There is no way that Congress is going to pass any of Bernie's proposals, just like there is no way that the ideological purists of the Right will ever get their way either. Bernie is an Independent with no network or political allies.
I've seen several people advocate this basic position in this thread, and while I'm sympathetic to it I think there's some significant flaws in your reasoning.
First of all, it's important to keep in mind that ideology and pragmatism are orthogonal. You can't get things done unless you have a clear picture of the kinds of things you actually want to get done. Crucially, so-called "ideological purity" is not inherently in opposition to whether or not you can actually "get things done".
For a counterpoint, you need look no further than what the "ideological purists of the Right" have achieved at the state level (see this article for some interesting discussion). In fact, when you judge them by their own criteria, those ideological purists have also had successes at the federal level as well. Sure, they haven't passed many laws, but it's important to keep in mind that when your goal is to shrink the size of government (or at least keep it from growing), not passing laws and also preventing your opponents from passing laws is a genuine measure of success.
Secondly, although it seems intuitively reasonable that Hillary is better at the "getting things done" aspect than Sanders is, I'd like to see better evidence of that fact. You raised the question of legislation:
According to govtrack.us, Bernie Sanders has sponsored 362 bills while in Congress. Only 7 have been enacted. And out of those 7 bills actually signed into law, 5 of them deal exclusively with Vermont. That’s not my opinion, that’s facts.
At first glance, this appears to back up the idea that Sanders is an ineffective legislator who simply keeps "yelling and yelling" rather than getting things done. However, simply putting out that information in isolation gives a very misleading picture of things, because of the lack of context—you yourself have said, getting a law passed is "harder than trying to herd cats". So, when we look at the actual facts in question, here's what we see:
Bernie Sanders, from 16 years in the House and 8 in the Senate: 781 bills sponsored, of which 3 became law (two of them renamed post offices). 5453 bills co-sponsored, of which 203 became law.
Hillary Clinton, from 8 years in the Senate: 713 bills sponsored, of which 3 became law (two of them renamed things). 2677 bills co-sponsored, of which 74 became law.
By the numbers, their records on legislation are not really very different, and thus you definitely haven't presented enough evidence to justify the claim that Sanders is ineffectual.
Finally, I'd like to cite Steve Randy Waldman's short article here as a defense of Sanders; the core point is that the most important role of a politician is to "define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details".
For a counter-argument, I'd say that this is a much better critique of Bernie Sanders than I've seen elsewhere in this thread.
So, some recent research seems to back up the idea that segments of the population have indeed been harmed by free trade, particularly with China. This, I guess, plays a role in explaining the phenomena of why Sanders and Trump have done unusually well this year—their stances on globalization and free trade may be doing a lot of the work.
That said, while this topic has a genuine constituency, it seems to me that the debate is being framed poorly by most candidates. Hillary seems like she has some of the right ideas milling about, but she's missing a critical opportunity to push for progressive policies.
So when the modern Republican Party (R.I.P), in the name of “small government” and opposition to “class warfare,” set its face against policies to redistribute the gains from economic growth, it destroyed the theoretical basis for thinking that a rising tide would lift all the boats, rather than lifting the yachts and swamping the trawlers. Free trade without redistribution (especially the corrupt version of “free trade” with corporate rent-seeking written into it) is basically class warfare waged downwards.
As I see it, the full story is that while the neoliberal economic consensus of the past 40 years or so has pushed free trade for the fundamentally correct reasons that as a whole, both countries ought to end up better off, there have also been significant groups of people left worse off. The basic economic theory says that this is not in itself a problem, because those who would lose out could be compensated from the net gains, thus leaving everyone better off. However, the Republican party's ideological stance against redistribution in all its forms (including the welfare state) has made that argument wholly invalid.
Thus, the case that really needs to be made here is that the underlying issue is not free trade, but rather a dearth of proper domestic policy to mitigate some of its impacts. A much more robust safety net, as well as targeted programs for workers who lose their jobs, needs to be an essential component of trade policy.
On the subject of Trump, he's getting the shit kicked out of him in state conventions. North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and fucking South Carolina all look to have a majority of Cruz delegates going to the national convention. Cruz has essentially taken Hillary's strategy (co-opted from Obama in 2008) of focusing on delegates to the next level, and is setting himself up to win on the second through fourth or fifth ballot (depending on when the delegates decide to start going for the dark horse).
Comments
A future scandal in one of my campaigns.
Cruz has strong support from the base (as evidenced and legitimized by some solid results in the primaries), and he also has the advantage that heavy ideologues are willing to get behind him.
Kasich, on the other hand, has the significant advantage that he has (or appears to have) a much better shot than the others at beating Hillary. He also has at least been involved in the whole primary process.
Paul Ryan has the advantage that he could garner support both from heavily ideological conservatives, as well as the donor class and/or "establishment". However, he is also viewed as a traitor by the racist faction of the Republican coalition.
Finally, it's also important to note that while the GOP delegates may be free to pick whoever they want if Trump fails to get a majority, there are significant risks in doing so. Going against a candidate who has the plurality (and a near-majority) of primary voters behind him will definitely cause backlash. Maybe it wouldn't be too bad for a switch from Trump to Cruz, because many of the racist faction would be OK with a Cruz nomination. However, a Kasich or Ryan nomination would definitely be seen as the GOP establishment "stealing" the nomination away from Trump, with potentially disastrous results for the GOP.
As bad as it may be for the Republican party to have Trump as their nominee, denying him the nomination could be worse. That said, both outcomes have a significant chance of splitting the GOP.
GOP BROKE THE RULES TO APPOINT UNELECTED PRESIDENT WARGARBLE!
I put 60/40 odds toward Trump forming his own party if he's stripped of the nomination.
The GOP is a minority party in terms of the voting-eligible US population. It has been for a long long time. Its success comes from deep party discipline and the fact that it's cobbled together a coalition of social conservatism, religion, libertarian anti-government ideology, and the wealthy.
They've fostered the extremism to bolster their voter roles as demographics have turned starkly against them. Losing even one part of the coalition practically guarantees that they lose the house and senate.
Attempting to beat Hillary with a genuine moderate would cost the GOP far too much in terms of turnout. This, in turn, means that a moderate candidate doesn't do much for them with respect to their chances at the presidency, while hurting them in the Senate and House.
There is no moderate, middle position on issues like abortion rights, LGBT rights, civil rights, etc... The GOP has energizes a good chunk of its base by being uncompromising on the issues they have abhorrent positions on.
I clearly need some kind of professional help. Or maybe more booze.
Looks like Sanders v Clinton has entered the fake outrage phase...
Also see reaction to Clinton's Sandy Hook comment for opposite side outrage.
Also can we stop going to Twitter to get our political statements from politicians, if there wasn't a platform that cheapens the debate....
She responded pretty much perfectly to that claim - by bursting out laughing for a solid four or five seconds.
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/07/this_is_the_problem_with_bernies_revolution_how_one_down_ticket_election_in_wisconsin_shows_the_flaw_in_his_political_movement/
"Wisconsin Republicans might have scored the biggest win of the night by keeping the state Supreme Court ideologically divided in favor of conservatives. This is no small thing in a state that an ultra-conservative governor has spent the last few years turning into the Koch brothers’ wet dream. Bradley’s term is for 10 years, so assuming she serves all of it, she’ll outlast a Sanders or Clinton presidency."
"But even beyond that, there is another point that has always been the flaw in the Sanders model: It does liberals no good to turn out all these voters for a presidential election if they are not going to educate themselves about who else on the ballot they need to vote for."
First of all, it's important to keep in mind that ideology and pragmatism are orthogonal. You can't get things done unless you have a clear picture of the kinds of things you actually want to get done. Crucially, so-called "ideological purity" is not inherently in opposition to whether or not you can actually "get things done".
For a counterpoint, you need look no further than what the "ideological purists of the Right" have achieved at the state level (see this article for some interesting discussion). In fact, when you judge them by their own criteria, those ideological purists have also had successes at the federal level as well. Sure, they haven't passed many laws, but it's important to keep in mind that when your goal is to shrink the size of government (or at least keep it from growing), not passing laws and also preventing your opponents from passing laws is a genuine measure of success.
Secondly, although it seems intuitively reasonable that Hillary is better at the "getting things done" aspect than Sanders is, I'd like to see better evidence of that fact. You raised the question of legislation: At first glance, this appears to back up the idea that Sanders is an ineffective legislator who simply keeps "yelling and yelling" rather than getting things done. However, simply putting out that information in isolation gives a very misleading picture of things, because of the lack of context—you yourself have said, getting a law passed is "harder than trying to herd cats". So, when we look at the actual facts in question, here's what we see:
Bernie Sanders, from 16 years in the House and 8 in the Senate:
781 bills sponsored, of which 3 became law (two of them renamed post offices).
5453 bills co-sponsored, of which 203 became law.
Hillary Clinton, from 8 years in the Senate:
713 bills sponsored, of which 3 became law (two of them renamed things).
2677 bills co-sponsored, of which 74 became law.
By the numbers, their records on legislation are not really very different, and thus you definitely haven't presented enough evidence to justify the claim that Sanders is ineffectual.
Finally, I'd like to cite Steve Randy Waldman's short article here as a defense of Sanders; the core point is that the most important role of a politician is to "define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details".
For a counter-argument, I'd say that this is a much better critique of Bernie Sanders than I've seen elsewhere in this thread.
That said, while this topic has a genuine constituency, it seems to me that the debate is being framed poorly by most candidates. Hillary seems like she has some of the right ideas milling about, but she's missing a critical opportunity to push for progressive policies.
See this article for an interesting discussion: As I see it, the full story is that while the neoliberal economic consensus of the past 40 years or so has pushed free trade for the fundamentally correct reasons that as a whole, both countries ought to end up better off, there have also been significant groups of people left worse off. The basic economic theory says that this is not in itself a problem, because those who would lose out could be compensated from the net gains, thus leaving everyone better off. However, the Republican party's ideological stance against redistribution in all its forms (including the welfare state) has made that argument wholly invalid.
Thus, the case that really needs to be made here is that the underlying issue is not free trade, but rather a dearth of proper domestic policy to mitigate some of its impacts. A much more robust safety net, as well as targeted programs for workers who lose their jobs, needs to be an essential component of trade policy.