US General Election 2016

Oh, but X-Files is on tonight.

So far Clinton and Sanders are neck-and-neck, while Cruz has a modest lead over Trump.

CNN reporting that O'Malley is dropping out. Hillary and Bernie are still tied in the delegate count as more results have come in, but with Hillary ever so slightly ahead by votes. Multiple sources calling Iowa for Cruz; Trump and Rubio are still close in second and third place respectively, with 16% of districts left to report.

Jeb is sitting in sixth place right now, behind Rand Paul.

Who knows how long this will last so I just want to screencap this moment for posterity.





Edit: to be clear, Iowa is not representative of the nation as a whole, and this result does not mean that Sanders is likely to win by a margin like this nationally. But it's significant in that he cleared the first actual electoral test of his viability as a candidate, and will benefit from increased, positive media attention, which gives him a platform to continue to build on for the rest of the primary season. I would still call him the underdog, but if Iowa and/or New Hampshire had gone poorly for him, his campaign would have been all but over by the end of the next week. As it is, he has a substantial lead in NH polls, so the hope is for that lead to hold up in the actual primary (though as IA proves that's far from guaranteed).

Edit 2: and I still can't believe I'm actually talking about Bernie as a potentially viable candidate for the nomination since I've always thought that he got into the race not to win but to get his ideas in the discussion and to drag Clinton to the left.

With the late-reporting counties being stronger Hillary areas it looks like she will indeed pull out a narrow victory. She then faces an uphill battle in New Hampshire but will likely to do very well in South Carolina in a few weeks.

Politics!

Strong 3rd place from Rubio, but Cruz proves once again that the 99 county strategy is what to do.

Links to an amusing gif, tried to use the link feature but it wouldn't work for me.

http://i.giphy.com/l2JI7bVHN60DVG6Y0.gif

[/url]" />

Your candidates all look a bit boring this time around. Obama and Romney never seemed so dull. (Trump bores the shit out of me. I don't see him as colourful, just trite and ignorant, the only interest being how many shallow people there are in the world who find him interesting or a viable Leader of a Nation - scary really).

Cruz is equally scary in this respect. I find him fascinating to watch: such an oily smooth operator. The opposite of Trump in manner, identical in ideaology. (though I don't think Trump really believes a word he says, he's just saying whatever fires up the masses).

Bernie Sanders is giving the best speech I've heard of the election cycle. Too bad he's not 10 years younger.

Bernie's only six years older than Hillary (and five years older than Trump). Even Hillary would tie Reagan's record for oldest President at inauguration (though if you break it down by fractions of years Reagan was slightly older).

Orwell wrote:Your candidates all look a bit boring this time around. Obama and Romney never seemed so dull. (Trump bores the shit out of me. I don't see him as colourful, just trite and ignorant, the only interest being how many shallow people there are in the world who find him interesting or a viable Leader of a Nation - scary really).

Not really any hugely charismatic candidates, I agree, but I think Obama sort of spoiled us. Politicians with that kind of charisma don't come along very often.

We never seem to come up with good candidates for reasons I can't fathom. It is always a matter of lesser evils. This time is the worst in memory.

At least in other elections you couldn't be positive before hand that everyone was... so very bad.

Trump the fachist or agreebly perhaps scarcer  Cruz or Hillary the proven baldface liar. =(

The only hope i have is that with the national opinions of both parties candidates so low that perhaps a new and hopefully better party will arrise who will do better to truly serve The People.

Or maybe an independent can step in and capitalize on the ambivalence of the masses.

I can't imagine how any of these people could turn out being good for America or the world. Hopefully I'm wrong.

The 2012 GOP primary was fun with the "flavor of the month," and lots of funny moments I remember. "Oops." Herman Cain was like an enigma; loved his Pokemon song recitation, absolutely hilarious, and those strange political ads.

I'd forgotten about that. Cain was on some next-level shit. I half-believe Rachel Maddow's theory that it was all an act, a form of performance art.

I've read a theory that all of Trump's bloviating is just calculated to get him nominated, then he'll change his tune subtlely enough to pull in independents without losing his base, and eventually as president he'll go back to his more liberal leanings of the past. Nice to dream.

Most likely we'll get Hillary, who is also walking the tightrope. She'll be a strong moderate, and any changes will be incremental.

Lots of candidates try to pan back to the center after the nomination, but Trump went way too far to be able to convince anyone and I think he's smart enough to know it.

I don't think Hillary would necessarily be a bad President on the domestic front, but her foreign policy beliefs are frightening, especially considering what she wanted to do but couldn't convince Obama of. Then again, the rhetoric from the GOP side (sans Rand Paul) has no relation to reality whatsoever, so that's not much of a choice. Unfortunately Bernie isn't very strong on foreign policy either, but it seems to be more a case of not knowing/caring that much rather than actively wanting to get the US into more stupid, unwinnable wars.

What exactly did she want to do but couldn't convince Obama to do?

Going to look more into Marco Rubio. Tough goings for him, because he's so young and hasn't done much in the senate...that reminds me of someone...

Rubio strikes me as a neocon who got into politics about 10 years too late, but because of what's happened to the GOP since the end of the Bush years he looks like a moderate next to the other front-runners. But neoconservatism was terrible so I couldn't in good conscience back Rubio.

halfwise wrote:What exactly did she want to do but couldn't convince Obama to do?

It's mainly that she was itching for greater intervention in Syria at every turn. Her claim (also shared by many others) is that the Syrian Civil War started out as a struggle between pro-democracy, Western-friendly rebels and Assad, but that it was corrupted by Islamists and the "good rebels" were marginalized and driven out. Of course, the argument as recently as 2012-13 was still that there were both good, secular rebels and bad, Islamist rebels fighting, though political and media attention focused on the "good" ones as much as possible. Once the success of ISIS and to a lesser extent Al-Nusra made it impossible to keep up this fiction, the story shifted to the "if only the West had intervened sooner", even though a look at the history of the conflict makes it clear that the rebel factions were Islamist-driven from the beginning. The same thing happened in Libya, where the West did intervene in the civil war on the side of the rebels, and the country ended up largely controlled by Islamist groups anyway. Because that's what the rebels already were. But of course, Hillary still defends the Libyan intervention despite the way that turned out.

Some of her statements:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/hillary-clinton-debate-libya/410437/

Also note that this is not a new development; she was for the Iraq War in '03 when Obama wasn't, and that's part of what helped Obama beat here in 2008. She's always been more of a hawk than Obama. Which is not to paint Obama as dove or anything, far from it. He's a hawk too, just not as much of one than Clinton (and also a lot smarter). But let's not forget that Obama was the one calling the shots when the CIA killed a 16-year-old citizen for the "crime" of having a father who supported terrorism.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/how-team-obama-justifies-the-killing-of-a-16-year-old-american/264028/

Just say "No" to Neo-Cons.

The most disappointing thing is how little distance Obama and Clinton have put between themselves and neo-conservatism. The main difference is that they rely on the CIA, special forces, and foreign proxies instead of committing the whole military to stupid ground wars. Which is an improvement, sure, but a fairly small one in the grand scheme of things, and even less of one in the moral sphere.

But -- and I know I'm being part of the problem by saying this -- I do think that Clinton would be better than Rubio, so I would vote for her in the general.

The GOP needs to do a better job courting people who aren't Christian, or aren't religious at all. I look at that party and it looks like a group of people that wouldn't want my support even if I lent it.

edit: Seriously, Trump's the only one that strikes me as a secularist at heart who memorized a few bible verses and put on a show for Liberty University. But then there's all the crazy shit he's said...

The GOP has actively let itself become insular, and as a strategy it worked for a while, but changing demographics make relying on the conservative, religious, white vote above all others not as much of a viable strategy anymore. Changing patterns of religiosity and attitudes on social issues, especially among young people, and increasing racial diversity (especially interracial marriages and children) have all contributed to the necessity of having a broader base of support. But the GOP is still operating in the shadow of the Southern Strategy:

Reagan-era GOP strategist Lee Atwater wrote:You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Evolution_.281970s_and_1980s.29

You can follow a similar trend with the way that anti-gay rights politicians have discussed that issue. How it's gone from being "ew, fags" to being about defending an important social institution to being about the supposedly threatened religious liberty of the Christian Right. But the motivation and intent behind it remains clear and it affects the way people vote, both for and increasingly against the GOP.

Edit: couple articles for anyone interested in reading more and/or who wants a perspective other than mine (which is good ).

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/us/politics/11south.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-todays-gop-crackup-is-the-final-unraveling-of-nixons-southern-strategy/

It should go without saying, but as with everything in politics (and history, and all the other social sciences), there are plenty of people who disagree with all of this.