Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Zangi]

Kinda like, I've gathered up enough unrestricted money, time to officially get into the game where most of my opponents gathered up their money under restrictions.

Yup.

[Aqizzar]

Combination opinion polling for likely Republican candidates continues to point to a significant problem as the Presidential race gets close to organized debates.  The problem: nobody knows who is or is not significant enough to bother inviting and giving screen time.

Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Macro Rubio and Ben Carson are currently leading opinion polling, a marginal change from last month's leaders of Bush, Huckabee, Walker, and Ted Cruz.  Everything in the preceding lists is meaningless, because when you consider the 4-6% margin of error in most early polling, anyone could be currently leading, and it would only be a lead of fractions.  Well, anyone except George Pataki, coming in at an unmatched zero percent both months running.

"Anyone not listed" is also poling at essentially zero percent, the surest possible sign that the candidacy field is oversaturated when people literally can't think of anyone else they'd want to see.  Ironically, even when nobody can think of anyone else to nominate, "None of the choices available" is currently way out ahead of all actual people with a combined 22%.

So far, everything is going pretty much exactly like 2012.

EDIT: Just read through some more of that report, and this really stuck out to me:

Fewer GOP voters say that abortion or education will be a litmus test in their choice for the party’s 2016 nominee.  Just under half (48%) say they will only support a candidate who agrees with them on abortion, 27% might support someone they disagree with, and 19% say that a candidate’s abortion position is not an important factor in their vote choice.

Finally, 34% say they would only vote for a candidate who shares their views on the Common Core [education plan], 28% say they would consider someone they differ with on this issue, and 25% say it is not all that important in the choice for the GOP nomination.

And bear in mind, this is mostly poling of Republican voters.  The Culture Wars are an ever-shifting battlefield.

[FearfulJesuit]

That's too bad...Pataki's probably the only GOP candidate I'd vote for.

I suspect we'll see a few candidates peel off between now and the end of the year, maybe even the end of the summer. I'd be willing to bet that Cruz is trying to pad his resume this go-around more than actually win the nomination. Carson's not a politician, and no non-politician has won the presidency since 1952...and that man won WWII.

If I had to guess, Walker, Rubio, Bush, and Huckabee will be the frontrunners by the end of this year. I have a sneaking suspicion the nominee will probably be Rubio...like Romney, he's few people's first choice, but nearly everyone's second.

[Angle]

Hence why he won't win.

[Sheb]

Well, the Republican tickets is going to be Undecided/None of the Above. Undecided 2016! We don't know why you should vote for us!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Ben Carson

Delicious.

[Aqizzar]

Ben Carson

Delicious.

Don't forget that the Herminator (Chairman Pizza, Ol' Nine Ninety-Nine) was also very briefly a frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2012.  While it would be pretty fantastic watching people's hair light on fire if the Republican party picked a black man for a candidate, that is also exactly why it won't happen.

[Bauglir]

So far, everything is going pretty much exactly like 2012.

Not quite - we don't have a Romney. Possibly I'm not following as closely as I could be, I suppose. I'll throw my expectations behind the first person who appears in slogans like "Anybody but so-and-so"; nobody else seems to have that "default" expectation about them.

EDIT: Regarding black Republican candidtates, you never know. They might conclude that Obama won because he's black due to the persecution complex and try to engineer a black guy's victory for "strategic" reasons, but it depends on how much the party leadership buys into its own swill.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Ben Carson

Delicious.

Don't forget that the Herminator (Chairman Pizza, Ol' Nine Ninety-Nine) was also very briefly a frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2012.  While it would be pretty fantastic watching people's hair light on fire if the Republican party picked a black man for a candidate, that is also exactly why it won't happen.

Not actually my thought process. Ben Carson is just loves amazingly fallacious far-right rhetoric in a way that is deeply amusing to me. All of you should go search for him on Right Wing Watch, it's great.

[Morrigi]

I can't conceive of a world where both parties are that dumb.

"In a democracy, each party devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed and are right."

—H. L. Mencken

[mainiac]

"In a democracy, each party devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed and are right."

—H. L. Mencken

Someone distract me before I start trying to substantiate the naivete of cynicism in a median voter efficient political model.

[Bauglir]

No, no, go on. The quote is right, in my experience, with the major thing it conceals being that the parties are not equally unfit to rule. So I'd like to hear the counterargument.

[mainiac]

Even the platonic ideal of a party would appear to have flaws when perceived through a partisan political system.  But the question of fitness to rule isn't even that standard, the question is if the party is good or bad for the system.  And if we look at history we see that those who did vastly good things in retrospect were considered very confrontational at the time.

[Bauglir]

Yeah, but the quotation has nothing to do with the appearance of flaws or with the degree to which things are confrontational, so I don't see how that's relevant. Neither party is fit to rule because neither party's interests align thoroughly with the people they try to rule, partly because a large chunk of their interests wind up being "thwart the other party to score points come next election" instead of solving the problems they purport to make up their platforms.

EDIT: I guess what I'm trying to say is, what does any of that have to do with cynicism? Or the supplied quote? Or anything at all that wasn't introduced in that very post of yours?

[mainiac]

So your platonic ideal is a party that aligns with the needs and wants of the nation as a whole.  For instance the democratic party in the 1940s.  They didn't rule by acclaim, they faced opposition that with some success depicted them as incompetent.

It's a bullshit criticism because it's not falsifiable.  The only way to beat the standard would be to simultaneously offer contradictory things.  And frankly I think most complaints about politics boil down to exactly that desire.