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[RedKing]

Couple of updates in the escalating Trump-Univision war. A quick timeline to recap:

1. Trump makes his announcement speech, says Mexico is sending its drug dealers and rapists here. And some of them are good people, he guesses.
2. Univision drops Trump like a hot burrito, including broadcasting the Miss USA pageant.
3. Trump says he'll sue Univision for breach of contract and says that privately, Univision officials have apologized but are under pressure from the Mexican government.
4. Univision CEO says Trump is full of it and denies ever apologizing for anything.
5. Trump issues a notice to Univision that its staff and journalists are not welcome at any Trump hotels or golf courses.
6. After a week or so of increasing pressure, NBCUniversal (Univision's parent company) also cuts all ties to Trump, including the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants (which they co-owned with Trump), and has indicated that Trump will not be back on NBC's "The Apprentice" any time between now and when hell freezes over. Trump is threatening to sue NBCUniversal as well.

At this rate, he's going to wind up suing existence for not conforming to his will. At which point, one hopes existence cuts all ties with Trump as well.

[mainiac]

Well existance 86es us all sooner or later.

[nenjin]

Well existance 86es us all sooner or later.

That hair piece though. That thing will go on in perpetuity.

[smjjames]

His hair doesn't seem THAT bad. *shrug*

[FearfulJesuit]

The Atlantic on the GOP's inability to produce a decent presidential candidate.

It's difficult to say what's going to make the GOP produce someone electable...as the article notes, the GOP is acting like they've got the upper hand in the race, when they really don't. It's not 2010 anymore, but they haven't gotten the memo.

I suspect the only thing that'll make GOP presidential contenders see sense will be a real wallop in the Electoral College. The problem is, as FiveThirtyEight notes, that's getting harder and harder to pull off, because the increasing political polarization of the country means that a landslide in the vein of 1964, 1972 or 1984 is pretty much impossible these days. (Nate Silver calculates that if the GOP lost 2016 by 1984 margins, they'd still have 136 electoral votes. In contrast, Mondale walked away from 1984 with only 13 votes.)

[nenjin]

I think their confidence is three things:

1. They've been in the Obama Echo Hate Chamber so long it's magnified what they perceive as the electorate agreeing with them.
2. Good old fashioned confidence bluster.
3. A lot of these candidates are juniors on the political scene. Quite a few are trying to still make a name for themselves, which results in a lot of #2.

[mainiac]

Most politically engaged people are in an echo chamber.

[smjjames]

Most politically engaged people are in an echo chamber.

Including us on Bay12? Heh

Anyways, I guess the Republican candidates are too afraid of alienating their own base to take advantage of those opportunities mentioned in the first article. That and they have blinders on.

Well, the upside is that as the republicans push further and further to the right (and drive more and more to the left), eventually their vote margin will drop to null, at which point two things could happen:

1) They go back left to recover
2) They stay right and become meaningless while the Democrats eventually split because there must always be more than one party

Or possibly, just possibly, the sane portion of the Republican Party will break away from the rest.

Also, they've already reached the batshit insane region (well, some of them, not all of them) of the far right and are still relevant. At this point, it's pretty much political suicide for a republican to lean more left than most.

[RedKing]

Oy...somehow I ended up on Infowars.com, reading the comment section on a dumbass article there (really, are there any other kind on Infowars?)
Now you want to talk about an echo chamber....try fifty illiterate poo-flinging monkeys fantasizing about murdering George Soros. >_<


That's my only real concern, the same one I've had the last couple of elections actually. That the spittle-flecked fringes are gonna get so worked up and buy into the apocalyptic rhetoric so hard that somebody's gonna die. Which is kinda ironic, given that we haven't had a serious assassination attempt on a candidate since what....Robert Kennedy?

Sure, you had attempts on sitting Presidents (Ford, Reagan) but not on candidates. Whereas that used to be a thing in the 19th century, the early 20th century and the 1960s.

[nenjin]

I mean, if the black communist muslim kenyan for our president didn't get assassinated...pretty sure there's only one or two buttons you can still press on the far right.

[FearfulJesuit]

Well, the upside is that as the republicans push further and further to the right (and drive more and more to the left), eventually their vote margin will drop to null, at which point two things could happen:

1) They go back left to recover
2) They stay right and become meaningless while the Democrats eventually split because there must always be more than one party

I think a political realignment of some sort is probably going to occur before long, though it might take a crisis to trigger it. Situation 1) is pretty much inevitable, though it might take a couple decades. No party's gone defunct since the Whigs, who collapsed 160 years ago, and that was after an ideological split so bitter that the incumbent president couldn't get his own party's renomination. (Mind you, that's not an impossibility- it seems entirely possible for Jeb Bush, say, to pass immigration reform with mostly Democratic votes in Congress, and face an intense primary challenge from Ted Cruz.)

What's more likely is that the Republicans will dwindle to the status of regional party based in the South and Great Plains for a few elections while they try and get something worked out. The Democrats held this status in the 1920s, remaining a political force in the South only; after the Great Depression swung the balance of power back to the Democrats, the Republicans camped out in New England and the Great Plains until after WWII.

Additionally, there seems to be this strange law in American politics that no presidential candidate can ever get more than about 60% of the vote, no matter how out-of-touch the opponent is. Roosevelt got 60.8% in 1936; Johnson got 61.1% in 1964; Nixon got 60.7% in 1972; and Reagan got 58.8% in 1984. Since then nobody's even cracked 55%. So, assuming that the two-party system holds, the GOP is going to win about 40% of the vote even in a year when they get absolutely walloped, and they'd only need to drag 10% of the electorate away from the Democrats to bring the situation back to balance again. I think once a couple of contentious issues for the GOP become accepted as the "new normal"- disliked, but irreversible (Obamacare and immigration reform are the most likely candidates)- they'll start putting forth some constructive proposals again instead of just shouting "no!" at absolutely anything the Democrats want to get passed.

[Lord Shonus]

Well, the upside is that as the republicans push further and further to the right (and drive more and more to the left), eventually their vote margin will drop to null, at which point two things could happen:

1) They go back left to recover
2) They stay right and become meaningless while the Democrats eventually split because there must always be more than one party

I think a political realignment of some sort is probably going to occur before long, though it might take a crisis to trigger it. Situation 1) is pretty much inevitable, though it might take a couple decades. No party's gone defunct since the Whigs, who collapsed 160 years ago, and that was after an ideological split so bitter that the incumbent president couldn't get his own party's renomination. (Mind you, that's not an impossibility- it seems entirely possible for Jeb Bush, say, to pass immigration reform with mostly Democratic votes in Congress, and face an intense primary challenge from Ted Cruz.)

What's more likely is that the Republicans will dwindle to the status of regional party based in the South and Great Plains for a few elections while they try and get something worked out. The Democrats held this status in the 1920s, remaining a political force in the South only; after the Great Depression swung the balance of power back to the Democrats, the Republicans camped out in New England and the Great Plains until after WWII.

Additionally, there seems to be this strange law in American politics that no presidential candidate can ever get more than about 60% of the vote, no matter how out-of-touch the opponent is. Roosevelt got 60.8% in 1936; Johnson got 61.1% in 1964; Nixon got 60.7% in 1972; and Reagan got 58.8% in 1984. Since then nobody's even cracked 55%. So, assuming that the two-party system holds, the GOP is going to win about 40% of the vote even in a year when they get absolutely walloped, and they'd only need to drag 10% of the electorate away from the Democrats to bring the situation back to balance again. I think once a couple of contentious issues for the GOP become accepted as the "new normal"- disliked, but irreversible (Obamacare and immigration reform are the most likely candidates)- they'll start putting forth some constructive proposals again instead of just shouting "no!" at absolutely anything the Democrats want to get passed.

There's also a really high chance in a few election cycles that the Democrats will start shedding a fair number of single-issue voters that sided with the Dems primarily for support of gay rights - now that it would take direct divine intervention (or the less likely Constitutional amendment) to block gay marriage, and the case will be a very heavy precedent when the rest of the gay rights agenda (employment and housing protection's going to be the next big one - those battles are long overdue) comes before the court; it's no longer a battle that needs to be fought, and they'll have the luxury of reconsidering their allegiance.

[Sheb]

Are those candidates that bad? Sure, it's all fine for us liberals to rant about how Scott Walker is horrible, but from a right-wing perspective he's not horrible. Same for Bush I guess.

[FearfulJesuit]

Yeah. I also wouldn't be surprised if the Democrats slowly ease up on social issues, for a few reasons:

a) Most of those battles are being won through the courts.
b) The Dems draw a lot of their votes from ethnic and racial minorities, who tend to be more socially conservative than the college-educated, Atlantic-reading true-blood liberals who comprise the party's public face.
c) The key swing constituency in American politics is actually working-class whites, who may end up on the Democratic side over economic issues or on the Republican side on social issues. The Democrats have lost working-class whites consistently for several decades now; it's by how much they lose them that dictates who wins elections.

So don't be surprised if the Democrats of 2040 are the family-values party, and the Republicans are a somewhat more levelheaded libertarian-lite club with a more consistent laissez-faire attitude. (You can visit the nascent kernel of such a party by visiting any Reddit thread- there are a lot of naturally conservative STEM types who only vote Democrat because the Republicans want to take away their weed and hate le science.) Predicting anything at this remove is difficult, though.

[SalmonGod]

So don't be surprised if the Democrats of 2040 are the family-values party, and the Republicans are a somewhat more levelheaded libertarian-lite club with a more consistent laissez-faire attitude. (You can visit the nascent kernel of such a party by visiting any Reddit thread- there are a lot of naturally conservative STEM types who only vote Democrat because the Republicans want to take away their weed and hate le science.) Predicting anything at this remove is difficult, though.

You paint a bleak picture.