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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
In addition, superdelegates prevent a brokered convention. In the case of a crowded Democratic field and none can get the absolute majority from assigned delegates from the voters, the superdelegates, representing the Democratic Party essentially, can be a kingmaker by siding with the nominee with the majority of the assigned delegates.
As far as Sanders goes, he needs less to win the Democratic nomination over Clinton than Cruz needs to win the Republican nomination over Trump. That should tell everyone all they need to know about the sad state of the Republican Party
edited 28th Mar '16 6:31:00 PM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food BadlyWhat they really need is proportional delegate allocation like the Democrats have. Trump wouldn't be so far ahead if he didn't keep wining big winner take all states.
Speaking of which, is anyone else considering registering Republican so they can vote against Trump?
edited 28th Mar '16 7:18:39 PM by storyyeller
Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's PlayHonestly, as I consider myself a liberal, seeing supposed liberals spit on the very concept of human camaraderie and spew hateful hardline anti-poor class war rhetoric makes me deeply embarrassed. I had always thought most liberals had moved beyond the mentality of the coercive eugenics era, but it seems not. It's deeply hypocritical to criticize the Right when you're guilty of exactly the same flaws, just coached in slightly different language. Such a deep misanthropy is incredibly saddening, and I can certainly say I agree with them when they can't trust people who spew hateful hardline rhetoric. But that's them.
I do try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but that's straining it. But perhaps I'm making assumptions, they said they were against conservatism but that could mean anything, they don't have to be a liberal. I hope not.
Maybe my initial prejudices about liberal vs conservative personal character (as opposed to actual policy) were completely wrong. I did try to move beyond the us-vs-them mentality, but it's so hard not to fall back to it.
edited 28th Mar '16 7:35:34 PM by CassidyTheDevil
@Guru: There are other ways to prevent brokered convention scenarios that don't require superdelegates. It's a mechanism for the party elite to put their thumb down on the scales if a candidate they aren't willing to run wins the popular vote by a non-overwhelming margin, in theory to prevent another scenario like 1972 where an unelectable candidate wins the primary.
Whether or not the party would actually overrule the popular vote in any situation other than a virtual tie is another matter entirely. The general consensus is no, they wouldn't overrule the primary voters, but it's never really been put to a serious test, and likely won't be barring a crushing Sanders victory in New York and California.
edited 28th Mar '16 7:21:07 PM by CaptainCapsase
Doing some quick math from the numbers I got from wikipedia, there are 811 delegates still up for grabs in the Republican primary.
Trump has 755 delegates currently, so to get the nomination he needs to win 59.4% of the remaining delegates. Cruz, with 465 delegates needs to win 95% of the remaining delegates.
Kasich needs to win...34% more delegates then are actually up for grabs.
At this point, it's pretty obvious that Kasich is only in the race to increase the chances of a brokered convention. In fact at this point I don't see a likely scenario where Trump doesn't walk into the convention without at least a plurality of delegates, so the only chance the Republican establishment has to avoid a Trump nomination is to have a brokered convention. The easiest way to do that (and the only way that might not fracture the party) is to keep Trump from gaining a simple majority of delegates and to simply unite behind an opposing candidate in a second ballot.
There is also the nuclear option of writing a "no Trump allowed" rule on the eve of the convention. If that happens, I can't possibly predict what the end result would be.
Yeah, as much as I think Trump has the ego to do that, I don't think the RNC is going to just hand things over to Cruz, their currently most liked candidate.
That said, we're not at that bridge yet. We may be pleasantly surprised. Or horrified, depending on where you stand. I really don't think that Trump cares too much about the health and strength of the Republican party.
Not 100% certain how legit this all is, since it seems like the main person involved may be fudging her level of involvement but...
Former Trump super-PAC director: Donald doesn’t even want to be president
Another site, Occupy Democrats, has the headline as "Trump’s Top Strategist Just Quit And Wrote This Brutal Open Letter To Trump Voters"
Not sure why folks here would want to vote for El Diablo over Trump, though, seeing as he doesn't seem to be really any better than Trump as far as policies go. Just a bit more stealthy. And given that El Diablo is trailing in California, I don't know how effective that would be even if it were a good idea.
As for riots at the RNC - given the sort of crowd that follows Trump, I don't think that is so unlikely.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanI'd vote for Cruz over Trump any day, as I think Trump is weak, petty, rude, dishonest (even by the already low standard set by politicians), unprincipled, un-patriotic, and economically too left-leaning.
Cruz is too aggressive, fundementalist, and extreme for my tastes, but Trump is even worse as he's a Straw Hypocrite who combines just about every thing I dislike about the democratic party with things I dislike about the republican party.
edited 28th Mar '16 10:56:17 PM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34Neither should ever get close to power; that we can have a serious conversation about which one would be less horrible for the country is telling about our current political environment.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I have in mind Brian D. Mc Kenzie's "Political Perceptions in the Obama Era: Diverse Opinions of the Great Recession and its Aftermath among Whites, Latinos and Blacks." How the study worked
Mc Kenzie, a professor at the University of Maryland, finds that a large share of the white population perceives itself to have been experiencing economic distress because Barack Obama is sitting in the White House, tilting the playing field in favor of black people. He finds that, naturally enough, white people who feel they are being victimized in this way have a lot of anger at the political establishment. And he finds that neither African Americans nor Latinos believe this is what is happening, perhaps in part because nonwhites are well aware that there has been significant economic distress in communities of color.
His key data source was a study undertaken by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post working with some scholars from Harvard to look at race and the recession. They used a big enough sample so they could do meaningful analysis of the racial subgroups. And, crucially, it included one question asking whether Obama has done "too much" in terms of " looking out for the economic interests of African Americans" and another one asking which racial groups had been hardest hit by the recession.
The results:
The Great Recession and slow recovery period are instructive for understanding ethno-racial elements of citizens' political attitudes beyond partisan distinctions. The analyses here indicate that numerous whites overlook the economic evidence that blacks were substantially harmed on multiple fronts during the recession and instead believe this group was unfairly aided by a sitting black president. These perceptual biases shape whites' political opinions and are associated with feelings of financial frustration and higher levels of blame toward the government in Washington. This thought process is consistently prevalent for whites, compared with other racial and ethic groups. And the replication analyses confirm that the key patterns of whites' attitudes hold across three time periods using several reputable data sources, including the 2012 American National Elections Study. Interestingly, while many whites believe that African Americans are the beneficiaries of favorable economic policies from the Obama administration, blacks themselves do not feel they have been uniquely assisted financially (Harris 2012; Harris and Lieberman 2013).
This ties together white nationalist themes, economic anxiety themes, and populist anti-establishment themes nicely — a large bloc of white voters believes they are suffering economically because their elected representatives in Washington betrayed their interests in order to help nonwhites. GOP leaders wanted to run on the opposite message
The connection between this cluster of ideas and Trumpism is pretty clear. But it's also easy enough to imagine it being channeled in a more conventional direction.
The problem is that following Mitt Romney's defeat in 2012, the leadership of the Republican Party decided that they wanted to go in the exact opposite direction. The idea was that under the leadership of Jeb Bush (with his Mexican-American wife) or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz (both Cuban Americans) and with backers like Sen. Tim Scott and Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, the GOP would present itself as a modern, cosmopolitan, forward-thinking vehicle for right-of-center economic policy.
Conservatism would be an ideology for everyone, not just for white people terrified that all their money was going to be spent on Obamaphones and hip-hop barbecues.
The problem, as we can see in retrospect, is that this sent exactly the wrong message to an important element of the GOP base. It said that their own party's leaders were planning to betray them.
My own take on the current relevant candidates:
- Cruz: Zealots should not be in power.
- Trump: Has consistently proven through word and through deed that he is unfit for the presidency.
- Clinton: some concerns about shady dealings, but otherwise the most competent one of the bunch.
- Sanders: Easily the most squeaky clean of the four, and big on ideals, but his ideas may be too Pie in the Sky to be realistic, going be posts here.
Either democrat would suit me fine. I can get behind Sanders' idealism, but if he doesn't get the nomination, Clinton's reputation doesn't dissuade me.

Superdelegates help create an Unstable Equilibrium by swinging the overall vote towards the most popular candidate.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"