2016 Presidential Horse Race

2016 Presidential Horse Race

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ACamp1900

ACamp1900

Counting my ‘bet against ND’ winnings
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IrishLax said:
Head-to-head, what states does Trump lead Hillary in? Any?
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None so long as Donald Duck, Humphrey Bogart and my great, great Aunt Tina who has been dead for forty years have anything to say about it....
 
Irish YJ

Irish YJ

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irishfan said:
Fiscally conservative. Socially liberal. Tough on immigration. Said forever ago in this thread he would beat Hillary and I still think it's true. He's going to pivot to the center and win over a lot of independents while letting his Wall talk keep his base engaged.
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Guy's a buffoon but I like that he's not 100% aligned with anything...
Nothing wrong with that. I'm closest to the right, but I'm a little left in some areas.
Note - If you have a Johnson, please do your stuff in the men's bathroom. That is all.
 
GoIrish41

GoIrish41

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Irish YJ said:
Guy's a buffoon but I like that he's not 100% aligned with anything...
Nothing wrong with that. I'm closest to the right, but I'm a little left in some areas.
Note - If you have a Johnson, please do your stuff in the men's bathroom. That is all.
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Problem is he's not aligned with himself on a range of issues. He's on both sides of many ... so much so that one can't really know what he believes. It's almost like he picks the side he thinks will play with a given audience and runs with it.
 
Irish YJ

Irish YJ

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GoIrish41 said:
Problem is he's not aligned with himself on a range of issues. He's on both sides of many ... so much so that one can't really know what he believes. It's almost like he picks the side he thinks will play with a given audience and runs with it.
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I guess that's still better than picking a side who pays the most....
 
Irish YJ

Irish YJ

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GoIrish41 said:
If you say so ...
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I'm firmly in the "Everybody Sucks 2016" camp.
If you compare Hilldog and Trump, I wouldn't trust either, at all. Hilldog may stick to her party song sheet, but I don't necessarily equate that as trustworthy or better. Honestly I'd rather have someone that chooses what the majority thinks on issues, not the party line. Trump going back and forth, and acting like he's not changed is a crock. But someone saying I've changed my position because I've heard Merica, is OK in my book.
 
GATTACA!

GATTACA!

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ACamp1900 said:
... you've never been known for your intelligence...
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puh-lease

landscape-1444418914-emilia-clarke-sexiest-woman-alive-2015-005.jpg
 
GATTACA!

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GoIrish41 said:
Problem is he's not aligned with himself on a range of issues. He's on both sides of many ... so much so that one can't really know what he believes. It's almost like he picks the side he thinks will play with a given audience and runs with it.
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Replace he with she and you just described Hillary

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t6_ULryoM3Q?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Bonus points if you can make it through all 8.5 minutes of listening to her.
 
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NDinL.A.

NDinL.A.

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irishfan said:
Oh, I agree. And I think she is the safer pick. I just think he's going to win. He has a new team coaching him, and I think the flip-flops will be done once it's the general election and everyone is paying full attention. I just think he's going to hammer away at the "crooked" image he wants for Hillary. He's not going to be polite like Bernie. He'll go over the top attacking of her large donor money and will say he donated to her in the past and she came to his wedding and sell it that she'll do anything her donors tell her to do and blah blah blah. One of the things he's been consistent about is less U.S. involvement in the Middle East and that's one area where he can really attack her well. I just think he's going to have a lot of ammo to work with to sell people on the idea that Hillary isn't the champion of the middle and lower class like she tries to be.
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Trump has done WAY too much damage, damage that can't be undone, to win the general. He can shift to the middle all he wants - he is NEVER getting the Hispanic vote, and he is never getting the African-Anerican vote. It's just not happening - especially with Hispanics, he's said stuff that cannot be forgotten, and the hate they have for him is deep and real. Wait until he gets to California - it will be Chicago all over again.

And then he's pissed off/offended people that, well, have a heart lol. You can't make fun of a handicapped reporter, an overweight protester, a POW, an entire religion, and scores of other people, and expect to come away unscathed permanently. He went too far - and it was great to get where he is, but there is no eraser button for him to hit. And he's hit Cruz (and Jeb and Rubio) so hard that many of his supporters won't vote him Trump either. He's fucked IMHO.
 
E

EddytoNow

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GoIrish41 said:
He'd better count on historically low voter turnout, and get a whole crap load of white men to vote for him. Most women, African Americans and Latinos are not going to vote for him no matter what. He can moderate his position all he wants. I think at this point, it will fall on deaf ears to large portions of the country. And it could cost the GOP more than the White House ... Trump's unpopularity could put GOP House control In danger | MSNBC
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A key demographic could be young voters. Right now they are in Bernie's corner big time. Bernie has them energized. If Bernie and Hillary can come together the way Obama and Hillary came together, young voters could be the difference maker. If young voters stay home, Trump benefits from the low turnout. However, Trump's unfavorables may actually encourage a large voter turnout on the Democratic side, which is not a good thing for the Republicans. Trump may do what Hillary herself can't do, get Democratic voters to turn out in record numbers.
 
Whiskeyjack

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The NYT's Ross Douthat just published an article titled "The Democrats After Sanders":

Before the Bernie Sanders crusade, whose dream of victory was extinguished in New York’s primary on Tuesday, the future of the Democratic Party seemed likely to resemble the final six years of the Obama era, only more so: a party increasingly ideological and left-wing on social issues and more incrementalist and technocratic in the economic realm.

This combination fits perfectly with the politics of the party’s donor class, cosmopolitan social liberals who benefit from low-skilled immigration and free trade and don’t want their taxes raised too high. It fits reasonably well with the trajectory of public opinion, which has shifted leftward on culture-war issues but didn’t exactly greet the 2009-10 wave of liberal legislation with open arms. And it fits with the seeming fiscal constraints imposed on liberalism after Obamacare — the cost of New Deal and Great Society programs, the aging of American society and the prospect of structural deficits for as long as baby boomers are taking Medicare.

But what it doesn’t fit with, it turns out, are the desires of the many, many Democratic voters who made Sanders a contender, a prolific fund-raiser and an extraordinary phenomenon even in defeat.

The Sanders insurgency is hardly the first of its kind: As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie points out, it follows in a long tradition of progressive candidacies that inspired but ultimately lost, with Howard Dean and Bill Bradley being the most recent examples.

But on his way to winning more caucuses and primaries than Dean or Bradley, Sanders has proved two important points about his party’s voters. First, they are quite ambitious. Many of them see the liberal policy victories of the Obama years (the health care law, Dodd-Frank, Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act) as first steps rather than capstones to the liberal project. Many of them regard Hillary Clinton’s leftward progress on issues like immigration and criminal-justice reform as admirable but wildly insufficient. And they’re eager for ideas — single payer! free college! a $15 minimum wage! — that would stamp their party as thoroughly rather than just partially left wing.

Second, their ambitions have demographic momentum on their side. The leftward, ever leftward impulse is concentrated among the party’s younger constituents, with whom Sanders has rolled up ridiculous margins. So there’s every reason to expect that a future left-wing insurgency could surpass his success even as he surpassed Bradley’s and Dean’s.

Especially since Sanders was in many ways a non-ideal standard-bearer for a left-wing youth movement. He had his own past deviations (on guns and immigration) from the present liberal line, he struggled to win over African-American and Hispanic voters even though many of them sympathize with his economic vision, he seemed like too much of a long shot to win endorsements from the party’s most liberal interest groups, and his obvious lack of interest in foreign policy prevented him from fully exploiting his opponent’s major weakness.

Elizabeth Warren, to pick one example, would have had fewer of these problems if she’d decided to run, and given how well Sanders has done it’s reasonable to suspect that Warren could have actually defeated Clinton. Now that it’s clear that the opening is there, a candidate of full-spectrum progressivism could plausibly enter the next contested Democratic primary as a favorite.

The interesting question, then, is how that candidate will deal with the real-world constraints that seem (or seemed) to limit progressivism’s ambitions.

One answer, Bernie Sanders’s answer, was to promise the thing that every major Democratic politician since Walter Mondale has abjured: major tax increases, not only on the rich (who would be taxed at a rate upward of 70 percent under his plans), but on everybody, middle class and working class and upper middle class alike.

This promise had the virtue of solving, at least on paper, the problem of how you pay for a welfare state even larger than the one we currently can’t quite afford: just tax, tax and tax some more.

But it had the disadvantage of being an extremely hard sell politically beyond Sanders’s core enthusiasts. Such an agenda wouldn’t just be unpopular with the party’s donor class (though it would); it would threaten the stability of the larger Democratic coalition, which depends heavily on middle- and upper-middle-class support and whose leaders have repeatedly backed away from middle-class tax increases lest they give Republicans an opening.

The Obama approach, and now the Hillary Clinton approach, of gently squeezing the 1 percent has become the consensus Democratic position for a reason: It’s very popular with voters (including many Trump-voting Republicans). Whereas Sanders-style tax increases probably wouldn’t even be popular with his own youth army in a few years, once their incomes had ticked up a bit.

Given all of this, the progressivism of the near future might end up forgoing tax increases on that scale and embracing a kind of “deficits don’t matter” liberalism instead. Progressives could follow the example of Republican supply-siders, by promising that government spending would pay for itself in huge, soaring economic growth and the higher tax receipts that follow. Or they could take the view that today’s low-inflation, low-interest-rate environment is the new normal, that global instability will make the dollar a safe-as-houses investment no matter how large our structural deficits become, and that in this environment borrowing and spending and borrowing and spending is actually the prudent and sensible thing to do.

(For the record: I think both views are wrong, but after seven years in which the markets have stubbornly refused to panic over Washington’s deficit follies, the second view seems less crazy than it once did.)

Swinging in a deficits-don’t-matter direction would alienate at least some of liberalism’s leading economists and wonks. There was a huge outcry from that cohort when the Sanders campaign pointed to a wildly implausible estimate of his agenda’s likely growth effects.

It’s less clear, though, how deeply it would alienate the party’s donor base. (Are Wall Street or Silicon Valley Democrats all deep-dyed Simpson-Bowles supporters, or just deficit hawks of convenience like most people?) And it’s doubtful that it would alienate the party’s voters in the slightest.

Which leaves this question for Bernie Sanders’s would-be successors to consider, as they contemplate how to pitch an expensive agenda to a tax-sensitive party and country: How many divisions have the wonks?
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connor_in

connor_in

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GATTACA! said:
puh-lease

landscape-1444418914-emilia-clarke-sexiest-woman-alive-2015-005.jpg
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I almost had to neg rep you dude.

the post immediately after this (by you) is a big honkin close up of HRC's face. How is anyone supposed to enjoy this pic I quoted if the other I referred to is on the screen at the same time...its evil man...full blown evil...and heinous
 
GoIrish41

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Just got back from a Bernie rally at my daughter's college. Three of my kids went with me. Given his diminishing chances of securing the nomination, it is amazing how much energy he generates from young people. He probably won't win, but he is getting a lot of kids interested in politics for the first time. His "revolution" isn't likely to get him this nomination, but it could have an effect on elections to come for years. It was cool to see my kids engaged in his campaign along with many of their peers. Left the event with a sense of hope for the future not just because of his message, but to all those young folks taking an interest and having his message help shape their outlook. Whether anyone believes his proposals are realistic, his ideals of economic fairness and social justice are powerful to the younger generation (and to me). I like that he thinks big and is not deterred by the more slavishly pragmatic folks in the party who are willing to settle for watered down, half measure proposals others are offering. When young people rise to more powerful positions in this country, I suspect some of his bold proposals will be at the forefront. Bernie's revolution may not happen as quickly as he hoped, but I think he might just be planting the seeds of it now.
 
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Irish YJ

Irish YJ

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Perhaps he could lead the blue hair ND pep rally. We need some energy with them folks.
 
GATTACA!

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connor_in said:
I almost had to neg rep you dude.

the post immediately after this (by you) is a big honkin close up of HRC's face. How is anyone supposed to enjoy this pic I quoted if the other I referred to is on the screen at the same time...its evil man...full blown evil...and heinous
Click to expand...

Well if you have to look at HRC isn't having that to scroll back up to make it a little better?
 
L

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