2016 US Presidential Election Pt. IV

[Mrs. Garrison]

Originally Posted by Headache in a Suitcase

A Trump Cruz ticket, which is never going to happen, but if it did...

You'd lose every independent voter, and even lose many moderate Republicans.

I don't doubt that the popular vote might come out fairly close, and that ticket would dominate the redder red states... but they would get slaughtered in the swing states.

I am registered Independent but lean moderate to left, this hypothetical ticket would lose me, as they obviously already have. However there are plenty of self-described Independents who are either conservative or libertarian and would love this type of ticket. So i think the Independent voter would be split, how the moderate republicans would vote is another issue.

[Mrs. Garrison]

Originally Posted by DaveC

You guys have clearly been hanging out with the wrong kinds of mannequins.

[BigMacPhisto]

In Why Are They Still Running News?...

- Mike Huckabee has vowed to call it a day if he doesn't finish in the top three in Iowa. Unfortunately, that means he'll likely be around until Iowa.

- The next Republican debate will be broadcast on Fox Business on January 14th. The criteria to qualify for the main debate is that you're either A) in the top six nationally or B) in the top five in Iowa or New Hampshire.

This would mean:

Main Debate (6): Bush, Carson, Christie, Cruz, Rubio, Trump

Undercard Debate (4): Fiorina, Huckabee, Kasich, Paul

Gilmore, Pataki and Santorum aren't even consistently polling at 1% nationally in order to qualify for the kiddie debate. Also, Rand Paul has vowed to not participate in the undercard debate and may well close up his campaign if he's relegated to that one.






Campaigns That Should Be Dead After Iowa If Voting Were Today (6): Fiorina, Gilmore, Huckabee, Pataki, Paul, Santorum

Campaigns That Should Be Dead After New Hampshire If Voting Were Today (2): Carson, Kasich


Christie would need to do exceptionally well in New Hampshire in order to keep going. New Hampshire stops Carson in his tracks after two underwhelming states because New Hampshire lacks the evangelical voters he needs (and now lacks in general). Kasich's eggs are all-in on New Hampshire with little to show for it, so he would bow out after that state as well if not sooner.

That leaves us pared down to Trump, Bush, Rubio and Cruz barring a killer New Hampshire performance from Christie. Everybody else is literally rearranging deck chairs at this point as their fates are already decided.

Rubio and Cruz can go very deep with their campaign funds and potential ceilings. Trump continues until his support is clearly low enough that it's not worth wasting his own dime and time to continue. Bush can go on until the money runs out, but that will be sooner rather than later as he'll need to have a high burn rate if he actually wants to win. I guess you could list Super Tuesday as the cash-in date on Bush's death clock.

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by mikal

I'd say the polling got things very wrong 4 years ago. Remember when many polls had Romney beating Obama in 2012? Maybe they've gotten better since then, not sure on that.

Romney was only even close nationally after the first debate and that was with polls with a much heavier R-lean than the rest of the year. Obama handily led him in any polls that weren't heavily skewed to have far too many Republicans in the sample. Final results showed that the polls favored Romney by 1% more than he actually received. Close enough?

Statewide polling was pretty accurate throughout. Nate Silver managed to get all 50 states right using his model and Ohio never left the Obama camp for the duration...

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by BVS

Really?! Answer me one question, by what communication are most polls being conducted today?

Fair enough, but they've still been generally on target lately and only getting more accurate as Nate Silver would tell you. I certainly agree that they need to do something better than calling landlines though...

Only times polls really drop the ball lately are when turnout is super low. These random elections or off-off-year elections often lead to Republicans winning and basically nobody voting....polling for 2014's midterms would have been more accurate had they known that nationwide turnout would only be about 40%, but there's no way yet to determine that accurately. Presidential years are a lot easier since it always hovers around 60% and they can nail the demographic turnout fairly easily.

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by Headache in a Suitcase

None of this will go to Trump or Cruz. Not a single endorsement, not a single penny.

This is the one part in your assessment where you are dead wrong. Ted Cruz has only been behind Bush in raising money and has far more cash on hand than anybody else in the race now that Bush's Super PAC has been throwing money out the window in order to keep his campaign afloat. Weird as it seems, Cruz does have a lot of big donors behind him.

He also has by far the best ground game out there where Rubio has virtually none and all of Christie's eggs are in the New Hampshire basket at the moment. Cruz is visiting dozens of counties in Iowa in the New Year and has a solid presence in Super Tuesday states, particularly in the South. He also has hundreds of top-name pastors in Iowa and Super Tuesday states that have agreed to stagger their endorsements throughout the primary season in order to continually give the guy a boost. Sad as it is, he's the candidate for the evangelicals.

Rubio has hardly any on-the-ground staffers and has made hardly any public appearances compared to the other candidates. It may come back to bite him. Really starting to look like Cruz's race to lose once Trump crumbles (and it will likely happen in Iowa where he lacks volunteers and I doubt people will actually brave the weather to caucus for him).

[Bluer White]

Well there.

[Irvine511]

Cruz would be a GOP disaster. Everyone but the true believers know it's all an act and he's a pompous jackass only out for himself. You'd see a lot of defections to HRC because she's not that scary to the Chamber of Commerce crowd.

[Mrs. Garrison]

Cruz is already a GOP disaster as a senator.

[Mack_Again]

To me, the existence of conservative party itself is a huge disaster to humans.


Sent from my iPad using U2 Interference

[Headache in a Suitcase]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

This is the one part in your assessment where you are dead wrong. Ted Cruz has only been behind Bush in raising money and has far more cash on hand than anybody else in the race now that Bush's Super PAC has been throwing money out the window in order to keep his campaign afloat. Weird as it seems, Cruz does have a lot of big donors behind him.

He also has by far the best ground game out there where Rubio has virtually none and all of Christie's eggs are in the New Hampshire basket at the moment. Cruz is visiting dozens of counties in Iowa in the New Year and has a solid presence in Super Tuesday states, particularly in the South. He also has hundreds of top-name pastors in Iowa and Super Tuesday states that have agreed to stagger their endorsements throughout the primary season in order to continually give the guy a boost. Sad as it is, he's the candidate for the evangelicals.

Rubio has hardly any on-the-ground staffers and has made hardly any public appearances compared to the other candidates. It may come back to bite him. Really starting to look like Cruz's race to lose once Trump crumbles (and it will likely happen in Iowa where he lacks volunteers and I doubt people will actually brave the weather to caucus for him).

I'm not dead wrong.

I didn't say that Cruz can't raise money on his own. I said that none of the Bush money will go to Cruz.

Bush's money is establishment GOP money. Nobody in the establishment GOP will throw that cash to Cruz. They hate the tea party and all it stands for.

[BigMacPhisto]

Pataki's out...that leaves Gilmore with Santorum in the also-ran pool, surely to be followed there soon by Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee.

[BVS]

7 years and not one:

Gun confiscated
Martial law
Sharia law
or
Death panel


But they're still gonna try. 10 more months of feeding off the fear of the uninformed.


Sent from my iPhone using U2 Interference

[Irvine511]

i'm sorry, but it's true. everything is pretty awesome, and so is the USA.

Everything Is (Even More) Awesome!
Ignore the downers. America is already great, and it’s getting greater.
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD | January 06, 2016

As we enter 2016, Americans are still feeling grouchy. Only one-fourth of the public believes the United States is heading in the right direction. The Republican presidential debates have been malaise-a-thons, competitions to portray American decline in the most apocalyptic terms possible, while Bernie Sanders is pursuing the Democratic nomination with a message so depressing that professional curmudgeon Larry David has basically played him straight. A year after I wrote an article only somewhat ironically titled Everything Is Awesome, cable news is an endless Debbie Downer loop of terrorism fears and market jitters, periodically interrupted by a weirdly coifed nativist blowhard promising to Make America Great Again.

Ignore that guy. Ignore cable, too. America is already great, and it’s getting greater. Not everything is awesome, but in general, things are even more awesome than they were a year ago. The rest of the world can only wish it had our problems. Start with the economy, which, if you listen to Sanders or the Republicans, is a garbage dump of existential despair. Actually, it’s doing quite well. Unemployment has dropped from 10 percent during the worst of the Great Recession to 5 percent today, thanks to a record 69 consecutive months of private-sector employment growth that has produced 13.7 million new jobs. The past two years have been the best two years for job creation in the 21 century. After a near-death experience during the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. auto industry enjoyed record sales in 2015. The housing market has also rebounded from the crisis, and aftertax corporate profits are at an all-time high. It can sound partisan to mention those facts when a Democrat is in the White House, but they’re facts; it ought to be possible to acknowledge them without necessarily giving President Obama too much credit for them.

In any case, the oft-predicted doomsday scenarios of the post-crisis era—doubledip recession, runaway inflation, runaway interest rates, out-of-control energy prices, a health insurance death spiral, a Greek-style debt crisis, a run on the dollar—are still stubbornly refusing to materialize. Growth is modest but steady.

Inflation is low. Interest rates are very low, although the Fed felt confident enough about the recovery to raise them last month for the first time since the global financial meltdown. Gas is barely $2 a gallon. About 17 million uninsured Americans have gotten coverage in the past few years. The federal deficit has plunged from $1.4 trillion in 2009 to under $500 billion, while the dollar has gained strength against foreign currencies. That’s a reflection of the relative strength of the U.S. economy—European unemployment is still in double digits, while Latin America and Asia are reeling—but it’s also an obstacle to even better growth, making our exports more expensive. In that sense, we’re victims of our own success, although it’s way better to be us than them.

Skeptics often portray the U.S. economy as weaker than the data suggest—because underemployment and long-term unemployment rates are still somewhat high, although they’re now falling even faster than the regular unemployment rate; because the “labor participation rate” is actually getting worse, although that's mostly a result of baby-boomer retirements and increased college attendance; or because too many of the newly created jobs are part time, which is simply untrue.

The most widespread criticism is that wages have been stagnant for decades, a legitimate problem, but wages actually grew 2 percent faster than inflation over the past year.

Meanwhile, other recent developments—cheaper gas, free birth control and preventive care, the elimination of annual and lifetime caps on health insurance, expanded tax credits for the working poor, increased efficiency measures that lower energy bills, and much more—have put more money in the pockets of American families, even though their incomes have grown slowly. Health care prices have risen at their lowest rate in half a century since the passage of Obamacare, increasing just 1.3 percent over the past year. Tuition costs are still soaring and Americans now hold more than $1.2 trillion in student debt, but the Obama administration has quietly changed the rules to let borrowers cut their payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income and get their loans forgiven after 20 years. Savings rates have almost doubled since the crisis, and family debt burdens have dropped to 2002 levels.

In non-economic news, despite a year of furor over mass shootings and urban unrest, crime in big cities dropped about 5 percent in 2015, and has been cut in half since 1990. The teen birth rate is down more than 60 percent since 1990, and that’s not because of increasing abortions, because they’ve fallen by more than a third. U.S. oil imports are at their lowest level in nearly three decades, while wind generation is up more than threefold and solar generation is up 25-fold since 2008. Carbon emissions have dropped 10 percent from 2005 levels. High school graduation rates are at an all-time high, with the most striking gains for minorities and the poor. The financial sector is much safer, with much more capital to absorb banking losses, much less of the risky overnight funding that fuels panics, and much broader regulation of Wall Street institutions that once operated in the shadows. And despite all the rhetoric about border crises and wall-building, America’s population of undocumented immigrants has remained stable for the past five years.

In an era of legislative gridlock in Washington, those are pretty cool developments. And guess what? Legislative gridlock in Washington eased significantly in 2015. After four years of divided-government paralysis, President Obama signed a slew of major bipartisan laws last year, including a bizarrely responsible reform of a long-standing Medicare funding problem and a sensible overhaul of the unpopular No Child Left Behind education law. Republicans and Democrats also came together to pass some more dubious laws, like a long-term highway bill that will use budget gimmicks to finance America’s unsustainable addiction to asphalt. The point is, for better or for worse, Congress is doing stuff again.

Glass-half-empty types, especially Republican glass-half-empty types, argue that none of this really matters when Americans don’t feel safe from jihadists. And yes, the attack in San Bernardino was horrible. But only 45 Americans have been killed by jihadists since 2001, fewer than the death count from lightning or toddlers with guns or just about any disease you can imagine. If Americans are freaking out anyway, well, maybe they shouldn’t. And incidentally, American soldiers are dramatically safer now that so many of them have come home from war zones. Last year, only eight were killed in Iraq and 27 in Afghanistan, after more than 8,000 casualties in the previous 12 years.

In general, this is an exciting time to be a human being. We’re living longer. There’s less war, less infant mortality, less abject poverty. The phones we carry in our pockets today are more powerful than the supercomputers of a few decades ago, giving us 24-hour access to all the world’s accumulated knowledge, not to mention music and cat videos and GPS. There’s actually good stuff on TV, and we can watch it whenever we want. There are still challenges, of course, like global warming and Islamic terrorism, but the world is making progress in confronting those challenges. And there is still no better place to live in that world than the United States of America, which still has the most powerful military, the
most dynamic economy, the best action movies.

Again, the point is not that things are perfect. The point is that things are better.

Have a very happy new year; hopefully, 2016 will be even more awesome.

2016 Elections: Everything is (Even More) Awesome - POLITICO Magazine

[PhilsFan]

The only reason I have health insurance today is because they moved the age that you can stay on your parents' health insurance plan to 26. I do not get benefits at my current job, but I'm 25 so I can get some from my parents.

[Axver]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

i'm sorry, but it's true. everything is pretty awesome, and so is the USA.

What an absolutely obnoxious article. No, the "rest of the world" does not wish it had America's problems (what a pathetically meaningless grouping too, as if Norway, Ghana, Singapore, and Fiji all belong in the same basket). Whatever gains the author may claim, we don't wish we had America's problems with providing healthcare to its population or stopping its people shooting each other, and some of us have managed to enjoy economic growth every year for over two decades now. But keep up the "USA! USA!" chestbeating, it's really endearing.

[Oregoropa]

Gas is barely $2 a gallon

I don't know if we should be cheerleading this. Cheap gas means more cars on the road, more Carbon emissions, and accelerated global warming. One of the reason gas is so cheap is because Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are trying to push down the price by pumping more. Basically trying to slow our private frackers in the United States. The truth is Saudi Arabia needs the price of oil to remain above $80/barrel to support the infrastructure and public welfare of their country. America shouldn't dominate other countries through unfair resource advantage. It will be our fault if in 10 years Riyadh and Dubai resemble Detroit. The unemployed young population of the Gulf states will turn to other nefarious outlets, because lack of jobs and not theology is the main driver of terrorism in Middle East.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urpRRNxvsi8

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by Axver

What an absolutely obnoxious article. No, the "rest of the world" does not wish it had America's problems (what a pathetically meaningless grouping too, as if Norway, Ghana, Singapore, and Fiji all belong in the same basket). Whatever gains the author may claim, we don't wish we had America's problems with providing healthcare to its population or stopping its people shooting each other, and some of us have managed to enjoy economic growth every year for over two decades now. But keep up the "USA! USA!" chestbeating, it's really endearing.

relax. it's a mildly humorous article by an american and for an american audience, and meant as an antidote to the doom-and-gloom coming out of the GOP primaries, as well as Bernie Sanders, and especially Trump's "make America great again." the point is that running around screaming "the world is on fire" makes for good ratings and poll numbers, but it simply isn't true.

[mikal]

Australia sucks.

[Mrs. Garrison]

Canada sucks!