Trump 2016

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You make great points, @Techpriest, but part of the problem right now with Republicans in addition to the unprincipled reactionary psychopaths like Cruz and Carson is that Trump is the one who is most appealing to moderates both within and outside the party. All the things people, including myself, used to say would kneecap his candidacy out of the gate have only been helping him. His vulgarity and crassness is seen as "telling it like it is". His constant changes of every single one of his political positions are seen as him "being open minded". His thick-as-pigshit stupidity is seen as him "speaking to the people in a language they can understand".

Now none of this is entirely new to politics, nor is Trump the only one doing it in this year alone. Hillary Clinton alone has flip flopped just as much as Trump. But what takes Trump to a level beyond is that he combines every single one of the nastiest traits of all the worst candidates who've run in recent memory, openly flaunts them, and moderates perceive every last one of those traits as a positive quality almost entirely based on decades of disgust with other politicians.

It's the most extraordinary emotional con I've seen this side of Courtney Love.
 
Techpriest said:
Trump, Carson, and Cruz are basically the cancer eating away at the inside of the GOP, which effectively paralyzes its efficiency outside of local and state elections. The blowback of the 2008 elections is still alive and well, and its not stopping any time soon.
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I'd say the cancer really set in in the 2004 election. Although the GOP has always attracted the evangelical vote, that was the first time that they became central to its campaign. Rove believed (correctly) that the GOP could win by simply mobilising the traditionally low-voting parts of its base, which included a large slice of evangelicals. The problem is, while it was a good strategy for winning a close election, it may turn out to have hobbled the party, since in contexts where turning out the base isn't enough, the party finds it really hard to move beyond that base, since any attempt to reach out to the centre is pretty much guaranteed to alienate a bunch of otherwise-locked-in-voters, but there is no guarantee that an equivalent number of centrist voters will join the fold - let alone a larger number. It's ironic that George W Bush is not particularly popular with Republicans right now, because whatever else you might say about him, he was (or rather, he and Rove were) excellent at winning elections.

Of course it's not quite that simple - notably in 2004 Rove had a mandate to pursue a new strategy because the party had a clear leader (at least in an electoral sense). Now, with every election beginning with a bunch of people contesting the leadership, their tactical plans for winning elections are necessarily subordinate to getting nominated. So even if some Republican did make the same calculation I've made above - and I'm sure somebody has, much as I dislike the Republicans, they have plenty of talented political analysts - the guy who wants to take the short-term risk for the long-term gain has to win a primary against at minimum half a dozen guys who want to double down on avoiding the short-term risk.

Another factor is the US electoral culture, and the relatively high rate of non-participation. In other Anglosphere countries, notably Canada, the UK and NZ, right wing politicians can confidently reach for the centre because non-voting is a relatively rare phenomenon, so the number of hard-right voters they lose with X moderate policy is likely to be lesser than the number of centre-right and centre voters they gain with it.
 
W. Bush, like whoever the GOP nominee will be this year, was also facing quite tainted candidates in his elections. Al Gore, for all the goodwill he's generated as a global warming advocate, was heavily damaged by his association with the unprecedented corruption and sleaze of the Clinton years. John Kerry was also (deservedly) given endless grief for running in opposition to a war he voted in support of mere months beforehand. I don't think this caused too large a number of people to have voted for Bush when they ordinarily wouldn't have, but it certainly caused a lot of people to give up on even bothering to vote in the first place. And rough as those eight years were, I really don't think things would've been significantly different had Gore or Kerry been elected as opposed to Bush. Most people forget that both administrations before W. took significant military action against Saddam Hussein, and that similar pushes towards the expansion of brutal criminal punishment tactics had gone on even longer in response to many things ranging from the crack epidemic to the McVeigh bombings.

As for this election, I'm pretty sure the Republicans will win. Hillary Clinton has among the nastiest skeletons in the closet of any candidate. And even if the likes of Trump or Carson wind up with the nomination, the second they bring up the long Clinton history of sexual assault accusations and coverups, Hillary's support will wilt like a bouquet in a blizzard.
 
*Asterisk* said:
W. Bush, like whoever the GOP nominee will be this year, was also facing quite tainted candidates in his elections.
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No offense, but I think your partisan affiliation is biasing you. Yes, Bush's opponents weren't angels, but I have heard the exact opposite re: Gore - that he lost* because he worked too hard to distance himself from Clinton who, let's not forget, had really high approval ratings in 2000.

*In a purely technical sense
 
Don't most people live in states where their vote really wouldn't matter because their states are safe for one party regardless and would therefore give all of their respective electors to that party? I'd say that that would be the biggest factor discouraging them from voting.
 
RepQuest said:
Don't most people live in states where their vote really wouldn't matter because their states are safe for one party regardless and would therefore give all of their respective electors to that party? I'd say that that would be the biggest factor discouraging them from voting.
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In the general, that's definitely true. Upstate New York can be just as red as the Deep South, but you'd never know it from looking at the electoral results. But in the primary, things can get a bit more interesting.
 
RepQuest said:
Don't most people live in states where their vote really wouldn't matter because their states are safe for one party regardless and would therefore give all of their respective electors to that party? I'd say that that would be the biggest factor discouraging them from voting.
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Not all states are safe in statewide elections, which are generally for the Senate.

Where seats are usually safe is in the House of Representatives because of gerrymandering.
 
While elections for senators and representatives often being safe seats for one party over the other is also a major deterrent, I was talking specifically about the electors sent to the Electoral College in presidential elections. Since 48 states have winner-take-all, that means that votes from supporters of the opposition really don't count in a safe state, so why would they bother voting?
 
RepQuest said:
While elections for senators and representatives often being safe seats for one party over the other is also a major deterrent, I was talking specifically about the electors sent to the Electoral College in presidential elections. Since 48 states have winner-take-all, that means that votes from supporters of the opposition really don't count in a safe state, so why would they bother voting?
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They don't count nationally, but they still count at the local level. And local politics are where most of the tangible change actually happens. You don't vote for just the president; you vote for every seat that's up for grabs, from POTUS to local comptroller. Whatever the hell a comptroller is.
 
VLAD said:
They don't count nationally, but they still count at the local level
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True, but I think a lot of people choose not to go to the trouble of voting specifically because they know their vote won't count towards the Presidency, and the chance to get to choose their local comptroller doesn't do much to energise them.
 
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Feeling a bit deflated.

I had worn my Bernie 2016 shirt to wawa to spread the Bern and these two MEN asked me if I was really going to vote for him (in a patronizing tone that MEN take). So I said "Hellz yeah, aren't you?". They actually told me that, "Sanders is an idiot for not knowing how the economy works." And that his programs costed to much to implement. WHAT??!?!! How can people be so dumb? And sexist! Liek what about 'free' do they not understand? Free means no cost!!

I'm going to stay positive and know that they were just those types of folk.
 
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