Kasich is all in on Ohio and Michigan, which have their primaries in three weeks. His path to the nomination actually makes a ton of sense: he prevents Trump from winning delegates in a WTA state like Ohio and prevents him from clearing the delegate threshold before the convention, and then at the GOP convention–in Cleveland, btw–Kasich becomes a second or third ballot nominee as a compromise choice.
It’s not a bad strategy at all. It might be a winning one.
Maybe they (the Bushes) just could not fight back against the Trump’s personal attacks? They made their extra money all over the wars in the middle east, so probably (wisely) decided to just slink of quietly into the sunset and that comfortable retirement, how much more money could they possibly need?
Different take given the SC results by Sam Wang: http://election.princeton.edu/2016/02/20/south-carolina-nevada-open-thread/#more-14220
As Wang observes, he’s under no pressure to spin a narrative that there’s a horse race still to be won.
In short, the races for both parties allow their front-runner to get the nomination without a majority of popular support. Considering that’s where the bar is, it would take a seismic event to change the trajectory for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Media figures are pressured to fill a daily “news hole.” I am not under this pressure. Since I don’t perceive the coming months as being all that suspenseful, I’m tempted to sign off on Presidential coverage until June!
Consider Rubio for a moment: He had the entire SC Republican establishment on his side; he arguably has very favorable media coverage. Yet he tied Cruz (final results have Rubio .1 ahead of Cruz) and won exactly 0 delegates in a proportional state. The assumption that all of Jeb’s (and/or Kasich’s) voters will just automatically line up with Rubio is too simplistic. And if Cruz drops out, where do his voters go? Are they voting for Cruz because he’s very conservative, or are they backing Cruz because they view him as a force against the beltway Republicans? At this point, it’s more likely than not that Trump becomes the nominee. Given the record turn out Republicans are seeing in the primaries (and probably driven by Trump) that’s an uncomfortable prospect come November.
You’re not an American are you? :D
The scariest thing about this race, for me, is that I have a horrible suspicion the Dems will do what they did in the W era, which is, take an election they should under no circumstances lose, and figure out a way to screw it up and put Trump in the White House. For some unfathomable reason, the Dems have not been able to run a solid general election campaign even when given godsends from the opposition. Ok, the Obama wins were fairly well handled, but 2000 and 2004 were abysmal.
Well, we had Clinton before that, and he won.
I agree that with people like Bush dropping out it’s not a given that his votes go to Rubio. I think Trump will pick up some of those votes. With Cruz running a strong 2nd/3rd it’s going to be tough for Rubio to overtake Trump.
Bush doing as poorly as he has still surprises me. I guess it shows how different politics is now and how little control the GOP has over the primary process.
No GOP candidate that has won New Hampshire and South Carolina has failed to secure the nomination. Rubio can trumpet he came in 2nd or 3rd all he wants. He has shit to show for it, while The Donald is getting delegates and gaining believers by, you know, winning.
Pretty amazing. I don’t know whether to be terrified, fascinated or disgusted.
All three, I guess.
Trump is heavily favored in the next primary in Nevada, too, so he’ll pick up momentum there. Also, neither Kasich or Carson is leaving the race, so they will continue to siphon off some votes that might go to Rubio or Cruz. Kasich may be hoping for a brokered convention as his chance to get the nomination.
Yep. Bill Clinton’s campaigns in 1992 and 1996 were marvels of outstanding execution. There’s a reason that James Carville and George Stephanopolous became famous in the aftermath.
And honestly, if you’re really worried about the Democrats screwing up, you should be sending Hillary Clinton every penny you can get your hands on. Because bar none, the gravest, greatest single campaign error a Democratic candidate for president made in recent history was Al Gore allowing his personal animosity for Bill Clinton to get the better of him and not using a sitting president with a 60% approval rating on the campaign trail until it was pretty much too late.
Bernie Sanders, who seems to be treating Barack Obama’s two term presidency with the same amount of deference and respect that Obama treated George W. Bush’s, is primed to absolutely, 100% repeat that same idiotic, unforced error if he wins the nomination.
In fact I’ll go all the way in, by first saying that I love the stuff Bernie Sanders believes in. I believe in it too. I’m in lockstep with him that government can fix problems with economies, with education, with society in general. God bless Bernie Sanders. And now having said that, I’ll say this: from a historical and strategic perspective, his campaign is the most baffling, ridiculous, nonsensical and frankly idiotic thing I’ve seen in 30 years of closely watching presidential campaigns. It makes no fucking sense. I have no idea what he’s doing. I don’t think he has the slightest fucking clue as to what he’s doing. It’s as if he goes for days on end having forgotten that he’s running for the nomination of the Democratic party, and it honestly makes me worry after his mental acuity.
I honestly don’t think he intended on getting this far with his campaign. While he seems to be losing, he’s pushed Clinton significantly in the effort and dragged her a bit to the left of where her platform started. Pretty much that’s all that someone who identifies as a Democratic Socialist can hope for, these days. So his campaign seems split between “make noise” and “actually try to win” modes, and that’s not going to get it done.
Yep, the fact that Sanders is doing as well as he is while running a not-very-serious-about-winning campaign is kind of amazing.
(The same is also true about Trump, who has also been running a pretty half-assed campaign. But having a limitless campaign chest and starting as a celebrity certainly help considerably.)
And btw, I don’t mean to suggest that Bernie’s campaign is puzzlingly awful because he doesn’t like Obama. His campaign is puzzlingly awful because he’s running for the nomination of the party to which Obama belongs, which is a totally different thing.
Imagine a Republican running for GOP nomination in 1988 with the mission statement “Holy shit, the last 8 years have really been a nightmare, amirite?”
I was about to say, it mirrors the situation Kshama Sawant had going on for Seattle’s city council.
She is also openly socialist, also refused all corporate contributions (which we all thought was crazy, if admirable), also ran a grassroots campaign by & for the working class, also probably only intended to frame the issues & drag the election to the left (quite successfully—hello, $15/hr!), and then accidentally won at the last minute.
Seriously, we thought she lost at the election night party. She won in late votes. And now she’s been re-elected.
To some extent, I don’t think traditional political metrics are relevant to Bernie’s campaign. What he says mostly makes sense, and where it doesn’t, it’s only because the details are too sketchy, not because it’s morally wrong. People like it when you do the right thing.
As far as I can tell, the Democratic primaries are really just a race against time for Sanders. A race he’ll probably lose, of course.
Perhaps I should have clarified, “elections not featuring Bill Clinton;” that Clinton was charismatic and savvy, and his campaigns were solid. After Bill, though, the Dems sort of lost their mojo. I’m not sure how Obama’s campaigns fit in to this, but I suspect having less than stellar opposition helped. But in the broader sense, I agree that Sanders is not helping the big picture at all, in terms of keeping the GOP out of the White House. There does seem to be a sort of mirror-image of the Trump phenomenon going on, where liberal Democrats are willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
I mean, Hillary is boring, and has like zero charisma, but I’d far prefer her as president to any of the others, including, sadly enough, Sanders, because while I like his policies, he has zero political capital or ability to enact any of them even if he was, by some miracle, elected.
In 2008 I was not a Hillary fan.
Her campaign was a mess, and I found it to be mean-spirited at best, and something darker at worst.
I always wondered why Obama offered her State. Turns out, he wanted to offer her VP, but figured she wouldn’t take it.
And so in reading about her and 2008, I’ve come around completely on her. I’m actually now convinced that in 2008 she did one of the most remarkable campaign things that we’ve ever seen, even if most folks missed it. I mean, dig this: After Super Tuesday, Hillary just gets clubbed in the I-95 primaries (DC, VA, MD) and in Wisconsin. Double digit, even 20+ point losses. She’s completely out of money. Her campaign is a wreck, to the point that she’s fired her campaign manager. The only way she can continue in the campaign is to use her personal finances, and to that end takes out loans on her home in order to keep the campaign going.
And then in the next 6 weeks, she continually beat the snot out of Obama in debates. She went out on the campaign trail and started blowing up. She did town halls where people left going “Where the hell has THIS been?” Dan Balz noted this amazing turnaround in his book on the 2008 campaign, and the book Game Change spends a good deal of time on it as well. And while she may have gotten a boost from Rev. Wright, Obama got a nice boost from his excellent response, too. She made the nomination very close at the end. Which is a testament to her. And with everyone on his team regarding Hillary as the most poisonous thing ever, Obama to his credit recognized a worthy and formidable foe and wanted her on his team, no matter what.
I think that, like Obama, she gets intellectually disengaged when things aren’t all that challenging for her. If nothing else, Bernie seems to have re-engaged her interest in this particular campaign, which at times has seemed like something she was snoozing through. I suspect in the general, if age hasn’t taken her edge away, that she’ll be a very solid candidate.
@Taniel 11m11 minutes ago
Popular vote in IA+NH+SC:
McCain '08: 251,840 (31.5% of total)
Romney '12: 294,616 (30.5% of total)
Trump '16: 385,684 (31.9% of total)
Papageno
5420
At this point the only Republican candidate that I’d not feel physically ill seeing win the election is Kasich, and he pretty much has no chance at the nomination, so I guess I’d better have my barf bag handy on Election Night if the twenty-somethings can’t be bothered to get their asses to the polls to prevent a Trump/Cruz/Rubio victory.
He also just signed off on defunding Planned Parenthood, so so much for him not being a religious nutjob…
