Who's your money on?Follow

As it turns out tonight. Prior to this race, barring his slip up in NH, he looked to be the guy with momentum. Versus Cruz, who got one early win, and then sunk into 3rd or lower place in every race after that. The direction a candidate is going kinda does matter. Of course, now that direction appears to be negative. Hence my comment that it's decent odds he drops out now. He might stick it out to the 15th, but maybe not. This showing gives him a good excuse to drop out now. If he doesn't think he can win Florida (and the numbers suggest he probably wont), there's not much point to staying in. Unless he's thinking that between him and Cruz, they can get enough delegates to force a deal at the convention. Again though, once the winner takes all states come seriously into play, that might not be a great idea.

That's actually a tricky decision, now that I think about it. There's sufficient bad blood between Cruz and Rubio that it's hard to say if their collective numbers increase or decrease if one of them drops out at this point. More important question is what it might do to Trump's numbers. I honestly do believe that Rubio has a broader appeal than Cruz does. If it were Cruz dropping out, I think a larger percentage of his voters would go to Rubio (because there's even more bad blood between Cruz and Trump). Whereas if Rubio drops out, there's a good portion of his voters who maybe can't see much difference between Cruz and Trump. Of course, differences between candidates doesn't necessary correlate to differences in how voters perceive those candidates, so...

Honestly? No clue at this point. I'm seriously at the point where "drink heavily for the next 4 years" is becoming my best option. This is literally looking to be the first presidential election in my life where I actually dislike and disagree with every single one of the candidates. Not just "I'm not a fan", but "OMG. This person would likely be a disaster in the White House". The scary thing (as I said months and months ago) is that Clinton is the least bad, because she's just the garden variety of corrupt, power hungry, and incompetent politician. She at least wont tip over the apple cart because she lives in the freaking apple cart. No clue what Trump would do, and Cruz isn't much better (well, he's a lot better, which isn't really saying much).

The scary thing is that it's starting to look like there are a lot of angry people who want to tip that apple cart over. What's that great quote from B5? "The avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote".

Ok. I'm sure that's what you think. What exactly do you think that Clinton will do differently? Come out earlier with attacks? We'll see how that works out. She's already tried testing those waters with an attack on Trump, calling him a sexist. Did you read about how well that worked out? Trump didn't even need to respond. CNN tried to carry that water for Clinton and failed miserably, with their own guests turning it around into a discussion about Bill Clinton's affairs.

Normal attacks don't work on him. You don't think the GOP has tried? Everyone who has ended up worse for it. Why do you think they've been avoiding doing this? It's not like they didn't think of it months ago Joph. They chose not to because everything they were seeing showed that trying to attack him would fail. Now maybe they were wrong, but I don't think so. Bush attacked him and lost. Rubio just tried attacking him this week. And lost. And those are just the recent folks who got far enough. The early debate had lots of attacks against Trump. The pattern? Those who went after him lost ground in the polls. And every time he was attacked? His numbers just grew.

Clinton hasn't suffered this yet, because (other than that one thing she failed at), she hasn't actually attempted to attack him. Maybe I'm wrong, but we'll see what happens once she tries this. If I'm right, she starts dropping in the general election polls as soon as she does that. Does this make any sense? Not one bit. Hence, the drinking heavily part.

Yup. That's exactly what's feeding this thing. I've been hoping that people are smart enough not to do this, but it's looking that wishful thinking on my part at this point.

Were you not saying just a few days ago that the reason he's doing so well was "liberals are skewing the results" because "Trump is secretly a liberal"?

That's not necessarily indicative; the south and cities are Clinton's best regions whereas Northeast and liberal suburban arr Sanders's.

Is the punchline that you assess anything, your theories "working," or data ever actually factoring into them?

Only Techno-Viking can save us.

It's looking increasingly likely that Trump will actually be the GOP nominee, which I honestly didn't think was possible a few months ago. There's absolutely no way he can beat Hillary in the general, which brings up a few things:

1. Ugh, I'd feel dirty as hell voting for Hillary motherfucking Clinton in November, but she is clearly the lesser of two evils. Of course, being a resident of Illinois, my vote in the general election is literally worthless. I guess if I'm going to throw it away, it might as well be on Gary Johnson.

2. Hopefully the GOP get their heads out of their asses and nominate somebody slightly less insane in 2020. I imagine both Cruz and Rubio will be back, but neither of them fills me with warm fuzzy feelings. Rand Paul 2020!

3. Who is going to be crazy enough to accept a VP spot on Trump's ticket? You'd have to think that both Cruz and Rubio would reject the chance for another shot at the top of the ticket in 2020. I hope Kasich is too smart for that, but he's not as early in his political career as Cruz/Rubio. He's probably the best GOP candidate left from a general election standpoint, which of course means he's running last. That leaves either Christie, who is trying so painfully hard right now it's embarrassing, or Ben Carson, who might be the only candidate less qualified than Trump.

Edited, Mar 2nd 2016 10:43am by Demea

The obvious choice would be Sarah Palin.

And by obvious I mean the one I'd find funniest.

See how I capitalised the first letter of your name even though it's all lowercase? That's the level of enmity we have now reached.

Just imagine what you'll be amazed at in a few months.

Let's just wait and see what happens. There's a lot of mad to go around right now, and there's no clearer "establishment" candidate to focus the mad on at the moment.

I find it interesting that the couple Republicans here who've expressed an opinion seem to dislike not only Trump but Cruz and Rubio as well. Who would you guys have liked to see win (out of the declared candidates, not dream guys who never ran)?

Edit: Speaking of Trump-Clinton, it's probably worth noting that Trump would likely do even worse among Black and Latino voters than Romney did, if that's possible. After the last couple elections where the GOP "realized" that they were losing in large part because they were getting such low support from minority blocs, this cycle could be even worse.

Edited, Mar 2nd 2016 11:11am by Jophiel

Maybe Kasich, but chances are I feel that way not because he's really qualified but because the last like fifteen years of candidates and behavior have lowered my standards for them really low. He's been the least shitty looking bowl of shit. I thought Jeb? had the infrastructure and training to make a solid run, considering his family but that turned into a less convincing Nigerian Prince Email scam.