2016 elections - because it's never too early

[Tonitrus]

I hope this is the beginning of the end for Trump. I am not completely convinced he is serious about his run, but the amount of conservative tears will be simply delicious once he drops out.


Should he get the nomination, I am not sure that he has a chance to win. He'll lock up the GOP vote for sure and the right wing loves him, but I do not believe he has the appeal to the moderates or left to win the presidency.

All bets being fair, the Clintons are going back to the White House in 2016.

There's a recent Rasmusson poll that shows him beating Clinton by a small margin.  Though that poll still have 20%-ish voting "they would rather have some other candidates".

[DGuller]

Not good enough.  Iowa did vote for Huckabee last time around when everyone knew full well he was going nowhere, so Carson is definitely a possibility, but not a 45% possibility IMO.  I can take the short bus duo at 2/1, but not any higher.

I could go 3/2.  You owe me.  I gave you dumbass odds on McCain because I had a woodie for the guy.  You knew that, but you took my money anyway.  Give me a little payback to keep the karma balanced.

edit:  That's it!  Eureka! I was wondering all night what the second thing I learned at the Kennedy School was.  It's How to Bargain with Jews.

The first thing I learned, if you're curious, was when in doubt, over-introduce.

Okay, okay. 

So, $20 to you if someone other than Trump/Carson wins Iowa, and $30 to me if Trump or Carson wins Iowa?  Deal?

[alfred russel]

Not to disrupt this negotiation with facts, but there are betting odds on the iowa caucuses out there. The implied odds from betfair are as follows (the first percentage being the odds you get on the site, which obviously includes a house rake. In the second column I deflated all the odds by the same percentage so that they add to 100%):

Trump   31%   23%
Carson   25%   19%
Rubio   15%   12%
Bush           14%   11%
Fiorina   10%   8%
Cruz             6%   4%
Paul             7%   5%
Jindal   3%   2%
Kasich   11%   8%
Huckabee   2%   1%
Perry   2%   1%
Santorum   2%   1%
Christie   3%   2%
Graham   1%   1%

[DGuller]

Well, neither Yi nor myself are on the buy side of these two bozos, at these rates.  We're just trying to figure out where, between the two of us, one of us would go over to the buy side.

[Caliga]

I can't believe Trump is still the front-runner.  I'll believe it when I see it as the primaries begin, I guess.  If Trump wins the GOP nomination then the GOP has truly self-destructed.

[alfred russel]

I can't believe Trump is still the front-runner.  I'll believe it when I see it as the primaries begin, I guess.  If Trump wins the GOP nomination then the GOP has truly self-destructed.

To engage in Timmayism for a brief moment, while the Republicans may be self destructing on the big stage, downticket the GOP is dominating (in the house). Is it impossible that Bernie Sanders gets the nomination and wins the election against Trump while a tea partyish brand of GOP is returned to Congress at least in control of the House?

[Eddie Teach]

Is it impossible that Bernie Sanders gets the nomination

Unless Hillary has a stroke or something.

And Trump and the Tea Party are forces at odds with each other. If they both continue growing, the Republican Party might split.

[alfred russel]

Is it impossible that Bernie Sanders gets the nomination

Unless Hillary has a stroke or something.

Which:

a) is possible, she is old and seems to be out of shape, and
b) is everyone 100% the email thing is going away?

[DGuller]

   What is the plan if Hillary has a death episode and doesn't recover?  Does the party get to nominate her replacement?  And what happens if she dies in the middle of the primaries, when it's too late for register for the primaries for at least some of the states?  There must be a procedure spelled out for such an eventuality. 

[OttoVonBismarck]

I can't believe Trump is still the front-runner.  I'll believe it when I see it as the primaries begin, I guess.  If Trump wins the GOP nomination then the GOP has truly self-destructed.

To engage in Timmayism for a brief moment, while the Republicans may be self destructing on the big stage, downticket the GOP is dominating (in the house). Is it impossible that Bernie Sanders gets the nomination and wins the election against Trump while a tea partyish brand of GOP is returned to Congress at least in control of the House?

It's not impossible, no. The hardest part of that scenario is Sanders beating Clinton, which I do not believe he can do unless her campaign implodes. Obama is a good example, probably the best we have, of an upstart campaign unseating the heir apparent in a primary battle. Sanders to this point in the cycle is well behind Obama in all the important metrics versus where Obama was against Hillary in 2008. Sanders is in such a massive hole with minorities and really any Democrat who isn't a white male liberal aged 18-35 who spends 10-18 hours a day on the internet that I don't see a realistic scenario where Clinton loses to him.

The House of Representatives likely to be Republican into the 2020s. As the Washington Post and many other reasonable outlets have pointed out--this is not because of gerrymandering (something that does happen and has given the Republicans a few more House seats than they would otherwise have but is not the reason they have a majority), but rather because of the behavior of liberals. Liberals don't tend to live out in the country, and a huge portion of them love to live in cities. They themselves create high-density inner city urban districts where they run up 80/20 wins over Republican token candidates. Meanwhile in the suburbs the Republicans have a moderate edge, not huge, but moderate, particularly in Red and Purple states where lots of Republicans tend to live in any case. You can't cede the suburbs and all the rural districts to the GOP and just collect yourself with disproportionate geographic concentration in the cities and not suffer in terms of winning House seats. It's a function of single member districts and first past the post voting to select House members. It's simply geographic reality, even with perfectly unbiased British boundary commissions Democratic voters would be "self-gerrymandered" due to where they choose to live.

I don't think the redistricting in 2020 will have much to do with it, either. I think instead the Republicans lose the House sometime in the 2020s simply because their extremist views that alienate minorities and really anyone, white, male, female, black, brown etc under the age of 30 means that  by the 2020s the suburban districts in Red/Purple states where they may win by 5-15% now will be districts where they lose by small margins. At that point they'll suffer serious losses across the country. You're already starting to see, if you read the demographic data, that this could happen in unexpected places like Texas. When this sort of thing becomes common in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and etc, it becomes difficult even with deliberate political gerrymandering to change the results.

The only way I see the Republicans being swept out of the House any earlier would be a Republican President ala Bush being elected and getting very unpopular, leading to Republican disaffection resulting in losses all over the country and the election of lots of conservative Democrats in Red States--this is what happened in 2006.

[OttoVonBismarck]

  What is the plan if Hillary has a death episode and doesn't recover?  Does the party get to nominate her replacement?  And what happens if she dies in the middle of the primaries, when it's too late for register for the primaries for at least some of the states?  There must be a procedure spelled out for such an eventuality.

It depends on when this would happen. If she has already been nominated at the convention, the DNC gets to pick her replacement--it isn't specified how they must do this and presumably it could just be a majority vote of the DNC members itself. (The Republicans use a different method, theirs requires the RNC to call a new convention to select a new nominee, or by having RNC state reps hold a vote.)

If it's before the convention, and she hasn't won enough delegates to lock up the nomination I assume the primaries would simply continue. Whoever is #2 at that point probably wins every primary from there to the convention and of course Hillary won't win any. Come convention time if her large block of delegates she collected prior to death mean that no one candidate can get a majority in the first round of voting, then in the second round all of her pledged delegates are free to vote their conscience and it's just like any historical convention where this used to be the norm.

If it's before the convention but she has already won an absolute majority of pledged delegates, my assumption would be the DNC can issue a ruling at the convention that since she is deceased, her pledged delegates are permitted to vote for whomever they choose in the first round, and they would likely coalesce around a party favorite, but you could see the voting go multiple rounds.

[DGuller]

Yeah, I figured that the worst case scenario is where she doesn't lock up the vote, and there is only Bernie Sanders left on the ballot for the remaining states.  Too late for Biden to un-retire, too early for party to make its decision. Then again, I'm sure something can be figured out with the stand-ins of some sort.

[Kleves]

I'd still vote for Hillary after a severe stroke over Trump, Carson, or Sanders.

[Admiral Yi]

Okay, okay. 

So, $20 to you if someone other than Trump/Carson wins Iowa, and $30 to me if Trump or Carson wins Iowa?  Deal?

Let's do 30/45.  That way if I win I get a check, with the 20 you owe me.

[DGuller]

Okay, okay. 

So, $20 to you if someone other than Trump/Carson wins Iowa, and $30 to me if Trump or Carson wins Iowa?  Deal?

Let's do 30/45.  That way if I win I get a check, with the 20 you owe me.

Deal.