US Elections: When Murder isn't Murder

[Shryke]

20 minutes ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

To be fair, the plan was to prevent an awful insurgent (i.e. a McGovern), not an awful establishment figure like Mondale.

(And to be even more fair, by the time Mondale really did turn to custard - the tax increase promise and the Ferraro fiasco - it was too late for anyone to do anything. He'd been a perfectly OK Senator and Vice-President).

Specifically it was to prevent an awful candidate from getting the nomination with only a bare plurality. And also a few other reasons but would seem to be the big one applicable to this situation.

McGovern only got, like, a quarter of the popular vote but a majority of the delegates. Think sorta like the Trump situation today where a majority of the party hates the nominee. Except it would likely have to be even worse and with a more clear alternative to throw the nomination to.

[lokisnow]

Let's do some math. Let's take away all of Clinton's super delegates and all of Sander's super delegates. She has 469 Super delegates. he has 31 super delegates.

That leaves Clinton with 1279 pledged delegates Sanders with 1027 for a combined total of 2306 pledged delegates

That leaves Clinton with 55.46% of pledged delegates to 44.54% of pledged delegates.

Now let us add back in the 500 super delegates which means there is now 2806 delegates awarded.

We are going to give all 500 to Sanders, now he has 1527 delegates and 54.42% of the delegates

But wait, let's look at one more metric, 16,734,432 votes have been cast

Clinton has won 9,412,431 votes and Sanders has won 7,035,000 votes

That means Clinton has won 56.25% of the popular vote to Sanders 42.04% of the popular vote.

If the super delegates were to all flip to Sanders, why should they override the will of the people to give it to a clearly less popular candidate?

Thus far. There is zero evidence that the super delegates are overriding the will of the people. The people have spoken, and so far, 2.4 million more people have chosen Clinton than chose Sanders. 

The super delegates throwing the election to Sanders would be overriding the will of the people, though.

 

[IheartIheartTesla]

15 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Why are you so worked up over the Super Delegates? They're not the reason why HRC is winning.

It has nothing to do with my choice for nominee. In fact, I already said the superdelegate placeholders were preventing Hillary from declaring victory sometime this month.

I think they are an awful undemocratic idea is all. And as a member of this party I think I get to have an opinion about them.

[Altherion]

2 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Well, as I never tire of pointing out, without superdelegates Clinton would have clinched the nomination sometime in April for sure.

How do you figure that? There are 4051 pledged delegates so if we ignore the superdelegates altogether, a candidate needs 2026 to declare victory. Clinton currently has something like 1300 so even if she won literally every single pledged delegate remaining in the April contests, she still would not be at 2000. More realistically, I don't see how Clinton gets to 2026 pledged delegates until June 7th, when California, New Jersey and a few other states vote leading to a total of nearly 700 delegates being up for grabs.

[Guest]

Just now, Altherion said:

How do you figure that? There are 4051 pledged delegates so if we ignore the superdelegates altogether, a candidate needs 2026 to declare victory. Clinton currently has something like 1300 so even if she won literally every single pledged delegate remaining in the April contests, she still would not be at 2000. More realistically, I don't see how Clinton gets to 2026 pledged delegates until June 7th, when California, New Jersey and a few other states vote leading to a total of nearly 700 delegates being up for grabs.

Actually, there are more delegates out there than than that and Clinton is at 107% of the required total to be on track - without superdelegates.  See fiverthirtyeight.com

[OnionAhaiReborn]

Let’s Dispel Once and for All With This Fiction that Sanders Doesn’t Know How to Break Up Banks

Quote

Bernie Sanders gave some fairly normal answers on financial reform to the New York Daily News editorial board. Someone sent it to me, and as I read it I thought “yes, these are answers I’d expect for how Sanders approaches financial reform.”

You wouldn’t know that from the coverage of it, which has argued that the answers were an embarrassing failure. Caitlin Cruz at TPM argues that Sanders “struggles to explain how he would break up the banks” and that’s relatively kind. Chris Cillizza says it was “pretty close to a disaster” and David Graham says the answers on his core financial focus is “tentative, unprepared, or unaware.” Tina Nguyen at Vanity Fair writes that Sanders “admits he isn’t sure how to break up the big banks.”

This is not correct. Sanders has a clear path on how he wants to break up the banks which he described. Breaking up the banks doesn’t require, or even benefit from, describing the specifics on how the banks would end up, neither for his plans or the baby steps Dodd-Frank has already taken.

Generally, I believe Sanders would benefit from taking the important points Clinton has made in expanding how to tackle the financial sector as a whole. But bad arguments are bad arguments, and the arguments against Sanders here are bad.

There are three ways we can break up the banks.

1. Pass a law putting some sort of cap on the size of the balance sheet of financial companies, usually non-deposit liabilities. Caps, such as Senator Brown’s SAFE Banking Act, are generally proposed around 2 or 3 percent of GDP.

2. Have the council of regulators known as the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), on which the Treasury Secretary serves as chair, declare the largest firms to be too risky and must be broken up (Section 121).

3. Have the Federal Reserve, along with the FDIC, determine that the “living wills” of the biggest banks, which are plans on how they can fail without bringing down the economy, are not credible, and thus must be broken up (Section 165d).

The second two work through Dodd-Frank, the first would work through Congress.

Here’s the first exchange that people are citing:

"Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.

Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?

Sanders: Well, I don’t know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it."

Sanders is clearly saying that he wants to push on the first (“legislation passed”) and second (“secretary of treasury to determine”), two projects you can do at the same time. He’s emphasized Section 121 in the past. I wish he’d emphasize the third approach more, as that’s where the fight currently is, but his answer is fine.

If anything, Sanders is too wonky. The Daily News and commentators on this, I think, mean regulators as a whole, instead of the specific powers of the Federal Reserve itself, when they ask if the Fed has that authority already. Does the Fed have that authority? The Federal Reserve does have an extensive set of powers under the second and third approach, but it isn’t unilateral, but it also isn’t clear how much they could push if they truly wanted it. Sanders is correct to say it’s unclear how far the Federal Reserve can go but it is clear, however, that the Treasury secretary can lead FSOC to it.

The real problem with Sanders’ language on this topic is his one year promise. You’d need to replace a lot of regulators to try this approach, and that takes time, and even then it’s a hard slog. But it also seems like an area where the campaign rhetoric is meant to diverge from the policy analysis.

A lot of people are attacking Sanders for not saying how he’d specifically break up the banks based on this.

"Daily News: So, what I’m asking is, how can we understand? If you look at JPMorgan just as an example, or you can do Citibank, or Bank of America. What would it be? What would that institution be? Would there be a consumer bank? Where would the investing go?

Sanders: I’m not running JPMorgan Chase or Citibank.

Daily News: No. But you’d be breaking it up.

Sanders: That’s right. And that is their decision as to what they want to do and how they want to reconfigure themselves."

This is both a good and correct answer. This may not be intuitive to people who haven’t thought it through, but it’s not necessary, or even desirable, for regulators to specifically describe how to break up the banks. Instead tell them where they have to end up in terms of size – say no larger than $500 billion dollars – and let them figure it out the best way to get there.

The author of this article, by the way, is an expert cited by the Clinton campaign for his favorable appraisal of her proposals.

[Kalbear]

That's a pretty favorable interpretation of what he said, but that's fine. 

The criticism isn't about the specific mechanism that he uses to get the laws passed to break up banks. The question that he completely and angrily avoided is the 'what happens then' point, which is a huge deal. Depending on how the banks break up you can have massive credit shortage, massive economic disruption, major job loss, major small bank losses, massive runs on securities, and huge disruptions in global economies. Knowing the pros and cons of how these things happen is kind of a major part of the job he is applying for. 

For instance, simply the choice of passing a law saying that a company is now too big and must be broken up - and that's fine, mind you - still has massive ripple effects. Do all banks need to change at once? What is the timeline? Who decides what is acceptable as a plan to break up? Depending on the breakup, what happens to the accounts of the people involved? What happens to existing and future financial deals? 

These aren't questions with easy answers or even necessarily answers written in stone. I don't know the answers. But someone who is running as the candidate who wants this - they should know the answers or at least be able to talk intelligently about them. He should be able to disarm these questions and have given them thought. Because if he hasn't, if he has no plan and no answer, then doing laws like that are more likely to cause major disruptions than prevent them.

And that's not going into his lack of knowledge about what laws he wants to try people under, what he wants to do with prisoners, etc.

[Kalbear]

And if you're curious about how complicated this issue is, this storify is a good start. 

Another problem - is that he doesn't know if the current laws will allow him to do this or not. (The answer is that he does depending how he wants to do it, but doing it that way is probably not the better option)

 

http://femme-esq.tumblr.com/post/142358408965/bernie-sanders-says-he-doesnt-know-how-to-break

[lokisnow]

my prediction is that Trump goes in with a plurality about 150-200 delegates short of a majority. The first ballot confirms this. The second ballot is a landslide, with Ted Cruz earning 65% to 70% of the vote and a clear majority.

and since fewer than 20% of the convention goers will be strong Trump partisans, very unlikely to result in any disruption or rioting. the landslide will be so big that shock at how decisively Cruz wins on the second ballot will be the dominant reaction, not rioting.

[Guest]

32 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

my prediction is that Trump goes in with a plurality about 150-200 delegates short of a majority. The first ballot confirms this. The second ballot is a landslide, with Ted Cruz earning 65% to 70% of the vote and a clear majority.

and since fewer than 20% of the convention goers will be strong Trump partisans, very unlikely to result in any disruption or rioting. the landslide will be so big that shock at how decisively Cruz wins on the second ballot will be the dominant reaction, not rioting.

That could be exactly right.  I wonder how many will really vote for Cruz, he is pretty hated too and Trump voters were unlikely to vote for him (lower than expected at least) based on exit polling.  If they go for Paul Ryan (the balloon being floated) then do Trump and Cruz voters get mad?  IF Cruz easily wins (your scenario) do Trump voters turn on the party?  Can Trump run as a Libertarian if he feels he got screwed (they are on most state ballots)?

This could get wild.

[All-for-Joffrey]

6 minutes ago, GrapefruitPerrier said:

That could be exactly right.  I wonder how many will really vote for Cruz, he is pretty hated too and Trump voters were unlikely to vote for him (lower than expected at least) based on exit polling.  If they go for Paul Ryan (the balloon being floated) then do Trump and Cruz voters get mad?  IF Cruz easily wins (your scenario) do Trump voters turn on the party?  Can Trump run as a Libertarian if he feels he got screwed (they are on most state ballots)?

This could get wild.

I think most of the establishment delegates decide that Cruz is the best person to nominate to stop Trump while minimiing the chances of imploding the party over the long term. The campaign between Trump and Cruz is pretty nasty but I still suspect that there's a lot of overlap between their respective voters at the end of the day. So they'll still be denying the obvious frontrunner the nomination but giving it to Cruz will be more palatable to a lot of Trump voters than giving the nomination to Kasich or Ryan. (I'm sure they'll also be aware that no matter who they nominate, there most likely won't be a Republican in the White House in 2016 -- even with a Kasich or Ryan nomination as the Cruz/Trump wing of the party doesn't vote or votes third party.)

I also think a Cruz nomination minimizes the damages of a Trump third party candidacy. Trump can't get on the libertarian ballot -- they have their own primary process and he'll miss the deadline. Even running as an independent means tight deadlines to get on state ballots (if they haven't already passed -- I haven't looked.) The best he can do is a write-in campaign anyway. I think the bigger danger is Trump supporters abstain from the election and we see a permanent division in the party going forward.

ETA: Goodness -- I just realized that a year ago I was sure Jeb! would be the nominee. A month ago I was sure it would be Drumpf. Now I'm at Cruz. o_0

[Kalbear]

While Cruz is hated by many, the delegates he's been picking are very pro-cruz. He's been very good at selecting them so far. This may end up being a major flaw in trumps strategy - because he doesn't know these details he's actually losing first ballot delegates and almost certainly gone after the first ballot because these guys are almost entirely not on his side.

[Guest]

If Trump feels screwed, whch he is likely to under any scenario above, he runs as a Libertarian and tries to make them a viable third party going forward.  It would be groundbreaking. I doubt a regular Republican would run on the Libertarian ticket, but Trump/Johnson could become a thing.  I am not predicting this yet, but it would change the Libertarian party visibility forever.

" The Libertarian Party will be on the ballot in all 50 states, and some political strategists have speculated that a mainstream Republican could make a last-ditch effort to stop Mr. Trump by trying to run on the Libertarian ticket. Libertarians are unlikely to allow the party to be used as a vessel for such a cause, but they do not mind being part of the conversation. " - NY Times

[lokisnow]

11 minutes ago, GrapefruitPerrier said:

That could be exactly right.  I wonder how many will really vote for Cruz, he is pretty hated too and Trump voters were unlikely to vote for him (lower than expected at least) based on exit polling.  If they go for Paul Ryan (the balloon being floated) then do Trump and Cruz voters get mad?  IF Cruz easily wins (your scenario) do Trump voters turn on the party?  Can Trump run as a Libertarian if he feels he got screwed (they are on most state ballots)?

This could get wild.

no. I make that prediction because Cruz already controls more than a majority of the delegates awarded. Take Louisiana, for example, when the delegates were chosen, every single one was a Cruz partisan, from Cruz's supporters, not a single delegate from the Louisiana group is a Trump person or a Trump supporter. Now, Trump will have some of those Cruz-controlled delegates from Lousiana vote for him on the first ballot, because they are legally obligated to vote for him on the first ballot, but because Cruz already controls all these delegates, he doesn't have to fight for them after the first ballot, he already knows they will all automatically vote for him on a second ballot once they are legally allowed to.

This story has held true across the country in every state that this is possible in. Ted Cruz is a process guy, and he is not missing a delegate trick to maximize his second ballot potential. As best I can tell, he has already won, he just cannot win on the first ballot.

[Guest]

Just now, lokisnow said:

no. I make that prediction because Cruz already controls more than a majority of the delegates awarded. Take Louisiana, for example, when the delegates were chosen, every single one was a Cruz partisan, from Cruz's supporters, not a single delegate from the Louisiana group is a Trump person or a Trump supporter. Now, Trump will have some of those Cruz-controlled delegates from Lousiana vote for him on the first ballot, because they are legally obligated to vote for him on the first ballot, but because Cruz already controls all these delegates, he doesn't have to fight for them after the first ballot, he already knows they will all automatically vote for him on a second ballot once they are legally allowed to.

This story has held true across the country in every state that this is possible in. Ted Cruz is a process guy, and he is not missing a delegate trick to maximize his second ballot potential. As best I can tell, he has already won, he just cannot win on the first ballot.

And how bad will that piss off Trump?  Enough to run as a Libertarian or third party candidate?

[jarl the climber]

5 minutes ago, GrapefruitPerrier said:

And how bad will that piss off Trump?  Enough to run as a Libertarian or third party candidate?

That's the biggest problem for Cruz, what good is it for him to win the nomination and then get 30 or 40 percent in the general election and lose horribly? I'm not sure what Trump would do, if he wanted to run as a independent he would have ran as an independent/third party. I think he would talk to the Democrats first and try to make a deal with them.

[Shryke]

Enough to piss off a significant portion of the GOP base.

Ted Cruz may be a process guy but elections don't work on process, they work on legitimacy. That's why the 1968 riots happened. Not because the rules were broken but because the rules people thought existed were broken and so the legitimacy of the whole affair disappeared. And that's when people get PISSED.

[Maithanet]

9 minutes ago, GrapefruitPerrier said:

And how bad will that piss off Trump?  Enough to run as a Libertarian or third party candidate?

No one really knows.  I feel like this is actually the biggest unknown of the election - if Trump fails to win on the first ballot (as expected) and then his support collapses, how will he take it?  Is he ready to go Scorched Earth on his Trump brand to drag Cruz down with him?  Because if he wants to, it is well within his power to destroy Cruz 2016, if not the entire Republican party.  But he might be getting tired of this whole politician shtick, and instead take the high(er) road, try and maintain his Trump brand and move on to his next attention grabbing endeavor (whatever that is). 

[Shryke]

5 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

No one really knows.  I feel like this is actually the biggest unknown of the election - if Trump fails to win on the first ballot (as expected) and then his support collapses, how will he take it?  Is he ready to go Scorched Earth on his Trump brand to drag Cruz down with him?  Because if he wants to, it is well within his power to destroy Cruz 2016, if not the entire Republican party.  But he might be getting tired of this whole politician shtick, and instead take the high(er) road, try and maintain his Trump brand and move on to his next attention grabbing endeavor (whatever that is). 

Trump will not take the high road. Who have you been watching these past 20+ years?

Trump can't be seen as a loser so he will rail against the process and call the GOP cheaters who robbed him of the nomination he earned and throw a complete shitfit. And the media will eat it up like fucking candy made of cocaine and liquefied revenue.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

No one really knows.  I feel like this is actually the biggest unknown of the election - if Trump fails to win on the first ballot (as expected) and then his support collapses, how will he take it?  Is he ready to go Scorched Earth on his Trump brand to drag Cruz down with him?  Because if he wants to, it is well within his power to destroy Cruz 2016, if not the entire Republican party.  But he might be getting tired of this whole politician shtick, and instead take the high(er) road, try and maintain his Trump brand and move on to his next attention grabbing endeavor (whatever that is). 

I am not sure it burns down his brand, it may just add to it.  He is more well known across the globe than ever before, and he loves that shit.  Trump gets s riot in Cleveland, and Trump gets s third party run.