2016 US Election: what happened in Nevada?

[Fez]

1 minute ago, Shryke said:

It's the kind of thing that actually makes you wonder about the Convention now.

I'm still confident it'll all be fine and we won't know whether he's gonna be an idiot till after California. Till then it's still all posturing.

I am near 100 percent certain that Obama is going to give a full-throated endorsement of Clinton on June 8. And while that won't stop some Sanders supporters, I think that will take the wind out of the sails for a lot of them. 

Actually not just Obama, probably also Biden, Pelosi, Reid, Kerry, and Gore. Even if Sanders does decide to be an idiot, he can be mostly frozen out pretty easily. Especially if the media ignores him in favor of going all in on the general election horse race, which they've already started to do anyway.

[TrackerNeil]

57 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

This is true, but at this point only about 12% of active judges are Reagan/bush1 appointees, so the more important converse is that the majority of the next president's judge appointments will be to replace bill Clinton appointments, as they will naturally comprise a very large majority of retirees. So on most judgeships, Clinton is a punt, flipping relatively few dozen seats, but Trump would massively change the courts flipping a few Hundred seats. So the issue of the courts is asymmetric as democrats have far more to lose than republicans do.

Except, of course, for the Supreme Court, which has one conservative vacancy and could easily have another within the next few years. If things go a certain way, Clinton could replace four justices, giving liberals a 6-3 majority that could last for 15 years or so.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

18 minutes ago, Shryke said:

The 3 total people that compromise this intersection. 3-4%? Pfft.

We've had more than 3 people post in these threads that they're voting for Sanders or Trump. Sanders supporters are increasingly indicating that they won't vote for Clinton in the general. Some might vote for Trump out of spite. Others may stay home. That could easily lead to a 3-4% shift in the electorate. 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 minutes ago, Fez said:

I am near 100 percent certain that Obama is going to give a full-throated endorsement of Clinton on June 8. And while that won't stop some Sanders supporters, I think that will take the wind out of the sails for a lot of them. 

Actually not just Obama, probably also Biden, Pelosi, Reid, Kerry, and Gore. Even if Sanders does decide to be an idiot, he can be mostly frozen out pretty easily. Especially if the media ignores him in favor of going all in on the general election horse race, which they've already started to do anyway.

He won't, but god knows what his die hard supporters will do.

[TerraPrime]

The duoploy system does suck. But it is what we have. By all means, take actions to change that, such as supporting public financing of candidates, non-partisan reidstricting, etc. Voting with a write-in, however, does fuck and all to the bad duopoly system, and it will, on top of that, make it more likely that the candidate you hate more come to be elected. That seems like a lose-lose situation to me. The only upside is the self-knowledge that you didn't vote for the candidate who is less reprehensible.

If that sounds good to you, let me tell you a story.

 

2 years ago, in Illinois, the then Governor Quinn was facing election challenge from Rauner. Quinn is a Democrat and he took over after Blagojevich was removed from office for his corruption. During this tenure, Quinn led the charge to reduce pension benefit payouts to the state employees (in Illinois, state employees do not accrue Social Security and are instead forced to buy into the state pension program). Due to that move, Quinn upset a large number of typical Democrats - union members. Came election time, many of these people stayed home and did not vote. Consequently, Rauner won the election and became governor. As a result, Rauner put elimination of bargaining rights for unions on the table as a condition for releasing a state budget. This is why our state does not have a FY2016 budget some 320 days into FY2016. Meanwhile, or K12 and public higher ed are suffering, and our state has been accumulating millions of debt in interest on unpaid bills every week. The city of Springfield is threatening to shut off the electricity to the State Capitol building because the state government has not paid electricity bill for 10 months and running. Our governor is being sued by social service agencies who hold in their hands signed contracts with the state to provide services like care for the mentally handicapped and nursing aides to the elderly.

 

At my school alone, we lost 320+ jobs in the last academic year, which is about 15% of our school's total employees, give or take a few. Many of those 320 had stayed and not voted for Quinn. So, the people who stayed home because of Quinn have the moral satisfaction that they didn't vote for someone trying to rob them, plus the extra comfort of seeing their jobs threatened/eliminated as well as their community going to ruins. The warmth of seeing the state going down in flames will help with the heating bills, I am sure.

 

So that is what it means, in real life, when you cannot bring yourself to vote for the lesser of the two evils - the greater evil will triumph and you will suffer more.

[JGP]

Jesus Christ, TP. I've seen your FB posts, but that above illustrates a mess of epic proportions. Not to derail, but how the hell has that been permitted to continue? Were something similar to happen in Canada, it wouldn't have been long before someone got a memo from the Feds directing resolution of that shit on threat that if not they'd get involved.  

[Shryke]

33 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

We've had more than 3 people post in these threads that they're voting for Sanders or Trump. Sanders supporters are increasingly indicating that they won't vote for Clinton in the general. Some might vote for Trump out of spite. Others may stay home. That could easily lead to a 3-4% shift in the electorate. 

 

Based on what? This thread?

I don't think I've seen almost anyone here who says "If not Sanders, then Trump". And then ones that have talk like they are just straight up Trump supporters or Republicans the rest of the time and so I'm extremely dubious they give a shit about Sanders at all.

Basically all of them have been "Bernie or Bust" types.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

6 minutes ago, Shryke said:

Based on what? This thread?

Polls. Over the last 4 or 5 months the percentage of Sanders supporters who've said they won't vote for Hillary has risen from roughly 10% to roughly 33%. Now most likely that number will decrease as we get closer to Election Day, but by how much is unknown at this point.

[Swordfish]

41 minutes ago, TerraPrime said:

The duoploy system does suck. But it is what we have. By all means, take actions to change that, such as supporting public financing of candidates, non-partisan reidstricting, etc. Voting with a write-in, however, does fuck and all to the bad duopoly system, and it will, on top of that, make it more likely that the candidate you hate more come to be elected. That seems like a lose-lose situation to me. The only upside is the self-knowledge that you didn't vote for the candidate who is less reprehensible.

If that sounds good to you, let me tell you a story.

 

2 years ago, in Illinois, the then Governor Quinn was facing election challenge from Rauner. Quinn is a Democrat and he took over after Blagojevich was removed from office for his corruption. During this tenure, Quinn led the charge to reduce pension benefit payouts to the state employees (in Illinois, state employees do not accrue Social Security and are instead forced to buy into the state pension program). Due to that move, Quinn upset a large number of typical Democrats - union members. Came election time, many of these people stayed home and did not vote. Consequently, Rauner won the election and became governor. As a result, Rauner put elimination of bargaining rights for unions on the table as a condition for releasing a state budget. This is why our state does not have a FY2016 budget some 320 days into FY2016. Meanwhile, or K12 and public higher ed are suffering, and our state has been accumulating millions of debt in interest on unpaid bills every week. The city of Springfield is threatening to shut off the electricity to the State Capitol building because the state government has not paid electricity bill for 10 months and running. Our governor is being sued by social service agencies who hold in their hands signed contracts with the state to provide services like care for the mentally handicapped and nursing aides to the elderly.

 

At my school alone, we lost 320+ jobs in the last academic year, which is about 15% of our school's total employees, give or take a few. Many of those 320 had stayed and not voted for Quinn. So, the people who stayed home because of Quinn have the moral satisfaction that they didn't vote for someone trying to rob them, plus the extra comfort of seeing their jobs threatened/eliminated as well as their community going to ruins. The warmth of seeing the state going down in flames will help with the heating bills, I am sure.

 

So that is what it means, in real life, when you cannot bring yourself to vote for the lesser of the two evils - the greater evil will triumph and you will suffer more.

The flipside of that, of course, is that if you continue to vote for the lesser of two evils, then voting for the lesser of two evils will continue to be the only option you have going forward.

It's not about simple compromise, it's about the overall quality of the candidates being put forth by the parties, and the fact that we are inching toward oligarchy that people seem to be finally recognizing and reacting to.  Just ask Jimmy Carter, if you don't believe me.

 

 

 

 

 

[Kalbear]

Quote

Over the last 4 or 5 months the percentage of Sanders supporters who've said they won't vote for Hillary has risen from roughly 10% to roughly 33%.

Do you have a source for that? From what I've seen it's stayed pretty consistently at 65-70% of the Sanders supporters who said they'll support Clinton. 

[Dr. Pepper]

4 hours ago, BloodRider said:

I did.  I get passionate about Data Science......

I appreciate the data science passion you and others have brought as it's helped me be more effective in explaining to people I know why their decision to write in Sanders is fucking stupid.  Especially here in Georgia where we are inching closer to becoming a purple state for presidential elections.  

3 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

Judicial appointments are a very powerful way to move the nation to the left. I believe about 60% of sitting federal judges were appointed by Democrats, and after 4-8 years of Clinton we can bump that number over 70%. That's going to have a powerful progressive effect on public policy, and one that should never be discounted.

I wish the importance of judicial appointments was discussed more passionately during election cycles.  I'm always quite surprised at the number of people I encounter who aren't even aware of exactly what the judicial branch does.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

13 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Do you have a source for that? From what I've seen it's stayed pretty consistently at 65-70% of the Sanders supporters who said they'll support Clinton. 

I'll try to give you some links later, but iirc, earlier polls had both candidates' supporters saying that 85-90% would back the other candidate if their preferred candidate failed to win the nomination. And I've seen several polls over the last few months that have shown that the number of Sanders supporters who say they won't support Hillary rise from 10%, to 15%, to over 20% and now to now 33% who say they will not. Those numbers will reverse course and go down at some point, but having a higher ceiling of no to Hillary voters means what ever the end number could be will most likely be higher.

[lokisnow]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

We've had more than 3 people post in these threads that they're voting for Sanders or Trump. Sanders supporters are increasingly indicating that they won't vote for Clinton in the general. Some might vote for Trump out of spite. Others may stay home. That could easily lead to a 3-4% shift in the electorate. 

 

3-4 % of the electorate is roughly 3,600,000 to 4,800,000 voters choosing to do this. I find those sorts of numbers less probable to be true than the very friendly and seemingly plausible numbers of "3-4%"

depending on how these votes are distributed to the various states, they may not have a discernible outcome even in such numericly large numbers. It's sort of how a five percent increase in Latino turnout "nationally" probably wouldn't affect the outcome of any state because the votes are concentrated in states where they will not affect the outcome and aren't distributed to their most maximal point of impact.

[Myshkin]

8 hours ago, aceluby said:

 

I think one should be careful not to confound the Sanders campaign and vocal Reddit users.

Those Redditt users are getting it from somewhere. The Sanders campaign itself has tried to delegitimize Clinton's wins in the south by saying those states don't represent the real America, her wins in closed primaries are illegitimate because Independents weren't allowed to vote, her win in AZ is illegitimate because of Republican voter suppression (even though, you know, Clinton voters were affected more than Sanders voters in AZ), her win in NY is illegitimate because of purged voter rolls (even though, again, this happened in a county that had always heavily favored Clinton), and now this garbage in Nevada where the Sanders campaign is claiming, despite all evidence, that some shady shit went on because Clinton ended up with exactly the amount of delegates she deserved based on the actual vote. Sorry, but this isn't some small group of internet trolls; this narrative is coming right from the top.

And Sanders' statement on the vile shit his delegates and supporters are doing in Nevada right now is the most cowardly horseshit I've seen in a long time. I guess he really doesn't want to alienate the GamerGate vote.

[Myshkin]

Oh and also, if Sanders wants to win California it's not a good look to refuse to fully denounce those supporters of his who were shouting "bitch" at our very popular Democratic Senator.

[TerraPrime]

Re: Jeordhi

I honestly don't know why the federal government hasn't stepped in more in areas where the state is derelict in providing the basic functions. I think in part it is because while we are bleeding money for not having a budget (unpaid bills accrue interests and without budget we cannot find cheaper suppliers and must use what we had last year, etc.), the state's police, fire, water, etc., are minimally functioning thanks to early lawsuits that compel the state to pay these functions despite the absence of a budget.

 

However, there are many things that should be sued over. For instance, the state of Illinois has not paid for any vehicle or passenger damage caused by state vehicles this year. If your car is damaged, or if someone is injured, by a state vehicle, their insurance is left unpaid. I would have thought this is ground for lawsuit. But I guess not.

 

Either way, I don't want to derail the election thread further. But yes, it's a hot fucking mess, and we are two steps and a skip away from total financial meltdown. As it is, the damage done so far will take over a decade to repair.

 

 

Re: Swordfish

 

1 hour ago, Swordfish said:

The flipside of that, of course, is that if you continue to vote for the lesser of two evils, then voting for the lesser of two evils will continue to be the only option you have going forward.

 

I already addressed this.

You'd be right if all one does is vote for the lesser of the two evils and then does nothing else. But that's not what I am saying.

I am saying to work on reforming the system, but before that reform takes hold, do go and vote to stop the greater evil from wrecking your lives worse.

In practice, this means that I am working to donate time and money to independent and third-party candidates in local races, as well as supporting Democrats who seem amenable to reforming districting, etc. I am outcome-oriented for the most part, so I cannot see how writing in a candidate or voting 3rd party in a swing state will in any way help improve the system.

 

[Swordfish]

1 hour ago, lokisnow said:

Quote

 

^^ignore.  Stoopid quote feature.

 

Quote

You'd be right if all one does is vote for the lesser of the two evils and then does nothing else. But that's not what I am saying.

 

Which is what most people would do.  So...  What's the issue again?  if that's the tool that someone has, i see no problem with them using it.

 

 

Quote

I am saying to work on reforming the system, but before that reform takes hold, do go and vote to stop the greater evil from wrecking your lives worse.

 

That's an approach.  it's hardly the only one, and arguably not the most effective one.

The tea party has already shown us that what you are suggesting is not the only route to major change, and that it is not necessary to start at local and state levels.

 

Quote

In practice, this means that I am working to donate time and money to independent and third-party candidates in local races, as well as supporting Democrats who seem amenable to reforming districting, etc. I am outcome-oriented for the most part, so I cannot see how writing in a candidate or voting 3rd party in a swing state will in any way help improve the system.

Writing in a candidate has little effect other than withholding your vote from the candidate, just like staying home.  The net effect is the  same, which is that the major parties do not get continued support for inferior candidates, and are forced to do better if they want to win elections.  Which is pretty much the one thng they care about.

Voting third party has other, obvious impacts in addition to this.

 

 

[Swordfish]

And there is, of course, an even more extreme option:

Quote

NOLAND, Mary Anne Alfriend. Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68. 

http://www.richmond.com/obituaries/article_c21b60bc-1153-5abd-b3c8-268cfd32eb57.html

[TrackerNeil]

1 hour ago, Myshkin said:

Those Redditt users are getting it from somewhere. The Sanders campaign itself has tried to delegitimize Clinton's wins in the south by saying those states don't represent the real America, her wins in closed primaries are illegitimate because Independents weren't allowed to vote, her win in AZ is illegitimate because of Republican voter suppression (even though, you know, Clinton voters were affected more than Sanders voters in AZ), her win in NY is illegitimate because of purged voter rolls (even though, again, this happened in a county that had always heavily favored Clinton), and now this garbage in Nevada where the Sanders campaign is claiming, despite all evidence, that some shady shit went on because Clinton ended up with exactly the amount of delegates she deserved based on the actual vote. Sorry, but this isn't some small group of internet trolls; this narrative is coming right from the top.

Thank you! I learned from Nevada that an open and transparent primary process permits a campaign to lose a state caucus and still win a majority of delegates from that state. 

[ThinkerX]

Nope.

Trump somehow gets elected, my take is he screws up big time on constitutional/abuse of power type stuff.  That gets the democratic party and the republicans cooperating in an impeachment process.  That shouldn't take more than two years.

 

Clinton wins, she has no 'coat tails,' period.  Given their amazing incompetence at the state level, I'd deem it at least possible her party looses ground in both houses.  With the republican majorities in place, absolutely nothing gets done.  She tries anything significant via executive orders, or even normal 'power of the president' type stuff, she gets hit hard - possibly with lawsuits.   More, she'll start with one of the highest unpopularity levels of any US president in history, and WILL go down from there.  I have no difficulty envisioning a republican majority starting the impeachment process on her, especially after the democratic party manages to loose big time in the midterms.

 

More, there are serious events in the world at large.  I keep seeing repeated reports that some sort of screwed up rerun of 2007-2008 is at least possible.  The middle east is a bomb about to go off.  And long term oil/water issues are going to become more critical.  And Clinton or Trump, absolute best case is we are stuck with a president who cannot do anything to address these issues because of polarization.

 

Icing on the cake?  The issues that spawned Sanders and Trump are not going to go away, period.  To pretend otherwise is delusional.  But those are issues the 'establishment' cannot deal with, and tries very hard to pretend do not exist.