US Politics returns: the post-Election thread

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

42 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

In short, Christie threw the book at him, and got his dad the max sentence possible and then blocked any chance of an early release. And now the transition team is being purged of any Christie loyalists:

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-transition-shake-part-stalinesque-purge-christie-loyalists-n684081

So Jared Kushner does have cause to feel aggrieved?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

14 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Kaine was basically her in a nutshell - he was safe, not particularly negative, and wouldn't hurt her in any way. It didn't energize anyone and didn't help the brand, but the campaign basically bet on her being safe enough as long as she didn't fuck up too much. 

What she should have done is stuck to that. What she did instead is think that she could win big, and instead of campaigning hard in the rust belt and making sure she had it in the bag with more ads, she went to Arizona and Nebraska and Iowa. 

She did lose to the worst candidate ever, which signifies how bad she was, but it's also important to point out how incredibly close this election actually was, too. 

I think that's a fair assessment.  But I'm dizzy and still think independents breaking for Trump mattered.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

6 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Also, Michigan doesn't have party affiliations, so everyone there is technically an independent.

Trump won Macomb county (blue collar folk) and Saginaw county (lots of AA there), which havent gone for a Republican since whenever so you can see both sides of the coin here - depressed turnout as well as vote switchers I guess.

 

Kalbear,

SEEEE... I'm right because I'm dizzy and lightheaded.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

I expect Senate Republicans to fold like cheap laundry the moment Trump starts blasting them and threatening to support their primary opponents.

[Red Tiger]

15 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Kaine was basically her in a nutshell - he was safe, not particularly negative, and wouldn't hurt her in any way. It didn't energize anyone and didn't help the brand, but the campaign basically bet on her being safe enough as long as she didn't fuck up too much. 

What she should have done is stuck to that. What she did instead is think that she could win big, and instead of campaigning hard in the rust belt and making sure she had it in the bag with more ads, she went to Arizona and Nebraska and Iowa. 

She did lose to the worst candidate ever, which signifies how bad she was, but it's also important to point out how incredibly close this election actually was, too. 

What if she had Elizabeth Warren as her running mate?

[Kalbear]

7 hours ago, Weeping Sore said:

At least God-Emperor Trump can't serve that long because he's already 70 and has had some hard living so his heart can't hold out forever. Not like Mussolini who was like 40 when he became Prime Minister.

Dude. He's doing the thing all dictators do - he's putting his kids in charge too. You think it's coincidence that his family is so involved in the transition team? He's doing it because he can trust them, and he doesn't trust anyone else.

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Red Tiger said:

What if she had Elizabeth Warren as her running mate?

It was risky. I would have loved it, but it had the potential to alienate fragile male voters even more, Warren herself has some baggage, and more importantly it would have lost that senate seat for Dems and that would have potentially jeopardized a majority (which as it turns out was not going to happen, but). 

Warren was otherwise perfect - progressive, liked by the Sanders camp (aside from the ones who called her a traitorous cunt, of course), an excellent attack dog VP choice (Kaine sucked at this), and pretty popular in her own right.

[Kalbear]

12 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Also, Michigan doesn't have party affiliations, so everyone there is technically an independent.

Trump won Macomb county (blue collar folk) and Saginaw county (lots of AA there), which havent gone for a Republican since whenever so you can see both sides of the coin here - depressed turnout as well as vote switchers I guess.

 

We know there was both - and there's a lot of signs that reduction of polling stations, voter ID laws also contributed to lower turnout. I'm not saying that people didn't decide - but the numbers overwhelmingly suggest that it wasn't some big independent push that got Trump there, it was literally millions of voters choosing not to vote for anyone for President at all. 

[Fez]

6 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

I expect Senate Republicans to fold like cheap laundry the moment Trump starts blasting them and threatening to support their primary opponents.

Some will, maybe all. But Senators have higher profiles than Representatives, its hard to primary them. There's been a couple high-profile examples in the past, but not actually that many. Also, 21 of them, including Paul, McCain, Murkowski, Lee, and Portman, just won their elections, they're set for six years. The world could look very different in 2022 and I doubt they're that concerned about that election just yet.

[Maithanet]

5 minutes ago, Fez said:

Some will, maybe all. But Senators have higher profiles than Representatives, its hard to primary them. There's been a couple high-profile examples in the past, but not actually that many. Also, 21 of them, including Paul, McCain, Murkowski, Lee, and Portman, just won their elections, they're set for six years. The world could look very different in 2022 and I doubt they're that concerned about that election just yet.

I doubt very much that McCain will ever run again anyway, his state is getting purpler and he's already 80.  Not that I have a lot of faith in him generally, but the threat of the primary means nothing to him. 

[Kalbear]

20 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Kalbear,

SEEEE... I'm right because I'm dizzy and lightheaded.

If the erection lasts for more than 4 hours please consult a doctor.

The independent thing is especially hard to understand given the exit polls saying that exactly like 2008 and 2012 we had 90% of Republicans voting for R and 90% of Democrats voting for D. And we also had a lot of people just not voting democrat, period, for whatever reason. A good example of this weird phenomenon was that in New Hampshire, the senate race had more votes than the Presidential race. 

Also, what I think you're doing is saying 'independent' when you mean 'moderate'. There are a lot of 'independents' out there who will be...uh...kooky. The Jill Stein voters, the libertarians, the coalition party, the write-ins - all got a lot more than usual as an overall whole, and a lot of them are 'independent'. Tell me, how do you convince simultaneously a Jill Stein voter and a Johnson voter to vote for your race?

Furthermore, what we saw from the general election was more rural vote in general (14%, up from 13%) and less urban vote. Neither implies independent to any degree. 

In a 'normal' election this would have meant that Clinton would have gotten largely massacred because most of the Johnson vote would have been for GenericRepublicanMan. And that's what in general political theory says - after 2 terms of one party, most of the time there's a switch unless the economy is awesome. Trump depressed that by about 3-4 points. Clinton had an opportunity, but she blew it for a number of factors. 

[Kalbear]

The Trump transition team hasn't even talked to the Pentagon yet. 

 

[Kalbear]

yeah, the election had nothing to do with race

 

[Altherion]

10 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It was risky. I would have loved it, but it had the potential to alienate fragile male voters even more, Warren herself has some baggage, and more importantly it would have lost that senate seat for Dems and that would have potentially jeopardized a majority (which as it turns out was not going to happen, but).

Well, if fragile male voters were the issue, she could have simply chosen Sanders himself. I know, I know: too risky, potentially sacrifices the Vermont Senate seat and he's a socialist. Somebody ought to have reminded the Clinton campaign that it's hard to win with no risk and no sacrifice.

Regarding the seemingly eternal fight over the Midwest voting numbers: I don't want to get into it again, but I will point out that in PA and MI, had Trump not gotten 210K and 163K (respectively) votes more than Romney, he would have lost despite the fact that Clinton got fewer votes than Obama. The loss of turnout for Democrats was the larger of the two effects, but it would not have been sufficient on its own -- Trump needed both to win.

[ummester]

Let's just say Trump is an orange Mussolini - the point is that the US, like Italy before it, voted for him because, like Italy before it, the country had deteriorated enough to nurture the emotional need for someone like him. All of us, globally, reap what we so.

Re the protests being funded by Soros, I don't know if they are or not but here is an old 60 mins interview with the man - he put's Littlefinger's pragmatic amorality to shame. This is the mindset of the kind of people pulling the strings, not just Soros - probably Trump as well. It's either pick your poison or rise up against the lot of them - there are no good leaders out there, the ideal of liberalism never stood a chance against the true nature of humanity.

 

[Kalbear]

Yes, that's true. Trump did do better in the midwest. I'm not saying otherwise. But that was small potatoes compared to how much Clinton lost in turnout. And the more important thing is that the narrative saying how Trump managed to find HUGE amounts of people and won this on this giant turnout - well, that's wrong. 

Also interesting is that Wisconsin was one of the only states that had significantly less turnout than the 2012 election. Yay for voter ID laws!

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

So Jared Kushner does have cause to feel aggrieved?

Sounds like it, but at the same time it doesn't sound like his dad did much time. 

[Martell Spy]

Quote

Cohen told the Washington Post that he’d written the tweet after submitting names for possible national-security positions at the request of a longtime friend who’s a senior official on the Trump transition team. His friend’s response, Cohen said, was “very weird, very disturbing … It became clear to me that they view jobs as lollipop things you give out to good boys and girls.” His friend, he added, seemed “unhinged.”

The GOP Civil War Is Just Beginning

Formerly conciliatory Trump skeptics are backing away from the president-elect.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2016/11/buckle_up_conservatives_are_revolting_against_trump.html

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

Some will, maybe all. But Senators have higher profiles than Representatives, its hard to primary them. There's been a couple high-profile examples in the past, but not actually that many. Also, 21 of them, including Paul, McCain, Murkowski, Lee, and Portman, just won their elections, they're set for six years. The world could look very different in 2022 and I doubt they're that concerned about that election just yet.

One thing we have discussed is the Democrats that might be more open to working with Trump and Congressional Republicans to save their own seats. There are a few up for reelection in 2018 in deep red states, and Manchin, who is one of them, is closer to your average Republican than the average base voter in the Democtic Party. 

59 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

I doubt very much that McCain will ever run again anyway, his state is getting purpler and he's already 80.  Not that I have a lot of faith in him generally, but the threat of the primary means nothing to him. 

You're probably right on all non-national security issues, but I could see him and other hawks fighting back against Trump if he tries to do anything dangerous.

Also, his age probably liberates him to some extend. He may not live to see the end of his term, and if he does I'd be surprised if he ran again. 

1 hour ago, Red Tiger said:

What if she had Elizabeth Warren as her running mate?

Picking Kaine at the time made sense. In hindsight she should have picked Perez or Castro. Warren would have been a bad idea.

That said, if Warren, who was my first choice all along had run, I'd bet she would have drubbed Trump. 

[Altherion]

That turnout map is really interesting. For example, in Pennsylvania, the turnout actually increased. Thus, it cannot be that Trump won simply because Obama voters stayed home; his victory must be some mix of a surge of new Republican voters combined with a decrease of Democratic ones and Obama voters choosing Trump over Clinton.

Also, the transition is really interesting. Unlike a traditional nominee, Trump was running against both the Democrats and a substantial fraction of the Republicans (i.e. Republican voters supported him as they would any nominee, but Republican elites did not). This leaves him without the nearly ready administration architecture as some of the party won't work with him and some he doesn't to work with himself. Oh well, the country voted for a genuine political outsider (albeit one born to the aristocracy) and that's what we got.