Election 2016

[Username17]

Bernie swept Alaska? That surprises me. Someone care to tell me why it shouldn't?

What's probably the biggest news as far as demographics are concerned is that Bernie swept Hawaii, which is less than a quarter white. Do Asians love Bernie or something?

Caucuses are basically insane. Bernie has won in a landslide in several of them, including all three last Saturday. But caucuses are so disnfranchizing that they only measure the opinions of a tiny slice of the electorate. According to a Honolulu paper, there were 33,716 votes cast in the Hawaii Democratic caucus. To put that in perspective, Democratic senator Mazie Hirono got 269,489 votes in the last election. Turnout in caucuses is serious an order of magnitude off from a regular election.

Caucuses unsurprizingly often give surprizing results. Senator Hirono won her last election by more than 3 votes for every vote cast in the Hawaii Caucus. A landslide win for one candidate over another is still not a significant chunk of the actual electorate.

As to whether Asians and Pacific Islanders are feeling the Bern or not, no one knows. Statistically significant numbers of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans have not been present in any exit polling. Not even in Hawaii (where Bernie won big) or American Samoa (where Hillary won medium large). Because exit polling on the islands doesn't seem to exist and those minorities have been very small fractions of the electorate where polling has actually been done with cross tabs.

Sanders picked up 66 delegates over Clinton on Saturday, which is the kind of blowout he needed to stay relevant. However, Clinton's lead is still large and Sanders would need four more such blowouts to make the pledged delegate totals evenish. There won't be movement on that scale for quite a while. Next three weeks we get treated to just Wisconson and Wyoming. While those are probably Nernie country as well, they only have 100 delegates between them. So while Bernie expects to gain some delegates before the next big primary of New York on April 19th, his demographic targets are a pickup of only 14 (which Sanders wants to exceed because he's behind).

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie- ... n-defector

[Schleiermacher]

There's a fair bit of false advertising in that letter, most notably the title.

http://www.snopes.com/stephanie-cegielski-letter-trump/

She didn't work for the Trump campaign at all per se, she was the Communications Director of the "Make America Great Again" Super-PAC.

[Ancient History]

[Username17]

There's a fair bit of false advertising in that letter, most notably the title.

http://www.snopes.com/stephanie-cegielski-letter-trump/

She didn't work for the Trump campaign at all per se, she was the Communications Director of the "Make America Great Again" Super-PAC.

I don't think we should pretend that the Super PACs are not coordinating just because they are legally required to not coordinate. Obviously Ted Cruz approved of his super pac posting naked pictures of Donald Trump's wife to scare up Mormon turnout in Utah. Because FUCKING OBVIOUSLY. And Cruz's claims that it was just theactions of a superpac dedicated to raising and spending money on his behalf and not him per se is just a legal fiction to help skirt the legal limits of election year funding. Remember all the weird shady bullshit with Jeb's hundred million dollars when he was "not running for president" despite actually admitting that yeah, actually he was totally running for president?

The Make America Great Again super pac is part of the Trump campaign, and exists as a separate legal entity only so that Donald himself doesn't have to report campaign contributions. MAGA is run by the business partner of Corey "assaults women for Trump" Lewandowski and is literally named a Trump trademarked slogan.

Snopes has gotten really bad lately, and just isn't the source of raw facts that it used to be. It takes like twenty seconds of googling to find that yes, MAGA is obviously part of the Trump campaign, and it is both bogus and sad that Snopes doesn't have the cojones to admit that.

-Username17

[virgil]

Been trying to form an opinion on the whole super delegate thing, at least for the Democratic Party (we know the GOP is dumb). I'm seeing people call Jay Inslee's (governor of WA) pledge to Hillary as a severe moral failing on his part.

[Kaelik]

Been trying to form an opinion on the whole super delegate thing, at least for the Democratic Party (we know the GOP is dumb). I'm seeing people call Jay Inslee's (governor of WA) pledge to Hillary as a severe moral failing on his part.

If super delegates are a "bad thing" that still doesn't mean that super delegates doing their job as it was defined for them is a moral failing. So even if you accepted that Super delegates as a concept are evil, pretty sure nothing Inslee did is a moral failing at all, much less a severe one.

[nockermensch]

Been trying to form an opinion on the whole super delegate thing, at least for the Democratic Party (we know the GOP is dumb). I'm seeing people call Jay Inslee's (governor of WA) pledge to Hillary as a severe moral failing on his part.

http://i.imgur.com/efb3Oc4.webm
The real question here is, how many superdelegates do the Druids control?

[DSMatticus]

Been trying to form an opinion on the whole super delegate thing, at least for the Democratic Party (we know the GOP is dumb). I'm seeing people call Jay Inslee's (governor of WA) pledge to Hillary as a severe moral failing on his part.

If super delegates are a "bad thing" that still doesn't mean that super delegates doing their job as it was defined for them is a moral failing. So even if you accepted that Super delegates as a concept are evil, pretty sure nothing Inslee did is a moral failing at all, much less a severe one.

I dunno about that. If someone puts you on the Supreme Court to bring back Jim Crow, is it a moral failing to then bring back Jim Crow? Uhh, yes. Of course it is. The thing that makes this situation terrible is that black people deserve rights, and anyone willfully involved in denying them those rights is an evil douchebag. That means the person who appointed you because he thought you would take those rights away is an evil douchebag, and that also means you're an evil douchebag if you do in fact take those rights away.

I would say Inslee has a moral responsibility to respect the result of the popular vote because super delegates as a concept are pretty fucking shitty, and even so much as pretending that he might do otherwise is a failure of that responsibility. The thing that makes this situation terrible is the notion that voters shouldn't be the ones choosing their representatives, so anyone willfully involved in helping deny voters that choice is an evil douchebag. And that includes the party committee which invested Inslee with that power, and that also includes Inslee for threatening to do that.

I mean, they're less evil than the Jim Crow guy, I guess. The extent of the disenfranchisement is much smaller and the motivations are slightly less impure, but it's still obviously bullshit.

[Kaelik]

Been trying to form an opinion on the whole super delegate thing, at least for the Democratic Party (we know the GOP is dumb). I'm seeing people call Jay Inslee's (governor of WA) pledge to Hillary as a severe moral failing on his part.

If super delegates are a "bad thing" that still doesn't mean that super delegates doing their job as it was defined for them is a moral failing. So even if you accepted that Super delegates as a concept are evil, pretty sure nothing Inslee did is a moral failing at all, much less a severe one.

I dunno about that. If someone puts you on the Supreme Court to bring back Jim Crow, is it a moral failing to then bring back Jim Crow? Uhh, yes. Of course it is. The thing that makes this situation terrible is that black people deserve rights, and anyone willfully involved in denying them those rights is an evil douchebag. That means the person who appointed you because he thought you would take those rights away is an evil douchebag, and that also means you're an evil douchebag if you do in fact take those rights away.

I would say Inslee has a moral responsibility to respect the result of the popular vote because super delegates as a concept are pretty fucking shitty, and even so much as pretending that he might do otherwise is a failure of that responsibility. The thing that makes this situation terrible is the notion that voters shouldn't be the ones choosing their representatives, so anyone willfully involved in helping deny voters that choice is an evil douchebag. And that includes the party committee which invested Inslee with that power, and that also includes Inslee for threatening to do that.

I mean, they're less evil than the Jim Crow guy, I guess. The extent of the disenfranchisement is much smaller and the motivations are slightly less impure, but it's still obviously bullshit.

Except no one put you on the Supreme Court to bring back Jim Crow, they put you on the Supreme Court to do your job on the Supreme Court.

Just like they didn't make him a delegate to deny people their vote, they made him a super delegate to represent a different group of people who also voted.

It may be "bad" thing to give people who voted 6 years ago a say in the democratic candidate, or it may not, but it doesn't change that he was made a superdelegate to represent those people, not to deprive people of their votes now.

[Username17]

Been trying to form an opinion on the whole super delegate thing, at least for the Democratic Party (we know the GOP is dumb). I'm seeing people call Jay Inslee's (governor of WA) pledge to Hillary as a severe moral failing on his part.

If super delegates are a "bad thing" that still doesn't mean that super delegates doing their job as it was defined for them is a moral failing. So even if you accepted that Super delegates as a concept are evil, pretty sure nothing Inslee did is a moral failing at all, much less a severe one.

Basically this. There are valid arguments against the use of super delegates. They do not represent the will of the people as reflected by the primary election of their state. That is undemocratic in the immediate sense. If you wanna say they are wrong because of that, go ahead. But within the context of super delegates existing, Super Delegates as individuals only have a moral obligation to do their damn job. And that's voting for the person they think would make the best president. The end. It would be a moral failing to change their vote for bribery or skullduggery. Voting for a candidate they endorsed is simply their duty.

Now as for the governor of Washington specifically, that is a stupid place to draw battle lines about super delegates voting wrong. Bernie Sanders didn't get every delegate from the pledged side. A quarter of them went to Clinton because people voted for Clinton too. While he could be seen as obviating the votes of people in Washington by voting for Clinton, he'd be obviating the votes of (substantially less but still significant numbers of) people if he changed his vote to Sanders. But more importantly, Washington had a fucking caucus. Caucuses are undemocratic bullshit. The last gubernatorial race in Washington had over three million votes, the caucuses had 230,000. Causes are so exclusionary and shit that Jay Inslee won the election to be a superdelagate where more than ten people voted for every one person who voted in the bullshit caucus election that Sanders won. Sanders would have won a real election if there had been one, but there fucking wasn't because caucuses are bullshit.

Now the argument for super delegates is much stronger this year than it has been in previous years. If you'd asked me last year if we should purge super delegates I would have said yes. Now... I probably wouldn't, but I think there should be less of them.

Super delegates guard against two failure states and create one new one. Because super delegates are elected well in advance, they make it difficult for an insurgent ideologue to buy his way into the primary out of the blue and seize control with hateful rhetoric and insane empty promises. So like Hitler, or Donald Trump. Secondly, the block of super delegates can hash things out before the convention and give us a winner in a three way contest without having actual blood on the convention floor. So like this bullshit Trump/Cruz/Kasich thing? That's much harder to imagine happeing to Democrats.

The new failure state is for the electorate to solidly and consistently favor one candidate but have the will of the people overthrown by having the super delegates vote en masse for the other candidate. The Democrats have never done that. And actually I don't think that they are going to. Bernie Sanders being a long standing politician who is popular with Democrats but has specifically insulted the party apparatus repeatedly over a period of decades was our best chance in a long time to see if that was a thing that could happen. But the other challenger is Hillary Clinton, who is wildly popular, extremely well known, and leading in the election by like two million actual votes. So Sanders has no chance at all to be solidly and unquestionably ahead in the popular vote. Well, not unless he gets blowouts in New York and California, but there is no reason to believe that is a thing that will happen.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

Just like they didn't make him a delegate to deny people their vote, they made him a super delegate to represent a different group of people who also voted.

It may be "bad" thing to give people who voted 6 years ago a say in the democratic candidate, or it may not, but it doesn't change that he was made a superdelegate to represent those people, not to deprive people of their votes now.

If you think the Democratic party has superdelegates because superdelegates are supposed to represent the interests of voters in previous elections and not because they are supposed to represent the interests of the party leadership, you are just... wrong. You're not even wrong in the "that's what they say, but you're wrong because they're lying" sort of way. You are wrong in the "the party leadership disagrees with you" sort of way.

“Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists,” Wasserman Schultz calmly explained.

Debbie Schultz is the current DNC chair. She is a superdelegate because she is a DNC chair (and also because she is a current member of congress, but that isn't a requirement to be a DNC chair so let's ignore that). She was not directly elected to the DNC chair by voters; she was appointed to the position by a huge variety of different DNC members. Many of those DNC members were also not elected by voters, but appointed to their positions by different committees which were also not entirely elected by voters and so on and so on. If you actually trace this madness back to an election, you'll get lots of uncontested runs and/or abysmally low turn-out and absolutely no public campaigning - let alone a campaign platform for voters to even look at.

So right off the bat, no. Just fucking no. At no point did any significant number of people vote to make Debbie Schultz a superdelegate. When she casts her vote as the DNC chair, it will be with zero democratic legitimacy. She is simply too many steps removed from the voters to even pretend that anyone ever seriously chose her to cast a vote on their behalf. Representative democracy is fine and dandy, but there are genuine limits to how many steps removed someone is and how convoluted the process can be before the answer is "no, fuck you, that's completely disenfranchising."

But even once you get over that hump, Debbie Schultz is a superdelegate who believes her role as a superdelegate is to protect insiders from outsiders. She very specifically does not believe her role is to represent the few and distant voters who helped her secure her position. She does not believe that thing you said. She believes that thing I said.

[MGuy]

I'm just gonna say it looks bad. Very very bad and they should probably be trying to sweep the super delegate thing under the rug. I've heard and seen more and more people talking about voting trump or just writing in Sanders on their ballots if he doesn't win and these super delegate shenanigans are only making it worse.

[Schleiermacher]

The fun keeps coming!

[hyzmarca]

If you think the Democratic party has superdelegates because superdelegates are supposed to represent the interests of voters in previous elections and not because they are supposed to represent the interests of the party leadership, you are just... wrong. You're not even wrong in the "that's what they say, but you're wrong because they're lying" sort of way. You are wrong in the "the party leadership disagrees with you" sort of way.

Isn't representing the interests of party leadership pretty much the entire reason that parties exist?

[tussock]

Parties exist because if half the people in congress all agree to block-vote on everything, then they decide all policy and new laws on their own and that's all that ever gets passed. Either you're in that group, or why the fuck would anyone vote for you?

The answer being that you're in the other party, with different a policy set, and sometimes your guys get the majority and can block-vote your own stuff instead. Or maybe you have a system that supports more than two parties, where you get specialists around environmental policy and old white men's biases and various other things.

Parties themselves exist to organise the bargaining systems around building each voting block's policy set. Which is why populist outsiders running for leader fuck it all up. There's not actually a functional majority in congress for building a giant wall and making Mexico pay for it, or throwing out all the Muslims, for instance, even if that's what The Don has just promised everyone.

[DSMatticus]

If you think the Democratic party has superdelegates because superdelegates are supposed to represent the interests of voters in previous elections and not because they are supposed to represent the interests of the party leadership, you are just... wrong. You're not even wrong in the "that's what they say, but you're wrong because they're lying" sort of way. You are wrong in the "the party leadership disagrees with you" sort of way.

Isn't representing the interests of party leadership pretty much the entire reason that parties exist?

No. Well, yes, historically. But historically black people weren't allowed to vote. We're trying to get better about this sort of shit.

But the reason a democratic society should make use of political parties (instead of being one of the many things we need to get rid of, like the electoral college) is because they are a way for voters with similar interests to pool their efforts behind a single coalition capable of representing those interests in government. If your political party makes a point of telling you to go fuck yourself and that they're going to ignore you no matter what you say, you should be looking for ways to dismantle your party and start over. Particularly in the U.S. system, which can only really sustain two parties to begin with, and those two parties are massively entrenched.

[Mechalich]

I wouldn't consider it unreasonable for the party apparatus to have some small direct voice in the primary process - a handful of delegates capable of breaking an effective tie or perhaps anointing a single candidate in the scenario where many candidates acquired substantial numbers of delegates (as unlikely as that would be). The democratic party currently has superdelegates representing 15% of all delegates, which is far too high. A fifth of that would be something defensible. I doubt I would argue for that proposition, but it wouldn't be a big deal.

Caucuses account for 501, or 13%, of the voted for delegates in the democratic primary, and in all honesty that number ought to be reduced to zero, as caucuses are wildly undemocratic and their wildly undemocratic nature also serves as a justification for the existence of superdelegates.

[DSMatticus]

Caucuses account for 501, or 13%, of the voted for delegates in the democratic primary, and in all honesty that number ought to be reduced to zero, as caucuses are wildly undemocratic and their wildly undemocratic nature also serves as a justification for the existence of superdelegates.

Caucuses are not an opportunity for voters to fuck over superdelegates. Caucuses are an opportunity for one group of voters to fuck over another group of voters. It's about as justified as stabbing a stabbing victim. "The other dude already stuck him in the lung, so I thought it'd be okay if I stuck him in the kidney."

The real solution to the Trump fiasco (lots of candidates in the field, the leader is the least favorite option of a majority of voters) is just something like preference ordering. FPTP is pretty fundamentally bullshit, and it can produce candidates who are absolutely hated by an arbitrarily large percentage of voters involved in the process.

[Mechalich]

Caucuses are not an opportunity for voters to fuck over superdelegates. Caucuses are an opportunity for one group of voters to fuck over another group of voters. It's about as justified as stabbing a stabbing victim. "The other dude already stuck him in the lung, so I thought it'd be okay if I stuck him in the kidney."

Each undemocratic departure allowed makes it easier to allow another one. The 'superdelegates are undemocratic' argument is countered with the 'but the system is already undemocratic because of the caucuses' argument - which is a large part of what Frank was saying above. And in the current democratic case specifically the superdelegates serve as a pro-establishment distortion that stands in opposition to the anti-establishment distortion of the caucuses (though the value of the superdelegates is greater).

Both ought to be removed (or at least drastically reduced) but it should be done at the same time.

The real solution to the Trump fiasco (lots of candidates in the field, the leader is the least favorite option of a majority of voters) is just something like preference ordering. FPTP is pretty fundamentally bullshit, and it can produce candidates who are absolutely hated by an arbitrarily large percentage of voters involved in the process.

The Republican primary system is undemocratically distorted six ways from Sunday. Had the current republican scenario unfolded on the democratic side Trump would still have the most votes but he would have amassed a weak plurality around 30% and a contested convention would be a certainty.

FPTP is a major problem, since if you have proportionally representative primaries and you have more than 2 candidates with any level of traction it probably becomes impossible for any one candidate to produce a majority. Fixes for the primary system are more complicated than for the general though, since the primaries occur over a prolonged period of time.

[Maxus]

I'm wondering if the Republican convention is going to drop the nuke and declare proportional allocation of delegates and just ride out the explosions. I don't know if they can DO that, even, but it'd be the solution to their Trump problem.

[Username17]

Preference voting is a good thing, but democracy has a lot of failure states beyond the simple FPTP bullshit that we are so familiar with. I mean, we know the story of Egypt and how they failed to craft a democracy by having a half dozen major candidates such that they ended up with a runoff between the Muslim Brotherhood and the remnants of Mubarik's fascist regime, two groups that were justifiably hated and feared by a majority of the population and were overtly hostile to secular democracy. But there are many other failure states.

Consider the Reform Party. That ws that wacky thing Ross Prot created. It didn't get any states, but it got millions of votes. With a more coherent vision and a less crazy leader it could have contested congressional seats all over the country. It could have been like the UK's Lib-Dems before they killed themselves by climbing into bed with Cameron. Anyway, what actually happened was a group of Republicans registered as Reform Party and voted themselves into positions of leadership and pretty much dismantled the thing. Yeah, that's a real thing that could happen. Republicans and Republican leaning independents could switch their registration to Democrat in order to slate vote for Romney and his cronies, leaving a skeleton crew behind in the Republican party to vote up Santorum or some fucking thing and leave us with party nominations of Republican 1 and Republican 2. The more delegates you have from farther back, the harder that kind of hostile takeover becomes.

And yeah, that sounds outlandish, but that kind of shit has actually happened and political parties do need defenses against them.

A bunch of the weird bullshit that the Republican side has in their rules is to protect themselves from the other kind of attack, a slow usurpation by a small and dedicated cadre of lunatics who drive around to find meetings of the party that are sparsely attended so they can swoop in and pack committee chairs with loyalists. Which sounds like a conspiracy theory, but that was what Ron Paul's team was actually doing. So the Republican party stripped their regional committee members of their voting rights and made a rule that you needed to win outright majorities of delegates in eight states to even be on the ballot. This effectively killed the weird and underhanded Ron Paul revolution, but those same rules have a serious chance to create a Republican convention with Donald Trump as the only name on the ballot. Hence the Republican rule committee is now openly discussing changing the rules to fuck over Trump.

There are no simple answers to fixing elections, because there are radical groups of various sizes who are actively looking for ways to break whatever system you have. And they are literally willing to spend decades and billions of dollars breaking your system. While the Democratic Party could obviously be improved, within the context of contesting FPTP national elections on behalf of the interesys of a diverse group of people, many of whom are minorities, the Democratic Party does fairly OK. It isn't flirting with any gross failure states of democracy at the moment. The Republican party is flirting with several.

-Username17

[tussock]

Didn't the Democrats basically do that with the Greens in the US? Overwhelm the actual green vote to put Dems in charge of the thing and just tell everyone not to vote Green because it won't work.

[RobbyPants]

Fixes for the primary system are more complicated than for the general though, since the primaries occur over a prolonged period of time.

Is there a reason this has to be the case? Is this just a case of tradition? Candidates are able to communicate almost instantaneously and travel much faster.

Would it be feasible to run all 50 on the same day?

[Kaelik]

Didn't the Democrats basically do that with the Greens in the US? Overwhelm the actual green vote to put Dems in charge of the thing and just tell everyone not to vote Green because it won't work.

Pretty sure that didn't happen, and what happened is that no one ever voted for Green, except the one time a good chunk did, and George W Bush got elected, and then everyone sort of spontaneously agreed in the future to vote for the lesser of two evils no matter what.