Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

It caused a concussion.

Speaking of rehashing, Trump supporters are now insisting that the polls are undersampling them to account for a rise in independents.

Edited, Oct 26th 2016 2:20pm by lolgaxe

Can't speak to what Trump supporters are saying (I've honestly been actively avoiding political news for a while now. Just too freaking depressing). But looking at the polls, it's likely going to come down to whether or not Johnson's actually going to get the number of votes that the polls indicate, or whether those polling numbers are the result of people expressing their displeasure with their choice in a poll, but may not be willing to throw their vote away in the actual election. In pretty much every battleground state (and no, I'm not going to go look them all up just to double check), the margin between Trump and Clinton is somewhere around half of the number of voters polling for Johnson. So yeah, if he actually gets 6-8% of the vote in those states, Trump is toast. But if not, things could be quite a bit of a surprise on Nov. 8th. I'll also point out that in those same polls in which third party candidates are present, Stein consistently gets maybe 1% or 2% of the vote. So not a lot of wiggle room for potential liberal leaning voters for Clinton to pick up, but a ton of conservative leaning voters for Trump (seriously would take a lot of lip biting on the part of those voters though).

And yes, I get the whole "you say that every time gbaji!", but Utah is showing some interesting numbers that support this as a possible trend. Lots of talk about how the Democrats might pick up the state, usually while failing to mention that there's some local popular conservative guy who's running only in Utah who's polling at like 25%. Do we really think that 25% of the voters in Utah are actually going to vote for someone they know has absolutely zero chance of winning (cause, you know, not even on the ballot anywhere else). It's a good bet that most of those voters are just making a point in the polls, but will vote for Trump in the election because they know that voting otherwise will give the win to Clinton.

But hey. I could totally be wrong (hell, it's a good possibility even!). But I'm seeing this pattern in polling all over the place. It could be an honest move by voters towards a third party candidate (think Nader here). But Johnson is no Nader IMO. Smart money says Clinton wins in a landslide, but if there was any election cycle where you could say that the polls are very misleading, this would be it. And you know, I say that every election, so I've gotta point out the possibility this time around. Eventually, I'll be right and then everyone will call me a genius! Right?

Of course, that would mean... Trump. Gah! I'll sometimes, in a random conversation with friends or co-workers, just say "Two words: President Trump", just to scare them. It usually works. Then I cackle. Loudly. Then I think I sob. Yeah. Definitely that.

There's not much talk about Clinton winning Utah, there's considerable talk about Trump LOSING Utah. Clinton is opening a field office there to force Trump to play defense but the real story is that any win by Trump would likely be razor thin and he couldn't afford to lose Utah's 6 EVs. Thus him wasting one of the final days of the campaign with Pence in Utah begging people to "come home" to Trump.

Utah has some interesting demographics that make that 25% very possible. Mormons have a particular dislike for Trump (also helping to make Arizona competitive). Also, if it looks like Trump will lose nationally it's easier to cast a protest vote, pat yourself on the back for your convictions, and not associate yourself with a loser.

Also, Johnson has drawn a fair bit from the more liberal wing of voters (younger, socially liberal, ~25% minority, etc). Assuming that they'll break as a majority for Trump is deluding yourself. Currently, the amount of "undecideds" and third party voters would have to break 4:1 towards Trump for him to catch up. I wouldn't hold your breath.

I'm guessing the lemon is the one that didn't rape multiple tweens.

I think that it's objectively true that Clinton would be harder to impeach, as her reaction would be to avoid culpability and obfuscate the process, while trump would more likely shoot the accuser on live TV.

Every turd has an aluminum lining. Or something.

Speaking of turds, Newt Gingrich, the serial adulterer, accused Megyn Kelly of being fascinated with sex when she brought up the assault charges being leveled at Trump.

Edited, Oct 27th 2016 10:03am by lolgaxe

Ted Cruz says that if Hillary wins the election, the republicans will just take their ball and go home. Link



But other, cooler heads disagree

Guess the whole "let the new President pick the new judge" strategy didn't work quite as well as McConnell and crew thought it would.

What an odd way of asking for more funding.

Clinton is the rotten apple, because her methods are rotten to the core. Trump is the sour lemon because just thinking about him puts a sour taste in your mouth. I find them both kinda fascinating in that Clinton has a perfectly maintained exterior, but is clearly "bad" on the inside, once you peel away the outer layers, while Trump looks and smells terrible from outside, but (at least as far as we know so far), hasn't done anything close to the level of job applicable corruption.



Well, for what it's worth, I actually disagree with that (shocker!). Impeachment requires a willful violation of one's oath of office. The president can't be charged with crimes while in office, so anything either of them did prior to taking office arguably doesn't really matter (at least in that regard, public pressure is a totally different animal). Impeachment has to do with what one does while in office. And if the former president Clinton is any indication, nothing we even speculate about Trump doing in office would likely rise to the level of impeachment (much less successful removal from office). Clinton on the other hand?

Yes, I get that he's talking about public willingness to do something like impeach the first woman president on purely social grounds, but if we were actually looking objectively, I'd argue that Clinton would be far more likely to commit an impeachable offense while in office than Trump. Hell. I think she's so far into the world of corrupt politics that she can't avoid continuing it. There's a certain point in such a career, where one has no choice but to continue using the same dirty tactics to maintain power that they've been using all along. Otherwise, the whole thing comes crashing down. She has to keep threatening people with whatever dirt she has, and providing for those who've bought influence from her in the past, or they turn on her.

It's honestly my biggest concern with a Clinton presidency. It's not really about her party policies (although I'm not happy with those, obviously). It's what she might do in terms of abuse of power just to protect herself and her family's legacy. Who must she continue to provide favors for to buy their silence and support? What would she do with her power to gain leverage over more people in order to keep them at bay? While the immediate effects on the average citizen may not be that significant, the corrosive effect of that form of politics in the White House can be huge. I honestly don't even want to think about how much of our policies (especially foreign policy) will more or less be subject to who can pay her the most. We've already seen how donations to the Clinton foundation were used to buy influence when she was SoS. Imagine how much she can charge if she's president? And imagine how much more broadly impacting the results might be.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with even the idea that our president might be making decisions about whether to pursue a treaty, or start a war, or set or remove tariffs, or any of a number of things that a president has vast direct influence over, based on how much a given party has paid up to her family. Actually, I know I'm not comfortable at all with it. The best we can hope for with a Clinton presidency is to endure it and hope things can be fixed afterwards.

Sure. But one of those was pure speculation, while the other has some serious evidence of past behavior supporting it. It's one thing to think "Hey, this guy has family connections, who also have business connections which maybe might be used for influence peddling" and be a bit concerned about the possibility. It's a whole different animal when you have direct and strong evidence that this exact form of influence peddling was used by a given politician in the past, the structural components of the process of influence peddling are still completely intact, and the players involved are the same players said politician will be engaging with as president.

I'm not aware of any evidence showing a foreign party paying money to any fund associated with the Bush family, followed almost immediately by arranged meetings by a Bush family member in office between said foreign party and someone with influence in the government. We know this happened, multiple times, while Clinton was Secretary of State. And the Clintons have not only not promised to do anything to distance themselves, they're more or less going "what's the problem?" and pretending it's just not an issue at all.

Remember when Liberals spent years complaining about Cheney's connection to Halliburton, despite Cheney having removed all financial connections to the company prior to taking office and placing the remainder of his assets in a blind trust? Now imagine that he not only didn't do that, but maintained direct financial connections to the company, had family members running it, and wasn't just vice president but was president? Yeah. Now imagine that this isn't just some company that gains profit based on government contracts, but is a charity that can take money from any source, and provide funds to any target. The scope is much more massive, and much more global. The worst Halliburton could have represented was the potential for the president to choose to engage in activities that would require said contract work, thus padding profits (or course, he'd still have to get congress to go along as well). But no foreign influence could result from this. The Clinton foundation creates the ability for anyone with money anywhere in the globe to buy influence with our government. Iran doesn't want us shutting down their nuke program? They could spend hundreds of billions of dollars building concealed sites that we might bomb anyway, or just a few billion to the right charity (or even just a few hundred million would likely be sufficient, cause... lets not be greedy, right?). Russia wants us to back off on the whole Ukraine thing? Give a donation! The potential abuse is pretty much unlimited.

And again, this would just be speculation except that we already know that it has been used for just this kind of purpose already. The only difference is that Clinton will be in a position as president to directly make executive orders to benefit donors, rather than just arrange some meetings, and make some recommendations on their behalf as she could do as SoS.

Which, you know, is where the potential of impeachment comes in. And yeah, I suppose we could speculate that Trump might engage in executive actions that benefit parties (foreign or otherwise) that do something that benefit his businesses. But that's speculation. Also, the means by which one may benefit a business is far less direct than how one benefits a charity. People don't just write checks to businesses because they're feeling philanthropic or something. So it's a bit harder and more indirect to funnel funds into a for-profit business. A charity? Just write a check. It's set up specifically for that purpose. And while you may think that writing a check to a charity is "good" in a way that taking some action that adds to the bottom line of a business is not, that's not the point here. It's about whether there's a quid pro quo involved that matters. What action is taken to buy that response isn't relevant to the potential for corruption and abuse of power.

I honestly don't think she'll be able to avoid this, because if past actions and her own statements and response to the criticisms of those actions are any indication, she doesn't actually seem to think there's anything wrong with any of this. She actually seems to think that it's perfectly fine to reward people, organizations, or even countries who donate to that charity with whatever she has in her power to do. It's honestly hard to even imagine it, but that's the perception I get from all of this. She actually thinks it's ok. The "good" done with the money being in the charity apparently outweighs the problematic means by which it got there. Maybe I'm grossly misreading things, but it really does look like she's spent so long inside the power broker environment that she doesn't seem to know where that line you're not supposed to cross is.

Cause she looks like she crossed it long ago.

My concern is that "start WW3 to distract from domestic issues" seems to be on the table.

I'm not parroting meme material. If I was, I would have linked a bunch of those. Or used a tongue emoji.

I've been watching what she says and I'm legitimately worried that she really is planning to pick a fight with Russia. Granted, it'll likely be over the competing pipelines in Syria(and because she seems to have a lady ***** for regime change over there) rather than just to distract from domestic issues, but that does NOT make me feel any better.

Edited, Oct 29th 2016 12:10pm by Poldaran