Have at it. The end of the line for Marco? Yet another repudiation of the high road by Republican voters, and with it the self-described road for Governor K.? What are your thoughts?
Please share widely!
Reality-based commentary on politics.
It would be a great train wreck for the Republicans and amazing theatre.
Failing that, I remain that Trump, like Le Pen, has a hard ceiling that is not initially evident, and his presence on the ticket will be an anchor for everyone else in the party.
If Rubio doesn’t quit this week, he’s a moron. So there’s a good chance he’ll stay in it.
…contested convention. But yeah, that would be a fine train wreck to watch. Then too, if Bernie nails it in Ohio, Illinois, and so on, it will be delicious to watch as the “committed delegates” jump ship. If you think the attacks are vicious now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
…if nobody comes in with a majority.
that there are no brokers any more. So contested, but not brokered.
Admittedly a fine point and I’m not sure I care.
I guess I figure the Dem convention will be contested as two candidates will likely be placed in nomination, but not brokered because one of them will get an outright majority on the first ballot.
and this distinction is more substantial.
If a majority of delegates are pledged to Clinton at the start of the convention the results are preordained by party rules. No contest.
The primary is contested; with such a result the convention is not.
it is correct to call it a “contested” convention, since there aren’t brokers anymore to determine the nomination (as there were in older conventions a century ago).
If it gets to that point (more likely now with the Kasich win in OH), the contest will be contested among elected delegates and a much smaller number of uncommitted delegates most of whom will be free to vote the way they want after the first and subsequent ballots. It will be amazing political theater, even if I’m less sure about its benefit for American democracy.
Certainly if it comes to this there will be people from all camps wheeling and dealing behind the scenes and trying to persuade delegations to flip to their guy. Those are the people I would call brokers.
Barring an IL or MO upset, she has effectively shut out Bernie this round and by decisive numbers in places be spent a lot of time and money. Trump won every state except Ohio by pretty large margins and was briefly neck and neck with Kasich during the early reports. I don’t see a path for either Kasich or Cruz to get to the convention, short of joining forces ahead of time and even that seems unlikely to stop the Donald at this point. We have seen a major hijacking of an American political party.
Watch “Baker Versus Coakley”, an establishment Democrat with an uninspiring message runs against a charismatic Republican businessman promising change.
Repeat after me:
Donald Trump is not Charlie Baker.
Hillary Clinton is not Martha Coakley.
Finally, for completeness, Bernie Sanders is not Don Berwick.
Precisely because Bernie’s message is about the full spectrum of economic maladies and progressive remedies, despite all the talk that he is single issue, I present Don Berwick as a real single issue candidate.
Brokers are people who come to the table in the smoke filled room with delegates to sell. Not people seeking to persuade delegates no longer committed to a candidate.
I don’t blame you for not knowing but the fact that you don’t suggest the distinction between brokered and contested is valid.
The sources seem to suggest that my definition is valid, though with the primary system your definition is likely to never apply again.
In some states, the winning candidate gets to choose the delegates (he or she) won. In other states, they are chosen some other way.
For states where the former is the case, I would expect the candidate has enormous sway over those particular delegates. For example, Randal Paul, Mike Huckabee, Carleton Sneed Fiorina, John Bush, and Marco Rubio might encourage their delegates [hand picked or provided by the state] to support a Kasich/Cruz ticket, whereas Benjamin Carson, Sr. might encourage his to support D.J. Drumpf. The six uncommitted are anybody’s guess.
Now, are the failed primary candidates “brokers”? Well, it depends if you consider delegate loyalty to the candidate to be so strong that the candidate himself gets to broker them or not.
In short: I think it’s muddy. I think some delegates will, in fact, be brokered away in a contested convention.
Do you (or does anyone) know if all the delegates are chosen at a single caucus on the GOP side? One thing that has confused me is hearing that some delegates for a candidate may not actually be for that candidate personally. How would that happen. For Dems we have separate caucuses for the two candidates and the campaigns are able to vet delegates. Presumably this makes for very little chance of a pledged delegate being faithless on the convention floor, at least for the first ballot.
I was trying to imagine a situation in which Trump has enough bound delegates but that many of those people might personally detest him. Are those people really going to cast their votes for Trump? What if they don’t?
Okay, I take that back, these are Republicans; who know what they will do.
But if they don’t follow their own rules, which require bound delegates to vote as instructed on the first ballot, the only question will be how fast Trump can get an injunction against the entire party. Not if, how fast.
There is no discretion on the first ballot for these delegates.
No doubt Trump would sue, but I think the party could theoretically change the rules before the convention. It seems highly unlikely, but we already well into the domain of the unlikely so who knows.
Over the years there have been many lawsuits from members of organizations alleging that rules were not followed. The decision in those cases are the basis for parliamentary law, and there is quite a bit of it.
The upshot is that the members of private associations have definite rights that may not be abridged.
I do not pretend to know what the party rules are in this case or how they can be changed. However, if the party violates those rules and the plaintiff is Mr. Donald Trump, I predict a world of pain.
It will be nothing like that little bit of parliamentary skulduggery against the other upstart, Mark Fisher. It will be nuclear war.
Do the Koch brothers sit down with Sheldon Adelson and some other billionaires and iron things out? Does the Freedom Caucus call the shots with a side of Sarah Palin? I guess we will find out who the new party bosses are, if there are any.
… between a ‘brokered’ convention and a ‘contested’ convention ( though there is precious little history to suggest the terms haven’t been used interchangeable) whereby in a ‘brokered’ convention a new candidate, who did not involve him (or her) self in the primaries is put forward by backroom ‘brokers’… in the present instance, Mitt Rmoney has been mentioned, for example. Whereas in a ‘contested’ convention only primary contestants (who’ve presumably received real and actual votes/delegates) would fight it out for delegates to switch to them. That’s the distinction people are making…
unfortunately.
it’s looking like Trump and Clinton are both winning Florida big. Not really a surprise (except for maybe the margins: +20% for Trump and +35% for Clinton), but probably necessary in order for either to have at least a “good” night.
If so, that would mean Ohio would have to be a Sanders blowout in order for him not to be sad, right?
EOM
The Democratic contests are all proportional, which means that Clinton’s blowout win in Florida almost guarantees that she’ll have more delegates coming out of today.
Plus, as of now (8:30) it looks like North Carolina is another blowout win for Clinton. So I’m not sure how Clinton doesn’t come out of this extending her delegate lead substantially.
That Sanders does unexpectedly well somewhere (Missouri?) and gets 51% of 10 delegates and a loving media cycle. Meanwhile Clinton won 60% of the 100 delegates in other states, as expected, and runs up the delegate score.
Media loves, wants, cries for a comeback. Eight years ago, Clinton would edge Obama out in a big primary, and he would clean up in a red state caucus. The media’s interest is for a horse race, not for a smart race.
Though I do expect that Sanders will do well in several of the states coming up in the next few weeks. There are many caucus states, including in the West, where I think Sanders will do well.
That will give Sanders good press, but the problem is that there’s just not enough delegates in these states to allow a comeback. A string of victories after today will allow him to press his case, though, which I think ultimately helps Clinton as a candidate.
The virtue of awarding the delegates on a proportional basis is revealed by the fiasco in the GOP. I suppose the GOP rule was to make sure that the next Romney would secure the nomination more quickly — and is a result of their search for “reasons” for 2012 that do not indict their appeal to voters. Trump now seems to have used this rule to hoist them by their own petard. They are going to have to abandon their effort that stop Trump and instead focus on pr eventing him from losing them the Senate.
…exactly what that means state by state I think varies with regard to exactly how the math works by district, statewide, etc.
So Rubio’s career is over.
Also, Chris Matthews suggested that Clinton pick Kasich as her VP as some sort of grand unity ticket.
So that ain’t happening.
I do see Brian Sandoval as the next Republican to watch the MSM speculation machine focus on. He’s Latino, pro choice and pro equality, so DOA in the GOP. Maybe Baker gets a similar boomlet too.
What you said largely true, plus she’s a woman.
Rubio a second ago: “we had, uh, have a great team….”
Although he seems like a reasonable and decent enough guy (certainly compared to the rest of the crowd), he is hardcore conservative. It’s laughable and scary that he’s seen as a moderate.
Kasich is anti-enviro, anti-woman, and why would a POTUS want to put that much of a literal target on her back?
by reversing his stand on something. Gee, as if that would be something new on the Clinton ticket. Between the two of them they could share both sides of all positions twice.
There was a unity ticket right before the Civil War, but Kasich is still clearly a pretty conservative GOP. Only temperment makes him seem moderate.
Nothing to see there.
He is talented, and the speech last night, though none of you can admit it, was very good indeed. I suspect he runs for governor in Florida in 2018, and that we seem him nationally again thereafter.
I will agree that the speech was good and that he can be a very compelling and charismatic candidate under the right conditions. But he’s a lousy debater, easily flustered, and he just assumed everyone would love him. He ran an interesting strategy to be everyone’s second choice, which worked well for Kerry in 2004 but couldn’t be recalibrated to account for Trump. He very cowardly abandoned his own commitment to immigration reform and failed to use his personal narrative to counter the bigotry of Trump.
I say his career his over, he can make a comeback as Governor but he’ll be in his 50s the next chance he gets to run for president and the spin cycle will be focused on somebody new.
But whether he’s talented remains an open question. He’s been running for almost a year, and has consistently underperformed.
He got better toward the end, so there’s that.
It just wasn’t the year for his kind of candidacy. If Trump wins in November, he is done because that Republican party will have ceased to be.
If Trump loses, I would not count him out.
@jconway: It is a little odd to say he will be too old next time– his 50s!– when the Dems have just nominated a 69-year-old, who just beat out a 75-year-old, for the nomination. I think part of Rubio’s problems this time around is that he just seemed too young. Cruz is barely older, but looks older. Rubio’s campaign “profile” photo looks like it is from the school yearbook.
That concession speech was straight out of the “morning in America” playbook that has been the hallmark of successful GOP Presidential candidates after Nixon. After a Trump/Cruz loss, people will notice that and will remember it next time around.
Or maybe Rubio misspoke.
But did he just imply that slaves overcame slavery through hard work?
…and that the slaves themselves didn’t allow their spirit to be broken by their condition.
It seems like the typical Republican attempt of trying to shoehorn everything into the American Dream mythology. The sentence about slaves seems clumsier than the others.
Well, I guess we have an answer to what the shocking Michigan Democratic primary results would mean for future races: not much.
It looks like it was a fluke, probably driven by the fact that pollsters had a hard time modeling it since the state had delegates stripped from them in 2008 and it had a weird turnout eight years ago.
Tonight’s results look to be generally consistent with previous primaries and are hardly unexpected.
Maybe Ohio, but generally no surprises.
There was speculation that Michigan revealed that something is different about this cycle which the polls could not see. Young people for Sanders who only have cell phones, etc. Tonight seems to suggest that the polls are fine and Michigan was a fluke.
thanks
Not really any surprises tonight. My point was just that Michigan was legitimately a surprise, which might have meant that polls would also be off for states following Michigan.
Obviously, that has not been the case tonight, and it’s clear that Michigan was pretty much a fluke.
The DA who helped Rahm Emmanuel cover up a police murder was voted out by a nearly 30% margin in a Democratic primary. She’s lucky she didn’t get third place to the other challenger. Kim Foxx is a whip sharp progressive who will lead that department out of the abyss of racism and cover ups and into the light of transparency and due process.
An incredible watershed for that city and its long dark history of racist and corrupt law enforcement aided and abetted by the justice system. Unfortunately Clerk of Courts Dorothy Brown kept her job despite a federal probe and three terms of corruption and incompetence.
and also the reminder that there are a lot of interesting and important local races decided tonight in these states, in addition to the presidential primaries.
as I pack it in for the night Hillary has won Florida, N. Carolina, Ohio and Illinois. Missouri is too close to call. ( P.S. Terry, you lost our bet. I hit it on the nose for my girl !)
Congratulations to both Bernie and Hillary for running an issues campaign and I hope they will now both focus on the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
MSNBC has just called Missouri for Hillary giving her a clean sweep of all Second Super Tuesday races.
What a stunning victory ! Congratulations, Madam Secretary !
You go, girl !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
The vote totals out of Ohio are pretty scary looking ahead for the general.
I got these from NYT and it’s still early so there may be adjustments, but damn.
Kasich – 953,846
Trump – 726,769
Cruz – 267,002
Rubio – 59,245
Total – 2,006,862
Clinton – 676,597
Sanders – 511,903
Total – 1,188,500
In 2008, Clinton won with 1,259,620 to Obama’s 1,055,769. (2,315,389 total). In 2012, there were 1,213,879 votes cast for Republicans and 1,045,624 cast in 2008.
Maybe it’s simply that Kasich was in the race and Trump is such a spectacle, but there just seems to be no Democratic enthusiasm.
In 2008, Clinton won with 1,259,620 to Obama’s 1,055,769. (2,315,389 total).
In 2016, Clinton won with 676,597 to Sander’s 511,903. (1,188,500 total).
Looks like low turnout for Dems in Ohio….
Ohio has an open primary so it is not the case that everyone voting for a Democrat or Republican is actually a member of that party. There is no question that many Independents and Democrats voted for Kasich this time around.
It appears that 7% of the Republican primary voters identified themselves as Democrats and 28% as Independents in a NY Times exit poll while back in 2008 it was 3%/17% respectively in a CNN exit poll. Likewise, there were more Republicans voting in the Democratic primary back in 2008. So it’s really not quite so scary as you might think.
The fact that it is open makes it scarier, I think.
The Dems as a group did not inspire people to come out for them – nowhere near the levels that they did in 2008 (in which Obama carried the state in the general). The Republicans did inspire serious turnout this year, much more than in 2012 or 2008.
Now maybe the increased crossover was just because of Kasich or because of people trying to defeat Trump (or maybe support Trump thinking he would be easier to beat in the general). Unless a lot of the people who voted in the Republican primary won’t vote for the Republican nominee in the general, I don’t think it looks that great for Dems. It’s always better when you can show you can bring people out to vote for you rather than trying to get them to come out to vote against someone.
it could be that most voters did not view this as a contested primary, no one wanted to run against Clinton. What we had is a message candidate who was also an opportunity for people to also make a non-Clinton vote. That’s what Sanders candidacy was. With that, he’s done more and pushed the conversation, but that’s all it is. You see the results with Democrats around the country. You;ll get a different result in the general.
This line of argument is getting awfully speculative. There is no point in getting scared when there isn’t any actual data. It isn’t at all clear that lower turnout really means there is a lack of enthusiasm. But there is direct exit polling and ancedotal evidence that suggests that many people are just trying to stop Trump. That doesn’t tell you what is going to happen in the Fall, but if Trump ends up the nominee, one would guess that they aren’t going to be voting for him in the General Election.
The two primaries run separate and parallel, and are really no indication of general turnout. In Ohio especially there was probably a lot of favorite son promoting and if he’s not the nominee, many could come back to us, especially since Kasich and Trump are very different.
Theory A: Turnout equates to enthusiasm in the general. We are so screwed; let’s panic.
Theory B: Turnout correlates with how interesting the race is.
My money is on B.
It’s been pretty clear for a while that the nomination is Clinton’s to lose, so (present company and our like elsewhere excepted), yawn.
But on the red side: Yow!