It’s an interesting albeit depressing article. In a nutshell, it’s saying that the election will be won or lost on incredibly superficial grounds – that although Hillary is centrist and experienced and therefore should have the most mainstream appeal, Trump will attack her on superficial and irrelevant minutiae because he’s too uninformed to debate actual policy, so personal attacks is all he knows.
This is probably true, but the question is whether this is a winning strategy in a national election, or is Trump just going to embarrass himself even further? Just how stupid does Robinson think the voters are?
Well, if he wants to make it a character war, Clinton is probably the only person he can beat. And since he can’t beat her on issues or experience, that’s all he has. If he actually succeeded in beating her on those grounds, it’s not like she wouldn’t have had it coming. He approval ratings are near Trump’s level of awful.
So if the public has a choice between two ethically challenged slimeballs, do you pick the strong one or the weak one? I don’t think trying to look like the adult will help Clinton in this case.
But here’s the thing. Do you pick the strong one or the weak one at hurling insults, or do you pick the slimeball with a pretty distinguished political record and a strong centrist platform, versus the slimeball with zero political experience or policy knowledge who is also demonstrably a racist bigot and a dishonest self-serving crook?
I didn’t see it posted here yet, but Rubio won Puerto Rico today by a large margin, taking all 23 delegates at stake there.
Maybe significant in that it could give him enough hope to keep things going at least until the 15th. And it could help him with the Puerto Rican population in Florida’s primary.
What’s interesting is Clinton is considered centrist. I consider myself an “establishment” Republican, and I’m voting for Clinton in November (I voted in the Republican primary here in Virginia) largely on competency/not-being-crazy grounds, but she is definitely far left of where I want my President to be.
I think she’ll be more adept at foreign policy than Obama because she will correctly understand it on day one, whereas Obama honestly still doesn’t understand that the relationship between independent states is fundamentally different than the sort of relationships he’s good at building to win elections. I think that will lead her to be somewhat more Hawkish than Obama, some would say more “conservative”, but I don’t necessarily think hawkish/dovishness has to map on left/right lines.
But at least in terms of her other policy positions she’s pretty far to the left. The Sanders people call her centrist, and the Hillary people will do the same in the general to attract independents, but if you look at her actual history of positions taken and her voting record in the Senate she’s among the more liberal of all Senators during the time she was in office.
Basically the one jurisdiction where the Party Establishment was able to keep in command and deliver, because due to both cultural AND political peculiarities of the place the kind of voters Trump and Cruz appeal to do not even realize there is a presidential primary, and neither of them bothered doing any actual campaigning. Like, they presumed they’ve got nothing to look for among us.
So to update delegate numbers, (and they won’t match my earlier post which was still relying on some unfinalized results that have now been finalized from states that voted days ago) based on the current projections in Maine Bernie will win 65-35, and come away with 16 to 9 delegates.
(Not saying I’m a prognosticator but I hypothetically suggested in another thread that Hillary would lose Maine by about this margin, but there was no polling really in Maine to go on.)
So over the four election span we have:
Hillary - 75 delegates
Bernie - 59 delegates
Totals would now be 686 Clinton, 469 Sanders, 217 delegate margin. Sanders % of remainder needed moves slightly up to 54% (well 53.7, but I’ve been rounding that) from 53%.
It’s still not entirely clear which of the two Democrats the caucuses benefit (it’s obvious Trump on the GOP side does terribly with caucus goers compared to his primary performances, especially closed caucuses versus open ones.)
Clinton has won three caucuses (Iowa, Nevada, American Samoa.)
Sanders has won five caucuses (Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas and Maine.)
If Sanders does have a slight caucus advantage, it likely won’t matter. Only 8 elections left are caucuses, and only one in a state with a significant number of delegates (Washington.) Two are in territories which always seat a very small number of delegates and a few others are in the smallest population states (Alaska, Wyoming, Hawaii and Idaho.)
Well, I said it was interesting, not that Cruz would win. Either way he came in better than recent polls indicated, and Trump seems to maintain around a 1/3 share of the votes. Every loss (or even close win) costs more to him than his rivals, because his image is based more on being a “Winner” than anything. As long as there’s enough of a contest down the line, and his rivals can keep chipping off states here and there, we could end up with a brokered convention.