Sen Kaine Democratic VP pick

[fengosa]

Hillary is so crooked she needs a Kaine.

Fuck this is just too easy. Thanks, Hillary.

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Trump is going to take Florida. Pretty handily.

Trump has been polling poorly in Florida largely due to the number of hispanics in the state and by poorly we're talking from a historical perspective.

[Wildtree]

Trump is going to take Florida. Pretty handily.

If you think the general election works like the primaries, you're mistaken.

[Abysal]

People really overestimate how much the VP pick increases the odds of winning a state.

She may very well win Virginia but it won't be because of Kaine.

[muto]

Both vice presidents are more electable than Hillary and Trump LUL.

[usiris]

Selection confirms I will not be voting at all this year.

Pro TPP and deregulation, I'm gona pass.

[Chingylol]

Trump has been polling poorly in Florida largely due to the number of hispanics in the state and by poorly we're talking from a historical perspective.

I do think she'll take it. Although the margin isn't that wide.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...635.html#polls

[Zarc]

Strategically brilliant choice.

I really appreciate your posts as of late. It's so nice to read the point-of-view of a person who represents those Republicans who have not lost their mind. Of a Republican who doesn't vote for Trump simply because of party loyalty. Trump is so obviously in the camp of the alt-right, far-right, authoritarian camp of the likes of Putin who has a whole other set of "facts" or "truths" and who doesn't even agree on the very basics like having Liberal democracy as the form of government. In the face of that some differences on the policy positions of the next four years is quite insignificant when it all comes down to it.

[Orbitus]

You understand government? Then surely you must know that Obama Administration policies (enforced by immigration judges appointed by Obama personally) have stripped ICE of enforcement powers in regards to detaining illegals with criminal convictions. This was why 20,000 convicted criminals were set loose in 1 year alone. This stuff wasn't the act of congress it came directly from the Executive Branch and that's a fact.



Ah turning your back on facts that conflict with your adopted narrative? ...you'll fit in well here.

Oh and between you and I, and contrary to what that Orbitus troll said, /whispers I'm not actually a Republican --but SHHHH don't tell him that.

Oh and don't tell him I'm not White either because he loves to call me racist cause ...ya know ...its easier than dealing with those conflicting facts I just spoke of.

Yeah, I am the troll because you literally say every fucking post that you aren't a Republican but then all you do is try to shit on Democrats because you don't like the actual real world. You have been living in a bubble for a very long time. You should just admit that you are a Republican and stop saying that you aren't. We all know you have never vote for anyone but a Republican.

[Blur4stuff]

Any liberal who would bother voting in the first place will do so regardless of VP pick. By the time election day gets here they will be so hateful of Trump that they will show up anyways.

The only demo that's truly in play here is white male. Trump has to get something like 65-70% of them to have a chance at winning. Maybe even more than that. Clinton is clearly trying to put a dent in that.

[akris15]

Any liberal who would bother voting in the first place will do so regardless of VP pick. By the time election day gets here they will be so hateful of Trump that they will show up anyways.

The only demo that's truly in play here is white male. Trump has to get something like 65-70% of them to have a chance at winning. Maybe even more than that. Clinton is clearly trying to put a dent in that.

If you are bored for a few minutes this is a fun little toy to play "what if" with: http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/...-the-election/

[TrumpIsPresident]

Yeah, I am the troll because you literally say every fucking post that you aren't a Republican but then all you do is try to shit on Democrats because you don't like the actual real world. You have been living in a bubble for a very long time. You should just admit that you are a Republican and stop saying that you aren't. We all know you have never vote for anyone but a Republican.

If I had been posting here during the Bush years you would have seen me shitting all over that administration too. Why? Because criticizing the failures of government is what citizens are supposed to do. I'm living in a bubble? Please. You're one of the types here who default response to facts critical of Democrats is to either a) spam the "oh that source" meme b) find a way to invoke Trump or some other Republican or c) just label what other people say as "bullshit" or make some personal attack and then walk off. Seriously, go look at your post history, those three themes are repeated multiple times throughout the first page alone.

And you "know" who I vote for? Just like you "know" I'm White ...right? Please, you are obsessed with going around and bashing on other posters here to the point of vindictively trying to spur off other people's active conversations (like you did in this very thread) by going to one poster and saying "oh no don't talk to that guy hes just herp derp insert meme here". You take shit and make it way too personal and you get away with it only because the moderation here widely leans left. Can you remember the last time you made a post that wasn't some form of hostile attack?

Why don't you just add me to your ignore list and save yourself the trouble? I think that would be best for everybody.

<3

[Matchles]

Oh dear, a pro-TPP Democrat, I'll bet Labour Unions regrets endorsing her now. I guess her opposition to TPP is also soon out the window.

A bought and paid for man from the Banks, I can see why she likes him.

Yeah because the nominee adopting the positions of the VP... that always happens. You know how this works right?

[Hooked]

I read he plays the flute.

[Zenotetsuken]

Nothing wrong with putting American workers in direct competition with sweat shops and literal slave labor.

Nothing at all.

Don't forget about also giving foreign corporations sovereignty on American soil.

[eschatological]

TPP is an interesting bugaboo. For a long time, pro-globalization was squarely in the arena of neo-conservative Republicans, starting with Reagan. Bill Clinton's policy of triangulation changed that somewhat, but NAFTA was still primarily passed by Republicans (132 Republicans for, 43 against) versus Democrats (102 for, 156 against). It passed overwhelmingly in the Senate, 73-26 with one abstention. It only passed because of strong lobbying on Clinton's behalf among labor Democrats.

Trade has, traditionally, been a liberalizing force. It's how Nixon opened up Communist China, it's how the EU has maintained stability in the Balkans, etc. The hope of Democratic NAFTA forces was that taking capitalism worldwide, the regulations which make capitalism work (unionism, minimum wages, worker safety standards) would be forced upon countries seeking to enter into trade with the U.S.

We now know this hasn't happened. International law has no clout, and NAFTA did very little to require anything from its trading partners. The mistake was in hoping America can be competitive because people would want to buy American, but the average American consumer was uninformed and simply wanted cheaper prices. Coincidentally, this coincided with the rise of mega box stores like Walmart, and the fall of mom 'n pop stores in several sectors. In lieu of an international order of labor laws by the UN, organizations like the EU put together fairly stringent labor practices in the EU to keep things equitable, arguing that the free movement of capital required the free movement of people, so companies couldn't simply dumpster dive for the lowest standards without facing potential labor shortages and pressure externally to raise their standards.

But it cannot be argued: more people have been lifted out of poverty, world-wide, by programs like NAFTA and the EU zone. Unfortunately, equity often means the richer countries pay a price until things even out, and the average voter is 1) shortsighted, and 2) not really concerned about bringing the world out of poverty, even if it means more to national security than they thing. TPP is an attempt to bring NAFTA up to the standards of the EU trading zone. It is considered, by almost all economists, to be net positive for the U.S., while requiring more safeguards from trading partners like Vietnam. As a liberal myself, it is my hope that trade can actually be a liberalizing force, because no nation can be forced to adopt fair labor standards, since no theory of international law has ever had any weight in subjugating national sovereignty (and probably won't). The hope is, if there's money on the line, they'll do it themselves.

Of course, that's a pretty nuanced topic, so obviously critics in the Trump and Bernie camps can't discuss it honestly. They simply say, "Bring our jobs back!" without recognizing that to do that, we'd have to either implement a series of tariffs so stringent it'll make us isolationist in a global economy, and the consumer would, on average, have to pay more for clothes, food, cars, electronics, and most products. It is a valid concern to be worried about domestic jobs and fair trade; but the jobs are never coming back until labor standards are raised in those countries where they are lacking (or we roll back a century's worth of worker's rights and agree to pay more for our goods), and the only way to do that is to push them into trade pacts such as TPP.

[Skroe]

I don't know why people thought she'd pick Warren.

I'll tell you why. Because I don't know what it is about this election - maybe some people are just that goddamn frustrated with the world as it is - but there has been this ongoing state of delusion by individuals on the left and the right about the way things are or should be, that are extremely far from accurate or probable. It's basically lying to themselves.

Let's talk how campaigns are run.

The most important campaign since Kennedy in 1960 was Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. Most campaigns did and to a degree still use the classic model Kennedy pioneered. Obama in 2008, undermanned and underresourced in the primary, designed something superior. It leveraged technology and data analysis to get a very high resolution look at metrics in battleground states to, almost by the house, figure out where they needed to campaign to win. It was high technology and took a lot of brilliant people to design - people who have since commercialized and monetized the model and exported it around the world. But that is how Obama beat Hillary in 2008 despite the immense disadvantages he started with. While she was carpetbombing states with adds, he was engaging in a high tech ground game / get out the vote effort that spent resources highly efficiently. McCain, running the classic model, didn't stand a chance in the general. In 2012, Republicans again, ran a most conventional campaign, and lost badly. One of the first things they blamed with the lack of data analysis driving the get out the vote effort. It is, in the modern era, that important. It is how campaigns win.

In the 2016 primary, the following happened: Hillary's staff early on reassembled and grew the Obama 2008/2012 data / ground game team. A few went to sanders, but most went to Hillary. They've been laying the infrastructure for their operation for two years now. Sanders didn't stand a chance in these high population states, despite drawing huge crowds, because the Clinton team algorithmically figured out where to campaign in order to nullify a Sanders crowd. Sanders by contrast, ran a mostly conventional campaign. He employed some mostly useless digital stuff, such as "Facebanking" and Reddit, and $27 donations online, but it didn't make up for the lack of good data that the Clinton campaign had.

Republicans were in a simular boat. Of all the campaigns, the only one who ran a proper, modern, Obama-style campaign was Ted Cruz. For all of his disgust of Obama as a President, he basically constructed a Republican version of the Obama model. It is this that helped him surivive. It could not endure Trump's approach, but it made him the second to last man standing. Everyone else ran the Mitt Romney / John McCain model, that is obsolete.

Why do I mention this? Because the mechanics of winning the election are well researched and analyzed. It's all out there. It does matter. It matters that Clinton did what she did and Sanders did not. But Team Sanders... getting back to what Is aid at first, they didn't care. They believed that Sanders didn't need it because his message was so potent. They never had the introspection enough to stop and ask "woah woah woah, Hillary has a weapon that is going to ruin us and we need to counter it". Romney's team realized that, too late, in 2012, and tried to fix it. But not Sanders. His people convinced themselves that the edifice of his campaign was feature complete and there wasn't this gaping hole.

Picking a Vice President is no different. Warren only makes sense if you so convinced yourself that Hillary needs liberals in general, that she MUST pick Warren. But are Liberals a majority of this country? No. According to Gallup, they're the smallest voter group. Are liberals in battleground states in sufficient numbers to be more meaningful to a campaign than moderates and fence sitters? No, not at all. Then why WOULD any campaign pick a liberal. It only makes since in some kind of world where the edifice of a winning campaign is feature complete EXCEPT for a liberal element, but that is not how the general election has ever worked, given that independents are by far the largest voter pool, and independents self-identify more often as moderate and conservative than liberal.

You tell Sanders supporters there, they don't care. They never did. Their necessity to Clinton winning was some kind of cultish article of faith that if you told them "Clinton only needs to wind Florida or Ohio-Virginia... how do you folks make that more likely?", they pretend the question is invalid and Liberals in Oregon somehow matter (spoiler alert: they don't).

I've been throwing this picture around.



It's from the X-Files, but it suits the Sanders folks (and now the Trump folks) so damn well. Facts are irrelevant to these people... they can make their own reality. They want to believe something so much, that they believe they can will it into being. But that's not how the world works. That's not how anything works.

The Trump campaign is the story of a doom fortold. Ignore the polls no matter what they are. They don't matter. What it comes down to is this. Clinton is running the Obama Model. Donald Trump is doing basically nothing... has a miniscule staff, no ground op, no big data, no nothing. Even the Keneedy model isn't happening. The fund raising isn't happening. It's like he isn't running for President. That make be enough to excite tens of thousands of voters in a Primary, but it takes a sophisticated operation to turn out tens of millions of voters, especially the ~65 million voters the winning candidate will accumulate.

The Trumpists? They don't care. They want to believe. Just like the Sanders people wanted to believe. It's hard to believe they actually want to win. I know if I were a Trump supporter, I'd demand the campaign weaponize the hell out of every resource it has, and big data feeding the ground game is nearly the first item. That is the unifying strand, in my view, between the Acolytes of the Authoritarian Cheeto Jesus and the Bernie Bros... neither group asks terribly much of their campaigns. They mistake agreement on positions with unreserved agreement on how things work. Sanders could have beaten clinton, as Obama did, if back in November 2015, Sanderistas told the Sanders campaign "you got gaping holes in your operation here, here and here, you MUST fix them". The same is true of Trump. Right now, he hasn't a prayer. It's probably too late. The Trumpists should have demanded more of him, six months ago, to take on Hillary. Words are not enough.

[mvaliz]

The Trumpists? They don't care. They want to believe. Just like the Sanders people wanted to believe..

Just an FYI - I'm a Sanders Supporter too.. but I'm not also somebody who lets my emotions cloud my thinking (or try not to, at least :P). While I liked Sanders a lot more and voted for him, I still never saw Hillary as "Evil" like the other psychos out there make her out to be based only on the very shit you describe - they "want to believe she's evil" and that's sadly the only reason so they can be a "victim mentality" instead of taking responsibility. I've always maintained that if Sanders didn't win, than Hillary is logically the next best choice as she's the closest we'll get to Sander's ideals - and that's a fact no matter even IF she's unable to follow through on them all, as Dump isn't even going to attempt to court his ideals at all.

I'd just wanted you to know that some of us "Sanders Supporters" aren't as 2-dimensional as you paint us to be on the Sanders side of things. I suspect (and hope) this is true for most of us come election time. ^_^

[eschatological]

Trump's lack of ground game is literally what allows me to sleep at night.

[Skroe]

I really appreciate your posts as of late. It's so nice to read the point-of-view of a person who represents those Republicans who have not lost their mind. Of a Republican who doesn't vote for Trump simply because of party loyalty. Trump is so obviously in the camp of the alt-right, far-right, authoritarian camp of the likes of Putin who has a whole other set of "facts" or "truths" and who doesn't even agree on the very basics like having Liberal democracy as the form of government. In the face of that some differences on the policy positions of the next four years is quite insignificant when it all comes down to it.

The entire reknown Republican intellectual base is siting it out. Most moderate Republicans are sitting it out. Most Republican money men are sitting it out. Most of the Republican's most experienced campaigners are sitting it out. Basically Trump Incorporated is borrowing the RNC infrastructure for 5 months.

It's even more fundamental than that though. The Democratic Party is by far the larger party in this country. There are something like 55 million Republicans and 75 million Democrats in the US. Trump can't win - no Republican can - without a near total approval rating by his fellow Repbulicans, which Trump is nowhere close to having.

So many of the most vocal people now have voted Republican for years, but kept their racist, fascist side under wraps. Not this year though. This year though... it's on full view.

So what comes next? Tim Keane. That man in many ways (not all ways), should be a Republican. It's that the REpublican party has moved so far to the right, to grab as many of the declining number of far right and older voters, that people who otherwise would be Republicans are now "Conservative Democrats". The future Republican party should have people like Time Keane in it. A center right party, more analogous to the Christian Democrats in Germany or the Tories in the UK, than whatever the Republican Party has become.

It's really easy to vote for Hillary when she picks someone like Tim Keane, because in his model, I see the future. He, in many ways, Represents this country better than anyone. In someways he's very liberal - if you support growing the entitlement programs, like most Americans do, that is liberal policy by definition. In someways he is very conservative - he's basically Reaganite on Trade and National Security, the latter specifically, like most Americans. A party emulating that to a degree will have tremendous success, much more than another decade of playing to the crazies.

I'm hopeful about the Republican Party's future. Trumps defeat will wreck so many careers that need to be wrecked,it's going to be wide open to have Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, who are a lot more moderate than they let on (see Marco Rubio on the Daily Show if you wanna know what I'm talking about), rebuild the Party into something worthy of this country.

And these fascists supporting Trump... they have this stain on them for the rest of their lives. There is no forgiveness, no second chances.

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Just an FYI - I'm a Sanders Supporter too.. but I'm not also somebody who lets my emotions cloud my thinking (or try not to, at least :P). While I liked Sanders a lot more and voted for him, I still never saw Hillary as "Evil" like the other psychos out there make her out to be based only on the very shit you describe - they "want to believe she's evil" and that's sadly the only reason so they can be a "victim mentality" instead of taking responsibility. I've always maintained that if Sanders didn't win, than Hillary is logically the next best choice as she's the closest we'll get to Sander's ideals - and that's a fact no matter even IF she's unable to follow through on them all, as Dump isn't even going to attempt to court his ideals at all.

I'd just wanted you to know that some of us "Sanders Supporters" aren't as 2-dimensional as you paint us to be on the Sanders side of things. I suspect (and hope) this is true for most of us come election time. ^_^

That's a fair point, I should have been far less general because many Sanders voters did so in good faith and campaign strategy is simply off their radar. I apologize. But I think you understand specifically what type of Sander voter I'm referring to, and similarly what type of Trump voter.

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Trump's lack of ground game is literally what allows me to sleep at night.

The best part is, even if he started a month ago, it won't help him. It will take months to open offices, stand up staff, get them experienced and familiar with communities and building a mountain of data that can be turned around into precision advertising and get out the vote efforts. Trump has 4 months. Ain't gonna happen. Moreoever he has basically asked the RNC to do it for him, but the RNC is not well financed or staffed compared to any Presidential Campaign .the National political parties in the US are weaker and poorer than many think, and proportionally especially compared to European political parties).

I for one hope people take away one thing from 2016. That message, belief, conviction and character matter, but only so much. Winning a political campaign is actually largely mechanical. The people-factor encapsulates something that is fairly clinical in nature. From a software perspective, electing Hillary, with her deep flaws and unpopularity, is almost like a program running a hard-test case.

[eschatological]

What boggles my mind about Trump's campaign is that no one would touch it, to the point that Paul Manafort is running his national campaign. And no one has even blinked an eye at Manafort. Why would they? He's only a political consultant whose main job before this campaign was advocating for third world despots and rebel leaders, like Jonas Savimbi, Ferdinand Marcos, and Siad Barre, and Sese Soko. I guess if your clients are African/SE Asian dictators and no one knows who they are, they don't matter.

Nevermind that he was rumored to be bought by the Pakistani ISI in a false-flag operation, and that he knew about the operation.