UNOFFICIAL SCHADENFREUDE THREAD (AKA GOP Deathwatch 2016)

[Dominus Atheos]

The official election thread in N&P is getting depressing to read, so I thought I'd create this thread in Off-topic to celebrate the implosion of the republican party that's ongoing. I put it in off-topic because I don't want it to be as heavily moderated as the official stickied threads in N&P.

So this happened yesterday:

Levin: ‘I Am Not Voting for Donald Trump,’ ‘Count Me As Never Trump’

The #NeverTrump movement just got another backer.

Conservative radio host Mark Levin threatened on Friday that he will not support Donald Trump in the general election, should he be the nominee.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/m ... z45NKahdzP
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For those that don't know, Mark Levin is one of the top conservative talk radio hosts in the country, with something like 7 million listeners daily.

And those #nevertrump conservatives could get their wish, because right now this is happening:

Trump’s weak delegate operation could derail his nomination

...

With the odds rising that no candidate will secure the 1,237 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination, the race increasingly hinges on this kind of Byzantine state-by-state delegate selection process. Trump has won by far the most pledged delegates, who are required to support him on the first ballot.

There is little evidence Trump’s campaign is up to the task so far, however, giving Sen. Ted Cruz a major opening to overtake the front-runner on the Cleveland convention floor. Most will be free to vote for whomever they chose after that and candidates rarely select their own delegates, meaning they need a major grassroots effort to ensure they have loyal backers at the convention.

...

In an ominous sign for Trump, two Colorado congressional districts already held their conventions this week and Cruz swept both events, installing six delegates pledged to support him come convention time.

...

If Trump is swamped in Colorado Springs, it won’t be the first time. At North Dakota’s convention last weekend, where delegates were both unaffiliated and did not announce their favored candidates, Cruz claimed to have elected 18 supportive delegates against one openly supporting Trump.

“18 to 1: I’ll take that ratio any day of the week,” Cruz boasted in his victory speech in Wisconsin on Tuesday night.

...

Trump is looking forward to a friendly primary in his home state of New York on April 19 after losing Wisconsin, and if he makes it to 1,237 delegates before convention, all these esoteric delegate fights will be a footnote. His so-far disinterested delegate effort, though, means he’ll have zero margin of error. If Trump doesn’t win on the first ballot – even by one delegate – the party looks poised to have ample resources to shuffle him off the stage.

So it's looking possible, even likely, that Trump will enter the convention with a plurality-but-not-majority of pledged delegates, no one will win the first ballot, then the delegates will be released from voting for the person their state voted for and Cruz's ground game in getting his supporters sent to the convention will ensure that he wins the second ballot. And the Establishment will have no say in the matter.

This will piss of basically EVERYONE. Trump and his supporters are going to be livid and probably run third party. Establishment types hate Cruz as much as they hate(fear) Trump. Even the conservatives who support Cruz will be off-put by this blatant theft. The Democratic nominee will win the General Election in a landslide.

But wait, isn't the Democrat going to win basically no matter what due to demographics and the electoral map? Why does the margin of victory matter? Because a few years ago, this happened:

Thanks To Gerrymandering, Democrats Would Need To Win The Popular Vote By Over 7 Percent To Take Back The House

As of this writing, every single state except Hawai’i has finalized its vote totals for the 2012 House elections, and Democrats currently lead Republicans by 1,362,351 votes in the overall popular vote total. Democratic House candidates earned 49.15 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans earned only 48.03 percent — meaning that the American people preferred a unified Democratic Congress over the divided Congress it actually got by more than a full percentage point. Nevertheless, thanks largely to partisan gerrymandering, Republicans have a solid House majority in the incoming 113th Congress.

...

The upshot of this is that if Democrats across the country had performed six percentage points better than they actually did last November, they still would have barely missed capturing a majority in the House of Representatives. In order to take control of the House, Democrats would have needed to win the 2012 election by 7.25 percentage points.

Even if Trump is the nominee, RealClearPolitics has both democrats up by more then 10% Give Cruz time to cheat and Trump to run third party, and the GOP is basically going to be wiped out.

So forget about the bitter democratic primary, ignore any "the sky is falling!!!!" pronouncements, sit back, and enjoy that which is best in life:

[Starglider]

I think most of the 'establishment' Republicans are supporting or at least prepared to support Cruz at this point. Even if they could force a nomination of Kaisch or similar, it would lose too much of the base, likely wiping out any electability/popularity advantage. Whereas Cruz arguably would have won if the primary had been just him vs Trump. Cruz is of course an exceptionally odious religious nut, probably worse than Trump in the sense of actually being able to implement regressive politices. Unfortunately I think the strict candidate registration deadlines rule out a Trump third-party run, but fortunately even without that Cruz should lose fairly badly. Unless Clinton and/or Obama massively screws up...

[The Romulan Republic]

I'd be lying if I said I don't find the Republican Party of today deeply frightening, but I sincerely hope the Republican Party crashes and burns so badly that it never recovers. I hope it fragments and something new emerges from this cluster fuck (although I'm a bit scarred about what that "something new" might be).

The fact that they brought this on themselves by pandering to lunatics until they lost control of the lunatics just makes this more delicious and deserved.

[Baffalo]

There was a thing I saw a while back on Extra Credits that showed Gerrimandering screwing over the politicians who thought they were getting safe seats. Instead of dealing with moderates and having to appeal to everyone, they cherry picked safe seats and now their competition comes from their own party in a game of who can be the most radical to appeal to this new voter block of like minded people.

[Thanas]

This thread is in the wrong forum, totally superfluous and created only to escape moderation. Yeah, no.