The Gaming Den

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Oh good, I was wondering when Trump's Brownshirts were going to get an official name.

Here waiting for the Lion's Guard uniform to be unveiled. I'll be disappointed by a lack of pauldrons.

probably something like

Lion Guard is a freikorps for furries.



These chucklefucks last only until the night of the long knives, where they will be replaced by more loyal and disciplined paramilitaries. Those will get uniforms made by Hugo Boss.



-Username17

"Yugo Boss is a great designer. Really tremendous. I always wanted to work with him, because he's always designed such great looking outfits."

I've got to say that this is the most conflicted I've ever actually been at the polls. The lady asked me which ballot I wanted and even after thinking about it all day my first thought was "I still don't fucking know."

Do I vote for Kasich to block Trump and help send things into a brokered convention? What if Kasich picks up enough steam to be a viable pick at the brokered convention? Kasich is weirdly popular in Ohio even among Democrats, so it's easy to imagine him sweeping Ohio in the general if it comes to that. I actually live in Ohio, so the down-ticket consequences of Kasich taking the state (even if he ultimately loses because lolbrokeredconvention) kinda fucking sucks for me.

Then Hillary v Bernie is it's whole own fucking thing. Hillary probably is the genuinely more electable candidate, and I really wish Bernie were just more fuckin'... pragmatic? But a vote for Bernie - even if he doesn't win (and he almost certainly won't) helps pull the party to the left.

DSMatticus wrote:I've got to say that this is the most conflicted I've ever actually been at the polls. The lady asked me which ballot I wanted and even after thinking about it all day my first thought was "I still don't fucking know."

Do I vote for Kasich to block Trump and help send things into a brokered convention? What if Kasich picks up enough steam to be a viable pick at the brokered convention? Kasich is weirdly popular in Ohio even among Democrats, so it's easy to imagine him sweeping Ohio in the general if it comes to that. I actually live in Ohio, so the down-ticket consequences of Kasich taking the state (even if he ultimately loses because lolbrokeredconvention) kinda fucking sucks for me.

Then Hillary v Bernie is it's whole own fucking thing. Hillary probably is the genuinely more electable candidate, and I really wish Bernie were just more fuckin'... pragmatic? But a vote for Bernie - even if he doesn't win (and he almost certainly won't) helps pull the party to the left.

As a fellow Ohioan, that was frighteningly similar to my own thought process.

Fucking Ohioans and there presidential votes that matter

Meanwhile in Texas, it was basically Bernie or Hillary, because Cruz was going to win the Republican delegates regardless of what I choose.

Same here in Arizona.

Trump and Hillary have 25 and 30 point margins in NJ...

And Rubio's out! I wonder who's going to get his voters and/or money?

The Rude Pundit opined that Rubio should have made a declaration of opposition if Trump wins the nomination because nobody else is in as strong a position to do so. Rubio, of course, did not do such a thing, possibly because he doesn't have that level of independent thought.

Not a vast surprise; Rubio-bot's entire path to victory in the general election clinched on favored son status in Florida - since Hispanic voters hate him - if he couldn't even get the turnout to beat Trump there, he's got no hope at all. So he's doing the same thing Jeb did, only several million dollars and a couple more embarrassing debates later.

Maybe not so much a surprise that Kasich won Ohio, which at least means he'll stay in the race for a bit - and with Rubio-bot out of the way, he'll probably be a bigger candidate in a smaller field, at least for a while. The GOP have to be shitting themselves; backing Kasich is a long shot to a contested convention, but the only other alternative to stop Trump is to back Cruz, who would (and has) repeatedly shown his willingness to throw them all under a bus for personal political gain.

On the Democratic side...well, Sanders needed to do a lot better than he did. Even without counting superdelegates, she's broadened her lead considerably.

It's still kinda anyone's game, though. There's enough delegates in upcoming contests to make it anyone's game...well no, I tell a lie. Trump only needs like half of the remaining delegates, and as the designated frontrunner he benefits more from winner-take-all states than the other two; his lead is probably insurmountable, with their only hope a brokered convention which will likely split the party. Clinton isn't just going to waltz away with the nomination, which is good, but Sanders has to know that the math is against him.

From here on out, pretty much all the Republican states are winner-take-all (not even district-based winner-take-all, just straight winner-take-all). Rubio dropping out helps Cruz and Kasich more than it does Trump, but at this point Trump is on track to win the nomination outright. If I had to bet on an outcome this instant, that's where my money would go. Aside: every prediction I've made about Trump has been too pessimistic. It's like I'm fundamentally incapable of grasping how bullshit rigged the Republican primaries are.

Tonight was probably Bernie's last chance to flip it around and he didn't. There are a lot of delegates left (enough to hand someone the nomination on their own), but realistically nothing's going to happen to reverse the lead Hillary already has.

Sanders has won in every Clinton County that has voted so far. Not counties that reliably vote Clinton, but counties named Clinton. He won in Clinton County, Ohio; Clinton County, Missouri; Clinton County, Illinois; Clinton County, Iowa; and Clinton County, Michigan. Still outstanding: Clinton County, NY; Clinton County, IN; Clinton County, KY; and Clinton County, PA. However at this point Clinton's lead is such that she needs less than a third of the outstanding votes to clinch the nomination. Sanders needs to win more than all the remaining Clinton Counties, he needs to win all future states by large margins. Sanders won Minnesota by 23 points, but his large margins in Minnesota aren't large enough. He needs to run up the score by a lot. Hard to see that happening to Hillary, she isn't going to turn in a bad debate performance and lose all her support overnight like Rubiobot. She has constituencies and support networks that are deep and hard fought for. Unlike all these bullshit Republican candidates, Hillary has a floor to her vote share, and even though the South (which loves her the most) has voted already, there's good reason to believe Mrs. Clinton's support floor is still high enough to edge Sanders out of possibility.

On the Republican side, Trump Trump Trump! The existence of Winner Take All shenanigans in the Republican world of vote rigging and disenfranchisement still make this anyone's game. Kasich may need to get 91% of all remaining delegates but that could actually happen because of how thin everyone's support is and how bullshit the Republican nomination process is. Clinton and Sanders are both respected elder statesmen (is "stateswoman" a word?) of the Democratic Party, but if you'd asked five years ago who the fuck Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio was, there isn't anyone who could have told you. Trump scored yuuuge victories and got a super majority of the delegates for the night with like 40% of the vote. It's entirely possible that Trump's ceiling is still under 50% and that Kasich could make it a brokered convention by strategically suspending his campaign near the end and throwing all remaining delegates to a bewildered Cruz who would still lack the delegates to be nominated. Time is running out for these sorts of shenanigans because Trump is more than half way to the magic number already.

-Username17

DSMatticus wrote:From here on out, pretty much all the Republican states are winner-take-all (not even district-based winner-take-all, just straight winner-take-all). Rubio dropping out helps Cruz and Kasich more than it does Trump, but at this point Trump is on track to win the nomination outright. If I had to bet on an outcome this instant, that's where my money would go. Aside: every prediction I've made about Trump has been too pessimistic. It's like I'm fundamentally incapable of grasping how bullshit rigged the Republican primaries are.

There are actually a fair number of pseudo-proportional republican states left. Unfortunately, they mostly favor Trump, especially New York, which is the big one. Still, it's true that denying Trump the nomination and going into a contested convention is tricky, it depends on Cruz doing well and winning all of the winner-take-all states remaining that favor him heavily (Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, and New Mexico) and ideally that he steals a take - Indiana perhaps - or Kasich does - possibly Wisconsin or Maryland.

One important thing to note. Trump currently has around 650 delegates after Tuesday. It is basically impossible for him to reach 1237 without any of the delegates voting on June 7 - the last day of the primaries. He'd need to win basically 100% to do that. So this thing is guaranteed to go all the way to the end.

FrankTrollman wrote:Kasich may need to get 91% of all remaining delegates but that could actually happen because of how thin everyone's support is and how bullshit the Republican nomination process is

Kasich has been mathematically eliminated. There are 946 delegates remaining. You need 1237 to win an outright majority. Kasich currently has ~150 delegates, putting him almost 150 short of the necessary total even if he won every remaining delegate (its a little wonky because the GOP primary includes 'unbound' delegates who can potentially put someone over the top when they get close, but there aren't 150 of them).

There are actually way more than 150 superdelegates on the Republican side because the pledged delegates of Colorado and the American Virgin Islands and all but one of the pledged delegates of Guam went for "uncommitted" which makes them Superdelegates.

The Republican nomination process is fractally bullshit. Every piece of it is as undemocratic and insane as the entire circus. Every time you believe you've uncovered the last bit of treachery and voter suppression in the Republican system you can look a little harder and find more skullduggery and deception. The Republican Party is more underhanded and undemocratic than you can believe, even accounting for the fact that you already know that it is more underhanded and undemocratic than you can believe.

The thing that probably eliminates Kasich is that too many superdelegates actually are KKK grand wizards and neo-Nazi gun humpers and shit. RNC committee members are people that support the party but don't run for public office. For the Democrats that mostly means unphotogenic bureaucrats and ranty activists, but for the Republican side that often correlates to conservative activists who espoused views too radical and unpopular to make them plausibly electable. This in a party where Legitimate Rape is considered merely a "gaffe." You could kind of imagine what kind of hateful racist misogynistic garbage is spewed by the people the Republicans don't even try to run.

The reality is that the superdelegates aren't going to lock arms and bar the gates for Trump. A lot of the superdelegates have been masturbating to Trump-style fascism for decades.

-Username17

I believe there are 1012 delegates remaining, and after yesterday Kasich has at least 138. He cannot hit the magic target without shenanigans no matter how well he does.

So let's talk about the possibility of shenanigans. Remember when Ron Paul picked up a bunch of delegates in states he'd otherwise lost because his supporters sniped a bunch of unpledged delegates out from under the establishment? Well, that pissed the RNC off, so they changed the rules and now the RNC's 700-some unpledged delegates are no longer actually unpledged. They are assigned alongside each state's pledged delegates, with the exception of something like 3 delegates per state that are pledged to vote for the winner of the state popular vote regardless of how the state chooses to assign its votes. I did not actually know about this rule change until recently.

The extent to which this is binding is unclear to me; it's very likely that some delegates could vote however the fuck they wanted and it would be breaking the law while other delegates could vote however the fuck they wanted and it would merely be rude. While it is clear that the secretary of the convention has the power to reject votes in which "unpledged" delegates have broken their pledges, it is not clear that the secretary of the convention is obligated in all circumstances to reject such a vote if it occurs. The RNC didn't really get rid of all their unpledged delegates. They just turned them some into regular pledged delegates and some into pledged-delegates-but-different through a parallel - and ultimately legally untested - mechanism. Who the fuck knows?

It makes me unhappy knowing that there is now at least one way in which the RNC is more democratic than the DNC, but like it or not that is technically a true statement. For now. If they end up declaring that their own rules were toothless and non-binding (and no court tells them to fuck themself), then a couple hundred delegates that have already been assigned to candidates (i.e. assigned to Trump) could become unpledged.

It's fucking weird, man.

It's not surprising that even before we've gotten to the convention, a lot of Republicans are dissatisfied with their party. According to the NYTimes:

In every state that voted on Tuesday except for Florida, about two in five Republicans said they would consider voting for a third-party candidate over Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton in November.

Now, it's easy to say that at this point, but if Trump does get the nomination, I wonder how many of them will still feel that way come November.

As the rules stand the convention is required to reject all votes where someone votes differently from how they're required to by state law and local policy and simply record them as voting how they're required to. However, prior to the actual voting they can rewrite the rules to say whatever the fuck they want them to. Apparently if they want to set the board on fire they can seriously let the pledged delegates vote for anyone they want. I don't think they're that desperate, but it's technically possible.

Grand Dragon William Quigg endorses Clinton because he thinks she'll do the opposite of what she's saying if she's elected

...the stupid. It burns.

Prak wrote:Grand Dragon William Quigg endorses Clinton because he thinks she'll do the opposite of what she's saying if she's elected

...the stupid. It burns.

You say that, but that was literally the second most common explanation from Trump Supporters as to why they vote for him, after "because minorities are bad" and right before "because if the world goes to double shit, maybe people will try to make it better (but I sure won't try to make the world better now when it is shit)."

I don't know. "Trump won't actually do the crazy fucking shit he's saying he will" feels like a reasonable mindset, or understandable, at least. It's a defense mechanism, you know?

Prak wrote:I don't know. "Trump won't actually do the crazy fucking shit he's saying he will" feels like a reasonable mindset, or understandable, at least. It's a defense mechanism, you know?

It's one thing to believe he won't do the crazy shit, it's entirely another to vote for him because of that fact.

Oh, definitely. Anyone who finds themselves voting for someone on the basis of "they won't really do that shit they said they would" should probably be given some counseling before they're allowed to drop their ballot.

Not to do a reducto ad Hitlerum, but there were seriously people that argued that Hitler wasn't as anti-semitic as he seemed, and he only said those things to get elected.