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The Next President

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On the other side of the aisle, it appears like the republican establishment is gearing up for Ted Cruz to be their nominee, and while he isn't as loud and boisterous as trump, he is certainly just as bad.  He's basically a poster child for every conservative talking point you've ever heard, and generally encapsulates all the worst elements of all the other candidates.

 

Also, for those unfamiliar with the candidates, this site is pretty handy for a quick run down of each of them.

 

http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/

 

I saw recently that Bernie Sanders won a primary of US voters living outside the states, and am interested in getting the opinion of anyone outside, or not a citizen of the US with respect to this election.  I've always heard the US presidential election is a big deal internationally, but I'm never exactly sure what that means beyond the winner being a news story for a few days.

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I think my ideal situation is "brokered convention coalesces into Cruz nomination." There is NO WAY that dude will win. I think the jerks for Trump crown will not show up, because they will be rightly mad, and it will be a downballot blowout. Does this affect census year stuff? Since 2020 is a census year and is one of the few hopes for breaking certain strangleholds. 

 

Now, here is where my logic unravels a bit, but it will put to lie the notion that the GOP is losing because they haven't run somebody conservative enough. It's come up after every election. Nobody is more conservative than Cruz, but for this to work the GOP would need to accept evidence which is not how they govern, but I'll take a Pyrrhic victory.

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Fourth is how he turns every question into his stump speech about the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent, but whatever.

 

This is my biggest issue with Sanders.  Hard to get explicit answer out of that guy.  Granted I love his stump speech but it is a stump speech.  That and I seriously think he might die of old age any day.

 

Every time I look at Hilary she comes off as power monger and I don't mean that as to disqualify her as a leader... many historically great leaders were clearly power mongers nor is it mutually exclusive to other traits.

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On the other side of the aisle, it appears like the republican establishment is gearing up for Ted Cruz to be their nominee, and while he isn't as loud and boisterous as trump, he is certainly just as bad.  He's basically a poster child for every conservative talking point you've ever heard, and generally encapsulates all the worst elements of all the other candidates.

 

Also, for those unfamiliar with the candidates, this site is pretty handy for a quick run down of each of them.

 

http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/

 

I saw recently that Bernie Sanders won a primary of US voters living outside the states, and am interested in getting the opinion of anyone outside, or not a citizen of the US with respect to this election.  I've always heard the US presidential election is a big deal internationally, but I'm never exactly sure what that means beyond the winner being a news story for a few days.

 

Canadian here, so not that international, but this election is getting pretty heavy coverage up here. I've heard some discussion about "Could this happen in Canada?" in regards to Trump on the national news and speculating on how our PM (Trudeau) would deal with the various nominees. Every primary gets a fairly large article in the politics section of my local paper (Vancouver Sun) and a few Op-Eds. Don't live in Japan anymore but from what I can gather most US election news there is about Trump's constant bashing of Japan which is unsurprisingly not going over well at all. 

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Yeah, American news always gets huge coverage in Canada. In 2008, we had an election a month before yours and there was way more excitement about Obama v. McCain than there was about Harper v. Dion v. Layton.

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This is my biggest issue with Sanders.  Hard to get explicit answer out of that guy.  Granted I love his stump speech but it is a stump speech.  That and I seriously think he might die of old age any day.

 

Every time I look at Hilary she comes off as power monger and I don't mean that as to disqualify her as a leader... many historically great leaders were clearly power mongers nor is it mutually exclusive to other traits.

 

Yeah, he has like 1 speech and gives it everytime he is speaking anywhere.

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On the other side of the aisle, it appears like the republican establishment is gearing up for Ted Cruz to be their nominee, and while he isn't as loud and boisterous as trump, he is certainly just as bad.  He's basically a poster child for every conservative talking point you've ever heard, and generally encapsulates all the worst elements of all the other candidates.

 

Also, for those unfamiliar with the candidates, this site is pretty handy for a quick run down of each of them.

 

http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/

 

I saw recently that Bernie Sanders won a primary of US voters living outside the states, and am interested in getting the opinion of anyone outside, or not a citizen of the US with respect to this election.  I've always heard the US presidential election is a big deal internationally, but I'm never exactly sure what that means beyond the winner being a news story for a few days.

 

I've done some travelling to other countries during election years, and they are covering U.S. elections fairly rigorously. Of course you don't get the volume of coverage that you would get in the U.S., but you can expect to see something about the U.S. elections on any given day show up in the front page of major newspapers. For example, I remember being in Spain and France during the 2008 election and they did a great job of covering the details of the primaries, but they couldn't really grasp how Americans saw the Clinton vs Obama race, for example.

 

And this shouldn't come as a surprise given that the U.S. has such an oversized influence on world events. I definitely feel like it is pretty unfair that the rest of the world doesn't get to vote in our elections since so many countries will be so heavily affected by the outcome.

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I'm in Ireland so we have our own media and the british media is a big thing here too. Presidential elections are always huge over here. Right now, it's wall to wall Trump being a dickhead and has been for weeks. I must confess to some Trump anxiety myself. Plenty of coverage of Bernie Sanders too. It's great to see someone say what he's saying on a national platform, and I hope that energy is harnessed somehow.

 

It's a shame he's going to be beaten by Clinton, because she is flatly untrustworthy and uninspiring. She's a hawk and a shill for the banks. I hope she beats Trump or Cruz (surely the greatest demonstration of a Giant Douche vs a Turd Sandwich the world has ever seen. Cruz is terrifying, Trump is an idiot and terrifying), but the thought of a Clinton presidency does not fill me with hope.

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Washington caucuses are tomorrow. The first time that I can remember that the decision hadn't already been made by the time it came around to us. I'm kinda curious to go, but also weary that it's going to take all day because man folks like to talk around here.

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Washington caucuses are tomorrow. The first time that I can remember that the decision hadn't already been made by the time it came around to us. I'm kinda curious to go, but also weary that it's going to take all day because man folks like to talk around here.

 

I'm starting to think there's even a chance that California might matter in the primaries (in June), which is just crazy.

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I'm starting to think there's even a chance that California might matter in the primaries (in June), which is just crazy.

It will matter in the GOP primary for sure. Trump and Cruz are going to take it all the way to the end.

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The pre-election gets a lot of coverage around here, mostly with a tone of "Can you believe this Trump guy?", which is a little hypocritical given we have our own breed of blatantly racist douchebag politicians who never get grilled quite so thoroughly lest they accuse state-funded media of bias (which they still do, naturally).

 

I don't know if this has been discussed yet, but I had a chance recently to read this transcript of Trump's meeting with the Washington Post, and it's sort of amazing. At times he comes pretty close to making sense - not in a way that I agree with, but not completely disconnected from reality either - but then he immediately follows up in a way that shows he has no concept of nuance even when you give him plenty of space to elaborate (of course it's also interspersed with the usual grandstanding about how he makes great deals and everybody loves him). There's this gem from the end of the interview for instance, in response to his dismissal of climate change.

 

Well I just think we have much bigger risks. I mean I think we have militarily tremendous risks. I think we’re in tremendous peril. I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons. The biggest risk to the world, to me – I know President Obama thought it was climate change – to me the biggest risk is nuclear weapons. That’s – that is climate change. That is a disaster, and we don’t even know where the nuclear weapons are right now. We don’t know who has them. We don’t know who’s trying to get them. The biggest risk for this world and this country is nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons.

 

That honestly reads like he just now realized that nuclear weapons exist. Sure they are a problem, but they have been for a long time and are definitely less so now than during the decades of constant global standoff. You can't really make a point like this a) as if it invalidated climate concerns 2) without clarifying that they are still a problem despite the Cold War being over, or you just sound like an undergrad thinking they're so deep for waxing philosophical about Mutual Assured Destruction.

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Ended up getting out to the Democratic Caucus this morning. It was pretty unorganized and it was obvious they weren't expecting the turnout they got. Votes in our presinct were split two thirds for Sanders, which sounded like it was pretty typical in the rest of the room. Still, heard a couple of pretty passionate off-the-cuff speeches for Hilary from our little group. No votes really changed, but it would have taken a heck of a shift to actually change the delegates anyway.

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It was pretty unorganized and it was obvious they weren't expecting the turnout they got.

God, I'm so sick of hearing this. How can it possibly come as a surprise that turnout is greater than most years and probably insane in places heavy with young people? It was like that for me in MN, like they hadn't even planned lines or printed out the right fucking forms. I'm still not sure my vote actually counted, I had some weird form they said wasn't right but also that it didn't' matter, and there were too many other people crushing into the fucking bar (A FUCKING BAR?) the polling place was at for me to stick around. There's really no excuse anymore, volunteer costs and all that be damned. I'm so fucking sick of hearing about how it's too expensive for (poc, young, poor, old, queer, take your fucking selection of the disenfranchised.) Americans to exercise their god-damned voting rights.

This makes me SO mad, I am sorry.

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Do not apologize for being angry about this kind of shit. You're in good company. ):

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Are primary elections funded by the government? Or are they funded by the RNC and the DNC?

Edit: From what I read during a super brief research-session, it looks like states fund the primaries just so they will have some relevance in the process I suppose.

Also, I found out that Jill Stein is running as the Green Party's candidate.

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Speaking of Sander

Washington Post says there reason he won was because it how small the black population was in those states

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/27/why-did-bernie-sanders-dominate-saturday-caucuses-in-whiter-states/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_sanders_blacks_1125am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

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Are primary elections funded by the government? Or are they funded by the RNC and the DNC?

Edit: From what I read during a super brief research-session, it looks like states fund the primaries just so they will have some relevance in the process I suppose.

Also, I found out that Jill Stein is running as the Green Party's candidate.

 

The democratic party here in Washington picked up the bill to rent the school we were in, and most of the folks there were volunteers. I don't think it's until the next round that the state picks up the tab.

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I wonder if the decision makers in the DNC or RNC could reduce funding for primaries if they wanted to diminish the momentum of grass-roots candidates. I guess I'm saying "follow the money".

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Who pays is a primary/caucus distinction.

Primaries are state-run and they pick up the tab. They run a single primary election for any and all political parties who wish to participate.

Caucuses are private events paid for by the political party that's hosting.

Whenever you see an instance of only one of the major parties having a primary, it's because the other party has opted for a caucus instead. You won't have two different primary elections in the same cycle for the same state but for different political parties.

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I should also mention that while a bit crowded and disorganized, my caucus was "good enough" and didn't have problems near as bad neonrev is talking about.

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Not that anyone's surprised, but Trump's interviews on Sunday with the New York Times and the Washington Post on foreign policy (as well as critical reactions to them) are astounding. Highlights include:

  • Blocking the access of uncooperative countries like Saudi Arabia and China to American markets in order to force them to comply with the global strategic policies of the United States. That's right, we're going to stop buying Saudi oil even though we're not energy-independent and China's going to stop expanding its military coverage because it can't export trinkets to American grocery stores.
  • Withdrawing the American military presence in Japan and South Korea, allow them to rearm, and encourage them to start their own nuclear programs to counter China and North Korea. Literally no commentary is necessary here.
  • Gut NATO and generally start asking other countries to foot the bill for American involvement in their affairs. You know, because

Vox's Max Fischer really says it best:

Trump does not understand that these alliances are part of a global order meant to codify the status quo, deter interstate conflict, and thus maintain global stability, thereby both preventing a return to the catastrophic wars of the early 20th century and cementing America's preeminent global position.

Trump's foreign policy is a little like calling for the United States to abolish all government so we can save money on taxes. At some point, every high school civics student learns that taxes fund the government, which provides security and infrastructure, which allows us to have jobs and income in the first place, as well as live past the age of 30.

This is much like how the international order works: Countries pay into it such that there is a functioning and basically stable world. Trump doesn't seem to understand this, rather seeing the world as just a place where countries go to make deals.

This leads him to assume that Europe will always be peaceful and stable, and international trade will always be free and open. Therefore, in his mind, there is no reason to invest in things like NATO or open sea routes; those are just deals we make with other countries, and if we don't get favorable enough terms it's fine to abandon them.

That makes a lot of sense if you have no idea what the international order is or how it works, and it does not seem that Trump does.

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rearm south korea...???  rearm a country that's 1/4th the size of california with  9/10th highest military budget in the world with active conscription...???

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rearm south korea...???  rearm a country that's 1/4th the size of california with  9/10th highest military budget in the world with active conscription...???

 

Yeah, time for them to start pulling their weight! We'll give them a starter set of a dozen nukes and leave them to twist. America first! But not the way Lindbergh meant it. Except maybe a little.

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