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2016 US election discussion

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miami

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Isn't he doubt about his birth place and whether he can run for President. He was born in Canada.
Trump is already having a go about it.
One does wonder where all the birthers are? Oh, wait, he's not black

The Republicans do like proposing people not born in a state - John McCain was born in a US base in Panama, Cruz in Canada.

Mind you our next PM may well have been born in New York. Truly a globalised time we live in.
 

TheNewNo2

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They expected the Torys to get 278 seats, Labour 267 and Lib Dems 27.

Forecasting is easier in the US due to the two-party system, though obviously this isn't true in primaries. Nevertheless, 538 is the top elections prediction site out there.


Isn't he doubt about his birth place and whether he can run for President. He was born in Canada.
Trump is already having a go about it.
One does wonder where all the birthers are? Oh, wait, he's not black

"Natural-born citizen" has generally been considered as someone being a citizen from birth, which Cruz was due to his mother being American. The fuss over Obama was nothing but racism, though given Cruz is of Cuban descent there's more than a whiff of it here too.
 

Oswyntail

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...Mind you our next PM may well have been born in New York. Truly a globalised time we live in.
To date, only one PM has been born outside the UK - Bonar-Law, who was born in Canada. London, Edinburgh and Glasgow are favoured birthplaces. No PM has been born in the South West of England, or, more surprisingly, Wales.
 

Butts

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To date, only one PM has been born outside the UK - Bonar-Law, who was born in Canada. London, Edinburgh and Glasgow are favoured birthplaces. No PM has been born in the South West of England, or, more surprisingly, Wales.

I was suprised we have not had a "taff" in office , a few close calls mind.

David Lloyd George was born of Welsh Parents in Manchester the closest they have got.

Michael Heseltine and Michael Howard are probably the closest the Tories came to providing one along with possibly Geoffrey Howe. For Labour of course we all remember "Mr Sheffield and trip on the beach" Kinnock. :p
 

me123

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Iowa caucuses are tomorrow. Trump's been polling strong, comfortably sitting at around 30% of the vote, give or take. But Cruz has made a comeback; currently sitting at 24%. The results tomorrow will be our first "real" look at whether Trump can actually do this - it's been suggested that Trump voters may be less likely to actually go and participate in the caucuses. Here's hoping...

On the sane side, Clinton and Sanders are very close, with Hilary just very slightly ahead. Seems that she won't have the easy run that was predicted. Sanders is really gaining momentum - I think he'd be my choice if I was an American.
 

90sWereBetter

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The New Hampshire caucus is the one I'm interested in, because we'll get to see who the GOP establishment candidate might be. Rubio seems to be declining, Jeb! is nowhere, and Christie and Kasich are starting to climb the polls.

John Kasich seems to be the most "moderate" of this bunch of GOP candidates (which isn't saying much, if he was British he'd easily be denounced as the far-right nutjob that he is, much further right than Farage). Rubio would probably pose the most threat to Clinton or Sanders if he got the nomination, given his potential attractiveness to Latino voters. Mind you, he has to win some primaries first...:lol:

I could still see no-one getting enough delegates over the next few months, to the point where the GOP have to have a brokered convention. And that'll be how Jeb! gets the nomination after all
 
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NY Yankee

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Trump has a lot of support from "evangelical" Christians. Ironically, the same people who claim to be religious support a blatantly bigoted candidate. Although I'm not a fan of Ted Cruz, he is clearly the lesser of two evils. Bernie Sanders is clearly the best candidate. He speaks out about issues affecting minorities and the less fortunate. He is also anti-establishment. However, he's simply too old to be president. Assuming he's elected, he will be 82 if he completes both terms. Hillary has more name-brand recognition. Unfortunately, she seems somewhat aloof. She is also plagued by the email scandal.

If Trump wins, then I will apply for British citizenship. I'm not kidding. If I'm rejected then I will simply go on a vacation to London and then "miss" my flight back to New York. I'm sure there are many hostels that I can hide at. If I'm determined enough, I could find a job.
 

Busaholic

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Trump has a lot of support from "evangelical" Christians. Ironically, the same people who claim to be religious support a blatantly bigoted candidate. Although I'm not a fan of Ted Cruz, he is clearly the lesser of two evils. Bernie Sanders is clearly the best candidate. He speaks out about issues affecting minorities and the less fortunate. He is also anti-establishment. However, he's simply too old to be president. Assuming he's elected, he will be 82 if he completes both terms. Hillary has more name-brand recognition. Unfortunately, she seems somewhat aloof. She is also plagued by the email scandal.

If Trump wins, then I will apply for British citizenship. I'm not kidding. If I'm rejected then I will simply go on a vacation to London and then "miss" my flight back to New York. I'm sure there are many hostels that I can hide at. If I'm determined enough, I could find a job.

When I worked at Beckenham Library in London in 1967/8 we had a young so-called 'draft-dodger' from the Vietnam War living down the road in Penge and I believe he managed to avoid the clutches of the U.S. army. He certainly worked and had a bedsitter, although admittedly those things were much easier to achieve then.
 

miami

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If I'm rejected then I will simply go on a vacation to London and then "miss" my flight back to New York. I'm sure there are many hostels that I can hide at. If I'm determined enough, I could find a job.

That would be illegal, and not really help with your claim for asylum.

However if you convert to Islam you should be safe, as while the UK will want to kick you out, you won't be allowed to enter the US, so you'll be stuck in limbo like Mehran Karimi Nasseri.
 

TheNewNo2

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Iowa caucuses are tomorrow.

Yes, after four years of campaigning, the election is still ten months away!



Trump's been polling strong, comfortably sitting at around 30% of the vote, give or take. But Cruz has made a comeback; currently sitting at 24%. The results tomorrow will be our first "real" look at whether Trump can actually do this - it's been suggested that Trump voters may be less likely to actually go and participate in the caucuses. Here's hoping...

On the sane side, Clinton and Sanders are very close, with Hilary just very slightly ahead. Seems that she won't have the easy run that was predicted. Sanders is really gaining momentum - I think he'd be my choice if I was an American.

Actually Sanders doesn't have any momentum - recent polls show no change in his Iowa/NH support in the past month. Well, except one, but that had Hillary up by 21pts in the first place, so seems unlikely to be accurate. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/hillary-clinton-may-win-iowa-after-all/



Trump has a lot of support from "evangelical" Christians. Ironically, the same people who claim to be religious support a blatantly bigoted candidate. Although I'm not a fan of Ted Cruz, he is clearly the lesser of two evils. Bernie Sanders is clearly the best candidate. He speaks out about issues affecting minorities and the less fortunate. He is also anti-establishment. However, he's simply too old to be president. Assuming he's elected, he will be 82 if he completes both terms. Hillary has more name-brand recognition. Unfortunately, she seems somewhat aloof. She is also plagued by the email scandal.

Hillary is plagued by GOP-created "scandal"s. By "scandal"s, I mean things which the GOP feels are absolutely terrible, but everyone else thinks "so what?" The email "scandal" is no scandal - she used a private email server, which was allowed, and she sent emails using it, and there has been no evidence anything she sent was classified at the time. Similarly Benghazi, where the GOP have shamelessly exploited the deaths of four people to try and hurt Clinton.

Fact is the GOP have hated the Clintons since 1992 - they are sure they're full of sleaze, but nothing ever sticks. Even when they take grapefruit out into the back yard to prove Bill killed his political enemies...


I don't think Cruz is the lesser of two evils at all, in fact I'd say he's probably more dangerous than Trump because he's a true believer. Hopefully neither gets elected. Rubio is certainly the most problematic candidate for Democrats, but that doesn't seem to be relevant this cycle.

The New York Times of course endorsed John Kasich, in the saddest cry at the state of American politics I have ever seen.
 

southern442

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If Trump is nominated as candidate, then a very large percentage of Republicans will either vote for the Democrat candidate or (most likely) not vote at all. Surely that would mean that the Democrats would have a huge lead, as I'm assuming most of them would still vote even if their preferred candidate wasn't chosen?
 

TheNewNo2

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If Trump is nominated as candidate, then a very large percentage of Republicans will either vote for the Democrat candidate or (most likely) not vote at all. Surely that would mean that the Democrats would have a huge lead, as I'm assuming most of them would still vote even if their preferred candidate wasn't chosen?

I really don't think that would happen. Anyone the Democrats nominate and anyone the GOP nominate, absent a third party, will reliably get 45% of the vote nationwide. The country is polarised so much, and while less people call themselves Democrats or Republicans, voters who change affiliation are decreasing and people are defining themselves more by who they're against than who they're for.

(That is of course what the GOP itself has done for eight years - on the country level, it has defined itself as anti-Obama but not really pro anything).

Trump has gone from a wackjob with popular support to a wackjob with popular and establishment support, albeit not much of the latter yet. But whereas when he first started you wouldn't find anyone for him in the conservative media, now he gets introduced by Chuck Grassley, he has Rush Limbaugh behind him, and he has Bob Dole if not behind him at least willing to accept him. All the candidates have signed pledges to support the GOP nominee, and barely anyone has been willing to say they would not vote for Trump if he were the nominee.
 

me123

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Here's an interesting graphic from Google that I just found on the BBC.

b398e095-9240-4348-84ad-ca9b1c6fb39b.png


It looks at the number of searches for the phrase "How to caucus for [candidate x]", and ranks them in order of frequency. It may be an error but... whilst Trump is the candidate that's been searched the most times, it appears that people aren't searching for the phrase "how to caucus for Donald Trump".

Now, this is of course not in any way scientific. But it might suggest that the polls suggesting a Trump victory won't correlate with tonight's results because his supporters aren't going to caucus. This is very possible - Trump is a candidate who is gathering support from largely outwith the political establishment. People who haven't voted or caucused before. Therefore he has an uphill struggle to encourage his supporters to get out and vote for him.

We'll see in a few hours what happens.
 
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TheEdge

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Now I don't follow US politics that closely and don't fully understand caucuses and all that but still, here goes.

Everyone is talking about Trump and the GOP as if it is 100% confirmed their candidate will win. Are the Democrats in that bad health or is it just because we have concentrated on Trump so much it looks that way?
 

me123

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The results are (almost entirely) in.
Cruz takes the GOP Iowa nomination with 28%, comfortably beating Trump into second place (24%).
Clinton narrowly takes the Democratic nomination with 49.9%, with Sanders on 49.5%

I'm not surprised to see that Trump returned less representatives than the opinion polling suggested. As I said earlier, he relies not on traditional support but on new voters turning up and, in some cases, actually registering with the Republican party. Last night was a good demonstration that, whilst he's not out of the race, the opinion polls aren't showing the full picture and Trump needs to do everything in his powers to get people out to vote for him.

New Hampshire next week. Will be interesting. Iowa is a caucus, which means that a group of people turn up to their town hall (or wherever) and discuss and debate their choices. People will be encouraged to move away from their choice, and this could have lead to people moving away from Trump, or perhaps supporters of other candidates moving to Cruz in an anti-Trump protest. New Hampshire will be different. It's a "normal" ballot, so the opinion polls may be more accurate. Trump enjoys a much more comfortable lead in NH than in IA, and is more likely to take the nomination here I would suggest.

On the Democrats, Clinton narrowly beats Sanders, but in all essence it's a tie. Hillary will be looking to win NH next week - she comfortably won there eight years ago against Barack Obama. However, again, the polling suggests that Sanders looks on course for a comfortable victory if the polls are to be believe.

Everyone is talking about Trump and the GOP as if it is 100% confirmed their candidate will win. Are the Democrats in that bad health or is it just because we have concentrated on Trump so much it looks that way?

Not at all. I think the GOP often attracts more interest because their candidates are often comical (Bush, Palin, Trump...) and they have a very well oiled media machine. One of the reasons there's more interest in them as of late is that Clinton's nomination seemed to be a certainty (at least until Sanders entered the ring), whereas there's more of a fight happening in the Republican ranks.

But if you look at the actual polling, the Democrats seem to be leading more often than not. It's early days of course, but a Trump candidacy is not confirmed and a GOP win is most certainly not confirmed. This is the early stages of a long and, by our standards, bizarre election battle. At the end of it, there are only going to be two viable candidates for president - the Republican nominee and the Democrat nominee. So there's colossal interest in just who those two will be.
 

miami

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Sanders really surprised me. The age thing is a definite question mark, he'll be 75 when the election comes around, Reagan was 69.

Super Tuesday is 4 weeks time. Trump had 76% vote against him, Cruz had 72%. Almost half the voters voted for someone else.

In 2008 in Iowa, Huckabee got 34.41% and McCain 4th on 13%. In New Hampshire those figures had swapped round, with Mccain on 37% and Huckabee 3rd on 11%. On Super Tuesday Mccain got 42% of the vote, and 62% of the delegates and was pretty much guarenteed a winner, picking up the rest of the states easily.

However The Clinton/Obama fight went on far longer.

In Iowa Obama was comfortably ahead, 38%, ahead of Clinton on 29% and Edwards on 30%.
In NH, Clinton won with 39% vs Obama's 36%.
After Super Tuesday Clinton got 46% of the vote, Obama 45%

It was all fairly close.

Looking at Obama's support in NH, it went from 32% a month before to 41%. Clintons dropped from 32% to 28%. The polls didn't show what actually happened though.

The fight went on through the year.
 

me123

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The fight went on through the year.

Indeed, we have 49 other states to visit before we find out who will be the candidates. Things can change. All IA and NH will do is scrape the stragglers (Huckabee, Fiorina, Bush, Santorum, Christie, O'Malley etc) from the bottom - it's almost certain that some of the struggling Republican candidates will withdraw come the end of next week.
 

miami

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Indeed, we have 49 other states to visit before we find out who will be the candidates. Things can change. All IA and NH will do is scrape the stragglers (Huckabee, Fiorina, Bush, Santorum, Christie, O'Malley etc) from the bottom - it's almost certain that some of the struggling Republican candidates will withdraw come the end of next week.

That's what I assumed, until I looked at 2008. All 7 candidates contested Iowa and New Hampsire, and indeed the first 6 states. 4 of the 7 were still going at Super Tuesday. I expect Cruz, Trump, Rubio or Carson, and Rand Paul to still be going at Super Tuesday.

However looks like Huckabee's gone.
Former Arkansas governor and 2008 Iowa caucus winner Mike Huckabee announced on Twitter he will suspend his presidential campaign after finishing near the bottom of the pack in the opening contest of the 2016 race on Monday.
 

NY Yankee

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Now I don't follow US politics that closely and don't fully understand caucuses and all that but still, here goes.

Everyone is talking about Trump and the GOP as if it is 100% confirmed their candidate will win. Are the Democrats in that bad health or is it just because we have concentrated on Trump so much it looks that way?

Speaking as an American, Trump has the biggest mouth and the most money. That's why he commands the most attention. However, he's thin on substance. Most of this ideas are stupid and he knows very little about foreign policy. Trump's supporters are basically people in the Bible Belt and deep south who hate minorities and LGBT marriage.

Although there aren't as many liberal states as conservative states, they are generally more densely populated. The silent majority of Americans are democrats. Both Hillary and Sanders are liberals. However, some democrats view her as an elitist. Sanders is considered to be the more progressive of the two.

Fortunately, Trump was humbled and after he loses in New Hampshire, he'll take a hint and drop out. Either of the democrats could beat Cruz.
 

backontrack

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I'd expect Bush to keep going. Huckabee and O'Malley have pulled out; my guess is that Santorum and Fiorina are next to go. Rubio is a dead cert for staying in; he scored 23%, just 1% behind Trump. Carson was next with 9%, followed by Bush and Rand Paul with 3% each.

Meanwhile, all this means that this man could be the next president:

[YOUTUBE]EaZGaJrd3x8[/YOUTUBE]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaZGaJrd3x8
 
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Busaholic

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It's well-known that Trump hates a loser, so self-hate must now occur for the first time in his life.
 

me123

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It's well-known that Trump hates a loser, so self-hate must now occur for the first time in his life.

He tweeted this back in 2013. Wonder what he thinks about it now :lol:

30D048A100000578-0-image-a-33_1454426084697.jpg

--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
Well, the toys are well and truly out of the pram now. It's not at all possible that The Donald came in second place, of course. The only possible explanation - cheating. :roll:

Yup, Trump is demanding a rerun of the Iowa caucuses. He's like a toddler.
 

Tetchytyke

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It's well-known that Trump hates a loser, so self-hate must now occur for the first time in his life.

No chance.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/694879900256354304

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/694963798273323008

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/694964856609439745

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/695134210273775617

That said, if his allegations about Cruz are true (and they may well be) then, for once, he actually has a point.
 

TheNewNo2

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The worry is that Rubio comes through to win the GOP nomination. It's a total lie, but he is portrayed as being "moderate", and, of the candidates, is best placed to play against Clinton.
 
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