United States Presidential Election, 2016

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Padmé

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Jeb Bush is out; not that the chap had a chance with me. With the three men left standing (Conservative ticket), let me just say...

idk-not-trump-tho-06.jpg


Thoughts?


 

Pernicious

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Vermin Supreme has America's best interest at heart.

#PonyBasedEconomy
 

Jabonicus

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Seconding Vermin Supreme. His plans for a mandatory tooth brushing law sit with me well.
 

Warmonger

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I'm for Bernie Sanders. In fact, I early voted for him in my state's primary last Friday. To use his catchphrase, we need a political revolution in this country.
 

BLADE

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Probably the SEP or some other Trotskyist or Vanguardist formation, whoever they nominate. No dog in the Trump circus or Clinton's death march to the nomination.
 

+SpaceJesus+

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End of the world:

Hillary Clinton v.s. Donald Trump


To my fellow conservatives, please, we got the joke. Trump is crazy. It's funny, moving on. We can't actually make the dude president. He is killing any amount of legitimacy as an ideology we might have. And I cannot stand the thought of Clinton being the first female president. Women need a better representative than an awkward faux feminist liar.

Sadly, none of the rational people who are running are winning anything. Was going for Rubio until the polls went insane. This whole election is making me want to be a communist at some points
 

Phil

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Bill Clinton, he didn't do too bad of a job before.
 

Brandon Rhea

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Bill Clinton is a major reason why the financial system collapsed, why the drug war intensified, and why prisons continued to evolve as a for-profit enterprise. He did some good things but he was still a horrible contributor to our most systemic problems.

And I don't think Hillary Clinton being president would be the end of the world. I'm no fan, but she's no different than what's come before. A Hillary Clinton presidency would be business as usual. Not that the business is any good, but the idea that she'd be some relatively terrible president is pretty silly.

Trump, though, is an authoritarian demagogue and crypto-fascist who reminds us that when enough people get scared, the spirit of 1933 is alive and well.
 

Phil

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I was mostly going by Presidents that were around while I was alive. Though as much hate/infamy I may get, the only reason I would prefer Trump as president is because I don't think another politician in the White House is going to improve anything, and a business man may be better.
 

Brandon Rhea

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If you're going with presidents who were around when you were alive, then arguably Barack Obama is the best one. Marginally, but arguably.

I've never agreed with the businessman angle. Running a business and running a government are two very different things. Businesses are designed to maximize profits and deliver value for shareholders, owners, managers, etc. Governments are designed to provide necessary services to people.

Look no further than Michigan, with their governor. He was elected because "I'm a businessman!" is something people respond to. Then a decision, one that a businessman would make, was made for water utilities in Flint. Now, an entire generation of children has been poisoned.

Elected executive office seems to be the only jobs in the country where we think a lack of prior experiences and qualifications is a good thing. Look at Ben Carson. He's never held elected office. He is supremely unqualified to be president. But because he's not a politician, people like him. In actuality, he's a brain surgeon, and an amazing one at that. But if someone said "I don't want Carson to operate on my brain, I want that guy over there because he's NOT a brain surgeon," wouldn't you think that person was insane?

Donald Trump is also not a very successful businessman. His massive wealth is largely a myth.
 

BLADE

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/u...e-unsafe-lead-levels-in-water-nationwide.html

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2016...ylvania-with-higher-lead-exposure-than-flint/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ve-higher-rates-of-lead-poisoning-than-flint/

http://www.attn.com/stories/5736/new-jersey-cities-more-lead-poisoning-than-flint

A study in my own Northish Denver (Sun Valley Represent!) found elevated risks of lead poisoning. Needless to say all of those locales are not necessarily presided over by a Republican governor.

Snyder's a piece of shit but he's far from the only villain here.

Otherwise I have no real opinion. Trump --or at least his historical and temporal conjuncture-- is not scientifically speaking that of a fascist. He certainly has no organization of petty-bourgeoisie or backwards workers to smash his would-be enemies (assuming he even carries through on his promises when he wins.) And there is at least a certain thrill to see someone profane the hoary obscurantism of American "constitutionalism" and "elections" such as they are.

Mobilize for other issues. Arm your community (politically, morally, organizationally.) The actual main contest (between an aspiring war criminal and an actual war criminal) moves me not. I don't begrudge those who have illusions something is at stake here, because I have a feeling the likely winner (Clinton by the way) will soon disabuse them of those notions with greater and greater catastrophes (watch Syria.)
 
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Brandon Rhea

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I didn't reference the fact that Snyder is a Republican. I was arguing against the idea that being a businessman means there's some sort of inherent qualification to be elected to executive office.
 

Dakota

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I lost faith in the election a long time ago. While I'll still be actively canvasing for Bernie, I'm tired of the elections in the US becoming less about who would make the best leader, and more about 'which one of these people is the least awful for the country.' The only person whom I think would be a good, proactive President is Bernie Sanders. Trump is Trump, my hatred of him is well noted, and that goes double for Ted Cruz. While Trump is all reality show bluster and headline-news worthy nonsense, Cruz actually believes in the things that he says. In many ways, he's even further right than Trump will ever be, and that's a problem. I could've gotten on board with Rubio or Kasich, but in an attempt to become a reliable competitor to Cruz and Trump, they've pushed themselves further and further Right, right into irrelevance.

On the Democratic side, I just can't stand Hillary. Her campaign's repeated attempts to rig the caucus and primary results in her favor make me bring her entire candidacy into question. It doesn't help that, given her status as the 'de facto nominee' for the better part of a year now, she's been getting all kinds of help (including from the chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Shultz) in limiting Sanders' visibility so she can reap the benefits. That, and I really, really don't trust her.

But, like I said. It's an election of 'the lesser of 7 evils.' If it comes down to it, Hillary would be an objectively less bad president than Trump or Cruz in my eyes. Doesn't stop Bernie from being better than all of them, but that's a debate for another day.
 
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Nor'baal

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I am British.
I live on an island that predominantly subsists on tea and misery.

As such, forgive my silly question: Can't both parties just railroad through a candidate at their national conventions?
 

Fen Vel

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Quiet you,

As a fellow Islander, the melodrama and over the top stupidity of it all is the best thing on TV. Plus all dat hate!
 

Warmonger

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I am British.
I live on an island that predominantly subsists on tea and misery.

As such, forgive my silly question: Can't both parties just railroad through a candidate at their national conventions?
A little yes and mostly no. In the United States, both the Republican and Democratic Parties hold a general primary in order to choose among a field of candidates who their nominee will be for the top job come the general election after their conventions commence and close. What does that mean? Well, a little history first.

If you want to learn about some of the historical context then read what is in the spoiler.
Before the 1970s, the process to choose the party's ultimate nominee for both sides was a relatively scattered affair. Primaries were held in some of the states, but not others. This led to pressure for reforms in the Democratic party following the nomination debacle of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Why was '68 such an important year? Primarily because the Democratic Party was still largely an adhoc coalition between the powerful conservative and segregationist Southern Democrats who'd been voting Democratic since before the Civil War and couldn't imagine voting Republican due to the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the New Deal-style liberals in the north and west who'd been coaxed away from the more business-minded Republican Party by the likes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Going back to '68, though, the party was decisively split over a number of issues. The two most important issues, though, were civil rights (for African Americans) and the Vietnam War. Why those two issues? Well, for the Southern Democrats they'd largely been allowed to run roughshod over minorities (mainly black Americans) in their states without so much as a worry from the federal government in terms of intervention since the late 1870s and the end of the Reconstruction era. This all ended in 1948 when Harry Truman, the Democratic President of the US at the time who was running for re-election, pushed through a pro-civil rights plank onto the party's platform. In an extremely contentious vote on the floor of the Party's national convention, Truman managed to get the pro-civil rights plank onto the party's platform and went on to win an election he was actually expected to lose due to the rather sluggish economy at the the time. Southern Democrats, though, were incensed at the addition of a pro-civil rights plank to the party platform. So much so that many of the convention delegates from the southern states walked out of the convention and held their own in which they nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as their own nominee for President.

Like I said, Truman would go on to win the election with just under 50% of the vote and a majority of the electoral college vote (303 electoral votes). The Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey (who'd ran against FDR in 1944), got second place with 45% of the popular vote and 189 electoral votes. Strom Thurmond came in third with around 2.4% of the popular vote (all from ex-Confederacy states) and 39 electoral votes from the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina.

By 1968, the civil rights issue had torn the party even further apart following President Johnson's signing into law of the numerous Civil Rights Acts between 1963 and 1968. Southern Democrats, unwilling to peacefully coincide with the new direction of the Democratic Party, rallied behind George Wallace, the pro-segregationist Governor of Alabama.

As for the Vietnam War, the fault lines within the Democratic Party quickly became apparent following Lyndon Baines Johnson's re-election to the Presidency in 1964 and his subsequent ramp up of US involvement in the southeast Asian country in 1965 and each year after that. What were those fault lines? Well, amongst the Southern Democratic coalition anti-communism was rampant and support for the war was high. The phrase "better dead than red" is a good illustration of just how hostile to communism southern Democrats, as well as the Republican Party, were to the very idea of communism. For Democratic liberals, though, the war was deeply unpopular. Students fiercely protested what they believed to be an unjust and morally bankrupt and with the images and video of the war that the average American saw on television, support for the war slowly began to turn around. And it wasn't only white liberals who protested the war. Black Democrats, originally attracted to the party by FDR's economic policies and later by Harry Truman and LBJ's pro-civil rights policies and message, also grew tired of the war. Largely because, statistically, it was their sons who were being disproportionately drafted to go fight and die "over there" as a result of the fact that students were allowed deferments due to the fact that they were studying and there weren't a lot of Black kids who could qualify for deferment at the time.

At the '68 convention the split over the Vietnam War was dramatic. Wikipedia explains:
Robert Kennedy's death altered the dynamics of the race, and threw the Democratic Party into disarray. Although Humphrey appeared the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, thanks to his support from the traditional power blocs of the party, he was an unpopular choice with many of the anti-war elements within the party, who identified him with Johnson's controversial position on the Vietnam War. However, Kennedy's delegates failed to unite behind a single candidate who could have prevented Humphrey from getting the nomination. Some of Kennedy's support went to McCarthy, but many of Kennedy's delegates, remembering their bitter primary battles with McCarthy, refused to vote for him. Instead, these delegates rallied around the late-starting candidacy of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, a Kennedy supporter in the spring primaries, and who had presidential ambitions. However, by dividing the antiwar votes at the Democratic Convention, it made it easier for Humphrey to gather the delegates he needed to win the nomination.

When the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, thousands of young antiwar activists from around the nation gathered in the city to protest the Vietnam War. In a clash which was covered on live television, Americans were shocked to see Chicago police brutally beating anti-war protesters in the streets of Chicago. While the protesters chanted "the whole world is watching", the police used clubs and tear gas to beat back the protesters, leaving many of them bloody and dazed. The tear gas even wafted into numerous hotel suites; in one of them Vice President Humphrey was watching the proceedings on television. Meanwhile, the convention itself was marred by the strong-arm tactics of Chicago's mayor Richard J. Daley (who was seen on television angrily cursing Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff, who made a speech at the convention denouncing the excesses of the Chicago police in the riots). In the end, the nomination itself was anticlimactic, with Vice President Humphrey handily beating McCarthy and McGovern on the first ballot. The convention then chose Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as Humphrey's running mate. However, the tragedy of the antiwar riots crippled the Humphrey campaign from the start, and it never fully recovered.

Following former Vice President Richard Nixon's narrow popular vote victory over then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had been screwed in the South by George Wallace's third party run, the younger Democratic politicians and members clamored for reforms to the party's primary system. Originally led by the anti-war Senator of South Dakota, George McGovern, a commission was formed by the party to do just that. Vox explains:
After the 1968 fiasco, the Democratic National Committee created a commission charged with proposing reforms to the nominating process. (It was chaired initially by Sen. George McGovern and then by Rep. Donald Fraser.)

Its report brought state delegate allocations into line with the distribution of population and required state parties to adopt open procedures for selecting delegates rather than allowing state party leaders to pick them in secret.

In practice, states mostly implemented this by adopting presidential primaries — which generally induced Republicans to make the same change.

The new system kicked off a chaotic era in which mavericks and factional leaders could win over the objections of party leaders.

In 1972, McGovern took advantage of his own reforms to win the Democratic nomination, even with an ideology so unacceptable to major party factions that the AFL-CIO didn't support him over Richard Nixon.

Then in 1976, Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination despite a total lack of ties to the party establishment in Washington, and proceeded to win the White House and then not pursue the party's agenda.

Also in 1976, incumbent President Gerald Ford faced an extremely strong primary challenge from conservative leader Ronald Reagan and was forced to drop the incumbent vice president from the ticket in order to appease conservatives.

Four years later, incumbent President Carter was challenged from the left by Ted Kennedy, his renomination secured only by the rally-round-the-flag effect induced by the Iranian hostage crisis.

At around this time, it became fashionable to observe that American political parties were in decline. University of California Irvine political scientist Martin Wattenberg achieved the apogee of this literature with his 1985 classic The Decline of Political Parties in America (since updated in five subsequent editions), citing the waning influence of party professionals, the rise of single-issue pressure groups, and an attendant fall in voter turnout. After all, a party whose leaders can't even pick its own presidential nominee in a reliable way isn't much of a party at all.

The Republicans quickly followed in the footsteps of the Democrats and by the 1980 presidential election, both parties had either a primary or a caucus in each and every single state.

And finally we return to the original question. Why can't the parties just ram through a candidate of their choice? Well, y'see, in order for a candidate to be chosen as the party's nominee of President of the United States, they must win at least half of the total delegates available during the primary process. Before we go into that, though, I'll dive into the nature of the primary election. Within each party's primary system every state, including US territories and Puerto Rico. holds either a caucus or a primary. What are those? Well, a primary is simply an election in which primary voters vote for their preferred candidate. Just like a regular election, a primary sees voters obtaining a secret ballot and voting for their preferred candidate. So if you were a Republican voting in the South Carolina primary back on February 20, you would have casted your vote for one of the 14 candidates who'd managed to get on the ballot (there are filing deadlines and certain qualifications for campaigns to meet in order for them to be listed on a state's primary ballot). The process is very simple.

Caucuses, on the other hand, are totally different beasts. The rules for a caucus differ from state to state, but in general caucuses are a much more direct experience than primaries. I'm going to let this video and this video explain the general process of a caucus because it's quite complex and I've already written enough. Remember that every caucus has different rules.

So, moving back to the delegates. Each state rewards delegates to candidates who perform past a certain threshold in their caucus or primary. For the Democratic Party each caucus and primary, no matter the result, is proportional in how it rewards delegates to its candidates. So, for example, the next Democratic primary is in South Carolina this Saturday. The South Carolina primary rewards a total of 59 delegates of which 53 are pledged to the candidates who are on the ballot in proportion to their overall performance in the popular vote. So if Bernie Sanders wins 40% of the vote he will get approximately 20 to 22 of those 53 pledged delegates. In total, there are 4,760 delegates who will attend the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia at the end of July. In order to become the nominee, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton must get half of those delegate to vote for them when it comes time to officially select the party's nominee on the floor of the convention.

For Republicans the process is somewhat similar. In order for any of the remaining five candidates to become the nominee they must obtain at least 1,237 of the available 2,472 delegates come convention time. Depending on the rules of each state's caucus or primary, the way delegates are awarded varies greatly. In the Iowa caucus, for example, Ted Cruz "won" with a plurality of the vote (27.6%). As a result he was nominally awarded 8 of Iowa's 30 convention delegates. In the recent South Carolina primary, in which 50 delegates are rewarded, Donald Trump came out the victor with 32.5% of the vote. One would assume he'd be receiving a proportional share of South Carolina's delegates (16 or 17 delegates). No! He received all 50 delegates. Why? Well, South Carolina rewards delegates through a complex calculation. To zoom back out, the Republican National Committee decided to change the general rules in regards to the delegate breakdown. As Wikipedia explains:
The Republican Party presidential primaries and caucuses are indirect elections in which voters cast ballots for a slate of delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention. These delegates in turn directly elect the Republican Party's presidential nominee. Depending on each state's law and each state's party rules, when voters cast ballots for a candidate, they may be voting to directly award delegates bound to vote for a particular candidate at the state or national convention (binding primary or caucus), or they may simply be expressing an opinion that the state party is not bound to follow in selecting delegates to the national convention (non-binding primary or caucus).

Under the party's delegate selection rules, the number of pledged delegates allocated to each of the 50 U.S. states is 10, plus three delegates for each congressional district. For the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands, fixed numbers of pledged delegates are allocated. Each state and U.S territory will be awarded bonus pledged delegates based on whether it has a Republican governor, it has Republican majorities in one or all chambers of its state legislature, and whether it has Republican majorities in its delegation to the U.S. Congress, among other factors. A state or territory may then either use a winner-take-all system, wherein the candidate that wins a plurality of votes wins all of that state's allocated pledged delegates; or use a proportional representation system, where the delegates are awarded proportionally to the election results. Many of the states using a proportional system require candidates to meet a certain threshold before receiving delegates; for example, a candidate receiving less than 20 percent of the vote in Texas would receive no delegates.[94][95]

Unpledged delegates will include three top party officials from each state and territory.[94]

The Republican National Committee has imposed strict new rules for states wishing to hold early contests in 2016.[96] Under these rules, no state will be permitted to hold a primary or caucus in January; and only Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada are entitled to February contests. States with early-March primaries or caucuses must award their delegates proportionally. Any state that violates these rules will have their delegation to the 2016 convention severely cut: states with more than 30 delegates will be deprived of all but nine, plus RNC members from that state; states with fewer than 30 will be reduced to six, plus RNC members.

So, in South Carolina, the delegate rewards system breaks down like this: 3 delegates will be rewarded to each of the state's congressional districts. The candidate who does the best in each of those congressional districts, will receive said district's three delegates. Since South Carolina has seven congressional districts, 21 delegates were up for grabs that way. Trump received all 21 of those delegates dues to the fact that he performed the best in each of South Carolina's seven congressional districts. Another 26 delegates were to be given to the candidate who got the plurality of the popular vote. Again, that was Trump who won it by a fairly large margin since Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, respectively, got 22.5% and 22.3% of the vote. The remaining three delegates are RNC officials.

States differ on the delegate breakdown rules, though. Some, like Ohio, are winner-take-all in which the candidate with most votes gets the delegates per how well they did via each congressional district as well as statewide. Other states, like Delaware, are totally proportional. Meaning that, like the Democratic system, candidates will receive delegates proportional to how well they did in each congressional district as well as statewide. Still other states, like Alabama, have a certain threshold that a candidate must reach in order to reach the state's winner-take-all portion of the delegate reward. Otherwise, and the rules vary state-by-state, the delegates are further broken up between the candidates who place first or second. Delegate allocation methods can be seen in more detail here.

So once the whole primary season is done and over with (it stretches from February 1 with the Iowa caucus to June 7 for the GOP and June 14 for the Dems) and the convention rolls around the candidate with more than half of the available delegates is awarded the nomination and the general election, i.e. three more months of campaigning, is given the de facto go-ahead to begin.

Normally, a nominee is de facto chosen by the beginning of April since, by that time, most of the candidates will have dropped out and more than half of the delegates have been fought for. Two are usually still in it to win it, but by April 1 one of those candidates either has a lock on the nomination by having been awarded more than half of the delegates or they're very close to that threshold and the other candidate is just chugging along hoping to exert some influence when the party's convention rolls around.

The thing about this primary season, and this applies only to the Republicans since the Democrats currently have just two candidates battling it out, is that many people are expecting none of the remaining five candidates to have the necessary delegates needed to be chosen as the party nominee. Without going into the minutia of campaign expectations and polling, most people are expecting the race to be whittled down to three candidates come March 1, the day infamously known as "Super Tuesday" where a large block of 13 states (six of which are dyed-in-the-red southern states) will hold their primaries or caucuses. Of the five remaining guys, Governor John Kasich of Ohio and Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, will be heavily pressured to drop out since no one is expecting them to do well.

If they do drop, and Kasich will have to if Trump shows him up in his home state of Ohio (whose primary is on March 15), then Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz will be the three remaining candidates. The political pundits, and I largely agree with them on the labeling, believe that this primary has exposed three wings of the Republican Party where only two were thought to exist. Basically, there has always been a conservative wing of the Republican Party and an "establishment"/mainstream wing of the Republican party. This go-around those two wings are represented, as far as the polling and previous state results have shown, by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, respectively. The third wing, one made up of nationalistic xenophobes who care more about issues like immigration and terrorism, is represented by Donald Trump.

Unlike the two-wing theory, where one candidate, always the establishment candidate, will eventually come out due to the demographic make up of less conservative states like New York, California, and Ohio as well as due to where states decide to put their primary contest on the calendar, the three-wing theory, and this is where I am more skeptical of the political pundits, posits that because the party is split between three candidates and because of the complex delegate allocation system of later states Cruz, Rubio, and Trump, will be unable to meet that threshold of 1,237 delegates and we will have what is called a "brokered" convention. A brokered convention is basically the only chance that the anti-Trump establishment will have to stop Trump from becoming the nominee. Assuming, that is, that he'll continue to do about as well as he has done in the previous four contests and assuming that Rubio or Cruz or even Trump don't decide to drop out.

My issue with the possibility of a brokered convention is twofold. First of all, it is predicated on the belief that Trump has a middling ceiling of 30 to 40% of the vote in the Republican electorate. While that was true in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, Trump busted through that ceiling and gained nearly 46% of the vote in Nevada. Now, granted, Nevada was a state where his anti-immigrant message plays very well with local Republicans. However, in my opinion, momentum begets momentum. In the upcoming Super Tuesday states Trump leads in most, if not all of them via recent and not-so-recent polling. His big win in Nevada will carry him even further in those states and, in my opinion, he will outperform the polling in at least some of those states. Whether he'll breach 50% is another question altogether, but don't be surprised if he gets over 40% and even approaches or surpasses 50%.

My second issue is the fact that a lot of really smart people have deluded themselves into believing that the supporters of establishment candidates like Jeb! Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich (assuming he drops out) will inevitably flock to Rubio in an effort to deny Trump and Cruz the nomination. Personally, I believe that this is hogwash. Even if the majority of said candidates' voters do flock over to Rubio that won't magically give him the nomination when the convention rolls around. If you look at the results of the previous four contests, the combined mainstream vote amounted to around 40%. That's just not enough. Not only that, but I question how many Cruz supporters (who I put as having the lowest chance of getting the nomination of the three amigos) will transfer over to Rubio as Trump continues to steamroll through each projected victory. The two candidates have lobbed bomb after bomb at each other and that's produced a lot of hurt feelings. Furthermore, I question whether a substantial enough number of Bush, Christie, and Kasich supporters will run to Rubio in order to more easily threaten Trump's status as frontrunner. Rubio knifed Bush in the back when he decided to run (Rubio was Bush's political protege when Bush was Governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007) and there's bound to be some hurt left over from that amongst some of his supporters. Not to mention the fact that Trump's policies and rhetoric, as extreme as it can sound, isn't all that conservative. He will definitely reach into and grab some of the more moderate Republicans who are completely turned off by Cruz's conservative purity and disturbing personality and unwilling to back Rubio, who happens to be quite conservative himself.

Of course, anything can happen. Trump might stumble big on Super Tuesday and that'll be a massive boon for Cruz and Rubio and will probably encourage Kasich and Carson to keep on trucking. I don't think that will happen, but, hey, you never know.

As for the Democrats, they have their own process quirks as far as the convention goes. You see, while the Democratic method of allocating delegates is proportional with the percentage of the popular vote a candidate receives they implemented a system of superdelegates back in the 1980s in order to prevent maverick and dark horse candidates like George McGovern in '72 (who was blown out of the water by Nixon) and Jimmy Carter in '76 (who was stomped by Reagan in '80 and squeaked past Ford in '76) from being chosen as the party nominee. As Wikipedia explains:

After the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party made changes in its delegate selection process, based on the work of the McGovern-Fraser Commission. The purpose of the changes was to make the composition of the convention less subject to control by party leaders and more responsive to the votes cast during the campaign for the nomination.

Some Democrats believed that these changes had unduly diminished the role of party leaders and elected officials, weakening the Democratic tickets of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. The party appointed a commission chaired by Jim Hunt, the then-Governor of North Carolina, to address this issue. In 1982, the Hunt Commission recommended and the Democratic National Committee adopted a rule that set aside some delegate slots for Democratic members of Congress and for state party chairs and vice chairs.[7] Under the original Hunt plan, superdelegates were 30% of all delegates, but when it was finally implemented for the 1984 election, they were 14%. The number has steadily increased, and today they are approximately 20%.[8]

Basically, superdelegates are party leaders, congressmen, and DNC members (Democratic National Committee) who are allowed to back whoever they want come the convention. Currently, there are 715 superdelegates who are allowed to vote. Broken down there are 20 "distinguished party leaders", 20 governors, 46 senators, 193 representatives, and 436 DNC members. DPLs include former and current Presidents, ex-congressmen, ex-governors, ex-DNC chairs, etc.

With superdelegates, the majority of which have endorsed Clinton over Sanders, she could put her delegate total over 50% if he somehow managed to prevent her from getting over the hump. Of course, such a situation occurring is nigh impossible. Why? Because it would basically depend on the superdelegates, of which over 200 are still uncommitted, not deciding to flip their votes over to Sanders should he clearly win slightly more than half of the delegates in the primary and handing the nomination over to Clinton. Despite what a lot of Sanders supporters have to say about the Democratic establishment, that would be an unbelievably stupid thing to do and would tear the party apart and piss off a lot of liberals who would have gone on to vote for Clinton come the election should Sanders not be the nominee.

Hopefully this all made some sense and answered your question. :)

@Nor'baal
 
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