Forget debate: Two simple reasons a Republican will likely win in 2016

[Myron Proudfoot]

It's idiocy.

so, who is ahead in the 2020 primaries?? When's the first debate?

 

[Manopolus]

The two parties have to be equally balanced and equally sane for this sort of thing to work. They aren't anywhere close any more. Expecting a Republican to win right now is sort of like expecting the Whigs to suddenly make an unexplained resurgence -- the party is quite simply falling apart.

 

[Trebuchet]

so, who is ahead in the 2020 primaries?? When's the first debate?

Late January, 2017.

 

[Ladewig]

The two parties have to be equally balanced and equally sane for this sort of thing to work. They aren't anywhere close any more. Expecting a Republican to win right now is sort of like expecting the Whigs to suddenly make an unexplained resurgence

Have they drafted a candidate?
I don't like the current contenders in either party and I am looking for an alternative. I hear they are strong on infrastructure projects.

ETA
Prohibitionists?! ***** that noise.

 

[fishbob]

I would guess that all other things being equal, the GOP has a better chance than the Democrats to win in 2016. As the article notes, incumbents tend to win, successors from the same party tend to lose. There's also two-term fatigue. Look at recent elections where one party has held the presidency for two terms or more:

2008: Incumbent party lost
2000: Incumbent party lost
1992: Incumbent party lost
1988: Incumbent party won
1976: Incumbent party lost
1968: Incumbent party lost
1960: Incumbent party lost
1952: Incumbent party lost

That's 1-7, a pretty miserable record.

Before that you do have the fairly remarkable string of three consecutive elections won by an incumbent party which had been in office for two or more terms, but all of those were won by the sitting President, a situation which seems very unlikely to arise in 2016 (Biden would have to become President before the election and then win the Democratic nomination).

You can say that past performance is not always indicative of future results. And it is possible that 1-7 record is a fluke. There are certainly some extremely close elections in there: 1960, 1968 and 2000 were squeakers that could have gone the other way.

But yeah, if I'm betting on this election I would bet the GOP to win.

But all other things are not equal. The Republicans are currently all dressed funny in a very small car, gnawing the legs off each other. Bernie or Hillary can easily beat whichever Republican crawls out of the mayhem (with big empty shoes).

Rubio is not a complete idiot, which means he won't be the one surviving the primary. Neither is Graham, so he doesn't stand a chance either.

 

[Dog Town]

.

Proof that denial, is not a river!
Facts are facts! You don't get to make them up!

 

[lionking]

Proof that denial, is not a river!
Facts are facts! You don't get to make them up!

Like Hillary is Done?

 

[Dog Town]

Like Hillary is Done?

Lost poll numbers steady!
FACT!

 

[lionking]

Lost poll numbers steady!
FACT!

Is "Hillary is done" a fact?

 

[Cain]

I saw an article which made a similar prediction for the GOP and also cited history of incumbency, except a super-duper computer at Rutgers did the predicting. Still, I wonder if they're lending too much weight to certain variables.

Though I have not looked into it closely, I suspect the Electoral College now presents more significant hurdles for Republicans. Obama famously took North Carolina and Indiana in 2008. He held Virginia and Florida in 2012 against Romney.

I would not be shocked if a Republican won the popular vote, but lost in the EC, which would be fantastic for the country as we'd be one step closer to abolishing the antiquated institution.

 

[Foolmewunz]

Lost poll numbers steady!
FACT!

Did you lose a poll? I can help you find them, Li'l Bo Peep.

Or did you mean "last poll numbers steady"? 'Cuz that would be, like, all wrong and stuff. You may not be able to feel it but you can see the Bern (going down) and Hillary going up over the last 30/40 days. Today's poll, in fact, has Bernie trailing in NH, probably the only place he has a chance of winning. Oh, dear!

 

[aleCcowaN]

Trump versus Sanders? What other evidence of a deeply antidemocratic and 18th-century conservative electoral system would you need? The EC isn't the only thing wrong out there.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

Nixon was a clown, Reagan was a clown, Bush II was a clown.

You folks really have to get over the idea that everybody's got the same worldview as you. Otherwise half the time you will be amazed by what happens.

Nixon was very, very intelligent. And Reagan and Bush II, for all their flaws, had strong leadership qualities, knew when to take advice (I mean, Bush II apparently used to phone Bill Clinton regularly to discuss foreign policy), and understood accountability. I'm not sure there is any GOP nominee, except maybe Jeb, who has these latter, very basic presidential qualities.

 

[Ladewig]

Nixon was very, very intelligent. And Reagan and Bush II, for all their flaws, had strong leadership qualities, knew when to take advice (I mean, Bush II apparently used to phone Bill Clinton regularly to discuss foreign policy), and understood accountability. I'm not sure there is any GOP nominee, except maybe Jeb, who has these latter, very basic presidential qualities.

I can agree with your observations.

May I ask for your opinion of our Electoral College?

 

[aleCcowaN]

Forget that of changing the EC. It is a coherent part of the electoral system.

A more reasonable electoral system only for presidency would cast light on the defects of the rest of the system and attack the very basis of bipartisan dictatorship.

Imagine the United States with a reasonable system like electing president by direct votes, even with some system like special majority or ballotage. You'd have automatically 6 candidates with a noticeable chunk of the electorate. One tea party one, one typical Republican, one typical Democrat, one lefty liberal and the most feared candidates, a moderate Republican and a moderate Democrat that are almost indistinguishable from an ideological point of view.

These latter candidates will make the election unstable and you'd have ballotages between the most unthinkable combinations with the risk of having a non-Republican non-Democrat president to set on fire the whole bipartisan garbage that accumulated during centuries.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

I can agree with your observations.

May I ask for your opinion of our Electoral College?

Well, it seems clear to me that given the extensive legal and potentially immense political power of the President, a personal election is reasonable both to grant legitimacy, and to separate the President from Congress, the primary check on his powers.

But then, the electoral college is a decidedly odd way to go about it. Both the state-wise 'winner takes it all' organization and the disproportional distribution of electoral votes run against the very motivation for such an election in the first place. They seem to serve state, rather than federal, interests, and strike me as anachronistic. A more straightforward process, say county by county weighed against population, concerned with popular support versus the second most viable candidate*, seems to serve the purpose of presidential elections better.

*Obviously it's never as simple as this (see Arrow Impossibility Theorem) but there are many tried and true methods of direct popular election.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Both the state-wise 'winner takes it all' organization and the disproportional distribution of electoral votes run against the very motivation for such an election in the first place. They seem to serve state, rather than federal, interests, and strike me as anachronistic.

There you have the trick of the system. The "winner takes it all" guarantees there will never be more room but for two parties. The fact that the POTUS is just one and nationwide guarantees those two parties to be nationwide and almost lacking regional differences -there aren't many, in spite of how much Usaians like to take any grain of it and grow it into a sequoya-. So the disproportion only has a bearing in which party the winner belongs to and not about the nasty legal political duopoly.

 

[Ladewig]

Well, it seems clear to me that given the extensive legal and potentially immense political power of the President, a personal election is reasonable both to grant legitimacy, and to separate the President from Congress, the primary check on his powers.

But then, the electoral college is a decidedly odd way to go about it. Both the state-wise 'winner takes it all' organization and the disproportional distribution of electoral votes run against the very motivation for such an election in the first place. They seem to serve state, rather than federal, interests, and strike me as anachronistic. A more straightforward process, say county by county weighed against population, concerned with popular support versus the second most viable candidate*, seems to serve the purpose of presidential elections better.

*Obviously it's never as simple as this (see Arrow Impossibility Theorem) but there are many tried and true methods of direct popular election.

Fair enough.

Given that we currently use congressional district as the weighting system for states' electoral votes, we would probably stick with that division instead of county division. Of course the gigantic problem with that approach is the vast majority of states don't have independent bodies drawing the lines of the congressional districts and we get gerrymandering. Sometimes I think the U.S. looks more like a banana republic than an experiment in democracy.

 

[aleCcowaN]

The electoral system is designed to make the bipartisan duopoly as conservative as possible. In every other aspect the society is free of being as innovative as they can be. The same applies to Great Britain and basically to most of the Anglosphere. No surprise Chavez chose to transplant that alien system to Venezuela in order to consolidate his power.

 

[Cain]

There you have the trick of the system. The "winner takes it all" guarantees there will never be more room but for two parties. The fact that the POTUS is just one and nationwide guarantees those two parties to be nationwide and almost lacking regional differences -there aren't many, in spite of how much Usaians like to take any grain of it and grow it into a sequoya-. So the disproportion only has a bearing in which party the winner belongs to and not about the nasty legal political duopoly.

The framers did not intend for there to be two major parties; if nothing else, they thought the vote would get split among many candidates, which would throw most presidential elections into the House of Representatives.

I do not see how replacing the EC will undermine the political duopoly. It would take a really long time for this kind of institutional change to undo the decades of political socialization telling people the two major parties are the only two that matter and you're "wasting" your vote on anyone else. Aside from that, other institutional hurdles would remain: many states make it difficult for third parties to appear on the ballot, requiring signatures and gobs of money while Republicrats are grandfathered in.