In other words, the Civil War was about STATES RIGHTS not slavery.

if we get closer to that point, ill give you odds

there's too much up in the air, and that i am ignorant on, in terms of where delegates of candidates that've dropped out may be "forced" to go and other arcane happenings

and no i doubt trump does that. trump's a name brand, not a firebrand.

Technically this would be white supremacism, not necessarily racism.

But 100% of Americans don't vote in primaries. So if 50% of GOP primary voters vote Trump, 50% of primary voters vote in the GOP primary, and 33% of Americans vote in primaries at all and 100% of Trump voters are racists (or white supremacists, see previous post), you end up with 1 in 12 being racists, which seems, if anything, way too low.

Replace the bolded with "idiots" and I agree with you. He's appealing to the less perceptive people who are incapable of seeing through the bull**** and manage to always hear what they want to hear no matter what he says. He's saying nothing of substance, and simply recruiting an army of drones to blindly march alongside him. And this impresses you?

None of that -really- matters in the scenario that you describe. There was a possibility for an orderly convention held with an almost evenly matched Rubio and Trump where the party would use the existing rules to screw Trump with plausible deniability, for ex. by forcing a second ballot and then working to secure just a few Trump crossover votes while letting all the other Trumpistas off the hook. That would've had a very solid chance of working.

This plan went out the window last night. Rubio is nearly dead as a candidate. There is no unifier with enough delegates to get to the orderly convention part unless that's Ted Cruz, and nobody is lifting a finger for Ted Cruz. In fact, in the unlikely event that Trump says some more wacky KKK stuff on tape, they'd probably just try to rat**** Cruz instead. So now the scenario is one where Trump goes into the convention with 30 states and 1200 delegates (how? even keeping him < 1300 is awfully underpants gnomey), Rubio and Cruz go in with a few hundred each, Kasich adds his fiddy, the GOP unbinds everyone else because convention magic and hands it to 3.5 state winning Rubio thirteen ballots later.

---political apocalypse fringe prediction starts here---

This means you're counting on people who are turning out across the entire South solely to nominate noted Planned Parenthood defender Donald Trump to go "oh, ok" and vote Rubio in the GE. They're not going to do that. They're not even going to go "well, ****, but Hillary" and vote Rubio. Instead, they'll just riot, then riot some more, then open both metaphorical and occasionally literal fire on everyone wearing and not wearing a uniform and also brown people. I don't think the GOP will be a party afterwards. It might not be two parties. There will be a dozen states where a county sheriff couldn't get elected with a GOP tag and two dozen more where #NotTrump will be a mandatory pledge of allegiance for all GOP county sheriffs. Hillary will be spending October campaigning in Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. And that's my midpoint.

---end likely slashfic---

What Trump does after something like that doesn't even matter. You're talking about confirming all of the worst nightmares of the exact angry white dudes with guns who are going into this already feeling betrayed for decades. The GOPe can still do a lot, probably more than most people think, but I'm gonna go ahead and set the O/U at taking away the nom from Trump's 45%+ "David Duke NBD" faction and give it to the 20% candidate with no constituency and Hispanic name. This doesn't even account for the hundreds of opportunists who are gonna defect between now and then because all the sweet grift money is on the other side.

That ship sailed in NH and crashed on the Virginian reefs imo.

The GOP already changed the rules in 2012 and there's a good argument that Trump is benefitting more than anyone else from that rule change (upping the threshold from winning more than half the delegates in 5 states to qualify for the nom to 8). Changing them again before the convention just to **** Trump is gonna cause him to **** you **** you **** you you're cool **** you to the GOP and leave and take his ball with him and run third party and hand the WH to Hillary.

I am from a relatively rich, liberal, Massachusetts town (Sudbury) and have spent a lot of time in the South. I've heard a saying that in the Northeast a minority (ok, in the saying it's "a black guy") can be your boss but not your neighbor, in the South the opposite is true. This reflects my experience - people in my hometown were pretty big talkers about how liberal and progressive they were, but then you propose to build some low-income housing on the edge of town and you get a lot of people producing studies about how it'll make traffic terrible.

As for Massachusetts republicans, my theory would be that when you're generally conservative minded in the first place, living your life surrounded by and maybe working for paper liberals like the ones I'm talking about above might make you a little more extreme, if only out of tribalism.

This is now the second time that someone has made the same stupid mistake implicitly assuming that racists vote in primaries at massively over represented levels. As a non voter I'm sympathetic to this I guess but I'd be shocked if it were true and I'm more shocked that people keep saying it.

You should have realized the error when you are appealing to the fact that "most people don't vote in primaries." That's not a relevant factor.

And thats without even bringing up the also terrible implicit assumption that non republican voters are racists 0% of the time.

you think that the GOP is just going to let trump get the nomination with 33% of the popular vote and without a majority of delegates because it might piss off a few people in states where the republicans are a lock to win/lose?

remember the backdrop to all of this is about 35% of GOP voters say they'll never vote for Trump, and 15% say they're unlikely to do it. THAT is the disaster.

trump's threat to run third party is pretty much a joke.

The argument Alex is making is that the argument that all Trump voters are racists means that Trump getting 50% of the GOP primary votes entails 25% of the general population being racist. That's not true, because there are nonvoters. Obviously some of those nonvoters could be racists as well. You need more information to say what percentage of the general population is racist, but Trump voters only account for less than 10%.

This is Trump we're talking about, you know, this guy?

Dude is a complete narcissist. If he got screwed out of a Presidential nomination by backroom machinations he would go ape****. Not only would he instruct his supporters to boycott the election, you'd be very lucky if he agreed to tell them not to engage in violence.

Let's talk about the Minnesota GOP results. One off outlier due to caucasaments and Minnesotaments or an indicator of what might happen when the primary map moves west?

Seems like a lol caucuses result.

You could semantikes the "racist" claim but it absolutely makes you a white supremacist, which should be met with equal amounts of scorn and derision.

And the other 35% who just voted for Trump because **** these RINOs who never did anything for me anyway are gonna shrug their shoulders and vote for a RINO who just stole their once in a generation horse's nomination with the help of all the other RINOs?

If that happens Rubio is gonna Mondale it up, but not before lots of stuff burns down.

Depends whose conservative principles you use. Where in the bible does it say life is defined. If it is in the bible what right do you have to impose your religious views on the country. Is it conservative to take lands from the public and give it to rich ranchers? Ted Cruz was only able to write about 10 bills to end Obamacare. He took no time to pass bills that could be passed by 95% of the congressmen. His only ideal of being a senator is to cause problems and make stress on people.

What aspect of his campaign hasn't been a joke thus far?

It seems exactly like the type of thing he'd be willing to do which is why the GOP establishment is going to grit their teeth, roll over and show their belly, and line up behind Trump. They have no choice, if he runs 3rd party the Dems could run a chimp and win effortlessly. It would be suicide to broker Trump out of the nomination at this point. I sincerely hope they are that dumb but realistically I can't imagine it.

just for clarity, Trump is literally the definition of a Republican In Name Only.

You might wanna tell the other third of your party that tho

I get that both are definitely forms of racism, but wouldn't you expect your boss to live in a nicer neighborhood than you do? I am 99% sure that's not what they're saying when they use lines like this, I'm just sayin'.

Related: the politics of MBTA extensions (and generally all public transportation projects, everywhere in America) into the outlying suburbs tickles the same thing in the white person collective. The Orange Line, for instance, was supposed to go as far as Reading for the northbound terminus but stops now in Oak Grove on the Malden/Melrose line, which is basically the dividing spot between poorer white people who didn't have the leverage to object versus wealthier white bedroom communities who threw a fit in the late 70s about it.

Over the years we've had this debate out too ad nauseum but housing projects and public transportation fit into the "blacks roaming where they don't belong, I moved my kids OUT of the city to get away from them!" part of the suburban white section of the brain.

in the abstract, him running third party may seem like a trivially easy thing to do, and as such it is a trivially easy threat to make because people get all wound up over it and see it as some bogeyman lurking in the background.

in reality, it is difficult to get on many ballots, impossible for him to get on some ballots, and it will be absurdly more expensive than running as a major party candidate.

if he was going to run third party and attempt to win, he would've had to have made the decision at least a month ago.

I could have told you this wasn't going to go over well. Many people simply don't care when you point out that they have conflicting views, are inconsistent with their beliefs, etc. In many cases it just makes them dig in further.

Not sure what, if anything, can get people like that to change their minds.

Awice is literally praising trump for doing specifically what Oliver says trump does and which awice takes issue with. Does that make sense? Of course not. But pointing it out only makes folks like awice flail around and hold tighter to their beliefs that they're right and it's everyone else who's wrong.