Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Iowa Post-mortem: The Good, the Bad, and the Gone

While the parties did not have much choice about including Iowa and New Hampshire in the window of early states, the theory behind the early states is that all four are small enough and different enough to help narrow the field.   While winning is nice, the real goals of the campaigns are:  1) to seem viable enough that supporters (both voters and donors) don’t go looking elsewhere; and 2) to meet targets for delegates.  Candidates who are unable to show signs of life quickly find that their campaigns have no life.

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Iowa Math

While vote totals are not irrelevant to presidential elections (especially in the primary phase when trailing candidates quickly find that they lack the financial resources to continue), what ultimately matters is not the popular vote, but winning delegates (for the primaries) and electors (for the general).  The delegate math heading into the Iowa Caucuses are different for the two parties for two reasons:  1) the stage at which delegates are bound and 2) the two parties do proportional representation differently.

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The Road out of Iowa

In less than four days, voters in Iowa will head to some location in their precincts and cast the first official votes of the 2016 presidential campaign.  Both because of its small size and because of the unique compositions of the respective parties in Iowa (compared to the national parties), winning in Iowa is not essential to winning either party’s nomination.  What does matter is how Iowa sets up the rest of the race.

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A Brokered Convention???

At this time of every cycle, the media begins to speculate about the possibility of a brokered convention.   The speculation rarely goes much further than talking head and the blogosphere.  Over the past fifty years, there have only been a handful of  election cycles in which the ultimate result has been in doubt by the end of the primary process.  The last time that a major party took more than one ballot to choose its nominee was the 1952 Democratic Convention.  This time around, however, the leadership of the Republican Party is talking about the possibility of a brokered convention (although only behind closed doors).  What is different with this cycle?

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Post-Thanksgiving Leftovers — Some Musings and Questions and the Republican Presidential Primary

It is that time of year.  When folks have way too much leftover turkey and too many leftover visiting in-laws that seems like it will take forever to get rid of.  Both of which call to mind the Republican presidential candidates — still fourteen strong with two months to go to Iowa.  I have been playing around the last week with the Real Clear Politics tool on the race for delegates on the Republican side.  One big caveat on the tool, it is not too good on the states that allocate congressional district delegates by congressional districts.  In proportional states that allocate by congressional district (thirteen states), it tends to assume that the statewide allocation of congressional district delegates will mirror state-wide results.  It will not.  Depending on the state, either the top three candidates will get approximately one-third each (a close enough fourth placed candidate may steal some delegates on a district-by-district basis) or the top candidate will get approximately two-thirds of the delegates with the second-placed candidate getting one-third.  In winner-take-most states (six states), the tool assumes that the number of districts won will be proportional to the state-wide results.  Again, it will not.  The state-wide winner should win most of the congressional districts (unless there is a good reason to think that the state-wide winner will win their districts by a large margin and narrowly lose a lot of districts).  Having tried to adjust for the individual state rules, I still came to the conclusion that the Republican outcome will depend on the answer to a series of (not-quite twenty) questions.

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Pre-Labor Day Reflect: The State of the Presidential Race: Republican Primary

It is easy to define the Democratic Primary into three or four key questions.  The Republican Primary is an almost infinite number of questions.  However, they ultimately come down into several questions repeated over and  over again — who makes it to Mid-March and when do other candidates drop out.

Right now Trump has a solid lead in the majority of national polls.  While every state has some discretion over their rules,  for the states within the two-week mandatory proportionality window, only Trump is safely over the 20% that states are allowed to set as a threshold for delegates.  Additionally, when you add the other “non-politician” candidates, about 50% of the primary votes appears to be going to “outsider” candidates.

More significantly, there is little or no meaningful gap between a large block of candidates.  There are currently five candidates with between 5-10% of the vote in the Real Clear Politics average of polls.  Right now, it is easier to define who will almost certainly not make it to March 1 (Graham, Jindal, Pataki, and Gilmore) then to guess who will emerge from the pack to save the party from Donald Trump. Continue Reading...

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The Uncomfortable Defense of Donald Trump

Sadly, I must defend Donald Trump’s comments on Megyn Kelly. Trust me, this hurts me more than it does you. Basically, The Donald felt that he was treated unfairly by Kelly, and his step over the line was to intimate that she had her period. Thus, the misogynistic idea that monthly flow makes women stupid, confused, angry and all the rest of the lies that men have used against women over the years.

It used to be that it was a thing. That the fact that women bled regularly and men didn’t meant they could be treated differently in business environments. As in: don’t hire women because they’ll get pregnant and leave. Mothers miss time from work for their kids. Etc.

BUT let’s compare his ACTIONS toward women compared to the rest of the Republican field, and to the Republican platform. When you do, you’ll see that if actions speak louder than words, The Donald comes off better than all the rest of them. Sad but true. Continue Reading...

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