NorthSideSox72

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 3, 2016 -> 11:57 AM) I liked this bit from Romney's speech: All of the Republican tax plans are ridiculous. eta: bonus laughs for this Mitt Romney is actually criticizing someone for not releasing tax returns. Many of the criticisms Romney leveled at Trump apply just as well to Rubio and Cruz. Definitely some hypocrisy in play here. Though I'm pretty sure Rubio at least already released his tax returns, I'm not sure about Cruz. And neither of those two have such a well-documented history of playing both sides on nearly every policy point in discussion, so some secret tape is just more proof I suppose.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 3, 2016 -> 11:31 AM) He is 100% right on pretty much every count. This is the ultimate con job. It's too bad the messenger doesn't exactly ring with fidelity for many voters, but he might for some of the swing voters which is who matters ultimately anyway. I don't see his speech doing much for the Trump faithful, who have decided that he's somehow "more honest" despite lying right in front of them on every topic. QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 3, 2016 -> 11:43 AM) Yeah, Hillary has to be loving this. She is going to get to run against the biggest empty shirt in the history of American politics. She is running against the ultimate con artist, which is saying something considering she is a part of the Clinton Machine. As long as Clinton isn't indicted (which I think is highly unlikely), she has smooth sailing ahead.

It's funny to me, that on this Clinton email thing, everyone seems to either be in the "it's nothing, ignore it" court, or the "illegal and she should go to jail" court. Both of these are missing the fact that, regardless of whether or not it was illegal, it certainly showed a stunning lack of good judgment. One does not need to be tech-savvy to realize that perhaps conducting government business at the cabinet level over private email is not a good idea for a myriad of reasons. To me it clearly displays poor decision-making, whether it was intentional or due to just plain stupidity.

QUOTE (bmags @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 03:42 PM) NS I think the disconnect between your view nad others, is that as the road to actual victory becomes more and more remote for Rubio/Cruz, their donation base dries up. People won't keep shelling out money for a lost cause, as Hillary Clinton saw in 2008. It takes money to go all the way to the convention, and they won't have it. So, yes, I think Trump is a foregone conclusion, because the forces that remove others from the race will start to be felt. Honestly, there is so much anger out there against Trump, as long as guys are winning delegates and potentially keeping Trump at bay, the money will keep coming. In my view anyway. QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 04:08 PM) I don't quite know what Carson is doing, but he's essentially out of the race. He won't be attending the debate on Thursday and sees no path forward. Not sure what exactly that means and why he hasn't yet suspended his campaign, but that clearly is next. Carson's voters (the few there are) probably go to Cruz and Trump, if I had to guess.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 02:54 PM) http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/electi...legate-targets/ 538 has him 112% on track to win the nomination. Refresh if it gives you the Feb 29th version. It should be from this AM. That's 112% of the curve they assigned based on what they think is his ideal path. It's actually much more complex than what I wrote up and interesting, but he is not 112% versus general numbers as a percentage. He is 112% compared to their anticipated curve. There is a crucial difference there. As I've said, assuming Rubio and Crioz don't drop out, it's all about the big WTA states - Ohio and Florida mostly, but also California and a few others. If Kasich and Rubio can win their home states, Trump won't be the nominee. If Trump wins both, he will be. If he wins one, eh, depends on how other things go.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 02:07 PM) Could be true, but Trump has a lot of roots in Florida. I think you continue to undersell Trump because you have a huge bias against him. Not blaming you for it, but like I said, I'm at the point that for the 2nd time in the last 3 election cycles odds are high that I'll have to write-in my vote for president (I didn't vote for McCain, instead wrote in Romney). I always thought Mccain was a joke as a presidential candidate (VP, sure, but Pres...no way). There's a difference between underselling Trump and overselling others. No other candidate has any shot to win cleanly. The numbers are the numbers. Trump has to do better than he's been doing so far, in order to win. That's just what it is, and that is hard to accomplish. Not impossible of course. Besides, if it was really a bias thing based on party, I'd want Trump to win the nomination. He's going to get trounced in the general. What I actually want is for the GOP to nominate a candidate fit for the job.

QUOTE (bmags @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 01:31 PM) Because while Trump has a difficult road to 51%, the others have a pretty much impossible road considering none of them have, say, the poll numbers hillary had on super tuesday, where after South Carolina you knew she'd have an easier road. None of them have a group of states they are ahead in aside from Trump. Oh yeah, none of the other guys have any reasonable chance to win outright before convention. That much is quite clear.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 01:18 PM) Kasich is within a few % points but Rubio is like 20 points off in his own state. How the hell is that even possible? Any polls for states that haven't seen much campaign traffic yet should be taken with enormous amounts of salt. I'd wait a bit.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 12:45 PM) Is there any truth to this NY Times report that Trump indicated the whole talk about a wall, etc, is just talk and never has any intentions of doing it? If so, I'd think that would do him in with his base? Or is this just Cruz pushing something non existent. NYT people have said the tape exists, so it's not totally made up. But who knows what he actually said, and the NYT says they won't release unless Trump asks them to.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 01:14 PM) The winner take all states mean if the other three split their votes amongst each other, Trump, even in the high 30's or low 40's will do fantastic and just roll up the delegates. Unless these other candidates strategically target certain states to run up their numbers in specific states and let the races be "smaller" in other states. Not even sure how that is possible. Say kasich picks 4 states and Rubio picks 4 and cruz picks 10, but in no world is that going to work. Basically a collected effort to say lets get this to go to the convention and than at that point, Kasich / Rubio / Cruz stop working for each other and see who can be the nominee through the brokered convention? If Trump takes all the big WTA states, he is in. But I am not at all sure that happens. It's sort of fascinating in fact, that Ohio and FL are two of the biggest ones and home to two other candidates. And they haven't really begun campaigning in them yet, to speak of.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 12:39 PM) I keep hearing all the talking heads say the only chance to beat Trump is to have others drop out, but really it looks like exactly the opposite. Cruz and Rubio, and probably even Kasich need to stay in because you have to assume that if any of them drop out, at least some of the people who would have voted for them would switch to Trump. QUOTE (bmags @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 01:07 PM) Another part of this is inevitability. People tend to want to vote for the winner. I'm going to guess Trump's polls will get stronger as people will want to begin to feel invested in their campaign. Both good points. I tend to think Hickory's point is stronger, because fundamentally, Trump needs to do quite a bit better than he already is to make it work. But bmags' factor is true too. I'm sort of puzzled why most (but not all) the media I am seeing is making it seem so inevitable. It really isn't.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 12:05 PM) Statistically, I don't know how Trump's shot isn't in excess of 90%. He's going to destroy everyone in Florida and polls strong in a lot of the winner take all states. See the long-form post I wrote (and edited with some help from B>W). If Trump does proportionally as he's doing now, he has to win a large chunk of the WTA states as well. Certainly possible, but by no means 90%.

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 11:59 AM) There's nothing really tricky about the numbers. They're related to Super Tuesday only, so the timeframe doesn't matter. 2008 had a hotly contested Dem race. 2016 has a hotly contested Rep race. Ah, my bad then on the Super Tuesday thing. And yeah, one way or another (which I assume B>W was getting at), Trump's presence certainly has an effect.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 11:50 AM) Trumy effect one way or the other. That's a neat trick with far less than half the 2016 season over. Also ignores the stark reality that the Dems have had only two candidates basically all season. I assume the asterisk means they are projecting based on states so far.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 11:26 AM) Can't keep the delegate counts low for long. March 15th they start being winner take all (or most). Trump ahead of Romney, McCain at same point. It's over. Don't even see a brokered convention path. Trump has absolutely no competition in the Northeast (once Kasich drops, but even then he's not losing these states) which have huge number of delegates coming and no competition in the South at this point. Rubio can compete in the Midwest (maybe) and Cruz can compete in the southwest but Trump is still solid enough there where he's close and not losing much. Math says it is far from over. Trump has the easiest path of course, but it's all relative. He's still going to have to perform even stronger than he has to go to convention with an untouchable majority, and that isn't the most likely scenario. I'd put Trump's shot at the nomination less than 50% at this point.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 10:39 AM) The old system was that states would decide whether they were bound or not bound. Different states chose the different option. This year however the RNC said the delegates will be bound in some manner. This is from the GOP website for new rules this year: "The unbound RNC members will be bound in the same manner as the state’s at-large delegates, unless the state elects their delegates on the primary ballot, then all three RNC members will be allocated to the statewide winner." The Bustle with a clearer explantion: "The Republican Party’s unbound delegates are the 168 members of the Republican National Committee — but in 2016, they won’t be allowed to vote for whomever they want at the national convention. They normally would be given this luxury, but the RNC ruled this year that these “unbound” delegates wouldn’t, in fact, be unbound at all. They’ll have to support whomever their state supports, just like regular ol’ delegates." Of course if the GOP wanted too I'm sure they could change the rules. It's a party rule, they can do whatever they want, and I think we all know what they think of Trump. I updated the OP, though I put the DC and territories into the voteable category. In reality they aren't, but if I put them in party-dictated, it actually only furthers my main points - Trump is the only real possibility to win without a convention fight, and Cruz' fortunes and decisions likely dictate the final outcome more so than anything else.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Mar 2, 2016 -> 10:26 AM) Just a couple brief corrections and I'll add my two cents in a bit. The total amount of delegates possible is 2472. I think you made a typo there. The 3 per state is already included in that. It's different than democrat system. Also you forgot to include DC and the territories get these delegates as well, so it's 168n not 150. But that number is already included in the 2472. Also, remember, unlike the Democrat side where super delegates exist and can vote how they please, these 3 extra delegates are bound to a candidate. How they are bound depends on the state. Thanks, I'll correct for the 2472. Good catch, same on the territories. Give me a few minutes to rebuild. But I believe you are incorrect on the 3 per state. Those are party delegates and are specifically unbound.

This will be more like a blog post. I wanted to look at what the numbers say, and how the establishment will fall in for the GOP nomination. First, if any candidate wins enough voting-pledged delegates to get a majority PLUS enough to override the 3 party delegates per state, then they win regardless of anything else. So first that math: Total GOP delegates: 2,472 plus 18 for DC + Non-specific overseas is 2,500 Party-level delegates - unbound: 150 So, voting-linked delegates: 2,350 50.00001% of 2,350 is rounded to 1,176 Add 150 to that, and the "magic" number is 1,326 to "clinch" a nomination prior to the convention. So, let's now look at where the delegates stand post-Super Tuesday, as far as I can tell (this is from digging out results for some incomplete states and trying to allocate the last stragglers evenly based on % - so it could vary a few delegates in the end but not much): Trump: 328 Cruz: 239 Rubio: 119 Kasich: 28 Carson: 8 --- Bush: 4 Fiorina: 1 Huckabee: 1 Paul: 1 TOTAL SO FAR: 728 awarded (30.9% of voting-linked total) After the above, the total remaining number of voting-linked delegates in future states and territories is 1,622. So for each candidate to reach the magic number individually, they would have to do the following in the remaining states in terms of delegates and percentage of delegates won: Trump: 998 delegates (61.5% of total) Cruz: 1,087 delegates (67.0% of total) Rubio: 1,207 delegates (74.4% of total) Others: lol If the states were all proportionally allocated, even if Kasich and Carson dropped out, the chances of any of them getting that majority by the convention would be extremely slim. I mean, as well as Trump is doing, even with the help of a big winner-take-all SC he only has gotten 45% so far. So the idea of any of the three managing 60%+ is far-fetched. And even though Cruz and Rubio (more Rubio) probably don't have to get that extra 2 or 3% (because some of the party delegates may actually support them), it's still just too big a stretch for them to reasonably expect. I'm going to assume for the rest of this exercise that none of the big three drop out prior to convention, so they will keep going after delegates. Clearly if one of Cruz or Rubio drops out, the math changes. The wildcard in all this the list of winner-take-all states: FL (99), MO (52), Marianas (6), Ohio (66), V.I. (9), AZ (58), WI (42), DE (16), MD (118), IN (57), CA (172), MT (27), NJ (51), SD (29). Those combine to make up 802 of the remaining 1,864 delegates. Let's assume that each candidate wins the remaining proportional delegates (1,062) at more or less the level they have so far on completed proportional states (all but SC - so 678 total), including Kasich and Carson (because who knows how long they stay, they are pulling smallish numbers anyway). That would put the counts, leaving the Winner Take All states out: Trump (applying 41.0% to remaining prop): 763 Cruz (35.2%): 611 Rubio (17.6%): 305 Kasich (4.1%): 72 Carson (1.2%): 21 Now, this is similar to a general election electoral college game. For each candidate, which of the WTA states do they need in order to win outright? Here are what delegate counts they need in the WTA states to do that: Trump: Must win 563 of 802 Cruz: Must win 715 of 802 Everyone else: Mathematically impossible In other words, for anyone other than Trump and Cruz, the only way they can win the nomination outright is to substantially increase their proportional position going forward. But look also at how difficult that path is for Trump, and even more so Cruz. Cruz would have to win nearly all the WTA states. Even Trump needs to win the large majority of them. More so than he's done so far. Put this all together, and it comes down to this: --The only candidate with a realistic shot at going into convention with a bullet-proof majority is Trump --Even Trump's path, unless he picks up more proportional values, is a very tough road to get that majority, if trends continue --The party votes won't go to Trump if it's a convention situation, nor would Rubio's delegates or probably most of the stragglers with tiny amounts of delegates in carry --The path above doesn't change much unless either one of the three big candidates drops out, OR one of them make very big moves in their Win% What does all that mean? Here's the scary thing - the nomination likely rests in the hands of... Ted Cruz. Partly in an ability to win some of the WTA states. But also if he's willing to back Trump at convention, Trump clearly wins. If he isn't willing to do so, unless Trump absolutely romps the rest of the way, then probably neither of them can win. It's probably Rubio in that case, with party backing. So in the end, Ted Cruz probably dictates this election, but also has almost no chance of winning himself. Fascinating.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Mar 1, 2016 -> 02:05 PM) Reports across Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee of votes being changed from Trump to Rubio. I thought the gop stood against voter fraud? Votes being changed? Those are primary states, so you mean voting machine changes?

Trump will need to win about 53% of all voting-tied delegates by convention time to win the nomination. The GOP version of supers (3 per state) commit only at convention time, and they won't go for Trump. And the party would make sure any other delegate holders consolidate to one non-Trump. Thus, Trump still has a mathematically tough road ahead of him, even after Super Tuesday.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Mar 1, 2016 -> 08:49 AM) Yeah, I just corrected myself. That's some bizarre roster management by Arizona. Burning up a prospect's first option year by sending him down less than a week before rosters expand. I'd be pissed if the Sox did that. Yeah I thought that too, unless maybe ARZ was in a playoff push and was all-in on that focus. But I don't think they were at that time.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Mar 1, 2016 -> 08:43 AM) From what I'm looking at, Davidson didn't get added to Arizona's 40 until he was called up in August 2013, and stayed up the rest of the season, so that wouldn't count as an option year for him. He was called up in August 2013, then sent back down later that same month. Then back to MLB again in September.

QUOTE (Joshua Strong @ Feb 29, 2016 -> 01:13 PM) That's not true, it was a story about a man running away from tragedy, a tragedy that saw him fail his wife and daughter. And when he's at his lowest he stumbles upon Furiosa and the wives. The movie talked about mental illness and had a very strong feminist overtones and imagery. It had a ton of depth. Maybe we didn't see the same movie. So, it's one thing to say that it was a really good action movie that they added some depth to. I'd agree with that. It did have some feminist overtones, and the characters had a little more interest than some of your typical actioners. But to say the movie was "about" tragedy, family, mental illness, etc. is quite a stretch.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Mar 1, 2016 -> 06:23 AM) The 21 Best Grilled Cheeses in America Now this, this is important.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Mar 1, 2016 -> 08:04 AM) It comes back to campaign money. Every word from another candidates mouth aside from Bernie is calculated to get more money from someone. Well not someone, rather something. I'd rather have a flip flopper than that. Flipping on your positions can often be more honest than not. Whether that applies to Trump remains to be seen. I still find him more genuine than the rest, aside from Bernie. You have to be joking. More genuine? We're not talking about flip-flopping one an issue or two, which can happen for either political or personal reasons. He's an opportunist who has clearly demonstrated he will say whatever gets him the most votes. In other words, what others do for money (and then to win), he does much more dramatically and for emotional response (and then to win). Also, far more so than others, he riles up anger to do it. Everything you claim to dislike about fundraising, Trump does and far more often, with the same end goal in mind (to win). How can you make Trump's version seem better?