So... any bets on the outcome of the Iowa caucus?

[HiTemp]

Latest poll has Trump at 28%, Cruz at 23%, and the Rube at 15%. All the others are down in the weeds someplace.

Cruz in some hot water for sending out the same email I got from some R-associated pack last year. Basically states "you don't want your neighbors knowing that you didn't vote, etc. They have the last five elections listed and an X next to it if you voted or not. Implication is, if you don't vote that will be broadcast to all your neighbors - sort of trying to shame someone into going to the polls. Guess Cruz's email made some implications that the Sec of State's office would be releasing the data, and the Iowa Sec. of State was none too happy at the distortion of facts. Will it help or hurt Cruz? Who knows?

Wish I could vote in the D caucus there as I'd vote for Sanders. That guy needs to win the D nomination because he's definitely got bats in his belfry. His chance of winning the WH would be about the same as Bush's right now. If Steven Hawking is so set on humans colonizing space, Sanders is our guy! I read his proposals and I sure can't figure out what planet he's on.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

I would be surprised if Trump loses any of them, but we will just have to wait and see if the cheerleaders actually will vote for him, and caucusing is a whole other step to do. If its like here, its treated like a state secret until its over when you find out where and when it it was.

And I would be careful about wishing for Bernie, he would bring all the millennials with him who think his ideas are something new, and probably beat the GOP candidate if just some of the Dem base turned out.

[HiTemp]

Oh I think Bernie doesn't have much of a shot at all. For one, all the big money donors and the Wall St. types aren't going to support him because he sees them as the problem and one of his first available targets. If there was one positive about Obamacare it's that it has people who never before would consider asking now wanting to know how a promise is going to be paid for. I remember well some conversations I had with folks I know back when O-care was going to be the solution to those 34 million people with no medical insurance. "Who is going to pay for it?" I asked them. "The government," was their usual answer.

Well now that they are losing the decent insurance they once had to this ridiculous spectacle called Ocare, and the ones who don't are shelling out a percent (two percent this coming year) of their income as a penalty, suddenly they're pissed off that the government passed the costs on to them. Gee, what a surprise!
But now that they've been burned once it's make them much more questioning about the pies in the sky that politicians promise which is something they should have been thinking about all along.

Sanders is kind of like the D version of Ron Paul. Some great ideas but the path he wants to take to get there is a virtual soup sandwich. Totally impractical methods that would cause as much chaos as it supposedly cures. Like Sander's plan to tax the rich at an 80% rate. I'd move to Belize if I had to pay 80% tax and I'm far from rich monetarily. Same thing with businesses, and we've already seen the manufacturing base of our country virtually dry up. If another Pearl Harbor happened today we better make Taiwan the 51st state the following day or we'd be screwed. Sanders wants to tax business in the same kind of way for the same kind of reasons - because they are a source of money he wants government hands on so they can waste spend it.

I really don't think he'd have any support outside the millennial college types who are wrapped up in protesting things while insisting the 1st Amendment be done away with.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

Maybe, but then Obama was not even in the running about this time either. Hillary is the problem, she is unelectable, has way too much baggage, has an unlikable personality and comes across disingenuous even when she is, if she ever is. I suspect she will tank, either being tied up with further investigation or in scandal of being, or not being indicted when she clearly should be. Once the party decides to move on from her, all it takes is a few magic vote counts like last time to make it a real race between an unlikable Trump and Bernie the buffoon who seems to scare no one as being a viable alternative.

Though I do have to agree, I don't think people are really paying attention to the dem primaries, we have celebrity president reality TV going on. When Bernie has to appeal to a greater audience, his support may fold like a cheap shirt too.

I like that though, he is the leftists Ron Paul, all ideology, no practicality.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

This why I don't gamble. Trumps media face time doesn't seem to always translate to votes. If he doesn't run away with NH, he may have more trouble than he thought.

The real surprise for some was Hillarys lack luster showing. The talking heads discounted it and says Sanders won't win, and he may not but its not a given to her highness either.

[HiTemp]

Hilarious! Clinton wins 6 counties by coin toss. I guess that reflects how much voters think Sanders is out in left field that they'd vote for a person with possible federal indictments hanging over her head.

I was not surprised by the Cruz win, he's been working the hell out of Iowa because I think he had a fighting chance there. I don't think he's going to do as well in NH but you never know. I think SC will be a better test. I do believe the Iowa win is definitely a dagger in the heart of the establishment Rs who can't stand Cruz, and who knows what they will do now that he's technically the front runner?

[HiTemp]

On the local gun forum this morning I saw this, which is the best summary of the Iowa D caucuses I've seen so far:

I don't know about a "deep division," only that half want an honest socialist, the other half want a lying socialist.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

Bernie has his own skeletons, a wife who has some allegations of fraud and misappropriation of funds while she was a president of a small college. I don't expect Cruz to play well in NH, but he is definitely courting the evangelical vote, so SC may be more attuned to him, just have to see. Rubio was definitely the winner though, coming back from a distant 3rd in polls to nearly unseat trump as runner up. The DC crowd is seeing Jeb as a bad bet, I suspect they start supporting Rubio by default soon as anyone but the terrible Ts. None of the maianstream 'moderate' Republicans showed better than single digit, which I think you are right, put a stake through them. They will have to start openly thinking other than, and co-opt someone if they can, which my bet is they may start to reach out to Rubio if this trend holds until after super Tuesday.

[HiTemp]

Well all of the Krauthammer crowd that was "highly questioning" whether or not Trump was a conservative are going to have a hard time selling Marco Rubio as one. He is NOT a conservative, he's a Miami Republican which is like saying someone is a NY or MA Republican. He is the only candidate with a demonstrable instance of caving to the Ds and supporting immigration. I don't trust him to stand up to a congressional minority with a loudmouth media hounding him day and night. He will cave, so he's not getting my vote period. He's also my Senator and as as far as that is concerned he's a waste of good oxygen and District of Columbia office space. He flat out hasn't done sheet.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

I like how he comes in 3rd, and for some he is the presumptive nominee already. I may have liked him at one time, but that gang of 8 BS has pretty sunk that boat. He will fail if he does like says he will, appealing to the conservatives, and the establishment, and the independents. I don't know how many times they have to try being all things to all people and lose to figure out they are supposed to be appealing to a certain voting block that they call their base.

[Garf]

Looks like Hillary bit the dust on both Caucus and Primary. Love it.

[HiTemp]

Me too... but then there is the Dem Superdelegate thing so it appears Hillary lost NH by a landslide but comes out with more delegates total than Sanders. I don't see how the voters can stand for that because it essentially gives the party a larger say over who gets nominated than the voters. At most they would only need 1 superdelegate in case of a tie or something like that, but not enough to reverse the primary election for gosh sakes!

Will be interesting to see how this pans out. Nor can I wait to see how Bernie does in the south. My prediction is the voter turnout will be an all-time low if the race is only between Hillary and Sanders, and there won't be enough votes in the popular election for either one to prevail. What the Dems have done is basically repeat the Republican mistake of running a McCain or a Romney. Wins the primary hands down but can't make people show up on election day.

Which is great as far as I am concerned.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

How does that work? lose the election and win the delegates? I would be curious to see what happens in SC, apparently the Bern is not felt so much by black people. And I guess we will see how Trump plays down there too. I actually saw a Trump sticker on car locally, and besides ancient Obama stickers I have not been seeing many political stickers at all. Well other than my daughter who had to put a Sanders sticker on her car just to get me going.

[HiTemp]

The way the Dem party has set it up is that there are so many delegates from each state that are allocated based on the vote, then on top of that there are superdelegates, also called "pledged delegates," essentially party officials who are free to support whichever candidate they feel like. In NH, Bernie won 14 delegates by vote and Hillary won 9, but the 6 superdelegates from NH are all supporting Hillary so out the door she gets 15 delegates and Bernie gets 14.

Nationwide, Clinton already has 394 of these party hacks in her camp while Bernie has only a handful. So in order for him to win at the convention he's going to have to change some minds or else win states 80-20% to get enough delegate support. This is why I don't see how voters can stand for this, where their vote is essentially nullified by some select group of party officials.

Its one of the reasons I hope Sanders keeps winning because then, at the national convention, the Dems are going to forced to swap over for Bernie or else explain to the whole country why their voice in the primary elections was essentially meaningless. And if that happens, it will fall to Debbie Wassherface-Sheethead to 'splain it to the folks. I don't see many people going out of their way to go out and cast a vote on election day if that happens. So as far as I'm concerned, I hope they just continue being Democrats so it blows up in their face.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

Seems like Trump and Clinton are have problems closing the deal here. The DNC is going to have a real problem with their coalition of interests when they screw ol Bern if he has won nearly half the states

[HiTemp]

As far as the Dems go, they're simply going to fall back to the position that Hillary was favored by the superdelegates and Bern was not. That's politics, so take a seat Bern. Now I agree his followers aren't going to like that very much, but if they don't realize by now a coronation is underway, I guess they're on the wrong boat to begin with.

I'm not sure why you say Trump is having a hard time closing. He just took 3 more states last night, and the two largest of the four from March 5th. Amazingly, the delegate count right now is the same for both from those contests but it has to do with 12 delegates from LA that have not been proportioned yet. Trump will have to get the lion's share of those as the LA delegate count sits at T 18 C 17 right now. It should end up around T 24 C 19.

There are also two dynamics at work here as we prepare for next Tuesday with FL, IL, MO, NC, and OH. One is, Trump has been absolutely savaged by Romney and it didn't so much as put a dent in him. Rush has an interesting article from his show yesterday about how Romney's father is the one who did the same thing to Goldwater back in '64. So with Romney, several Senators, a couple of Governors, and a who's who of Republican superpacs against him, he still easily won states 5-3 over Cruz. Yesterday's contests, Michigan primarily, was the first test of the impact of these ads because there was no early voting there; all votes came after the Romney et al attacks. It showed they didn't work, and if anything only fired up the Trumpsters to go vote just to piss off the establishment yet again.

The other dynamic, this one working against Cruz, is that there are more allegations of his campaign workers sending out stories designed to make people think others are abandoning the race. I think it was in HI where some volunteer sent out copies of a CNN single-source story claiming internal bickering in the Rubio campaign about whether or not he should drop out to preserve what's left of his political career. Now this really isn't much of anything but it puts a pattern in place that allows people to think of the Cruz campaign as more like a Hillary campaign where anything goes and they can always apologize after the fact. That will NOT fly in FL, as people are still extremely sensitive about fairness of election processes and campaign actions after the 2000 fiasco. Cruz is polling a low third here right now, and Rubio is between 5% and 23% trailing Trump depending on who you believe.

The polling, while I agree is not exact and has been wrong, shows Trump leading in FL, IL, and OH. The closest race is OH with only a 5% margin to Kasich, but even losing OH Trump will be more than halfway to the magic number if he wins FL and IL. NC is a proportional state, so even a second place finish will get Trump around 25 more delegates. Cruz is the only real force that can stop Trump short of a convention fiasco, and Cruz is polling 3rd in those three states, 2nd in IL in one poll. I just can't see how Trump can come out of next Tuesday not being more than halfway to the magic number.

Then... there's AZ where Trump is leading, 58 delegates, winner take all. Wisconsin, Trump leads, but would probably lean Kasich or Rubio but who knows if they get trounced next week? New York, 95 proportional delegates... I don't think Ted is going to win that one, nor will Rubio or Kasich.

For Ted to win, he has to take every winner-take-all state except FL and OH. That means IL, MO, AZ, WI, DE, MD, PA, IN, NE, CA, MT, NJ, and SD. If he loses just one of those, he can't get to 1237 even if he wins every proportional state left. Oh - one possible exception - he could lose DE and win CO, that would work. His odds go up only if Kasich and Rubio both leave the race and his delegate split totals are higher. So I would say at this point it's almost mathematically impossible for him to win, because a Trump win in any of those winner take all states eliminates Ted from the magic number.

I really think Trump is in a good position to win the delegates he needs. We'll see.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

I have no problem with that take, but Cruz just keeps winning when he was not supposed to, and as of now has not lost ground on Trump, so I don't see its a done deal yet, at least until until after FL.

[HiTemp]

Oh the Cruzer certainly does have game, absolutely! If the other two knuckleheads drop out he might even beat trump in a head-to-head contest. A lot of states are nearly a month away, and a lot can happen in a month.

Fella down at the barbershop today had one of the best summaries of all these goings-on in the Republican primaries. You'd like this fella, Honcho... Korean War Vet, must be almost 90 but clear of eye and mind and feisty as they come. Tells people who ask him how he stays so strong and fit for a guy his age that he drinks two cups of vinegar and eats four 16d nails for breakfast every day. Guys a real card!

I really can't do his speech justice, and I don't have it exact but probably 96% or better accuracy. Try to imagine this spoken in a very thick southern Alabama accent. Potential infestation = PO-tenshul in-fuss-TAY-shun, etc.

Anyway, he says "See, what we got here (almost sounds like Cool Hand Luke's warden) is we got us a potential infestation of them Clinton cockroaches possibly happening at the White House. And no one in America except for dipshits want to see that. Those spineless gnats in suits up there in DC don't have the brains to stop it, and the only two exterminators who've stepped forward are some god-damned rich NY Yankees fan and a fella from over in TX who went to all them liberal schools and learned how to speak cockroach. Now that fella, we know how he's gonna kill cockroaches, he's gonna talk 'em out then stomp their ass into the WH tile floor. That other guy (Trump), we know he'll kill 'em all too but we don't know whether he's gonna stomp on 'em or use bug spray or a friggin neutron bomb because he's unpredictable like that. Way I see it, either one of those two will get the job done, it all comes down to what Americans feel about what method ought to be used. Long as I don't have to see my Marines dropping off hookers in the WH helicopter to that ass-wipe former president I'm a happy camper."

Needless to say we were almost in tears we were laughing so hard. And he's saying WTH y'all laughing at? hehehehehe. But I think he's revealed a lot of truth in what he says.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

Heh, yeah I bet that was worth hearing live. I just wish I had his confidence Trump is going to be anything but what he has been up until now. Trump talks a good game, but his score card is not exactly giving me the feeling of a conservative championship coming.

[HiTemp]

I swear there must really be a concerted effort on the part of the whole Republican party to get Trump elected in stealth mode. Cruz is out there today saying Trump supporters are all low-information types who aren't engaged. He cites Trump's support in the SE as basically taking advantage of ignorant folks. Really Ted? That's going to help you in FL if you do win the nomination, and FL is a state that will be a must-win for you.

Every time something like this happens, the Trumpsters turn up the voltage and Trump gets a surge no one was expecting. Why hasn't Cruz learned that if he's as smart as reputed to be? It's going to do him no good to win a nomination if he pisses of the very people who will have to get out there and vote for him.

I don't know if anyone can define conservatism anymore. The establishment claims they are, yet they won't support a single platform policy that was laid out as their own model of conservatism. Rubio claims he is, but he's fine with big donors and big immigration complete with handouts. Kasich says he is, but he's voted consistently against the 2A, in fact it was his vote that broke the tie and brought us the infamous Clinton Assault Weapons ban in '94, and when the House tried to appeal it, he voted against it. So he's not a conservative. Cruz claims he is, and he does indeed support MOST conservative ideals such as smaller government and better fiscal responsibility, but he's no conservative when it comes to the big banks and investors, and that's not surprising because they have funded his campaigns for quite some time including sweetheart loans that Cruz neglected to be straightforward about.

Trump, the only thing we know about him is he's a legit wheeler-dealer kind of guy with a lot of false bravado. But he does get things done, and with DC in essentially a gridlock of opposing parties, I believe he's got the best chance to try and break through all that and make some changes. I don't believe he'll get all he wants, they never do, but I believe his stated direction is the right one. I don't know if he'll get congress to move, I just know Cruz is going to have just as tough a time moving a senate outside it than he did inside it. He may well be a good behind the scenes dealer too, we just don't have any solid proof and are once again operating only on what we hope they can do. It always comes down to that, I suppose.

I'd support him if he was the candidate even with his insults, though I'd prefer he save those for Hillary.