Tuesday, June 28, 2016

No #DumpingTrump

No pasaran.  He's going to be the nominee.  What now, #NeverTrumpets?


Your New Republican Party.

Republicans looking to dump Donald Trump at next month’s convention have passion, energy and a fierce sense that their party will suffer unless Trump is unseated. What they appear to lack, however, are the votes to make it happen.
POLITICO reached out to all 112 members of the committee that will write the rules of the national GOP convention. This is the panel that anti-Trump activists hope to jam a proposal through to free convention delegates to spurn Trump and select another candidate instead.
What emerged from the survey, though, is a portrait of a committee with little interest in the dump Trump crowd. In fact, most members may be eager to stop them.
“I support DJT 100%,” said Alabama rules committee member Laura Payne in an email. “I ran to support … Trump & to represent the voters of Alabama. It may or may not be an attempt, but the voters will prevail.”
"Trying to change the rules in mid-game because you don't like the outcome is tantamount to saying you are going to take your ball and go home because you are losing," said Christine Serrano-Glassner, a Rules Committee delegate from New Jersey. "I will be supporting our Nominee, Donald J. Trump."
It was a common sentiment. Among the 32 committee members who responded, 25 said they would fight efforts to stop Trump’s nomination. Another 33 members of the panel have been previously on record as endorsing Trump or rejecting efforts to rip the nomination away from him at the convention.

The NYT piles on.  It's such a fascinating thing to me in this cycle that so many binary thinkers are going to be suffering so much cognitive dissonance.  Those that were once psychologically shackled inside the two-party box are suddenly forced to think outside it.

-- The media will be compelled to include the Green and the Libertarian in the horse-race polling, or else show themselves as duopoly frauds.  Polls without them won't reflect reality; just another attempt to silence their voices.  Manipulating the data by removing third party votes altogether and then presenting the D and Rs as the full universe of the electorate is one of the transgressions I would imagine I'll be forced to point out.  More times than I would wish.

-- There will be an ever-louder cry to include the two minor-party candidates in the presidential debates, which are currently micromanaged by the CPD aka Ds and Rs to the exclusion of voices outside the two main lanes.

-- Most importantly, people who never would have considered the most proper protest vote will now be casting one.  Whether it turns out to be an extra couple of percent above their usual one or two, or whether it's more than that -- or much more than that -- is basically the most interesting conversation that's going to be happening this cycle.  Trump and Clinton's gaffes, legal problems, and assorted other he said/she said bullshit and negativity -- as fascinating as the corporate media will keep telling us it is -- just aren't going to do anything except suppress voter interest and correspondingly turnout, as polling traditionally demonstrates.

There remain far too may people who will insist that you only have two options, and a vote for one helps elect the other.  Stop falling for that crap.  Stop, also, listening to people who say that your vote is wasted, thrown away, or otherwise cancelled out unless you pick Coke or Pepsi.  Frick or Frack.  Ford or Chevy.  In a world full of multiple choices of everything, why should anyone settle for evil or less evil?

My teevee just isn't going to tell me anything about this election.  My recommendation is to not let yours tell you much either.  The Fox/sheep effect is nothing for so-called liberals to emulate.

Let's show that we're smarter than they think we are.  That's not too difficult a task, is it?  Not too much to ask?  It would be easy to be cynical, I know.  I still have hope for something more than incremental progress.  Call me naive'...

Monday, June 27, 2016

UT/TexTrib polling has some surprises

Let's get Trail Blazers' take, since they were first (after the actual sponsor, that is):

Texas supporters of Bernie Sanders are more reluctant to support Hillary Clinton than Ted Cruz supporters are to support Donald Trump, according to a new poll released Monday morning.

The University of Texas / Texas Politics Project Poll found Texas voters who supported Cruz's presidential campaign are more likely to support Trump than Sanders supporters are to support Clinton. Nearly 70 percent of Cruz voters are ready to vote for Trump, but just 40 percent of Sanders supporters are ready to vote for the former secretary of state.

WaPo's poll from just this past weekend begs to differ on the rapidity with which Sandernistas are boarding the Clinton bandwagon.  So Jim Henson may just be spinning here.

"Sanders has been reluctant to throw in the towel and endorse Clinton. That's showing in these numbers," said James Henson, a UT-Austin professor and the director of the Texas Politics Project. "Clinton has plenty of time to work with Sanders and his supporters. But I think the ball is very much in Sanders' court right now. The Sanders' voters are likely in large numbers to follow the lead of their candidate. But he's gotta lead them to that place." 

Whether that happens or doesn't, what I'm gathering from social media is that Berners aren't waiting to be led anywhere.  I believe Henson's supposition is false, but time (and more data) will tell.  Here's the counterpoint.
 
Since Clinton became the presumptive nominee, Sanders has refused to concede. While acknowledging that he's not going to be the nominee and that he'll likely vote for Clinton in November, the Vermont senator hasn't dropped out yet. He has also not formally endorsed Clinton.

Accurate, and it doesn't reference the platform arguments that Sanders' people lost over the weekend, and some seething I'm seeing about that.  So is WaPo's poll wrong about Berners jumping on with Clinton and TexTrib's right here?

And there's the usual caveats about polling methodology.

The poll was conducted online from June 10 to June 19 and surveyed 1,200 voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.83 percent meaning that results can vary by that much in either direction. Some public opinion experts question the effectiveness of online polling, because it relies on "sample matching." 
This statistical tool draws samples from online groups of pre-selected respondents and weighs them to represent demographic groups.
Typically, the best polls are conducted over telephone. Still, the University of Texas / Texas Politics Project Poll provides interesting insight into the upcoming general election. 

And the DMN's political blog buried the lede ...

Trump leads over Clinton 41 to 33 percent, according to the poll.  

That's going to excite all those Democrats who believe Hillary when she says "I can win Texas".  But hey, if you were ignorant enough to have swallowed all her lies up to this point... why would you suddenly stop now?

The head-to-head matchup is presenting itself as a very skewed and blinkered way to look at this election cycle.  In a three-horse race (with Lib Gary Johnson), it's 39-32-7, with 14% saying 'someone else'.  And this poll neglects mentioning Jill Stein or the Green Party completely, which I think is flawed methodology especially when you consider the wildest of UT/TexTrib/YouGov polling results over their relatively long history of comical errors.  Even if you're a Democrat who is hostile to Greens, it's a dumb thing to do to simply ignore them (or hide their support in other ways).  And we'll probably see more of that.

More from the Austin Statesman.

*Disclosure: I was surveyed for this poll by YouGov.

The burden is undue.

Pretty straightforward.


In the other pending Supreme Court decisions remaining for the last term we'll ever have to be #WaitingForLyle, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell will not go to jail, payday lenders will be subject to interest rate caps ...

Rejecting calls from across the financial-services industry, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a ruling that gives borrowers more power to enforce state limits on interest rates.
The justices turned away a company’s effort to avoid a class-action lawsuit over its efforts to collect credit-card debt from New York consumers.
The rebuff leaves intact a federal appeals court ruling that lenders say is already having far-reaching effects by undercutting the burgeoning internet lending business and raising questions about debt-backed securities that contain high-interest loans.
The practical effects "are difficult to overstate," the debt collector, Encore Capital Group Inc.’s Midland unit, argued in the appeal.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said borrowers in some circumstances can invoke their state’s usury laws, as the interest-rate caps are known, even if the loan originates elsewhere.

... and domestic abusers will lose their guns.

The U.S. Supreme Court backed the broad application of a federal law barring firearm possession by people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, ruling it could be used against two men convicted under a Maine law.
The justices voted 6-2 in the case, which drew attention in February when Justice Clarence Thomas asked questions during arguments for the first time in a decade. Thomas dissented from the ruling.

A great day for justice overall.