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Rubio and Kasich Are Living Out a Classic Game Theory Dilemma
HughPickens.com writes: Kevin Quealy writes in the NYT that the two remaining mainstream candidates for the GOP Presidential nomination — Marco Rubio and John Kasich — are living out an issue studied for decades in game theory. Game theorists might call the GOP predicament an anti-coordination game or a volunteer's dilemma but most of us might call it by a more familiar name: chicken. Although Rubio is the obvious establishment favorite, the two are splitting some votes. so to have his best chance against Trump and Cruz, Rubio needs Kasich to drop out. The longer both candidates remain in the race, the worse it is for both of them.
Kasich's first option is to stay in the race but he could go further, by committing to stay in no matter what. In a classic game of chicken between two drivers rushing headlong toward each other, this strategy is like removing your steering wheel, leaving you no choice but to drive straight toward your opponent. Kasich could hope for another robotic debate performance from Rubio or even an implosion from the Trump or Cruz campaigns. Kasich 's second strategy would be to cut a deal with Rubio — offer to drop out, for example, in exchange, for the second spot on a Rubio ticket or a cabinet post. Kasich's third strategy would be to threaten to support a different candidate, like Trump or Cruz. If the threat had the potential to damage Rubio enough, it could be a useful bargaining chip. "Being crazy is a strategy, but only if your opponent actually believes it," says Richard Thaler. Part of the problem is that this is a game that's played just once. "The chance to be your party's nominee for president comes along only every four or eight years, even for the very luckiest candidates," says Quealy. "If the candidates lived in a universe in which they could run for president hundreds of times, they might agree that, on average, their shared interests were better served by cooperating." But this is not an iterated dilemma. It's a one-time-only dilemma with a tremendous payoff for the winner. Ultimately, both Kasich and Rubio risk an outcome neither wants. But as Daniel Diermeier, the dean of the public policy school at the University of Chicago, notes, "A very important lesson of game theory is that sometimes the world is a grim place."
Kasich's first option is to stay in the race but he could go further, by committing to stay in no matter what. In a classic game of chicken between two drivers rushing headlong toward each other, this strategy is like removing your steering wheel, leaving you no choice but to drive straight toward your opponent. Kasich could hope for another robotic debate performance from Rubio or even an implosion from the Trump or Cruz campaigns. Kasich 's second strategy would be to cut a deal with Rubio — offer to drop out, for example, in exchange, for the second spot on a Rubio ticket or a cabinet post. Kasich's third strategy would be to threaten to support a different candidate, like Trump or Cruz. If the threat had the potential to damage Rubio enough, it could be a useful bargaining chip. "Being crazy is a strategy, but only if your opponent actually believes it," says Richard Thaler. Part of the problem is that this is a game that's played just once. "The chance to be your party's nominee for president comes along only every four or eight years, even for the very luckiest candidates," says Quealy. "If the candidates lived in a universe in which they could run for president hundreds of times, they might agree that, on average, their shared interests were better served by cooperating." But this is not an iterated dilemma. It's a one-time-only dilemma with a tremendous payoff for the winner. Ultimately, both Kasich and Rubio risk an outcome neither wants. But as Daniel Diermeier, the dean of the public policy school at the University of Chicago, notes, "A very important lesson of game theory is that sometimes the world is a grim place."
Kasich is smart enough to realize that he isn't going to win the general election in 2016. He also may be the only person on stage smart enough to realize that none of the GOP hopefuls will, either - hence there is no reason for him to negotiate with Rubio for a cabinet position that will never materialize. There has only been one national poll so far that has shown a GOP candidate beating Hillary, but it was within the margin of error. If the democrats nominate Sanders, however, it will be a GOP bloodbath as he beats the GOP candidates by much more than the margin of error.
Kasich is more likely staying in the game for the same reason that Trump entered it - fame and recognition. Obviously Trump was already famous before announcing but now he is even more so; though very few people outside of Ohio knew of Kasich before he got in the ring. Much like several other past GOP hopefuls, Kasich has opened up great new opportunities for himself as a Fox News commentator, a Washington lobbyist, a think tank leader, or various other jobs of that sort which were previously beyond his grasp. The longer he stays in, the more his brand grows.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
..because it assumes only rational agents.
I still wonder how it is possible that the republicans can't come up with a single decent candidate. And this is not the first time that happened.
He has only been a senator for 3 years, and is associated with the radical second-wave/post hijack/radical conservative Tea Party movement (not the libertarian movement).
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Whoever wins the republican nomination could still win. Political races are funny things and swing voters are fickle and emotional. Let me give an extreme example. Kasich is almost the nominee and a fire breaks out in his hotel. He starts pulling people from the fire and saves some children and it's caught on camera. Suddenly he takes the nomination and the presidency. Yes, it's stupid but people have lost over less... see Howard Dean's scream.
The thing that is scary about Kasich is how he has fooled the press into thinking he's a moderate. He's no moderate. He's one of the stealth anti abortion candidates of the 90's. He sounds moderate but his actions are pretty radical(anti abortion bills with no abortion exception even to save the life of the mother). I fear Kasich far more than Cruz. Cruz can't hide his instanity. Kasich does it quite nicely.
The press has failed us. They tell us all about the horse race, but tell us little to nothing about policy differences.
No candidate can win the convention on the first ballot unless they have a majority in 8 states.
None of the candidates are currently poised to do this. None have won a majority in any state yet. The implication is that this game is considerably more complex than chicken. It's very possible for any candidate to lose a plurality but win the nomination.
If Cruz or Trump wins and Hillary is the nominee. You will see Republican-leaning voters and blue dog democrats coming out of the wood work to support the Republican over Hillary. Cruz is not controlled by Wall Street and Trump is openly running a pro-common man, fuck the special interests campaign and he can pull it off because he's so rich he could moon Wall Street in public and not miss a single dollar from them.
Clinton, on the other hand, is married into Wall Street. She's pro-amnesty, pro-every Chamber of Commerce fuck the little guy interest out there.
And to add to the problem for Clinton, she consistently loses millennial female support every time the issue of her and Bill's behavior toward women comes up. Bill makes Trump look like Billy Graham in his treatment of women. Hillary has a proven legacy of keeping women from getting their due in court, including laughing at a 12 year old rape victim.
Sanders is the only electable candidate they have unless it's a Kasich-Bush ticket.
I still wonder how it is possible that the republicans can't come up with a single decent candidate. And this is not the first time that happened.
Why would you need a decent candidate ? Primaries on the Republican side are governed by the most right wingers, racists, bible thumpers extremists. You cannot win the primary be being a good/moderate/compromising Republican. Hence the host of batshit crazies that sprout up. Trump is an anomaly because he's his own man. You can bet whatever you want he doesn't give a shit about the Republican constituency. He just wants the presidency, and can shout louder than anybody else. After all, he's being more Republican than all the other Republican candidates put together.. The Republican leadership has a lot of soul searching to do. You cannot cater only to extremists for more than a generation and think it won't fuck up the political process. We have already seen what the current bunch of uncompromising Republitards had done in Congress. This is simply more of the same.
When I studied Game Theory and couldn't work out an answer I would simple posit "What would the biggest d-bag in the entire world do?" Not just some asshole, but the biggest dbag on the entire planet. This served me very well.
Often in GT there are questions where you will have something where the end question would be "How would the captain share the 100 gold pieces among his 5 sailors?" Obviously the biggest d-bag in the entire world would keep 95 and share only 5. This or something very close to it would be the answer most of the time.
Where Game Theory often gets it wrong is that there is a second tier of math that people will impose on a GT scenario. So in the classic prisoner's dilemma the whole snitching as a default strategy is rebalanced by Mario cutting your face off if you snitch.
Also Game Theory is balanced culturally. For instance in most parts of Canada a four way stop sign will work very well with everyone taking their turn 99% of the time. A cultural sense of fair play keeps it functioning even though game theory says to never take your turn. I have been in some third world cut-throat countries where a four way stop would just end up with a bunch of cars all jammed in place nose to nose with scooters weaving in and around the mess. In these countries everyone is a snitch in the prisoner's dilemma.
Maybe this is exactly what the GOP needs to happen. If an 'establishment' candidate scrapes through and loses, you may well have the same people voting Trump now pushing even harder for a candidate like him next time (under the belief that he would have won if they hadn't been robbed by the 'establishment'). If Trump does win the nomination and then gets thrashed in the election leading to a Democrat landslide a few of them might reconsider. Consider it as the difference between a painful field amputation and a slow painful death due to the spreading infection.
Uh, last time I've checked, Rubio vs Clinton was rather very GOP (+5% to Rubio):
http://www.realclearpolitics.c...
Rubio to Clinton is roughly what Clinton is to Trump:
http://www.realclearpolitics.c...
Cruz vs Clinton also doesn't look bad for GOP at all:
http://www.realclearpolitics.c...
Cruz + Rubio have more votes, than Trump, had one of the two dropped out in favor of the other... Nobody would care about what Kasich does.
(I don't see how him supporting Rubio allows Rubio to beat Trump, if Cruz is still there with 20% of the votes)
What the article doesn't get is the following in terms of voters.
Rubio + Kasich is less than Trump
It's going to be a lot less than Trump. Not a little but a lot. As the campaign goes on, Trump will pick up momentum and he will easily begin to get over 50% of the vote in states with the rest of the candidates fighting over the scraps. I'm not his biggest fan, but to me there are certainly worse alternatives in the Republican primary and his ability to win a national election is vary badly underestimated by many on the left, just as they are very likely grossly overestimating Bernie Sanders ability to win a national election.
I still wonder how it is possible that the republicans can't come up with a single decent candidate. And this is not the first time that happened.
Arguably neither party has a decent candidate this go around but I agree. The GOP candidates in particular all have wigs, red noses and large shoes. That party has kind of painted themselves into this ridiculous ideological corner and they get weird candidates that try to fit that impossible puzzle. They claim to want government out of people's business but then ignore that when it comes to "values" thanks to the religious wing of the party. They also claim to be about fiscal responsibility but they can't ever vote for raising taxes if they want to stay in office even when it is absurd not to. And despite their claims they wan to cut spending their actions show exactly the opposite - they just want to spend money on THEIR causes. So they have to argue the ridiculous idea that somehow we can achieve prosperity by continually cutting taxes, mostly for wealthy people, while not reducing spending (especially on the military) and staying out of people's private lives except when it offends their religious sensibilities. That's the very definition of conflicted messaging.
And then they get a demagogue like Trump and they can't figure out how to deal with him because they have been so busy painting themselves into this ideological corner that any reasonable candidate can't even win a local election thanks to the Tea Party and social conservatives.
I bet the establishment Republicans think they're in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
You mean, they're held hostage in a resort, with a large, balloon-like rover that captures or kills anyone who tries to escape?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
And yet he won a second term, which indicates that the Democrats have had this problem for at least almost as long.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"I still wonder how it is possible that the major parties can't come up with a single decent candidate. "
FTFY.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Trump is openly running a pro-common man, fuck the special interests campaign and he can pull it off because he's so rich he could moon Wall Street in public and not miss a single dollar from them.
No he isn't. Sanders it running a pro-common man campaign. Trump couldn't care less about the "common man". The only thing Trump is for is Trump and you'd have to be an idiot (like his supporters) to not see that. Trump has ALWAYS been 100% about promoting himself. He isn't a policy wonk, he doesn't care about or understand what "common people" need, he speaks in sound bites with no content, and it's not clear how he would go about getting a consensus for anything from Congress. The President isn't a dictator so he'll have to actually play nice with others to get anything done should he get elected. I've seen no evidence he has a clue how to do that. You seriously think he's going to be able to insult his way to getting bills passed?
Clinton, on the other hand, is married into Wall Street. She's pro-amnesty, pro-every Chamber of Commerce fuck the little guy interest out there.
So is every other candidate out there including Trump, except maybe Sanders... maybe. Trump isn't married to Wall Street, he IS Wall Street personified.
Sanders is the only electable candidate they have unless it's a Kasich-Bush ticket.
As much as I would like to agree with you I'm not optimistic about his chances in the general. He appeals strongly to a certain block of voters but it's not clear how much he appeals to moderates. The only way Sanders wins is if he can somehow appeal to moderates and get a lot of young people out to vote. Possible but not easy and I'm not sure he has the sort of mass appeal Obama did. That said, he might have a chance if Trump is the guy on the right. I think even a lot of Republicans are pretty uncomfortable with the idea of Trump in the White House.
To be fair, the only arguably decent candidate from the DNP this go round is Bernie Sanders, and he is going to lose to Hillary-cesspool-of-lies-and-skeletons-Clinton. Ironically, that's because the black vote is going to a bougie fraud instead of someone who has actually worked for civil rights.
Yea, the GOP has a circus going on, but the DNP has the biggest clown, and she's not funny.
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I don't know game theory but I do dabble in political strategy. Most Republicans, or Americans for that matter, have at least heard of Rubio. Few outside of Ohio have heard of John Kasich. The tie for last place has finally put Kasich in the public eye. Rubio can only drop in the polls and Kasich can only rise.
There's very little chance that either Rubio or Kasich could win the Republican nomination, but there's also little chance that either Trump or Cruz could win the national election. This primary season has made it all but impossible for Cruz or Trump to pivot to the center after the primaries. The only two candidates who could still do that are Rubio and Kasich. The best scenario at this point is if Cruz drops out and throws his support behind one of the moderate candidates. The last moderate candidate standing is the only Republican Party candidate with any chance of winning the presidency. If I were betting I'd put my money on Kasich.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
getting free stuff under Sanders
That myth comes almost exclusively from the right. Sanders never claims that this stuff will be outright free. He very plainly explains how single payer health care will be paid for with taxes. He very plainly explains how college tuition will be paid for with taxes. Nobody who has paid any attention to Sanders subscribes to this absurd mythology that these things are just magically free.
More importantly, the people who actually pay attention do realize that those two items in particular though will in the long run pay huge dividends. There is no better investment a government can make than in education; the ROI is usually around 6:1 or better. Single payer healthcare is also a proven economic winner as the increased efficiencies, reduction in disgusting payouts to CEOs, and uniform accessibility improve things across the board.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The argument that this is a classic game theory dilemma assumes that only the actions of candidates matter and that voters don't think and aren't aware of this situation.
Early-career politicians have different motivations than as does late-career politicians. The best move for the young/new players is to always to keep running, to keep building up their own constituency. If you want to play the presidential election game you have to build up a reliable base of supporters on a national level.
Staying in for them is a dominant strategy.
Its certainly no prisoners dilemma if a player is playing a dominant strategy. The entire premise is bullshit.
"His name was James Damore."
He has only been a senator for 3 years, and is associated with the radical second-wave/post hijack/radical conservative Tea Party movement (not the libertarian movement).
Seemed to work out fine for Obama.
Indeed, and Rubio has been far more active in his tenure than was Obama - and also seems vastly more tuned into foreign affairs. Obama's (still!) staggering naivete on that front has been a disaster.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
When they don't compromise, they do things take the world economy hostage by threatening to not raise the debt ceiling. That's basically like saying you're going to nuke the world. or they shut the government down. Or they fail to fund road building and bridge repair. There are a thousand necessary things that aren't getting done because of a lack of compromise.
Also the patriot act shouldn't be in your list. That wasn't compromise, that was fear.
TARP while disgusting, was necessary to save the world economy. It should have been followed with some prison sentences.
Quite frankly we're getting what we deserve by not being involved in all elections all the time. This can't happen with an engaged and informed public. Idiocracy is happening now.
Are you saying that those were Democrat bills that were passed because the Republicans compromised with the Democrats? If so, you're way off. The majority of Republican politicians supported those outside of any deals with Democratic politicians. Not to mention all of the years of massive deficit spending under Republican politicians' "leadership". (Please don't get me wrong - the Democratic politicians are not without blame in any of the above)
If the democrats nominate Sanders, however, it will be a GOP bloodbath
No, it won't. If the Dems are dumb enough to nominate Sanders the GOP will frame the election as "Capitalism vs. Socialism" and Bernie will get destroyed. Sorry.
There has only been one national poll so far that has shown a GOP candidate beating Hillary
You' assume Clinton will still be running by November despite having pulled several felonies with her private email server and failure to handle classified information. Not everyone will ignore that.
What's stopping them is a fundamental flaw in the focus of the party. The republican party at its core is there to push the agenda of the rich. In order to do that they need to convince the poor and uneducated to vote against their best interests. Republicans can't win by being honest so they have to use the subterfuge of abortion, coded racism, xenophobia, gun rights paranoia to get elected. Over the years they have stoked the fears and stupidity and have created a voting horde of zombies. This worked very well for a while but now you have rich people like the Koch brothers who would rather have direct control of the Zombie horde. So the Koch's have a political apparatus that is at least three times the size of the political apparatus of the republican party. You have other players also trying to take direct control of the Zombies.
Now the other problem is side of the problem is that of "decent candidates". The problem here again lies at the root of the purpose of the republican party... to further the goals of the rich. Republicans tend to pick(draft) candidates from business who they think will win an election. These candidates for the most part have no history of public service and often don't understand the role of government or how it works. They just take their orders, copy the legislation that was given to them by some PAC and repeat talking points. Democrats, on the other hand, generally have to work their way up doing real community service. The outlook is completely different. You have to demonstrate that you can and have worked hard for the working man in order to be a democrat on the national stage. Remember all the derisive comments about how Obama was a community organizer (like that's a bad thing?)? That's because the republicans don't see the US as a team or a community where helping each other out is valuable. It's more of a "fuck you, I've got mine" mentality rather than a serious problem solving mindset.
Now there are still a few old school republicans in the senate who take their responsibilities seriously but they are being replaced with the new and improved scorched earth republicans. The house? It only has a majority of republicans because of cheating, AKA gerrymandering. The republicans can't win fair elections so they try their best to disenfranchise voters, gerrymander districts , cut voting hours so working class people have a hard time voting, etc...
Trump is interesting because he's stealing the zombie horde from the Koch's, et al. He's tapped into that lizard brain that Fox News, Limaugh, etc.. have been grooming for decades. They original owners of the zombie horde are pissed, but there's not a lot they can do about it.
Game Theory should be the real topic to keep this for the nerds.
We need more examples of how fucked up an unrealistic Game Theory is in modeling human nature. It works for modeling how mental cases handle situations... which in this case is most the GOP candidates; it's especially fitting in that they themselves tend to view the world in that unrealistic model even if they have no clue about the math involved.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The kleptocrats will protect Hillary. They have too much money riding on her now for her to be charged with those felonies.
There is no better investment a government can make than in education; the ROI is usually around 6:1 or better.
There is actual data on this, and the ROI on education spending in the US is nil. That is, increased educational spending does not lead to better educational outcomes in the US.
You might be thinking of K-12 spending, which is a very different matter than higher education spending. There have been difficulties correlating increased spending on K-12 public education with better outcomes, though that is largely due to the fact that people want a yes/no answer to a vastly multifactorial problem.
However when it comes to higher education, there is no disputing the fact that making it more accessible to people across the board (which requires investment) reaps dramatic rewards. People make more money, they are less likely to be involved in crime, they help their communities, the list goes on and on. A lot of people also errantly assume that this means everyone goes to the local state university and gets a 4 year degree in any topic of their choosing, this is not the case nor has Sanders ever called for it. Many people will go to community colleges, many will go to vocational / technical colleges. Yet others might go to truck driving schools or police academies. These are all avenues that would not have been open to these people with only a high school degree. These are all ways to improve peoples' quality of life without giving them money directly, and to see those rewards truly propagate through the community as well.
Single payer healthcare is also a proven economic winner as the increased efficiencies, reduction in disgusting payouts to CEOs, and uniform accessibility improve things across the board.
Half the US health care system is already public,
Not by dollar spent, it isn't. Most of the money is on the private side. Similarly not by subscribers who use their health care, either; there are more subscribers in private plans than in public plans. You need to check your numbers.
it spends more per capita than many European health care systems spend for public and private health care combined.
The private side of the US health care system spends vastly more than any European or Asian country, that is beyond dispute.
So, if Sanders wanted to bring European style health care to the US, he could already do that without any new taxes or expenses, simply by covering everybody under the existing public health care system and making it work efficiently.
Have you actually listened to anything Sanders has said? He has been calling for expansion of medicaid, which would be exactly that. Initially it would require more taxes - though the individuals would quickly find they would be getting the same care for less this way by paying medicaid instead of paying to their for-profit health care plan.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
And this is different from the democrats in what substantive way?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
TARP was one way to do it. Explain to me why breaking up the banks and bailing out their victims instead would have destroyed the world economy.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I... can't imagine that's what the GP is suggesting. I don't know the details of all of these, but the ones that I recognize are all "bi-partisan" - meaning that they had significant support from both parties - however, if you look at the actual votes it's pretty clear that these are really Republican bills with support from Democrats. The Patriot Act, for example, while receiving bipartisan support was/is more Republican than not. Passed by a Republican controlled Congress and President and defended by Republicans when it came time for renewal.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley was Republican (in addition to the vote, all of the bill's sponsors were Republican), NAFTA was Republican.
The exception that I can spot is TARP, which was mostly Democratic. So... I don't know where the GP is going with this.
examine all of the laws they passed by "compromising" with the Democrats.
These were nearly all Republican proposals. Many Democrats don't see these as the result of "compromise". They see them as a result of Democrats caving in to Republican demands.
If you are really opposed to NAFTA, TPP, GATT and FISA, then I think you are in the wrong party. Those laws reflect the core principles of the GOP.
If you exclude the religious, the militaristic, and the moderates then what remains?
The libertarian wing, which mostly supported Rand Paul. He got less than 5% of the vote in Iowa. His dad, Ron Paul, who was a better candidate, peaked out at about 10% in 2008 polls.
This is why Bernie is going to lose. The Bernie Bros are over the top in their vitriol and turn off the swing voters he will need.
People who engage in hyperbole are worse than Hitler.
Jeb spent $81 million, on a primary, to get less than 4% of the vote. Why do people think money=votes?
McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform disallowed individual citizens from putting on a TV commercial within 90 days of an election explaining why you should vote for their favorite candidate. That is an individual was prevented, not a corporation. The ONLY way the Supreme court could have decided that case was to strike it down. It should bother you the vote was 5-4 and you really should wonder why those 4 voted to uphold censorship against individuals.
If they upheld the law you would have literally had political prisoners in the US for speaking their opinion on political matters.
I almost hope that Trump wins the nomination process, just so it will burn the current GOP to the ground. And I say that as a registered Republican, who is ashamed of what this party has become.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
-1 Stupid.
Bernie has a political career that spans decades now, and he's been entirely consistent. And unlike Hillary, he doesn't have a lot of questionable ethical actions in his past. You can think he's unrealistic or overly idealistic if you want (which doesn't really matter; the President can only pass the laws that Congress puts on his desk anyway), but if you think he's less trustworthy than Hillary, you're either an idiot or a shill.
And that's why Trump is going to win. Hillary will win the DNC nomination one way or another (probably involving some dirty tricks on the part of the DNC's leadership with DWS), and all the Millenials and other Bernie voters will either sit out the election, write in Bernie's name, or vote for Trump out of spite. Combine that with Trump's huge polling numbers, and the distrust and disdain that so many Americans (esp. on the right) have for Hillary, and we can look forward to a Trump Presidency. And AFAIC, the corrupt DNC has only itself to blame for this fiasco.
The only reason Obama got elected in '08 is because he was popular with the younger crowd: they thought they finally had someone they could believe in, so they rallied behind him. This was 4 years after the DNC fielded wooden Kerry, who failed to excite them enough to bother to turn out and vote against another 4 years of GWB. Then Obama failed to perform as his voters expected, so he managed to squeak by in '12, mainly because Romney was such an uninspiring candidate. So you'd think the Dems would have learned their lesson that they need a candidate that resonates with the voters, and they've found exactly such a candidate with Bernie. He generates all the excitement with younger voters that Obama did, except this time he actually has a long political record to back up his progressive rhetoric; the younger voters have learned this time around not to get excited by mere words, but by actions. But instead of seizing this opportunity, the DNC is doing everything they can to shut down his campaign and push Hillary, a candidate that almost no one is excited by, and is obviously just a tool for Wall Street. So, just like Romney in '12 and Kerry in '04, or worse Dukakis in '88 (where he lost in a landslide), Hillary is probably going to lose this year because she just isn't a candidate who is going to make the Democrat voters want to bother going to the polls, which is a frequent problem with Dem voters as seen in every midterm election.
As someone who will never vote democrat, let me inform you all that Rubio wants to TRIPLE the number of H1B visas and wants to expand warrantless wiretapping from the CIA.
And these are two more reasons I'm a Bernie fan. He's against H1B visas too, and also against warrantless wiretapping.
Of course, Hillary is the opposite, which is why there's no way I'm voting for her.
Wrong about Bernie: how do you think Obama got elected? He energized the young people and they turned out in droves to vote for him.
Of course, then Obama turned out to be a big disappointment to him, as he was just a lot of hype, and then you saw a lot of non-voting as you noted from that crowd, because other Dem candidates just didn't excite them. However, Bernie is exciting them now, and unlike Obama, Bernie actually has a long political career that backs his rhetoric, and has done a lot more than just being a "community organizer" and a short-tern Senator voting mostly "present".
Bernie could easily get elected, but only if the DNC allows him to win the nomination. They don't look like they want to do that, because they want corrupt Hillary instead and are willing to do just about anything to get her there.
I still wonder how it is possible that the republicans can't come up with a single decent candidate. And this is not the first time that happened.
They had one in 2012, Jon Huntsman. He is not batshit crazy enough, and he committed the offense of being multilingual (he speaks Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Hokkien) and the cardinal sin of having adopted a child from India and another one from China. How offensive to American values!
The GOP cannot find a decent candidate anymore because of its current constituency, one whose lunacy was cultivated by the GOP itself since the bad black man stole the White House for the express purpose of killing Baby Jesus and bald eagles with chemtrails because UN Agenda 21, Sharia and the illuminati.
The republican party at its core is there to push the agenda of the rich.
I fundamentally disagree with the premise of your comment. Real Republicans believe that Federal Government is not the answer to every problem. To Real Republicans, the 10th Amendment still counts, just as much as the 1st, 2nd, and 5th.
The problem with your comment is that in practice there are essentially two choices of who holds power in this country. Power is held by the rich or the common people. The only significant voice of the common people is the federal government. State governments cannot exert much power over the wealthy because of how easy is it to move between states. It is also hard for the federal government to exert power of the wealthy, but it is order of magnitudes more capable than state governments.
So while in theory strong state governments are a good idea, in practice only a strong federal government is capable of giving a significant voice to the people. So there really are only two choices:
1) Believe in a strong federal government
2) Believe in pursuing the agenda of the rich.
At some point in the future a strong federal government will not even be enough, and a strong world government will be necessary. Trade agreements play that role now but will be even more important as time goes on.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Sanders hasn't proposed raising the top tax rate to 90%. He's only pointed out that taxes had been that high before (in the 1950s) and America did just fine, so the more modest amount that he does want to raise them would not be the disaster Republicans keep trying to paint it as.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The same reason NAMBLA can't come up with a decent candidate. The entire party panders to the worst of the worst in politics.
We don't ally with any of them. Don't kid yourself, none are our allies.
We maintain a stalemate, Iran/Iraq war style. Whichever side is losing; we have someone they trust, sell them more weapons.
Should be good for 20 years. By which time alternative energy sources will have matured enough that petroleum matters much less. Then we can get around to seriously punishing them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'