On Super Tuesday Two: Too Super, Too Tuesday

Last night, as I headed to bed, a storm rolled in. It was one of those occasional Spring storms which lives out its whole course in a single ten minute span, the cacophany and fury of the event being totally unrepresentative of the amount of time it lasts.

I mention this because today is, once again, a huge day in American politics. And like that storm the pressure has been building over the past few weeks for an event that has the potential to be a last stand for at least two of the Republican candidates seeking to delay Donald Trump, or a clearing of the air.

As the primary race starts to shift to the winner takes all states starting with Florida and Ohio, alongside Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina, gone are the days when the votes cast lead to a proportional delegate breakdown; we're now into a situation where one good win can net scores of those crucial delegates in one go.

Last week your retired Third Grade Teacher, Bernie Sanders, scored a major upset over rejected Skynet prototype, Hillary Clinton, by winning Michigan. So far Sanders has been struggling in the more diverse states, despite boasting the endorsement of Killer Mike,one half of rap duo Run the Jewels, and very probably the only non-white person Bernie Sanders has advising him. Despite his weakness among the strongly Democratic African-American base, Sanders has succesfully cornered the market on the kind of white, middle-class, socially conscious liberals whose comfortable lifestyle means they face little real adversity and who are therefore unconcerned about the impracticality of Sander's reform agenda.

In winning Michigan Sanders overturned a 20 point polling deficit to open up the Rust Belt, the states which were once the manufacturing heartland of America, and are now more akin to the Elephant Graveyard in The Lion King.

Not pictured: actual Hyenas.

This upset has the potential to keep the race going at least until the convention, especially if Sanders can pull off further victories tonight (watch Ohio and Illinois, two big states that could unexpectedly swing for Sanders), even though the delegate math still says that he has no real chance of winning.

On the Republican side a torrid two weeks have seen Donald Trump spend a debate reassuring the world's last great superpower that he has a big dick. Opposition to Trump has finally switched to Ted Cruz from Marco Rubio, whose once sparkling campaign got Cinderella syndrome and revealed itself as comprised of a few fat mice and a pumpkin.

For a candidate who was meant to be the Establishment wing's '1812 Overture', Marco Rubio has at times seemed more like he's orchestrating a movement of Sad Trombones. Watching his political aspirations die in real time, to the point where he told his own supporters to vote for John Kasich, the least interesting man in the race, has been sad. Not, admittedly, upsetting sad, but more the kind of sad where someone's trousers fall down, and as they bend to pull them up their underwear splits and they topple over and roll down the stairs, while the Benny Hill Theme plays out. That kind of slapstick sad.

It's left American conservatives to weigh up the evil of two lessers; men who in any typical year would be among those knocked out in the opening rounds of the electoral destruction derby. When the Republican Establishment is forced to swing behind someone who was once described, by his own colleague, as being so disliked that if he were "shot on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the senate" nobody would ever find the murderer guilty (source), you know that they might be in trouble.

The problem is that nothing seems to be slowing Trump down. Even an explosion of violence at his rally's over the last few days has only cemented his position as the 'says it like it is' candidate. The threatening rhetoric, hate speech, and race-baiting he's displayed have only endeared him to the significant reactionary sections of the Republican Party who sincerely believe that conservatism means a return to the days of white's only drinking fountains. There have been better articles than this about the way that Trump uses racially charged language, subtly calculated to appeal to the exact people who he's currently sweeping - here's one, And here's a video.

When Donald Trump deliberately travels to cities that are being torn apart by issues of racial identity, they cannot express surprise when their brutally racist tone causes a reaction.

It's hard to even express at times the utterly shocking way that Trump's vile ideas have suddenly gone mainstream. It's worth remembering that even now Trump is yet to win over a majority of the voters in the Republican Party, and certainly there's an increasingly vocal cross section of Republicans waging a guerrilla war for the soul of their party, with reports of party officials drawing up ways to run Senate and House races campaigning against their own presumptive nominee.

But so far, despite all the back room chatter, disquiet and outright attacks, there have been few Republican leaders prepared to stand up and distance themselves, unequivocally, from Donald Trump. When asked if they would support Trump if he were the nominee, Kasich, Rubio and Cruz all said yes. At this point it's difficult to imagine what Trump has to do for them to say he's gone too far, and that they wouldn't vote for him.

If he wins, as it seems more and more likely he will, it will be the fault not of good men doing nothing, but selfish, hypocritical men choosing their party's interest over that of their country.

On the average Wednesday after Super Tuesday

It may seem strange, but Super Tuesday's result wasn't actually the worst outcome possible for the terrified majority who're currently freaking out about the possible reign of Dystopian future President, Donald J. Trump. Certainly, it was a pretty bad result, until you consider that some advance polls had him sweeping every states available, like the vengeful broom from the Sorcerers Apprentice.

So instead of Trump being the inevitable presumptive nominee, we now have him as just the almost-inevitable, presumptuous nominee. There is, mathematically speaking, a chance that he could be beaten, although considering that there isn't really a viable alternative candidate and he's projected to win in virtually every upcoming state, that hope seems more than a little forlorn.

For everyone hoping that Marco Rubio might have been able to staunch some of the arterial bleeding of the GOP's body politc, there was the last gasp victory in Minnesota, a victory which meant he won a state on just the 15th time of trying. That puts him slightly ahead of the people who haven't won a single state, Ben Carson, John Kasich, and 99% of America. Unfortunately, as our generation's Shakespeare, Taylor Swift, points out, "Band aids don't fix bullet holes", and Rubio undermined his own insistent rhetoric about being the only credible roadblock to a Trump victory by coming third in most of the other states, and not picking up any delegates in nearly every state that required candidates meet a certain threshold of votes.

That delegate math thing is really important, because it means that of 700 or so pledged delegates Rubio has just over 100, Donald Trump has 320, and even Ted Cruz, a man who looks like an anthropomorphic paper bag full of wet garbage has 225.

Ted Cruz, 2016

In the race to amass the 1237 delegates needed Rubio is falling behind, leaving him with less room to lose the states still in play, and without the moral high ground necessary for him to appeal to the rest of the field to drop out and unite behind him to tackle their true enemy.

And that's really important, because the accepted view is that nobody can possibly stop Trump until it becomes a one on one race. There's a indisputable scientific law called the 'Conservation of Ninjitsu' which is used to explain why a single ninja will be able to beat the hero, but as soon as multiple ninja's appear, they're all easily defeated. Under the 'Conservation of Ninjitsu', there is only a certain amount of competence and fighting ability to go around; in one person it's enough to make them a powerful force, but once it's diluted across the multitude, they're all weakened.

The same principle applies to the race to stop Trump, in that the anti-Trump vote hasn't been able to coalesce around a single candidate, with each taking away some of the support from the others. Inevitably, Rubio's people immediately blamed Ohio Governor John Kasich for stealing voters from the demographics most likely to support their man, but unfortunately declined to follow up with the accepted Ninja practice of slaughtering their enemies and eating their still beating heart to gain the strength of their foe. Although there's still time.

Now, though, for the first time, the Republican Party seems to have realized that in order to defeat Trump, they may have to team up with their old enemy, Magneto. Oh, wait, sorry, no, that's the plot of X2: X-Men United.

What I meant to say was that the Republican Party are suddenly looking to the only man they actively hate more than Donald Trump: Ted Cruz. 

The poor man's Magneto

To say that Ted Cruz is an unlikely hero for anyone to look to is really, really underselling how awful Ted Cruz is. If Donald Trump vocalises the populist view from the gutters of American intolerance, then Ted Cruz is the sewer that scum water drains into. Having based his campaign around winning over the kind of white, evangelical voters who're anxious to reject un-Godly concepts such as sex education for teenagers, vaccines for children, equal rights for gays, and taxes for anyone, he's been ignored in favor of the one guy running to the right of him on the hot button issue of immigration, an area where he struggles by being of both Canadian and Cuban descent.

Even his own colleagues in the party are reported to hate Cruz, the man responsible for the disastrous shutdown of the Government in 2013 over whether they should get money to run essential services. In recent weeks though he's been most damaged by the public perception that he's a liar and a cheat, to the extent that he was forced to fire his own head of Public Relations for misrepresenting Marco Rubio's comments that 'the Bible was a good book, with lots of answers', as "you won't find any answers in there."

Still, he's somehow found a place as the choice of voters who don't trust Trump's conservative credentials, and crucially he's won 4 states and 225 delegates, and that alone could be enough for his Party to grudgingly get behind him, however much they don't want to.

On the other side, Bernie Sander's equality and economic justice revolution was derailed by Hillary Clinton's campaign for "some equality and economic justice maybe, although probably not actually, thanks for voting tho anyway guys." Bernie picked up wins in Vermont, Colorado, Oklahoma and Minnesota (yes), while Hillary Clinton won the South by broadening her appeal to include voters who weren't white or under 25, the one demographic that Bernie had concentrated on. If his support in this age group holds firm then Bernie Sander's will almost certainly win the Democratic nomination, and the subsequent Presidential election.

In 2044. When he's 102.

This isn't to at all downplay what he's achieved so far, though, because in pushing Hillary Clinton to actually engage with voters and come up with some policies he may well have pushed her a hair closer to being a genuine liberal candidate, rather than a posessed mannequin with a nice line in pant suits. In reality, there's almost nothing wrong with Hillary Clinton that isn't also wrong with every other American politician. She's simply a disappointing standard bearer for the left, and when you stick her next to Bernie Sanders, a genuine progressive titan, with his own CD of protest anthems, and an ideology that excites people, she looks even less appealing.

I mean, let's face it, nobody is going to be travelling to Vermont to get a free tattoo of Hillary, are they.

A genuine thing that is happening

On Super Tuesday

Today is Super Tuesday, and I am Super Excited.

It may seem like this is an odd post to be writing, considering that my blogging has been so absent for the last year, and there are far more interesting things going on in my life at the moment.

I don't really want to say that this is the most exciting day of the year, because obviously that'll be Election Night. And then it'll be Super Tuesday. Also, Jalyss and I are having a baby so I imagine that'll be in the top 5 or so.

For those of you who aren't aware, Super Tuesday is part of America's horribly convoluted political process, whereby citizens elect their President by first voting on a candidate for each party in each state, which then sends a certain number of delegates based on an archaic algorithm sorted by population, state size, and which states each party finds most important. Each candidate tries to get enough of these delegates to secure the nomination, but delegates can switch to support other people, even if they're only really there on the basis that the people of their state voted for them to support a certain person, and some of them aren't democratically selected but are literally just people whose opinions are considered to be more important.

It's somehow both too democratic, and not democratic at all, culminating in a situation where someone can win the popular vote, or the majority of states, or even more delegates, and still not get the nomination.

And the cornerstone of this hastily built edifice is Super Tuesday, when roughly a quarter of states and a third of the delegates are selected. Basically, it's where campaigns to become to the Presidential nominee live or die. Lose big on Super Tuesday and you should probably drop out; win most and you're likely to win it all.

It's incredibly fascinating, especially because this year it's likely to lead to the coronation of two candidates who will somehow be both the most and least popular politicians running. Donald Trump, a hairpiece with a mouth, is hated by 60% of the population, to the extent that his own party is currently trying to work out how to run against him, while Hillary Clinton is loathed by 59% of the country, including a significant proportion of the population who believe she should be in jail for "crimes" she committed while Secretary of State.

Behind them come Marco Rubio, a young (-ish), Latino Republican running on optimism and compassionate conservatism, who would seem to be exactly what a party with historic difficulties in attracting minorities would want to be able to win an election, were it not for the fact that those difficulties steam from a significant part of the party who are just out and out racist.

That isn't hyperbole, by the way; 31 % of Trump supporters (and 21% of all Republicans) think that White's are a "superior race", a third support banning not just all Muslims from entering the US (74% support that idea) but also all gay people. 38% wish that the South had won the Civil War, and 20% disagree with the Emancipation Proclamtion, Abraham Lincoln's Presidential decree that freed Southern slaves during the Civil War. By any measure, those are pretty extreme and pretty racist, positions - sourced here).

This week, in an amazing display of pandering to racists, Donald Trump refused to disavow the former head of the KKK, then said he didn't know about the concept of 'white supremacy', then blamed a microphone for not immediately distancing himself from them. In fairness to him, this may simply be down to the fact that Donald Trump is convinced of his own personal supremacy over everyone else in the world, and his own skin tone is default Terracotta, with a tinge of Oompa Loompa.

Unsurprisingly, Marco Rubio is struggling despite being the choice of the majority of the establishment Republican Party , because it turns out having million of dollars, dozens of endorsements, and an actual coherent policy platform, as well as wide appeal to a broad base, and a photogenic, articulate charm, doesn't mean much if you're a little bit browner than Edward Scissorhands.

Scissorhands for President, 2016

Behind him, or sometimes in front of him, and this is where it gets difficult, because at some points all three candidates have claimed victory in a state where only one of them has actually won, is Ted Cruz.

There's a bit in Shrek where he inflates a toad to act as a balloon, and Ted Cruz looks exactly like what I imagine that toad to look like now. He looks like someone has deflated a fatter man.

Ted Cruz looks like a cheap rubber Halloween mask of Ted Cruz's face came to life, and is running a Presidential campaign on the platform of unending winter. I would not be surprised to learn that Ted Cruz is actually an animatronic being controlled by a small slug floating inside his watery centre.

Nearly 40% of people can't conclusively tell you that he wasn't a serial killer who operated years before his birth (source), which is a good indication of how little people like him. His own colleagues have refused to endorse him, and he's running on the campaign slogan of 'trusTED' whilst facing charges of sending potential voters fake letters from the state to vote for him or face fines, and of lying about whether other candidates were even in the race anymore.

Tell me, does that this looks like an actual human being? Or does it look like what an alien visitor to Earth might think a human being looks like having intercepted our radio signals for decades.

He's the Christian candidate. Actually, he's one of the Christian candidates, but Ben Carson is so irrelevant to this process as to not warrant anymore mentions than this single sentence.

One the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton has been forced to remember that she's supposed to be on the left of the political spectrum, as uber-Pensioner Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist who joined the Democract's 6 months ago just to run for President, has run a grass roots campaign based around reminding people that Capitalism is a bit shit if you let a few people keep all the money for themselves.

Now, Sanders has about a 0% chance of actually winning the nomination, but it's now got to the weird point of Republicans being able to legitimately call their potential opponent a socialist, a word that's thrown at anyone who's a bit left of Eisenhower in America. He is 'Boy Who Cried Wolf'-ing it, in that it's actually probably part of his appeal that the word socialist has been so undermined by years of using it to describe anyone at all, that now an actual Socialist is running, everybody assumes he's just another liberal.

He's the kind of raging extremist that would look fairly standard anywhere else in the world, what with his calls for such un-American abominations as paid maternity leave, free public education for all, and regulations on banks to prevent future financial crises. The maniac.

So this is what I'll be doing all night - following along with the updates as they come in on who has won what. And probably crying at who has won what.