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.