Qassändra

In total shock.

That the polls as they stand are correct but current undecideds will go for the status quo.

Nowhere near half of Europe is coming here.

The demographics that have postal votes are favourable for Leave to begin with.

This account of a Trump rally was a joyous read.

REMAIN 54 LEAVE 46 TURNOUT 61

Fair! But Hillary will still be a step towards making that better. She's still committed to overturning the Citizens United ruling.

I will not have 50 queer lives commemorated with the Black Eyed fucking Peas. DIVINE OR NOTHING

It's not even about 'culture change'. The majority of Americans are against assault weapons being available for sale (let alone without background checks), as is the President, as likely is the next President. The main problem is that the NRA has a solid majority of Senators and Congressmen bought up or with viable rivals they're willing to fund to the hilt. Until that changes, nothing will.

I doubt you'd be calling it something the winner had to listen up to if the moderate candidate got 43%.

It's very strange that you're saying this is undemocratic and unfair, when calculating on the basis of 'how many states were won' is itself an undemocratic and unfair way of calculating a winner - it biases results towards smaller states, rather than towards the actual democratic result of how many votes a candidate won. All of the above are not measures any self-respecting democratic system would use to decide the winner. The winning candidate in this primary got nearly 4 million votes more than the second placed candidate. The winning candidate got over 300 more pledged delegates than the second placed candidate - delegates that were allocated proportionally. The eight virtual tie point is bizarre - for a start, it made no difference in terms of delegates, but also it isn't how probability works, because elections aren't like flipping a coin. If it was, yes, it would be suspicious. It isn't that suspicious that a candidate that won nearly 4 million votes more than the other candidate generally won in close contests. Defaulting to an assumption of fraud is a huge leap - what exactly did the Hillary camp do? If they could do it for all those states without anybody noticing the fraud, why didn't they do it for all the states? How did they know ahead of time all of the states were going to be so close they could get away with X number of faked votes? The only relevant point in the above for 'the winner has been decided unfairly' is number 4. But it ignores that where primaries have been held afterwards in caucus states (such as Washington), Hillary stormed them, and Bernie dominated the less accessible caucuses which needed people to hang around for hours rather than just voting. Had every state been a primary it's unlikely Bernie would have done as well in those as he had done in caucuses, as seen by Hillary winning primaries where Bernie-won caucuses had already been held. If anything, Hillary would likely have been further ahead had every state been an open primary. Arguably the caucus system is the one that's outdated. I don't think either could be described as corrupt - superdelegates may feel corrupt, but for a look at how they're useful, look at how the Republicans are having to contort themselves to back Trump and how much that'll damage them. It's unlikely a Democratic primary will produce a candidate that the party absolutely can't get behind. A superdelegate system probably would have stopped Trump.

I'm just wondering what excuse Michael will have for not changing his name.

Think I've found the one correct Michael post in the thread though.

A 15% lead in California would likely leave him 2 million votes behind and would give him a net 75 pledged delegates. Hillary has a lead of 300 pledged delegates. And has already won the nomination.

Literally no superdelegate has said they will switch if Sanders wins California tonight. The reason the Associated Press has said Hillary has the nomination is because they have confirmed with Hillary-supporting superdelegates that they will be supporting Hillary at the convention. They aren't going to change their minds just because Sanders ekes out a win by a couple of points in the last state - the Democratic nomination doesn't work on a 'this one's for keeps' basis.

LOL, no.

Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee.

Well without capitalism BHS wouldn't have existed in the first place, so it feels a bit churlish to blame it for going under...

The US is much more established as a two-party system than we are, so I don't think comparisons with us hold quite so much - youth turnout wasn't so much the issue last year as them voting Green (or whoever) once they were there. Separately, mid-term turnout as a whole for all their favourable demographics is a big struggle for the Democrats, so I don't know if we can draw any youth-specific lessons there. And by youth turnout standards, hatred and disdain for Bush *was* enough to get them to the polls in 2004 - 2004 saw a huge leap in youth turnout to 47% from 36% in 2000 (to compare, 2008: 49%, 2012: 41%). I don't think you can argue Bush 'didn't get them out' just on the basis that Kerry didn't win - if anything, given he lost with the biggest youth turnout since 1992, it shows the follies of relying too much on turning out the smallest age demographic rather than persuading ones higher up. And given turnout was only up two points four years after with the most inspiring candidate in modern political history, I think it shows negative reasons have the power to be at least roughly as motivating as positive ones. I'm of the opinion that Trump will probably be perceived even more negatively by the youth vote than Dubya was (who for all his weaknesses wasn't an open racist, sexist, xenophobic liar etcetcetc). Probably not 2008 turnout levels but I think it'll be more than 45 percent. I agree that young voters may be *more* encouraged by having someone to positively vote for, but I think the difference between 2004 and 2008's turnout shows there are times and circumstances where the alternative is so bad that a lot of young voters will feel compelled to vote for the least worst option.

Donald Trump's initial target state list is...creative.

Well yeah, he'd have lost without the youth vote, but I'm on about turnout of the youth vote here as opposed to the Democrats winning among those that do turn out. Putting down turnout by 5-10 points isn't as consequential as handing the youth vote to the Republicans. In any case, I think Trump as potential president could be as strong a turnout driver (albeit a negative one) for the youth as Obama was as a positive one. Fewer weaknesses than Hillary in the sense that none of them stopped Reagan, but that whole authenticity thing would've been given a hell of a workout by the media had he run what with things like leaking his son's deathbed wish for him to be president.

The 'you can ignore Tories and just win on non-voters!' proposal has been critiqued to death SO MANY TIMES that it's infuriating someone thinks they can just sashay in and restate it without saying a thing about all the very, very pressing points against it (i.e. why do you think non-voters skew Labour rather than, say, UKIP? how do you focus your resources on the 'right' non-voters in that case? why do you think a man with communication nous so bad that the majority of the country doesn't know what he stands for (!) can win over people who don't pay attention to politics en masse? given the seats with the most non-voters tend to be Labour safe seats, what does that suggest about targeting non-voters as a practical winning strategy for actually winning seats?) But no, god forbid we dirty ourselves by trying to persuade people who happened to think the Conservatives were the answer at the last election.

LOVE this thread concept

It is never too early.

Absolutely not! That was an initial theory put out in the first couple of the days after the election, but it only worked if the expectation for turnout was 82% (which would have been higher than any election since 1950), and got dismissed in the final report. The final conclusion of the investigation was that most pollsters' panels had ended up having unrepresentative samples in terms of age and geography, as well as containing too many 'avid' voters (which meant they didn't end up accurately representing people not too interested in politics, which is a systematic problem with polling I think - in an age of PPI calls and rejection rates going up, it's going to get more difficult for pollsters to combat that). As I've said before, millennials are deeply overrated as a factor in elections. Not only is their turnout comparatively awful with other age groups even in elections where they *are* motivated to turn out (like for Obama in '08), with birth rates going down they pale in comparison population-wise. Bernie if anything is evidence of what happens when you get too excited about getting three quarters of the smallest cake when you only get a quarter of the biggest one. It's not to say millennials don't matter at all. But the next election won't be won and lost on the basis of millennials. Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico (and even Arizona if he stays where he is now) are 31 pretty handy electoral votes to have if Trump comes anywhere near Ohio and Michigan. She does worse with Obama on those, okay (there's an interesting conversation in there on the white working-class, who backed her in 08 and fled Obama in 12, as arguably that they haven't returned for her shows it may be down more to systemic realignment going on for the Democrats. Worth also noting that none of those types was really *enthusiastic* for Obama in 2012). But for the generally disinterested who vote on the basis of who they like or trust the most...well, she's not going up against Obama there, she's going up against an open racist. I may be wrong on this and I need to check, but I also have a feeling from some of the maps I saw that Obama did worse with men overall than Romney did with women overall in 2012.