Qassändra

Pivots are vastly overrated in the internet age. Romney's etch-a-sketch didn't work out too well, with far less offensive comments.

Well not quite. Cruz is a disgusting almost-theocrat, but if nothing else he wasn't running on a platform of open racism that has people fearing for their lives.

Yes, it is assuming it, because they won't change. Hillary will have won the majority of states. The majority of votes. The majority of pledged delegates. You're expecting party delegates that are loyal to Hillary and not Bernie-inclined in any case to overrule the will of the Democratic voters and switch to Bernie because oh, I guess you said so (off the back of a few late landslide victories which, uh, didn't materialise for all the other contests you predicted them to happen in). It is one of the stupidest arguments ever.

Hillary doesn't have to win any more states to get the nomination. She only needs to win 180 more delegates of the remaining 1,100 to get the nomination. She could lose every single state by 80-20 and she would still get the nomination. She has won on pledged delegates, she has won on superdelegates, she has won on states, she has won on votes. All of those things will still be true even if Bernie beats her 80-20 in every state from here on out. He won't. She has won on every single democratic metric going. Bernie. Has. Lost. Stop peddling this bollocks.

Which is about 125 delegates behind where he needs to be.

Hillary has won Delaware and Maryland and will likely be confirmed as winning Pennsylvania in a bit. EDIT: Confirmed. I have a fairly strong feeling it may be mathematically impossible for Sanders to win in the next primary or two. Not that that's stopped the Republican 'race', but there's little chance of Sanders persuading already committed superdelegates away, whereas if Trump doesn't make it to 1237 on the first ballot then Ted Cruz is almost certainly in.

You all remember what happened at last year's election with the whole prospect of Labour relying on the SNP, right? God I'm so depressed.

Yes, but on the changed constituency boundaries and minus Scotland, Labour wouldn't be the biggest party unless they had a solid lead on the Conservatives.

By the same token, how many of the people complaining about people having a say in what would happen to their own United Kingdom are perfectly happy for Obama to intervene and tell a totally different country what to do? For the record, I'm chill with both.

i'm screaming @ this dominance. glad 2 c the usa paying due respect

if purple rain could finally get #1 i would die a happy man

...no really, how?

The change.org side of the Democrats have started campaigning against Castro as a pick, so I think he may be out. Thomas Perez might have the same appeal while also reaching out to the left.

*.* that you're full blown Dem these days baby!

Most of the polls had her with a lead in the mid-teens. The Bernie camp/anyone trying to talk up the 'Clinton is doomed!' hypothesis has a habit of cherrypicking her biggest leads last summer and contrasting them with her smallest ones now.

No, because your argument was (and always has been) 'Bernie Sanders is guaranteed to win the primaries'.

Again, 'proven safe pair of hands' doesn't really work when everything that goes wrong is mysteriously the fault of Westminster. It's more like a goalkeeper taking credit for all the saves but blaming everyone else for the goals. 'No original ideas' is fairly rich given anything proposed as a solution to said problems is by turns either 'talking Scotland down' (the most ludicrous and embarrassing retort to a policy critique probably ever conceived by a modern political party. That it somehow has traction says a lot about the state of politics north of the Border), '#snpbaaaaaaaad' (dear me) or 'making Scotland pay for Westminster' (?! for the notion of what would happen after independence!).

Also worth adding that the main beneficiary of the fall in the Conservative vote has been...UKIP. Oh.

If it weren't primarily a nationalist phenomenon rather than a socialist one, the Greens and RISE would be doing far better than they are. As indeed would a Labour Party going into this election on a more left-wing platform than the SNP.

When you've got people blaming SNP cuts on Westminster yet also blaming anything that would alleviate those cuts as 'penalising people to pay for Westminster', then yes, I think it is fair to say their support is in large part constitutional. If you only get to take credit for the good with all the bad being blamed on a nebulous constitutional boogie man, of course the constitution comes into it. Let alone 'remotely'.

She was. But it's intractable at the moment. So long as the floor for one side is 45 and you have three parties fighting for the other 55, there is no answer. The only solution is someone good enough (or for the SNP to get bad enough) to break the former. So long as that support is an article of faith, there aren't going to be many of those lying around.

It may have been the most lethal resignation statement ever. Obviously not the cause of last year in and of itself, but it's probably added a good ten years to any possible recovery. In one shot it pretty much validated that 'only the SNP can stand up for Scotland' line.

After THAT exit...

It's almost as if having a charismatic leader and gesturing left while in practice being centreground is a killer app in politics.

It'd...be good for continuity, if nothing else.