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Originally posted by Starlight
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I saw a brief clip a couple of days ago on Scott Walker in which the commentator felt Walker was too stupid to have any serious chance of winning the presidency (of course, that didn't seem to stop Bush Jr) and compared Walker's intelligence to Palin's based on examples of things Walker had said in interviews, I don't think the commentator realized Walker's lack of education. However, Walker appears to have been a long-time favorite of the Koch brothers, so he is probably in a good position get the $1 billion they are throwing at this election. So I would currently pick Walker as likely to win the Republican primary but have no chance of winning the Presidency itself.
I honestly don't think the GOP has an icicle's chance in hell of winning the presidency anyway for another 4 terms at least - the changing demographics are steadily eating into their share of the vote, with them polling particularly terribly among Latinos, Blacks, and young people. In every election now, the majority of the vote goes Democrat. And while the GOP is currently managing to use Redistricting to save themselves from democracy (due to carefully redrawn electoral district borders, the GOP currently has a majority in both the Congress and the Senate despite the majority of voters voting Democrat), and Redistricting doesn't work at a state level so it won't affect the race for President. (And if the Presidency gets changed to popular vote they are definitely screwed)
The one way for GOP presidential victory would be for the Democrats to put up a dud candidate while the GOP manages to find an amazing one. So far, none of the numerous GOP contenders (apart from Scott Walker, maybe, who I don't personally know much about) look anything close to amazing - in fact none of them seem to rise above the level of seriously bad.
At the moment, the Democrats have two obvious decent options. Hillary, who is currently leading by miles in the polls simply because everyone's heard of her (but polls at this stage are meaningless). The problem with Hillary is she's so far to the right and so pro-establishment, pro-war, pro-corporatist, that all the liberals/progressives within the Democrats are like "meh. Why would we even go out and vote if Hillary is the candidate?" and equally a lot of the minimum-wage demographic that usually votes democrat and who tends to need to be seriously inspired and motivated to actually make it to the polling booth is unlikely to be bothered taking time off one of their 2 works shifts per day to go vote for someone who's not going to make life any better for them. As a 'moderate' candidate, Hillary might, however suck up quite a few votes from the center that might have otherwise gone to the right, so it's possible that what she loses from ignoring the left-wing of her own party she might gain from the center, although I doubt it.
The other obvious good option for the Democrats is Elizabeth Warren, who's currently polling second-highest (though so far she's not running). She has an FDR / JFK type viewpoint on economics that is currently making liberals/progressives jump up and down with excitement, and bankers on Wall St • Edited by a Moderator • their pants in fear. She seems to be a populist candidate - well liked by the masses but absolutely hated by banks, corporations, the rich etc. I suspect however, that US politics is getting too corrupt to allow a populist candidate to ever win again: Political campaigns require huge financial expenditures and hence the backing of wealthy donors, and few wealthy people are prepared to spend money supporting a candidate that wants to raise their taxes and regulate their companies. I find it really quite hard to predict how a Warren run for the presidency would work out in practice: It's quite possible that the rich would be driven to spend huge amounts of money supporting Warren's opponents out of fear, and it's quite possible the right would manage to stick a label of "communist" on her (especially if she went with Bernie Sanders as her Vice Presidential choice).
I honestly don't think the GOP has an icicle's chance in hell of winning the presidency anyway for another 4 terms at least - the changing demographics are steadily eating into their share of the vote, with them polling particularly terribly among Latinos, Blacks, and young people. In every election now, the majority of the vote goes Democrat. And while the GOP is currently managing to use Redistricting to save themselves from democracy (due to carefully redrawn electoral district borders, the GOP currently has a majority in both the Congress and the Senate despite the majority of voters voting Democrat), and Redistricting doesn't work at a state level so it won't affect the race for President. (And if the Presidency gets changed to popular vote they are definitely screwed)
The one way for GOP presidential victory would be for the Democrats to put up a dud candidate while the GOP manages to find an amazing one. So far, none of the numerous GOP contenders (apart from Scott Walker, maybe, who I don't personally know much about) look anything close to amazing - in fact none of them seem to rise above the level of seriously bad.
At the moment, the Democrats have two obvious decent options. Hillary, who is currently leading by miles in the polls simply because everyone's heard of her (but polls at this stage are meaningless). The problem with Hillary is she's so far to the right and so pro-establishment, pro-war, pro-corporatist, that all the liberals/progressives within the Democrats are like "meh. Why would we even go out and vote if Hillary is the candidate?" and equally a lot of the minimum-wage demographic that usually votes democrat and who tends to need to be seriously inspired and motivated to actually make it to the polling booth is unlikely to be bothered taking time off one of their 2 works shifts per day to go vote for someone who's not going to make life any better for them. As a 'moderate' candidate, Hillary might, however suck up quite a few votes from the center that might have otherwise gone to the right, so it's possible that what she loses from ignoring the left-wing of her own party she might gain from the center, although I doubt it.
The other obvious good option for the Democrats is Elizabeth Warren, who's currently polling second-highest (though so far she's not running). She has an FDR / JFK type viewpoint on economics that is currently making liberals/progressives jump up and down with excitement, and bankers on Wall St • Edited by a Moderator • their pants in fear. She seems to be a populist candidate - well liked by the masses but absolutely hated by banks, corporations, the rich etc. I suspect however, that US politics is getting too corrupt to allow a populist candidate to ever win again: Political campaigns require huge financial expenditures and hence the backing of wealthy donors, and few wealthy people are prepared to spend money supporting a candidate that wants to raise their taxes and regulate their companies. I find it really quite hard to predict how a Warren run for the presidency would work out in practice: It's quite possible that the rich would be driven to spend huge amounts of money supporting Warren's opponents out of fear, and it's quite possible the right would manage to stick a label of "communist" on her (especially if she went with Bernie Sanders as her Vice Presidential choice).
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