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Gingrich is an asshole, but Romney comes off as some sort of soulless politician robot with perfect hair, and people will take an asshole over a robot any day of the week. Being an asshole at least sort of counts as a personality.

Romney needs to get caught laughing at a fart joke or calling some guy a ballmuncher. He needs something that's enough of a faux pas to get the media talking, but that nobody casting a vote will really hold against him. Something on the order of Obama getting caught smoking. Something that humanizes him.

Yeah he needs to quit coming off as a stereotypical rich prick and lots of other things too, but the GOP base has always been rather cold to him, and it's not all just because he isn't crazy enough. Part of it is because he comes off as this sort of android who gets his marching orders from a focus group and never diverges from them and can't understand why this hasn't made him President yet.

The reason why I am so enthused about Newt winning is that it means the primary is now destined to go on for quite some time.

I'll admit, I would actually rather have Romney in the general specifically because he is so unlikable and un personable,. He is like the GOP version of Al Gore.

But if Mittens had won SC, it would have basically been it. The elections after that would have snow balled and very soon the others would drop out, or it would just be assumed he would have been the party nominee.

But now, NOW, well who knows! We may not know who it is all the way up to the convention. And the longer it takes, the more money they will spend, the more they will hurt one another, the more infighting and dirty laundry may come out.
And, well that is just fine with me

Same thing happened four years ago with the Democrats and Obama still won by a fairly wide margin in the end, so a drawn out primary doesn't nessissarily help much.

The Romulan Republic wrote:Same thing happened four years ago with the Democrats and Obama still won by a fairly wide margin in the end, so a drawn out primary doesn't nessissarily help much.

Big difference in that case is that the Democrats weren't going up against an incumbent republican with the full support of the GOP establishment behind him. Even though McCain won the nomination, he never had that kind of top to bottom support from the party. Obama is probably the most vulnerable incumbent we've seen in quite some time, but he's still raising a lot of money and would be able to outspend anybody he's up against.

irishmick79 wrote:

The Romulan Republic wrote:Same thing happened four years ago with the Democrats and Obama still won by a fairly wide margin in the end, so a drawn out primary doesn't nessissarily help much.

Big difference in that case is that the Democrats weren't going up against an incumbent republican with the full support of the GOP establishment behind him. Even though McCain won the nomination, he never had that kind of top to bottom support from the party. Obama is probably the most vulnerable incumbent we've seen in quite some time, but he's still raising a lot of money and would be able to outspend anybody he's up against.

Of course, Obama was a relative unknown, so a drawn out primary helped him more than it hurt him, since it introduced people to him and his oratory. Mittens lacks that charisma. That being said, people are disillusioned with him, so he doesn't have the kind of public support that he would need to keep people from going in a new direction that's presented to them, even if the Democratic party is behind him.

Crossroads Inc. wrote:The reason why I am so enthused about Newt winning is that it means the primary is now destined to go on for quite some time.

I'll admit, I would actually rather have Romney in the general specifically because he is so unlikable and un personable,. He is like the GOP version of Al Gore.

But if Mittens had won SC, it would have basically been it. The elections after that would have snow balled and very soon the others would drop out, or it would just be assumed he would have been the party nominee.

But now, NOW, well who knows! We may not know who it is all the way up to the convention. And the longer it takes, the more money they will spend, the more they will hurt one another, the more infighting and dirty laundry may come out.
And, well that is just fine with me

Your thoughts mirror mine.

I'm not voting GOP, but Mittens scares me the least of everyone. I'm also all for seeing the GOP infighting drawn out.

The reason I see this helping Obama is that even with Romney eventually clinching the nomination, now the whole process is destined to last MUCH longer. It was looking like 1-2-3 for Romney and suddenly he lost Iowa retrospectively and got thrashed by Gingrich in winner-takes-all-SC. So even if Romney wins in FL, it will not be a victory lap primary but one that will make Gingrich and Paul get nastier.

And give attack fodder to the Obama campaign.

This brings me to a point I have made before: The American primary system seems to be very much in the favour of an incumbent president. For 12-18 months the incumbent's team can watch his prospective opponents tear each other apart and collect all the material they need. The internet makes it better now: Jon Huntsman tried to delete his anti-Mitt campaign ads after (before?) he quit, but they're all archived.

UnderAGreySky wrote: This brings me to a point I have made before: The American primary system seems to be very much in the favour of an incumbent president. For 12-18 months the incumbent's team can watch his prospective opponents tear each other apart and collect all the material they need. The internet makes it better now: Jon Huntsman tried to delete his anti-Mitt campaign ads after (before?) he quit, but they're all archived.

That's a recent development since the primaries used to take two months over the summer. Not to long ago the Primaries ran from March to May, half a century back they ran from May to July. They have been creeping up election cycle by election cycle as each state gets into a dick waving contest every four years about who gets to go first.

Ah, I did not know any of that. Thanks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_R ... mary,_2012
Remember that Florida has been stripped of half its delegates for moving its primary up, but even with only 50, the winner of Florida will be ahead in delegate count no matter who it is.

DudeGuyMan wrote:Gingrich is an asshole, but Romney comes off as some sort of soulless politician robot with perfect hair, and people will take an asshole over a robot any day of the week. Being an asshole at least sort of counts as a personality.

Romney needs to get caught laughing at a fart joke or calling some guy a ballmuncher. He needs something that's enough of a faux pas to get the media talking, but that nobody casting a vote will really hold against him. Something on the order of Obama getting caught smoking. Something that humanizes him.

Yeah he needs to quit coming off as a stereotypical rich prick and lots of other things too, but the GOP base has always been rather cold to him, and it's not all just because he isn't crazy enough. Part of it is because he comes off as this sort of android who gets his marching orders from a focus group and never diverges from them and can't understand why this hasn't made him President yet.

None of that will help him, at least not in the South. He lost in South Carolina mostly because he is the epitome of the Bossman - and working-class Southern whites hate the Bossman almost - or as much - as Obama. Bossman is the guy who walked onto the plant floor on Friday afternoon, Dec. 23rd, and fired everybody, doing so with a smile. Bossman is the bank branch manager who tells you the foreclosure is going through no matter how much you plead.
Even before Gingrich's SuperPAC hadn't went after Romney over his tenure with Bain, many Republican voters felt this way. The Bain shit just hammered it home. And those counter-arguments, about how Gingrich was not attacking Romney, but capitalism itself, was always going to fall on deaf ears amongst the attack ads' target audience - working-class whites. Bossman illustrated below:

It's like Bossman and Fratboy had a lovechild.
Nothing Romney can do will shed that image in the South. That's because he is that guy.

3:59 pm - That's a Wrap

Mitt Romney has been declared the winner, the candidates have given their speeches and are now on their way home, and we are, too. Check out NYTimes.com and The Caucus for continuing coverage. Thanks for following along.

Here's the link for the results. Full results here.

Rough results are as follows:

Romney ~ 42%
Gingrich ~ 26%
Paul ~ 18%
Santorum ~ 13%

Looks like Romney has the nomination (as if he were ever in doubt). Gingrich has vowed to fight on, but it's hard to see how he can win from here. Ron Paul continues his ingenious strategy of not actually winning a state. Santorum looks dead in the water.

bobalot wrote:
Looks like Romney has the nomination (as if he were ever in doubt). Gingrich has vowed to fight on, but it's hard to see how he can win from here. Ron Paul continues his ingenious strategy of not actually winning a state. Santorum looks dead in the water.

I don't know why that's the conclusion you draw when Romney was on home grown. Utah and Nevada (And to a lesser extent Arizona) are home territory for Romney because of Romney's religion. Specifically Mormons vote for Romney the way African Americans vote for Democrats. IE 85%-95%. Less than 100k votes and large turnout of Mormons clinched it for Romney.

Second at the current pace, Romney will fail to secure the require number of delegates to become the nominee. If he keeps winning with less than 50% by June he will be hitting the floor with 600-800 delegates with Romney and Paul with 200-300 each.

I am SO SICK of these caucuses and the delegates and the ads and the neverending debates and all this shit.

Seriously, just have all the candidates put their names in a jar, and then whoever pays the most money wins. It's basically the same method and will get the same results but is much faster and more honest.

This is why living in a state whose primaries never matter is nice. And probably the single greatest drawback of living in Iowa.

Mayabird wrote:I am SO SICK of these caucuses and the delegates and the ads and the neverending debates and all this shit.

Seriously, just have all the candidates put their names in a jar, and then whoever pays the most money wins. It's basically the same method and will get the same results but is much faster and more honest.

I'm happy because it means more mudslinging between the candidates, more division, and more fuel for the anti-GOP.

The entire idea of the primary election is deeply, deeply weird to me in the first place. The idea of a political party machine not actually choosing who they run in the actual election...shit, I'm a native American, and it doesn't make any sense to me, never mind what it looks like from the outside. And even if that's inevitable, the fact that hostile advertisements aren't explicitly banned by the party machines baffles me almost as much. Yes, let's just hand ammunition to the actual opposition while we're all too busy stabbing each other in the back to pay attention.

White Haven wrote:The entire idea of the primary election is deeply, deeply weird to me in the first place. The idea of a political party machine not actually choosing who they run in the actual election...

Who the fuck is the political party if not the people comprising it?

Okay some numbers time now we are at 75% reporting in Nevada
Total votes in Nevada are roughly 25k atm.
Of that vote total 27% were Mormon votes of which were Romney votes.

25k x 27% = 6750 votes x .92% = 6210 Mormon votes for Romney
As Romney's vote total is currently 11822 minus that 6210 we get a vote total of 5612
Which means if the Mormons had not been in Neveda period New Gingrich would have won Nevada. Had they gone for Romney by only say 75% Romney still would have won but only by six or less points. Which means the Mormon population pretty much swung Nevada to Romney's side by itself and because of their high turnout compared to other registered voters this means Romney had an easy win. Utah as well will be a cake-walk and there's a good chance were we could see similar numbers in Arizona.

Could you plese explain to this non-American what those "total votes" figures mean? 25,000 voters seems very small for a whole damn state. Even if those are just registered Republicans it sounds small. Who exactly is voting in this thing?

The party machine. Key word there. The strategists, the movers and shakers, so on and so forth. Understand that I'm not making a moral judgement, but a strategic one, the idea of the primary election doesn't make sense to me, from that angle. Hell, we hear the discussion every four years, 'Such-and-such is a good candidate in the primaries, playing to the far right/left, but will he have enough broad appeal to do well in the general election?' Strategically, it seems deeply insane to permit that sort of uncertainty in who you run, from the perspective of the political machine itself.

White Haven wrote:The party machine. Key word there. The strategists, the movers and shakers, so on and so forth. Understand that I'm not making a moral judgement, but a strategic one, the idea of the primary election doesn't make sense to me, from that angle. Hell, we hear the discussion every four years, 'Such-and-such is a good candidate in the primaries, playing to the far right/left, but will he have enough broad appeal to do well in the general election?' Strategically, it seems deeply insane to permit that sort of uncertainty in who you run, from the perspective of the political machine itself.

It used to be that way. The reason it's not anymore is because people were fed up with having their choices made for them by assholes in a smoky back room.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Could you plese explain to this non-American what those "total votes" figures mean? 25,000 voters seems very small for a whole damn state. Even if those are just registered Republicans it sounds small. Who exactly is voting in this thing?

30%-50% of registered Republicans, Neveda is a caucus state which means to vote you go to your polling place (Typical a school gym) and all gather in a big crowd. Then there a speeches and talks from all the campaigns and at 9 PM or some such time you all move to physical locations corresponding to the possible choices. IE Newt people by the bleachers, Romney people by the water cooler, Santorum people next to the bathrooms, Paul people to the sub-sub basement. Rolls are then taken and votes counted by physical attendance.

Caucus states favor the most die hard supporters because it's not a show up to vote thing then leave but a three or four hour block party of sorts.

Ah that explains things. Thanks.

Mayabird wrote:I am SO SICK of these caucuses and the delegates and the ads and the neverending debates and all this shit.

Seriously, just have all the candidates put their names in a jar, and then whoever pays the most money wins. It's basically the same method and will get the same results but is much faster and more honest.

They'd just turn around and immediately start campaigning for the general. There is no escape from the eternal election season.