Donald Trump is now the official Republican Nominee

[Tempest]

Wait... A number of people already voted for Ted, as well as Rubio, and Ben Carson etc.
Where do those votes go now?

Hopefully? To Bernie.

 

[Kitti]

Are you meaning voted in the primaries/caucuses/etc? The people who voted already should be resident in states whose primaries have already been decided, then, in which case, they counted but did not win. Trump is now the presumptive nominee but I think that the Convention where it's official is in July this year.

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

This whole election is to determine who represents the party though through delegate count.
What does resident of state matter seeing how delegates can be divided like that?

Cause if these people's votes failed, not because the election ended but the candidate left, shouldn't they be able to go elsewhere to someone whose still running? :/
Like, this isn't an issue in Canada because we don't do this primary stuff, you vote and the person actually bothers going into office.

 

[Kitti]

Those who have already voted don't get to move their votes elsewhere. It becomes sort of a complex matter when they drop out.

A candidate can officially endorse another and (should) send their delegates that way. I believe that an "unpledged" delegate may choose to align as they choose with the remaining candidates.

 

[The Spectre]

Man, people are still forgetting about Kasich. Only if he had a chance to becoming the president. He's my favorite republican next to Rubio, but oh well.

Now, I must get used to the idea that the childish Trump and the crooked Clinton could become President. Sanders might have a chance at becoming the nominee, but he will never become President.

 

[Dervish]

I meant that you guys aren't hearing about it 24/7. I can't even go outside without seeing signs. Luckily most of the people around here are Hilary or Bernie supporters, so it's not that bad. Every time I see a Trump sign though, I want to smear dog shit all over it. I got asked if I would put a Trump sign up in my yard. I almost said yes so I could vandalize it and not get into trouble, but even thinking about having my little area of the world being tainted with that trash turned my stomach.

I literally haven't gone a day in the past two months I've kept track without hearing Trump's name.

I said I would buy 100 dollars worth of lottery tickets if I could go a single day without hearing US election bullshit. So far, my money is safe.

 

[☆Luna☆]

Those who have already voted don't get to move their votes elsewhere. It becomes sort of a complex matter when they drop out.

A candidate can officially endorse another and (should) send their delegates that way. I believe that an "unpledged" delegate may choose to align as they choose with the remaining candidates.

Although, in a system that makes sense, people would vote via the alternative system, and drop-outs could be deal with properly.

 

[Sir Salty]

I am going to die. Do you think the UK will take me back since my original birth certificate is in Liverpool, England​

 

[Cpt Toellner]

I dunno guys, I think kasich's still got this.

FUUUUUUUUU

 

[Brovo]

You know, you guys, Trump is really not that bad. You're kind of blowing this way out of proportion. Y'all had motherfuckin' Andrew Jackson--the man who eagerly entered into duels just so he could maim and murder people--as your president once. This same man ran on a platform that made him all kinds of hot and bothered for slavery, supporting it fervently. Even back in his day, there were many who thought he took his love of slavery too far, and he was implicated in breaking laws surrounding slave trading. He created the trail of tears and gleefully ordered native americans to be forcibly moved and even killed just to allow more imperialist western expansion.

Donald Trump is an asshole. I get it. Yes, he says provocative and idiotic things, but do you really think he's the only one who does it? Bernie Sanders is promising a 15 dollar federal minimum wage. In some states, that would increase the cost of hiring employees by more than 100%. That would easily create a nightmarish, economic apocalypse right there by itself, but he also proposes widespread increases in spending. All of which will be paid with by increasing taxes on the rich?

Are you fucking kidding me?

The Liberals made that same kind of promise here in Canada. It punched a two billion dollar deficit in their budget plans instead, which quickly and grotesquely grew to ten billion. I don't think people grasp how taxes fucking work. I don't think Bernie does. It's not like the rich have infinite amounts of money, once you take their money, it's just fucking gone. Assuming they don't just leave.

And then there's Hillary Clinton. Hillary "literally lies about everything under the sun" Clinton. Hillary "black kids are super-predators" Clinton. Hillary "I'm against investment banks just like Bernie" Clinton. Hilarious Hillary. Hitlery. Hillary Cunton. Whatever you want to call her, she's just as fucking bad as Trump is. Hell, probably worse, because she's come out as pro-censorship in the past, and she would happily betray any value to whoever paid her top dollar. Trump's voter base is frightening, but so is Clinton's voter base. There are people voting for her simply because she has a vagina and hopes she'll harm the white male menace.

And if we're going to hold people accountable for the actions of their voter base, y'all realize the KKK supported both of them for president, right?

Is Trump is a good person? Probably not, but then, you've had worse people for president, and the people he's running against are just as fucking insane as he is.

As for the Hitler comparisons, yes, it's funny, invoking Godwin's law, and thinking you're clever, but, please, unless you're joking, you should stop. As someone who has studied history, what he's doing has little to do with the rise of Hitler. In case you haven't noticed, when Trump beats someone out of the Republican race, he usually takes a moment to stop with his attacks and send praises and well wishes their way. Which makes sense, given his history. He used to star in a several year long reality television show where his entire job was to be an asshole to people, essentially. He's using what he knows from reality TV to stir people to his side and shoot holes in the credibility of his opponents. There's no real or serious sign that he's out to create the dictatorship of Trump. First, he's not that competent. Second, the people he's surrounded himself with are equally not that competent, most are just stooges and cronies for whatever his ambitions lay. Third, I'm not sure you understand the power of your congress and the supreme justices to cock block the president. Even the prime minister of Canada technically has more power over their country than the president of the United States has over theirs. Fourth, and this is really the key, if he completely fucks up at his job and does things even the Republicans believe to be too far, he can be easily impeached and knocked out of office. Or, at the very least, threatened with it to put him in line. Fifth, he hasn't created a private army of paramilitary pseudo-soldiers to do his bidding. (No, really, look it up. If you seriously think it's the same as the raving racists who hate muslims and support Trump, you're a fucking idiot.) Sixth, he has made no death threats or implications thereof toward any of his competitors in any of his statements. He's more like the schoolyard bully than a violent concentration camp creating dictator. Seventh, he's made no implication of dismantling democracy, or increasing presidential powers. Eighth, he's at no point vowed to imprison or limit the rights of any minority group currently in America. No, not even the Muslims. He does want to limit immigration, but that's not a new fucking stance by the Republican party, and pretending it is is stupid. He's just the only one honest enough to admit what kinds of people he doesn't want in the country.

Again, I'm not really a fan of Trump. I'd think I'd rather shoot myself in the knee than vote for the crotchety bastard, but then, I wouldn't want to vote for the servile cunt that is Hillary Clinton either. I'd maybe support Bernie? But he's kind of fucked now. Even if he wins every single primary from here on out, Hillary will still probably get enough candidates to take the nomination thanks to how the broken superdelegate system works.

Yet, pretending that either candidate is going to ruin your country is fucking stupid. Hillary is a lying sack of shit who will serve the interests of investment bankers and Wall Street, and who will make (hopefully) empty promises to her progressive voting bloc to try and keep them for a second term election. Trump is a shit disturber who bullies people to get his way and yet is beholden primarily to his own interests, which seem to be basically just ego.

Trump is an evil I know and an evil that can be easily kept in check.

Hillary is an evil that could do actual further damage to your system, because investment banks can just buy her to support any bill they want for four years.

And yet either of them is still not as bad as Andrew "I'm going to murder someone in a duel just because I don't like him" Jackson. So would you all stop swearing you'll move to Canada when we all know you fucking won't? Because this happened with the Bush Jr elections and Obama elections too, people promising the complete destruction of the nation and swearing up and down that they would lose all their civil rights and that they had to run to another country. Never fuckin' happened. Still not happening.

Now relax. Go drink some tea, enjoy the sunrise. Your political system is a joke but it has been for decades, so getting outraged over it now isn't going to solve anything.

 

[Kitti]

Now relax. Go drink some tea, enjoy the sunrise. Your political system is a joke but it has been for decades, so getting outraged over it now isn't going to solve anything.

That is the part about this that I truly disagree with. Frankly speaking, it seems condescending and terrible advice, in my opinion.

Don't "sit back and relax" if you're not happy with politics. If it's your country, it's your politics! GET PASSIONATE. If you think the system is broke, WORK TO FIX IT. Get politically active. Work to make an impact on a system.

Political apathy because "it's been broke for a long time" helps nobody. Write letters. Canvas for a candidate. Work phone banks. PARTICIPATE. You think it's a joke? Work to fix it. Even if it doesn't work, at least you know that you didn't sit back "relax and drink tea".

 

[Jorick]

This whole election is to determine who represents the party though through delegate count.
What does resident of state matter seeing how delegates can be divided like that?

Cause if these people's votes failed, not because the election ended but the candidate left, shouldn't they be able to go elsewhere to someone whose still running? :/
Like, this isn't an issue in Canada because we don't do this primary stuff, you vote and the person actually bothers going into office.

What happens to those votes and delegates is actually fairly simple to explain, but it does highlight some problems with first-past-the-post voting systems, early voting, and the whole delegate/convention system being used instead of the more direct method of counting votes and making the call based on those. All forms of indirect/representative democracy have problems with perfect representation though, so it should come as no surprise that such problems exist in the US primaries.

For early voting, those who vote for a candidate who later drops out are still counted as voting for that person. This is why if you go look at the full voting results for states that voted later on in the process many of them will still show thousands of votes for Bush or Rubio or so on. These useless votes don't tend to make up a huge percentage of the total vote (for example, on the Republican side of the Indiana primary from last night only 2.5% of the votes went to people other than Trump, Cruz, and Kasich), and I don't think any have been big enough to qualify to win delegates if they'd still been in the race and got that many votes, so they really end up as wasted votes in the end. It sucks for the people who voted early, but that's the risk you take when making use of the convenience of early voting.

For delegates pledged to a dropped candidate, it's a bit trickier. Mostly it depends on state laws and party rules, but there are two main ways it can play out. One is that the candidate has fully and officially dropped out and totally ended their campaign, which generally means all their previously pledged delegates become unbound and can vote for any eligible candidate they want come convention time (and what makes people eligible or not for voting is a complicated mess in and of itself because the rules can be changed every election cycle, but normally only people who have garnered a certain portion of the primary delegates are eligible at all). The other situation happens when a candidate "drops out" but doesn't actually end their campaign, usually referred to as "suspending" a campaign, which happens rather frequently because campaigns need to remain as official entities to pay off campaign debts. When this happens the delegates are usually still bound to vote for their pledged candidate come convention time, but candidates can release delegates from their pledges and let them go into the convention unbound, which is the normal course for suspended campaigns.

Again, this is just the general idea and things differ from state to state based on the differences in their laws and rules, but usually an ended campaign equals delegates unbound going into a convention. This means that the voters who caused the delegate to be pledged to, say, Jeb Bush, end up not being perfectly represented in the convention. The people who had been selected to fulfill their votes are now free to do whatever they want, and what's worse is these delegates are usually just party insiders chosen by other party insiders, not people elected to truly represent the voters. The laws put in place in most states to force these delegates to follow the will of the voters are kind of shaky, usually only applying on the first ballot at the convention to determine the party's nominee, and they kind of fly out the window completely when it comes to candidates who drop out.

 

[Brovo]

That is the part about this that I truly disagree with. Frankly speaking, it seems condescending and terrible advice, in my opinion.

Don't "sit back and relax" if you're not happy with politics. If it's your country, it's your politics! GET PASSIONATE. If you think the system is broke, WORK TO FIX IT. Get politically active. Work to make an impact on a system.

Political apathy because "it's been broke for a long time" helps nobody. Write letters. Canvas for a candidate. Work phone banks. PARTICIPATE. You think it's a joke? Work to fix it. Even if it doesn't work, at least you know that you didn't sit back "relax and drink tea".

Yeah, except "getting passionate about it" by pinning all the problems in the system on one particular candidate is stupefying. You want to fix democracy in your country? Target the system, not the people running in it. It's not like getting rid of Hillary and Trump will suddenly make it better. It's not like Cruz wasn't just as fucking deranged as Trump was.

You want to fix the system? I get that. I support that.

You think Trump is going to end all life and destroy the country in four years as though he has hitler-esque powers as president?

You need to relax and drink some tea, because, boy oh boy, he is nowhere near the worst president y'all have had if he wins.

 

[Kagayours]

Fourth, and this is really the key, if he completely fucks up at his job and does things even the Republicans believe to be too far, he can be easily impeached and knocked out of office.

Er... I'm pretty sure that impeachment is only possible if a president breaks some sort of law, though? As opposed to the rest of the government being able to just kick out any president they strongly dislike?

That's my understanding of it, anyway. :/

 

[Jorick]

Er... I'm pretty sure that impeachment is only possible if a president breaks some sort of law, though? As opposed to the rest of the government being able to just kick out any president they strongly dislike?

That's my understanding of it, anyway. :/

Not really, it's not actually directly connected to breaking specific laws. I had to go read up on it to get the details that I missed in the lackluster civics portion of my high school education. The line granting congressional power of impeachment reads as such in the US Constitution:

"The president, vice-president, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."

The phrase 'high crimes and misdemeanors' comes from old English law and can be applied to basically any abuse of power or status that makes a person unfit to continue serving in their elected or appointed office. After the ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton explained impeachment-worthy offenses as such in one of the Federalist Papers: "those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."

For more specific examples, here's a list of charges against federal judges throughout US history who were impeached or seriously looked at for impeachment proceedings: being habitually drunk, showing favoritism on the bench, using judicial power unlawfully, using the office for financial gain, unlawfully punishing people for contempt of court, submitting false expense accounts, getting special deals from parties appearing before the court, bullying people in open court, filing false income tax returns, making false statements while under oath, and disclosing confidential information.

So nope, no blatant lawbreaking required for impeachment.

 

[Dervish]

You know, you guys, Trump is really not that bad. You're kind of blowing this way out of proportion. Y'all had motherfuckin' Andrew Jackson--the man who eagerly entered into duels just so he could maim and murder people--as your president once. This same man ran on a platform that made him all kinds of hot and bothered for slavery, supporting it fervently. Even back in his day, there were many who thought he took his love of slavery too far, and he was implicated in breaking laws surrounding slave trading. He created the trail of tears and gleefully ordered native americans to be forcibly moved and even killed just to allow more imperialist western expansion.

Donald Trump is an asshole. I get it. Yes, he says provocative and idiotic things, but do you really think he's the only one who does it? Bernie Sanders is promising a 15 dollar federal minimum wage. In some states, that would increase the cost of hiring employees by more than 100%. That would easily create a nightmarish, economic apocalypse right there by itself, but he also proposes widespread increases in spending. All of which will be paid with by increasing taxes on the rich?

Are you fucking kidding me?

The Liberals made that same kind of promise here in Canada. It punched a two billion dollar deficit in their budget plans instead, which quickly and grotesquely grew to ten billion. I don't think people grasp how taxes fucking work. I don't think Bernie does. It's not like the rich have infinite amounts of money, once you take their money, it's just fucking gone. Assuming they don't just leave.

And then there's Hillary Clinton. Hillary "literally lies about everything under the sun" Clinton. Hillary "black kids are super-predators" Clinton. Hillary "I'm against investment banks just like Bernie" Clinton. Hilarious Hillary. Hitlery. Hillary Cunton. Whatever you want to call her, she's just as fucking bad as Trump is. Hell, probably worse, because she's come out as pro-censorship in the past, and she would happily betray any value to whoever paid her top dollar. Trump's voter base is frightening, but so is Clinton's voter base. There are people voting for her simply because she has a vagina and hopes she'll harm the white male menace.

And if we're going to hold people accountable for the actions of their voter base, y'all realize the KKK supported both of them for president, right?

Is Trump is a good person? Probably not, but then, you've had worse people for president, and the people he's running against are just as fucking insane as he is.

As for the Hitler comparisons, yes, it's funny, invoking Godwin's law, and thinking you're clever, but, please, unless you're joking, you should stop. As someone who has studied history, what he's doing has little to do with the rise of Hitler. In case you haven't noticed, when Trump beats someone out of the Republican race, he usually takes a moment to stop with his attacks and send praises and well wishes their way. Which makes sense, given his history. He used to star in a several year long reality television show where his entire job was to be an asshole to people, essentially. He's using what he knows from reality TV to stir people to his side and shoot holes in the credibility of his opponents. There's no real or serious sign that he's out to create the dictatorship of Trump. First, he's not that competent. Second, the people he's surrounded himself with are equally not that competent, most are just stooges and cronies for whatever his ambitions lay. Third, I'm not sure you understand the power of your congress and the supreme justices to cock block the president. Even the prime minister of Canada technically has more power over their country than the president of the United States has over theirs. Fourth, and this is really the key, if he completely fucks up at his job and does things even the Republicans believe to be too far, he can be easily impeached and knocked out of office. Or, at the very least, threatened with it to put him in line. Fifth, he hasn't created a private army of paramilitary pseudo-soldiers to do his bidding. (No, really, look it up. If you seriously think it's the same as the raving racists who hate muslims and support Trump, you're a fucking idiot.) Sixth, he has made no death threats or implications thereof toward any of his competitors in any of his statements. He's more like the schoolyard bully than a violent concentration camp creating dictator. Seventh, he's made no implication of dismantling democracy, or increasing presidential powers. Eighth, he's at no point vowed to imprison or limit the rights of any minority group currently in America. No, not even the Muslims. He does want to limit immigration, but that's not a new fucking stance by the Republican party, and pretending it is is stupid. He's just the only one honest enough to admit what kinds of people he doesn't want in the country.

Again, I'm not really a fan of Trump. I'd think I'd rather shoot myself in the knee than vote for the crotchety bastard, but then, I wouldn't want to vote for the servile cunt that is Hillary Clinton either. I'd maybe support Bernie? But he's kind of fucked now. Even if he wins every single primary from here on out, Hillary will still probably get enough candidates to take the nomination thanks to how the broken superdelegate system works.

Yet, pretending that either candidate is going to ruin your country is fucking stupid. Hillary is a lying sack of shit who will serve the interests of investment bankers and Wall Street, and who will make (hopefully) empty promises to her progressive voting bloc to try and keep them for a second term election. Trump is a shit disturber who bullies people to get his way and yet is beholden primarily to his own interests, which seem to be basically just ego.

Trump is an evil I know and an evil that can be easily kept in check.

Hillary is an evil that could do actual further damage to your system, because investment banks can just buy her to support any bill they want for four years.

And yet either of them is still not as bad as Andrew "I'm going to murder someone in a duel just because I don't like him" Jackson. So would you all stop swearing you'll move to Canada when we all know you fucking won't? Because this happened with the Bush Jr elections and Obama elections too, people promising the complete destruction of the nation and swearing up and down that they would lose all their civil rights and that they had to run to another country. Never fuckin' happened. Still not happening.

Now relax. Go drink some tea, enjoy the sunrise. Your political system is a joke but it has been for decades, so getting outraged over it now isn't going to solve anything.

I hear what you're saying about Jackson, but admit it, the election cycle would be so much more interesting if the debates were handled with some good old fashioned six shooter duels.

 

[Brovo]

I hear what you're saying about Jackson, but admit it, the election cycle would be so much more interesting if the debates were handled with some good old fashioned six shooter duels.

The Good, The Bad, and the Andrew Motherfucking Jackson.

 

[Dahrinn (Groucho)]

And so the Trump-Train comes bearing down on us.

Oh, and Hillary crooked so, it's looking like it's gonna be the lesser of two turds turds.

 

[Cpt Toellner]

Fuck it.

 

[Gwazi Magnum]

Our only hope left is third party. :(