US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6497

On January 04 2017 08:08 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think Megyn Kelly is one of very few people to come out of this election cycle looking better than she did going into it.

On January 04 2017 08:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:

I agree. I would say she is even the only one I can think of. I also don't think it's a good thing she leaves Fox. People with some critical abilities and independence are badly, badly needed there.

On January 04 2017 08:29 xDaunt wrote:
Who is going to be Megyn's audience? Historically, it has been conservatives who were loyal to Fox News. I promise you that that crowd is not going to follow her over to NBC. And I highly doubt that liberals are going to flock to her shows simply because she had the temerity to go after Trump. History is littered with good-intentioned conservatives and republicans who were the belles of the liberal ball for a grand total of about 15 minutes after turning on conservative/republican interests, only to find themselves quickly discarded by the very crowd that they sought to please.

On January 04 2017 08:49 Thieving Magpie wrote:


From what's been public so far.

She's gotten into arguments with Fox about everything from autonomy to pay. And the bigger she's gotten the more flexible she's been with her stances.

My guess is that she'll start as a conservative counterpoint to the attacks on the administration, it would be best to pair her with liberal talking point man early. The show would definitely be designed to attack Trump's policies but from a "centrist" POV.

If ratings go down she gets shifted to a group show as the "but what if" bad guy of the discussions.
If ratings go up then she would be shifted to a post-maddow time slot to give centrist bow-by-blow of Maddow's tirade.

If I was the producer, I would definitely milk her as the bad guy making the liberal counter-arguments for the network. Kind of like in Wrestling and eSports. Just to spice things up.

On January 04 2017 08:29 xDaunt wrote:
Who is going to be Megyn's audience? Historically, it has been conservatives who were loyal to Fox News. I promise you that that crowd is not going to follow her over to NBC. And I highly doubt that liberals are going to flock to her shows simply because she had the temerity to go after Trump. History is littered with good-intentioned conservatives and republicans who were the belles of the liberal ball for a grand total of about 15 minutes after turning on conservative/republican interests, only to find themselves quickly discarded by the very crowd that they sought to please.

On January 04 2017 08:51 xDaunt wrote:

That's all well and good, but back to my original question: who is going to watch her? Who really wants to watch her do this stuff?

On January 04 2017 08:29 xDaunt wrote:
Who is going to be Megyn's audience? Historically, it has been conservatives who were loyal to Fox News. I promise you that that crowd is not going to follow her over to NBC. And I highly doubt that liberals are going to flock to her shows simply because she had the temerity to go after Trump. History is littered with good-intentioned conservatives and republicans who were the belles of the liberal ball for a grand total of about 15 minutes after turning on conservative/republican interests, only to find themselves quickly discarded by the very crowd that they sought to please.

On January 04 2017 09:03 Mohdoo wrote:


I think Megyn's audience was reliant on Trump being a truly racist disaster. That doesn't appear likely at this point. I think she's making the worst possible move here. Unless she gets a sweet contract where she just retires at the end of her contract. In such a case, why not?

On January 04 2017 09:13 Thieving Magpie wrote:


I honestly believe that 99% of the move was because she tried negotiating with FOX and FOX was shocked to see a woman asking for more money.

She might have even decided to take an NBC role with less money and less prospects just because she would rather work somewhere that gives her autonomy over one that does not.

On January 04 2017 09:22 xDaunt wrote:

Given that Fox was reportedly offering her something in the neighborhood of $20 million per year -- which was far more than anyone else was offering (though we don't know the terms of this NBC deal, yet) -- I'm not sure what "more money" would have looked like. And the other thing that bears mentioning is that FNC really wanted to keep her. Ailes is gone, and the Murdoch sons clearly want to take the network in a new, more moderate direction. They made it very clear that they wanted to build FNC around Megyn Kelly instead of O'Reilly.

Kelly told friends that one of her top priorities was a family-friendly work schedule. Kelly has three young children and wasn't getting home on weekdays until well after their bedtime.

A daytime program on NBC will give Kelly a lot more flexibility.

On January 04 2017 09:52 Danglars wrote:

Oh, "Some prominent conservatives" have done this, according to NPR. Let's see if there's any truth to it. Nope.

It was signed by some very obscure conservatives, the closest to relevance was lending his name third-party to a recognizable conservative "instrumental in the successful Tea Party-backed effort to unseat then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor." (ala who? oh his mother's uncle!) Dishonest on its face; par for NPR.

The title was a little more credulous. Prominent Trump Backers. This is a recent Democrat-turned-Republican and the American people wouldn't certainly know who was prominent or not for this one campaign. But STILL there wasn't a name any Trump voter in this forum or elsewhere could write on a list of prominent Trump backers. So that one's out the window too. Two points for fake news, zero for professional journalism.

If we theorized that an editor could've spot corrected some truth into the article and put "several Trump backers" and later named the "left-of-center and right-of-center nonprofits," they could've nailed it.

Oh, and guess who was the one prominent signer on the letter?
Yes, that would be the Center for American Progress.
Even if you lived under a rock for twenty years and only surfaced six months ago, that would be one name you would have a chance to spot and recognize on that list. A prominent progressive advocacy organization with a record of influence and forty five billion+ at its helm.

On January 04 2017 08:08 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think Megyn Kelly is one of very few people to come out of this election cycle looking better than she did going into it.

On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:


Well setting up a fundraising apparatus that favored one candidate over another would be one obvious to me (the state party money funneling. To be clear, it would be like if Trump could use all the states Republicans control and Hillary only the ones Democrats control).

On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Also, if we make the parallel between delegates and electors, super delegates would basically be like the controlling side of congress getting ~20% of the electoral college vote.

On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
But if we're sticking specifically to what came out of the DNC leaks that would be illegal, one would be breaking the debate contract stipulating that none of the questions be given to candidates beforehand.

On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
There's more examples like the people rushing into the Nevada caucus with no records of their registration, and really a crap ton of violations around the country at the local level that the DNC ignored but I'm not really interested in rehashing.

On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
As for the "free" part, in New York, one had to know you wanted to vote in the Democratic primary in October of 2015 for their primary in April. And that you wouldn't be able to vote in the Democratic primary months later. You may remember the first debate wasn't until October...

Sanders actually benefited substantially from the format of the primaries. The first two states were very unrepresentative of the Democratic (and US) electorate in terms of demographics, and favorable to Sanders in that regard, giving his campaign a boost. When it comes to open contests, if you take away caucuses, Clinton has won thirteen open primaries to Sanders' six. The only type of format which actually benefited Sanders by a sizeable margin was the open caucuses, which is actually the kind of format which disenfranchises voters the most.

See for example the caucuses in Nebraska and Washington -- Sanders won the two caucuses 57,1% to 42,9% and 72,7% to 27,1%, respectively. Yet those two states also held primaries (which didn't award delegates, however), in which a lot more people participated, and Clinton won both contests: 53% to 47% in Nebraska, and 53% to 47% as well in Washington. About 230,000 people voted in the Washington caucuses, while more than 719,000 people voted in the states primary -- more than three times as much. The same is true of the attendance of the Nebraska contests. Sanders was therefore in reality incredibly favored by the existence of caucuses. See this map:



538 have actually just released an analysis of this exact matter: see here. I'll quote them:


Another important point to take into account to examine who the system benefited is the ratio of votes received to the ratio of delegates received. Sanders has received around 43% of the vote so far, yet he has received about 46% of delegates. And if the Democrats were using the same rules as the Republicans in terms of delegate allocation, Clinton would have won the nomination a long time ago. Sanders is getting the best possible system to help him remain competitive.

"What about superdelegates?", you ask? Well, despite Clinton having an overwhelming majority of superdelegates in her camp, superdelegates have never flipped a nomination against the candidate who had won the most pledged delegates, and there's nothing that indicates they would have done so if Sanders had been in Clinton's position with a majority of pledged delegates and a huge advantage in the popular vote -- in fact, many have said that they would follow the will of the voters even if they initially announced they were supporting another candidate. What matters is therefore who is getting a majority of pledged delegates, and that's Clinton by a sizeable margin, not Sanders. He's the one who's trying to get the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters, not Clinton.

Another argument coming from the Sanders camp is that he would win if the voting started now, since voters have gotten to know him better, but that's just as fallacious. First, if he needed more time, perhaps he could have joined the Democratic party and started campaigning earlier -- that's on him. The same is true of him not having her name recognition. Second, he has been lagging behind Clinton throughout the primaries, and the closest he came to her was an average of a five percentage point difference in polls. That difference is now of almost ten percentage points.

I'll close by mentioning the debates -- the DNC did try to limit the number of unsanctioned debates in this election, just like the RNC did, because the main takeaway from the 2012 Republican primary was that too many debates could seriously hurt the eventual nominee. This would have made Sanders' task of introducing himself to the electorate slightly more difficult, if they hadn't ended up scheduling more debates anyway. Sanders had every opportunity to present himself to the electorate, and spent even more money than Hillary's campaign throughout the primaries -- with the advantage of not having a history (and a present!) of being attacked by the Republicans due to being their biggest threat in the general election. As I showed, he has still remained behind Clinton in polls throughout the primaries.

In short, the actual process never substantially disadvantaged Sanders, and he's the one who actually benefited from it, most importantly through the caucuses which disenfranchised Clinton voters by huge margins.

On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
You may also remember when Politifact came out and said DWS's statement about "maximizing exposure" with the debate schedule was "False", the only thing saving her from "pants on fire" was that they were scheduled on network TV.

On January 03 2017 18:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
Seriously, can you just acknowledge that the primary process wasn't fair and we could move on?

On January 04 2017 10:32 pmh wrote:



I said it a while back already,maybe you can still see find the post on this thread.

Megyn Kelly is the biggest winner of this election.

Wonder how much they paid to get her transfer on top of the salary,something like 10m+ would not surprise me at all.
I am kinda curious what people like here would make, it will be way over 10m a year I guess?