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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

The insanity about this is HE'S NOT EVEN THE NOMINEE YET.

Considering how pissed the establishment Republicans are that he might be the nominee, they're all betting on an open convention followed by some combination of a Walker, Cruz, Rubio, Ryan ticket.

I can't believe how people have lost their minds and he most likely won't get the amount of delegates required to get the nomination outright before the convention in June. Clearly whatever he's doing, he's struck a HUGE nerve somewhere, because there is a fuck ton of panic in the streets and it's still very, very, very early in the process.

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Candidates like Trump often serve the useful purpose of making candidates that would otherwise seem extreme look moderate. I'm almost surprised there isn't some sort of loud-mouthed, extreme liberal anti-Trump candidate on the Democratic side to make some of their other candidates look more moderate by comparison.

Taking extreme positions doesn't win elections unfortunately. Trump has a few of his own extreme opinions and I feel relatively confident he's going to lose pretty bad to Hillary because of it. Hillary is the master of no extremes.

> Hillary is the master of no extremes.

except for consistently lying...

Are there any successful politicians that don't consistently lie?

I would say no but she's pretty bold and consistent

"Hillary is the master of no extremes."

That really depends on where you're coming from, politically. Compared to some places in the world, the most "liberal" and "socialist" Democrat (no, not Hillary) is already a right wing extremist. For starters: She's a hawk. She and her husband deliberately came in to office to push the already right-leaning Democratic party further to the right. She's for enlarging the already massive surveillance state. These are not moderate positions to a lot of people. Maybe moderate compared to Trump.

Regarding whether a moderate or an extremist is more likely to win, there's little evidence that Presidential elections get decided on political positions. Sadly, personality and style are far more significant.

I disagree about her being moderate compared to Trump. I fully intend to vote for Trump if it comes down to a race between Trump and her, because in my view, Trump is far more moderate than Hillary. As you said, Hillary is a war hawk, and I believe she'll start another war in the middle east. Trump, by contrast (despite all his crazy rhetoric about building a wall etc.), has preached non-intervention for the most part, not starting unnecessary wars, and really pissed off the Republican establishment by calling Bush's Iraq war "stupid". I don't believe he'll start a needless war. He might do a bunch of other things, but to me that's a big enough factor that I'll vote for him over Hillary. Add in the plain fact that she's sold out to Goldman Sachs and the private prison industry and Trump really looks quite reasonable by comparison.

Of course, my preferred choice is Bernie, but with how plainly and obviously corrupt the DNC is, I don't have a lot of hope of him getting the Dem nomination and running in the general election. Maybe things will go totally haywire and both Bernie and Trump will get pissed and run as independents after the establishment railroads them both, and then we'll have a 4-way race.

The only perspective that really matters is the average American voter. The average American voter, in some parts of the country, would possibly disagree with Hillary's gun control stance, but she's not really vocal about that and nothing else comes to mind that either side of the aisle would really care about. Of course there's the minority who care about things like privacy, TTP, campaign finance, etc. Most that's a pretty small niche and I doubt most Americans are even aware those issues exist.

If you removed gun control views Hillary could run just fine as a Republican. She's in favor of climate change policies too, which establishment Republicans disagree with, but I don't see many average joe Republicans giving a shit about it.

Hilary has her own set of issues, including an ongoing FBI investigation.

You are right though, she really has no extreme stances. This is mainly due to the fact she tailors her views and policies to what's popular at the time.

No kidding. Not too long ago Ted Cruz was a xenophobic, extreme-right religious nut. Now the media is playing him up to be some sort of moderate (he's still a religious nut).

By contrast, Trump is a moderate masquerading as a conservative caricature.

The worst part is that it looks like you guys will be stuck with an 'establishment' president who'll simply continue the status quo of funnelling money to the rich and waging wars in 3rd world countries (Hillary).

It's interesting that angry exclusionary interests have not had more traction among liberals. For example, there's nothing like Fox News to attract and organize such dissatisfied folk on the liberal side. (MSNBC has tiny viewership by contrast to Fox, and no democrat leaders have insisted on interviewing ONLY at MSNBC, unlike Fox. The same goes for talk radio.)

Historically, extremists on the liberal side have focused more on policy than personality, like Sanders, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, and to a lesser extent, Jesse Jackson. These guys aren't populists. They promote the interests of folk who are below average economically and civilly, raising their prospects upward toward the mean, rather than promoting the economic or moral interests of those already in the mainstream.

IMHO, that difference is less likely to attract megalomaniacs, like Trump.

Once you've witness a few elections, you start to see this stuff repeat over and over again.

"Oh my god! Candidate X won New Hampshire, what an upset! Who knows what will happen!!!"

[5 months later...]

"As expected, the candidate everyone thought would win the nomination did."

It's a bit of a farce. I swear the nomination process was created solely to see newspapers.

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