easy, he'd lose. Same goes for Pete and every other centrist and that one candidate who isn't picking a lane because they want to pretend to be progressive.

You know what, I probably just got it backward before. I thought I remembered you saying that you were trans-male (as in female sex, male-identified) before, but maybe I misunderstood and it's actually trans-female (as in male sex, female-identified) instead?

Anyway, it's aaaaaalllllll good!

I've reflected on this and I realize I was 100% wrong with my comment whining about a possible ban hammer and I want to own up to it. Was an overreaction to the abundance of Gabbard smears being a "secret kremlin or republican." Part of what factored it for me also was comparing it to a recent ban of a user who seemingly just dropped an inconvenient statistic and was banned for what I assume was provocation (although maybe there was something else I missed with him). 

I still find the "Kremlin/Republican" attacks ridiculous but people should get to speak their minds absolutely, even if it's baseless. I mean there are a lot of candidates with varying ideals/policy.. So naturally some of not going to be everyone's cup of tea and will even be hated, not trusted, etc.. and their ideals/policy attacked quite a bit at times, and that's cool. Actual debate over policy or ideals is actually a good thing. And hell, lord knows I've probably said my share of questionable stuff about a few of them.

I do still think at least attacks on the candidates' or politicians' character/history should be backed up by arguments/data (like I was requested to do with Hillary and uranium one in this thread).

But still, even the baseless character attacks on candidates should be ok, hell people could shout that Tulsi is the devil made flesh who eats babies for that matter, doesn't make a difference I guess - unless a user themself is attacked or it's something inappropriate. 

What I was 99% referring to were really only those 3 or 4 people w/a few posts who just swoop in here and drop these drive-by attacks on the candidate with no basis, not following up with an argument or justification. That to me just seems like pointless provocation. I haven't read this topic elaborately but I don't count you among those 3 or 4 and I assume you're not one of them. So I don't know why you assume this stuff was directed at you..

Again, with all that name calling/accusation stuff - I was really only referring to those few people who pop in and just throw down a few baseless attacks and leave, not the vast majority of users here who are making real arguments or engaging in real discussion. Didn't mean to imply any users were "xenophobic bigoted idiots" if it's me you're referring to, I'm merely addressing the rhetoric itself and how it sounds.

Regardless.. I still feel shitty about this :/

I see where you're coming from, but I don't think this map is likely, because given recent polling trends, I think PA, MI, and WI will once again go the same way, and that will be blue this time. I also don't think we'll underperform in both AZ and the rust belt at the same time. It's not an outlandish outcome, but it isn't the one I'd bet on. Good news is, the house decides, not the senate, in the event of a tie. Bad news is, it's 1 vote per state delegation, which would result another near perfect tie, but with several states split evenly, giving the advantage to the Republicans. Only way we could win is if we win the WI-7th special election in May, and then get Wi, PA, and MI's split delegations to somehow break for us, and even then only if DC gets a vote, which I don't know if they do in electoral college ties.

But lets hope it doesn't come to that. I don't think it will.

A few things here, first, I recognize it wasn't directed at me but felt the need to say something anyway because I felt that things had gotten nasty in the thread but also didn't want a thread where we can't make little jokes, which is what I took the "treason" jabs as being, because they were in the context of a silly tier list. Second, for you to get up in arms about a tier list joke, while I choose to stay quiet when certain individuals were suggesting Sanders supports anti-democratic socialist regimes and was some kind of monster for his opinion on Bolivia, it just really rubbed me the wrong way. Especially when people came to your defense over a candidate with little chance to win, and didn't come to my defense over a candidate with a decent chance to win, all in the name of "party unity" in case the candidate in question won, when in reality, the time for calling for that kind of unity and rallying is during the general, and if it's going to be too difficult to rally behind a particular candidate, that needs to be brought up during the primary (I'd say Gabbard and Biden both apply here, quite frankly). Third, I really wanted to avoid the mods getting involved at all, and I'm honestly a little embarrassed that it came to that. Like Ryuu said, everybody needs to just chill, this really shouldn't be that big of a deal.

I don't think I really saw that, but even if I did - I pretty much only really comment on and follow things I have knowledge about, and I'm not too familiar with the situation in Bolivia. But I'd wager it's hysteria that's pretty baseless, so I assume I'd be with you on that. I'm just not nearly as familiar with the happenings of the Sanders camp now as I was in 2016. My knowledge and passion (as I'm sure you know by now ha) is primarily centered around Tulsi and Yang with occasional bits from Bernie, not the Dem party as a whole, so that's just what I tend to hone in on.

Regardless I find the socialist scare with Bernie pretty ridiculous, it's not like capitalism is going to come to a halt on Bernie's watch. Many people in this country tend to have this knee jerk reaction to what they feel is "socialism" for merely wanting to hold large corporations more accountable and nudge things more in favor of the masses rather than the elite.

People can make jokes all they want of course. It's just I see the same rhetoric on other sites and some people REALLY seem to mean the traitor talk and like, some of them use it as insults or a cheap way of discrediting people (which baffles me since I've yet to see a shred of evidence and I've only seen evidence to the contrary). It's like these narratives just get started out of nowhere and take on a life of their own. Many I've read at places like twitter clearly are not kidding, and even throw in some choice words for Tulsi. So it's tough for me to decipher the jokes vs serious comments. But whatever - again whether it's joking around or serious it's fine, what's the difference, they got a right to say it.

Wait, what was said about Bernie's stance on Bolivia in here? His stance was and is the correct one so who claimed that he supports anti-democratic socialist regimes, when Bolivia had a free and fair election, he won re-election but was outed by a Military backed coup that was aided by the CIA. There is an argument that he should not have run for re-election considering term limits but he got the all clear from the courts so there was nothing wrong about the election. Also if you check the stats he helped a hell of a lot of people out of poverty with his socialist policies and the country was doing well. If I saw I definitely would have chimed in with that, but with the Tulsi stuff its a hell of a lot of smears. Like a lot a lot. And don't get me wrong, as someone who kinda lives on Twitter I see stuff from Tulsi supporters that piss me off so much. There's a lot of in-fighting between berners and tulsicrats and well I'm not a fan of it and I've seen people be wrong on records on both sides to push their candidates which is dumb.

I also want to point out on that note, the side of twitter which I mainly see, while they are Bernie/tulsi supporters, they are also see both candidates at most as compromise and that's it. If you're to the right of Bernie or Tulsi ggs, they will never vote for you. The funniest part about it too, is that this is the group that's actually with the base. This is the group you have to win over and even Tulsi has trouble winning them over. Anyone on the centrist lane and in general gets the "dem vote" or the "vote blue no matter who vote" but that's not gonna win you an election. I'm not gonna voter shame anyone or anything like that, but if you just took a look over here, you'd understand that certain people would lose to Trump in a general. Biden, Pete, Warren.... they'd all lose.

1) Biden: He needs to drop out. I'm not even remotely joking. Ignore the polling for a second and take a look at this man and his performances. Listen to him at his events and hear the nonsense that comes out of his mouth. Him telling people to vote for trump etc, him calling a voter fat and challenging him to a push up contest. He's going to get slaughtered in a debate with Trump and trump has so much and I mean so much ammunition he can use to turn people off of Biden that its just a no.... like for the love of god he needs to sit down and go spend some time with his kids and grandkids. Its time Uncle joe, Just relax and enjoy retirement.

2) Pete: Considering everything I said for Biden, would you believe me if I said he'd lose even harder than Biden? Cause that's the case. Pete has little to no POC support and just like Clinton his line of thinking is that "as a dem it doesn't matter they always show up to vote for the dem" Unfortunately for him that's not the case. He legitimately has no path to the nomination but that's not the point. Pete has been caught in a web of lies and scandals surrounding POC specifically black people and there are countless videos of things in the past and more recently like his douglas plan for example. His quick position changes etc don't help him either. He's basically gonna get called out for playing the political game along with the amounting scandals including where he's getting his money from and will just like biden, lose the progressive vote and unlike biden, he'll actually lose a decent chunk of the POC voter. Trump destroys this man in the general.

3) Warren: All things considered, she has the best chance of these 3 unfortunately for her, she still loses. Look at crossover support for a second between her and Pete and you'll realize they have the same pool of voters while they are ideologically different. The American people on a whole don't vote ideology. They vote on who they can trust, or in 2016's case the wanted to destroy the system and let me tell you, that feeling still exists. Warren has flip flopped on so many issues now and lied about so many things that her trust is pretty much gone. She's also trying to play an inside/outside game with the dem establishment and unfortunately for her, people don't like the democrats. They don't like the republicans either btw but that's not the point I'm making here. She talks a good game but with all the lies and flip flops coming up along with the fact that she over-reacted to the simplest of questions and was hostile to one of the few actual good journalist in America for that fair question just shows who she really is. She can't take the heat and she's shown this by trying to face off against trump with the DNA thing. That's bigger than you may think btw, but that's not the only thing. She stands a better chance cause she's not exactly alienating people (other than fox news people which is a bad play) but her lack of authenticity will cause her to lose. Trump is a liar, and he's all around bad. But have you ever felt like the Trump you see on stage isn't the real trump? I haven't, that's him, he's a slime ball. But Warren pretends to be something she is not and that is the biggest turn off you can have in politics especially when you don't have the charisma to hide it and she doesn't. She'd get torched as well, not as bad as they other 2, but still pretty bad.

Personally I only see Bernie winning, though I can admit that both Yang and Tulsi's crossover support make it possible for them to beat Trump as well. Everyone else is just setting trump up for re-election sadly.

True. Perhaps I'm just excessively wary of the creeping Republican strength across the upper midwest.

Long term, of course, to swap Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin for Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia will be a good deal for the Dems. They only have to hope the reddening doesn't come too soon...

I regard MN, IA, WI, OH, MI and PA to be elastic to semi-elastic swing states. IA and OH being the most elastic, MN, WI, MI and PA being less so. The former group is so elastic it finds itself on either side of the aisle from one election to the next all the time. The latter group is significantly less elastic, and usually follow each other, with MN lagging to the left of the other three, enough that it hasn't voted D since before Reagan. I personally believe we've reached a Republican high water mark for the latter group, and that a trend has started that will send it back the other way. Basing that mostly on polls and 2018 results. I'm also optimistic that Iowa will swing back for us as well, based on 2018 performance. OH is a harder one to read, but I think we've got a chance to flip it too. It usually follows the others a bit to the right. I certainly hope it swings, though, because the last time it voted against the winner was 1960. And even when the other 5 voted together for the Democrat, Ohio went for Bush in 2000 and that...ended very poorly...

In the table below, the winner is italicized and bolded.

An electoral college tie is very unlikely, but even then there might be unfaithful electors (in either camp, 2016 there were seven diverging votes). So there are quite some unlikely events before it comes down to this.