How can you be so sure? The polling suggests he'll get the most delegates (though not enough for a majority most likely) at the convention and the establishment prefer him to Cruz. It's definitely possible.

What were his pro-abortion comments? I know in the last debate he said Planned Parenthood did a lot of good for women's health, which is actually one of his most rational and sane positions even if you are opposed to abortion.

She isn't really worse as far as her candidacy goes. She's pretty much between Obama and Bush 43 on the left-right scale, we really wouldn't see much of a change under her, so that alone would make her very electable. From an actual left-leaning point of view she actually isn't a great option as she strikes me as something of a warmonger, which we really don't need right now. I say that as someone who started off wanting her to run in 2014/15 when the primaries were starting to be talked about again.

She lost more credibility to me, firstly with what I perceive as her entitlement to both the Democratic nomination and to the Presidency itself and also how she has handled Sanders' recent surge in the polls. While he has maintained a high level of class throughout, she has often rather let herself down.

The whole email business, I kind of write that off as noise, personally. It seems like there are more important things that need fixing in this country that our energy could be spent on than worrying about that.

The establishment loathes both Trump and Cruz, but Trump is a greater threat to the party because he is a party outsider who has stated positions on tax rates and free trade that offend the establishment (i.e. puts the party at odds with many of its contributors.)

It will probably be a brokered convention due to the lack of a majority, and they'll try to get Rubio (although they would have preferred Jeb.) Perhaps a Rubio-Cruz ticket would be seen as a sort of compromise.

Hillary Clinton barks like a dog, breaks Internet

And you did not hear about this?

I understand the current thinking in the GOP establishment is that Trump is preferred to Cruz because they think Trump is someone who they can negotiate with (given he's a brilliant negotiator, he said so himself), whereas Cruz is an ideologue who alienates everyone.

i just took another look at Real Clear Politics various presidential 'general' polls - Cruz/clinton, Rubio/Sanders, etc. It seems Rubio is the only one of the three (Rubio/cruz/Trump) that consistently beats Clinton, and none of them beat Sanders. It's early days to be looking at these, but I think the best thing for the Democrats is a Cruz victory. That reflects my view that Cruz would be the worst for the country of the three.

Go Ted!!

Example: RealClearPolitics - Election 2016 - General Election: Trump vs. Sanders

We don't all have alerts that go off every time there is a new story containing "Hillary Clinton" and "dog".

Neither one of them is popular with the leadership. Cruz's little insurgency doesn't bring them any joy, that's for sure.

FWIW, if it was a two-horse universe with Trump running against Cruz in the general election, I would vote for Trump because I believe that he is a BS artist who doesn't mean much of what he says and would probably end up delegating authority to mostly reasonable people. Cruz would be a very different story...

In a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Ted Cruz has taken the lead over Donald Trump. Cruz is at 28 percent, while Trump closely trails him at 26. Marco Rubio is in third place at 17 percent followed by John Kasich at 11 percent. Last month, Trump held a 13 point national lead on Cruz; and the business mogul has held a national polling lead since the late fall.

If Sanders wins the nomination, Joe McCarthy's ghost would blush at the big red tsunami of anti-commie tirades that will come flowing out of our screens. They would grind him into socialist hamburger.

This is where I think you are completely wrong. Hillary has a lot of issues and baggage, but nothing in comparison to Trump. Tell me one thing Hillary has said that comes close to Trump's craziness in regards to 'building a wall (and getting Mexico to pay for it)' or 'deporting 12 million illegals' or 'banning muslims'. If you bring up stuff like Benghazi, then you have to allow for the fact that many other tragedies precede this one and were far greater in scope, but Obama decided not to pursue those when he came into office (like going after Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc). In short, she's just not in the same league when it comes to scary prospects.

As for Rubio/Cruz; they don't have the political baggage of Clinton but they are committed to banning abortion, bombing the middle east (way more than Clinton would), and so on. So I just can't see how Clinton can be lumped in with Trump/Cruz/Rubio in terms of being a bad prospect. Compared to Kasich / Bush - maybe we can have a sensible conversation.

Me too.

I think (way back in the thread, it's true) there was quite a lot of discussion about Hillary and her strange facility for self-immolation. She is, patently, not a good campaigner, having been out in front in 2008 until relatively late in the process, and now having been widely assumed to be the candidate-in-waiting, she's finding that she can't get the primary voters motivated on her side.

However, I'm not so sure it's that Hillary is a bad candidate. Bernie Sanders has captured the public imagination on the Left in much the same way that several people (not necessarily including The Donald, I think that's a whole different ball game - thinking more of first Carson then Cruz) have done on the right.

A Sanders presidency would quite possibly be the best thing to happen to the USA for a very long time. If only because it would be such an absolute shock to the Republican Right that the party might completely implode within the next election cycle and reinvent itself as a functional organization rather than the fractious and fractured mess it is right now. But I think he would fail in a general election largely because he has laid himself open to ideological attack right from the word go; and the GOP machine will lay into him with unparalleled force all the way from the convention to the general election.

Clinton would, of course, be more of the same old same-old. Despite all the posturing and bleating, she's not going to be indicted or impeached or otherwise prevented from taking up office if she's elected. She may not be squeaky-clean, but if there was anything genuine in all the so-called scandals and endless Congressional enquiries then something would probably have actually stuck to her by now. She was, from the perspective of an outside observer, a competent Secretary of State, her grasp of foreign affairs is not really in any serious doubt and she actually seems to have trodden a path in office that was not really objectionable to either the D or R side of the aisle, drawing ire and opposition only really as a matter of form from her political opponents - even over the Benghazi thing, nobody has ever landed a punch except because they think they ought to have been throwing one. I strongly suspect she would be an equally competent, if unexciting, president.

One reason, of course, that this thread has concentrated on the GOP side is that the battle is so much more interesting (and amusing) to watch. The fact that the field is still so very full is telling in itself. In how many previous cycles have there still been this many people standing this far into the process?

The persistence of Trump is concerning: for all his rhetoric and bluster, he doesn't actually appear to have any policy platforms beyond "build a wall." He also seems to be quite a long way divorced from the truth in a lot of his pronouncements. Cruz, as has been discussed here at length, is genuinely frightening to a lot of people: he's so into the social conservatism kick that it's hard to reconcile his views on individual freedoms with his determination to limit those freedoms when they disagree with his world view. Rubio has positioned himself quite effectively as bridging the gap from the conservative base to the moderates, but he does seem to be a bit weak when put on the spot in debates: that doesn't bode well for a head-to-head performance in a general election. Kasich and Jeb!!! are harmless enough. Either could make a competent president, but neither is a particularly outstanding candidate. I still wouldn't be surprised to see Jeb! come from behind and take the nomination. After a lacklustre start, he seems to be gathering momentum, albeit rather too gradually to be spectacular.

It does seem a lot like deja vu all over again, but I think it's more than likely we'll see a Bush vs Clinton general election, this time with a narrow victory to Clinton.

The plot sickens ! John Poindexter now saying that when Scalia was found dead there was a pillow on his face.

Course this happened in Texas so why not think there was a conspiracy involved