| It's a cliché to say that the presidential campaign starts earlier and earlier each cycle, but seriously - we've been talking about late 2016 since early 2015. Ted Cruz was the first to declare his candidacy back on March 23; Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy on April 12. This is going to be a 596-day campaign, people. (And in case you'd forgotten, Canada just had a 78-day campaign earlier this year.) In other words, we'd say "Happy New Year" but really, we've already been living in 2016 for the past nine months. | | Tell your friends to join us for the next 11 months by subscribing to the For the Record newsletter, and follow the FTR crew on Twitter (@RGJBrettMcG, @joannaallhands and @jmestepa.) | | It's a bird, it's a plane ... it's superdelegates! | | Bernie Sanders picked up a superdelegate from Nevada, which in and of itself isn't that exciting (after all, he already had 10, and Clinton is up to 359 .) More importantly, how have we made it this far without talking about superdelegates? The already-confusing caucus and primary nomination process is confusing enough as it is; some states allocate their convention delegates with winner-take-all popular votes, some states allocate delegates based on the proportion of the vote they received, and some states have a hybrid of the two. | | Beyond that, both Republicans and Democrats designate certain people as so-called superdelegates, who can show up at the convention and vote for whomever they choose. Of the 5,083 delegates who will be at the Democratic convention, 747 of them (14.7%) will be superdelegates (click here to see all the information democrats.org wants to share about the delegate process). On the Republican side, 437 of the 2,470 delegates (17.7%) are superdelegates. By way of comparison, that's slightly more than Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, Utah and Montana combined. Watch for superdelegates to get much more attention in 2016 if and when things start to get too Trumpy for the establishment GOP's taste. | | (On an unrelated note ... who was that first guy who said, "Look up in the sky! It's a bird!" That guy had a ridiculous level of enthusiasm for birds. Walking around outside with him must have been an absolute ordeal.) | | Jeb throws all his letters back in the bag, shakes it vigorously | | It wasn't even six months ago that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were talking about Hillary vs. Jeb in 2016. But with just one month to go before voting begins, Jeb is staring up at not one, not two, but FIVE candidates in the GOP polls. With everything going wrong for him since mid-July, why not pull a page out of George Costanza's playbook and do the opposite of everything he's done so far? Right now, he's canceling his TV ads - only his, though; his super PAC's ads will continue - and spending the money on staff in Iowa instead. | | So is TV not working as a political tool anymore? "Big TV buys - traditionally a sign of a campaign's strength - are beginning to look like a sign of weakness," says USA TODAY's Rick Hampson. With expectations low for Jeb's campaign, any improvement upon his 6% in Iowa is going to look like a resurgence. | | BREAKING: Trump ends year by insulting rivals | | Ring out the old, ring in the old. At a rally drawing thousands of supporters in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Donald Trump took shots at Clinton, Bush and President Obama; reiterated his plans for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, and building up the military. Expect more of the same from Trump in 2016, because dance with who brung ya, right? In Iowa, Chris Christie said he's trying to avoid insulting his fellow Republicans in the race, though he did lob an attack at Marco Rubio (more on that below). But he didn't call Rubio a jerkface when he did it, and that's what passes for civility so far in this race. | | More from the campaign trail | | | | And that's all for us for 2015 ... next year we resolve to try to use fewer emdashes, but it's going to be a struggle. See you in 2016, everyone! | |
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