I do think that democrats need to Never Mind the popular vote, since they’ve been harping on it for over a decade. This whole attitude of ‘well, we ALMOST won’ is what leads to the situation of ‘well, we ACTUALLY lost’ over and over. If you lose the election, you lost the election, period. Trying to claim a moral victory for an irrelevant statistic is just pathetic and counterproductive. (If the candidates were getting over 50% of eligible voters, it might mean something, but when they’re only getting a third or less of the potential vote it hardly means they’re a popular choice)
Again, the Democratic establishment has not actually picked a winner since 1976 except for rerunning incumbents. I offered this to refute the proposition that they clearly know what they’re doing because of their repeated success, when they actually don’t seem to have much of any success.
Right, this is the sort of thing that the Democrats need to recognize. Their candidates are far worse at getting elected than alleged ‘fools’, they need to stop ignoring that and trying to claim ‘oh he just got lucky’ or some other nonsense. And really, using ‘con man’ in a derogatory way is hilariously absurd when you’re talking about a career politician like Hillary, who routinely lies and reverses position to get reelected (as I’ve pointed out in this thread).
Sure. Because the ‘will of the people’ is always expressed by the minority of actual voters. If you don’t get that there’s something wrong with that, and it’s not the way it should be, I got nothing.
Maybe if you took for granted that I can both read and comprehend what you write, you wouldn’t need to repeat yourself. Disagreement does not imply misunderstanding.
Interesting how you put in that [full stop], ignoring the rest of what I wrote. But come on, even you must recognize that when it comes to lying and reversing position, she’s an amateur compared to Trump, the man who has had the greatest percentage of untruths ever recorded.
Believe whatever you want, you haven’t convinced me in the slightest, nor, I think, much of anyone else.
Arbitrarily adding parameters to a statistic until your guy ‘wins’ is meaningless. Like I said and you ignored, no candidate actually got the majority of voters to vote for them, it’s about 1/3 for one, 1/3 for the other, 1/3 no-show, and has been for a long time. If someone manages to get 50% of voters to vote for them but doesn’t win the presidency, I’ll consider that significant, but the idea that tiny margins of victory in a statistic that is not what a smart candidate campaigns to win means something is just silly.
Claiming that you disagree with a position I didn’t take does, in fact, imply misunderstanding.
I agree that the Democratic establishment staked this election on someone who is pretty bad at being a politician, but I put that fact in the ‘evidence they are fools’ category and not the ‘evidence that they are really clever and only won because Trump got lucky’ one. If you’re going field a candidate who is dishonest and abandons principles for reelection, you should pick one who’s good at it.
Democrats have had their heads in the sand since at least the turn of the millennium, I don’t actually expect that to change much from “Bush wuz dumb, we should have won!”
Sorry, but three million votes is not a small margin, especially given the percentage who actually voted. It is, as I have stated several times before, generally the rural minority ruling over the urban majority. Then add in the stupid bullshit that Pubbies threw in to make it as difficult as possible for mainly Dems to vote (surprise), and it gets even worse.
Bullshit. Your thesis couldn’t be clearer, and you’ve restated it several times. The Dem establishment are fools, and its their fault that Trump is President because they didn’t pick the right candidate to run. There. Regurgitated enough for you? So spare me the idiot treatment; I assure you I am not. I got what you said, I just said it’s full of shit.
Man, you wriggle out of positions like a fish on a hook. So you denigrate Hillary first for being a liar, then for not being a good enough liar? Eeeyeahrite.
Sorry again, but disagreeing with your point is not ‘heads in the sand.’ Believe it or not, you really don’t hold the corner on reality. I know what you said, and the fact is that, especially in politics regarding over 100 million people, Occam’s Razor almost never holds true. So your explanation, while facile, is, if anything, a small part of the whole truth regarding presidential elections.
But please, condescend to teach us poor deluded Democrats your own view of reality, since you are the clear authority on electoral politics.
The popular vote is more than just the polish on the Electoral College. It matters, it signifies, if nothing else. However cunning and shrewd he may have been in allocating his attention, that’s gamesmanship. High level, high stakes, still gaming.
Trump is claiming an undeniable mandate, that he is empowered to dismantle the country and rebuild it according to his plan. He will jam his hand down America’s throat, seize the asshole at the far end, and pull it inside out.
Seems to me a program that ambitious/catastrophic would require a thundering majority, a sheer avalanche of popular votes. So that it shall rest on the solid authority of the people, and not on the gaming ability of the ruthless and ambitious. In my experience they are not reliable people.
Aside: Has he given up claiming that there were…what, three to five million?..illegal votes? Seem awfully accepting of someone who was screaming for an investigation for this massive crime. Either that or the attention span of an intern goldfish.
The popular vote is either relevant or irrelevant depending on context. If you’re trying to claim that you’re the real winners because you won the popular vote, then that’s not a valid claim. But if the discussion is whether your party is in crisis and needs a massive shift in strategy and approach to survive, then the fact that you won the popular vote (and also lost a bunch of electoral votes by extremely small margins) is very relevant.
The relevance of the popular vote is that a candidate who “wins” without it can claim the power of the presidency, but can not claim anything like “the will of the people is behind me” or words to that effect. This fact, of course, hasn’t stopped trump from doing so.
Good question. Do Democrats need to be more realistic about their candidates? I would say the answer is no.
The Democrat Party is doing a spectacular job of picking Presidential candidates. Plus, the Democrat Party’s use of super delegates insures that the Democrat Party leadership’s choice of candidate will be the Democrat Party’s candidate in the general election.