I’m not talking about the election being stolen. I’m talking about half the elected officials in the party *endorsing *the most hated woman in Middle America, and destroying their own reputations in the process. Speaking as a Missourian, I wonder what is Jason Kander’s career going to be now? It’s a surprising lack of awareness of the implications of poll data for a party that pretends to want to follow the polls and find the center.
Against Trump? Maybe. I’d like to think so, but maybe not.
Against Kasich or Cruz had one of them been the nominee? I really suspect not.
See, Hillary had a personal history of ignoring Middle America’s pain, and literally running away from the Midwest to the East Coast and Wall Street.
Dude, even without the super delegates being a factor he would’ve lost badly. She beat him by 359 pledged delegates. He lost the popular vote by 12 percentage points. A difference of 3.7 million votes. You can’t rig a margin this large.
Bernie lost fair and square. Get over it and stop whining about it. Bernie isn’t owed support anymore than Hillary is. You are engaging in revisionist history by claiming that the “party establishment” was his main roadblock to victory when all the available facts say the opposite.
Would you mind informing me of any existant “sensible republic” whose political system makes it so that only the candidates that everyone can agree on get to run for office?
Again, so what if she was endorsed by half of the elected officials in the party? Who were they supposed to endorse - a guy who wasn’t really a member of the democratic party to begin with? Stop living in imagination land and step into the real world. You seem caught up in Middle America - what about the urban America, which constitutes 90% of the country, and why couldn’t Bernie Sanders outperform Hillary Clinton there? And again, one more time, what makes you and all of the Bernistas believe that Sanders, a democratic socialist, would have competed well against any Republican in states that have become Republican strongholds? You seem to forget that the tea party itself was a movement born against the mere mention of the word “socialism”.
Yes, that was the point I was trying to make and you made it more succinctly than I did.
Okay, since you mentioned it, what specifically are you talking about here? What is it specifically about Middle America that Hillary Clinton did to ignore their pain, relative to say the rest of America or relative to any other Senator who served during her time?
Then it’s a good thing I didn’t say that isn’t it?
First, I’m not a Bernie Sanders supporter (thought I made that clear). Second, I didn’t say it’s the only reason, or even the main reason. I said
So it’s an IMPORTANT factor, and one that people like you want to hand-wave away. Yeah, Bernie lost in the end. But how much of that was because he was swimming uphill? You know, like having to deal with Donna Brazile? Or the perceptions caused by the over-whelming super-delegate lead (notice I pointed out that the lead in super-delegates in 2016 from the start was much greater than the one in 2008, but asahi conveniently ignored that statement in his rebuttal)? Sanders might never have won, even on a level playing field (personally, I think his brand of populist liberalism has only so much appeal). But we’ll never know, because the system worked to ensure he wouldn’t have a chance.
My position on this is clear: Bernie Sanders would not have been a better candidate against Donald Trump (I think he might well have gotten worse results). But by insulating Hillary Clinton from the Bernie Sanders campaign, it kept her campaign too complacent. She didn’t know where the potential for mistakes really lay until it was too late. She didn’t have to FIGHT her way to the win, which has a way of making you tough and battle-hardened for the fall campaign. And this became readily apparent when the fall campaign actually happened. She didn’t know how to attack the popularity of Donald Trump. She didn’t know how to push her own message so people would get energized about it. And, as a result, she got beaten by someone who most everyone agrees should have had the least chance to win a presidential election in the last 80 plus years (since we stopped letting conventions choose our candidates for us).
Your statement was that Clinton held the super delegates in her pocket and I pointed out that Clinton had a significant advantage in both super delegates and endorsements in 2008, just as she did in 2016. I didn’t conveniently avoid anything, and those are indeed the facts. It’s true that Clinton’s advantage was greater in 2016, but then consider the field that was running in 2008 compared to 2016. In 2008, she had to compete against a rising political star in Barack Obama, an established and (at that time) respected and liked former VP candidate John Edwards, a former Bill Clinton appointee and Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson, and an established and household name in Joe Biden. So yes, her super delegate lead was less but it was still a significant advantage given the competition, which was much more fierce in 2008. In 2016, hardly any of her challengers were known to anyone outside of their home states. As I said in my rebuttal, that was the real problem: the failure of the Democratic party to really plan for life after Barack Obama. I agree that Hillary Clinton was, in one sense, anointed by virtue of the fact that from 2012 there was nobody who could compete with Hillary Clinton in terms of name recognition and fundraising – nobody except the possibility of Joe Biden. And believe me, in the period from 2012 through 2015, when Hillary started taking it on the chin for her decisions as Sec of State, I’m quite sure that there were a number of Democratic insiders who desperately wanted Biden to challenge Clinton. But he did not. Again, none of this is the Democratic party rigging anything; it’s a confluence of factors that made it a near certainty that Clinton was to emerge from the primaries the victor.
Even so, had Bernie Sanders made more of an effort to get a real campaign going instead of waging an insurgency then maybe, just maybe he could have been taken more seriously. As it stands, though, Sanders has a history of being nothing more than a gadfly who attaches amendments to bills as they go through the senate and gets on a few hard-left progressive talks shows and bangs on about the middle class and how we need medicare for all. He hasn’t been a mainstream political figure, let alone a mainstream candidate for president. Sorry, but you can’t blame that on Hillary Clinton or the Democratic machine.
I think yours is an interesting angle but I’m going to disagree with it anyway. Hillary Clinton was not insulated from Bernie Sanders at all; in fact she was probably the least insulated candidate other than Donald Trump, who basically tried to be controversial and vilified. Hillary Clinton’s problem, like the rest of the mainstream candidates Trump disposed of, is that he didn’t know how to battle the likes of someone like Trump at a time when the voting public is disgusted with mainstream politicians. He had his own visibility, he had media savvy, and he had no political voting record. Beyond that, as I said in the other thread, HRC thought she could win by talking about what a bad guy Donald was, which was a mistake.
I realize that this is precisely why people on the left believe that Bernie Sanders would have matched up well against Trump, but unlike Sanders, Trump actually won the primaries, which is really the point. Hillary Clinton’s endorsements and delegates didn’t stop her from losing against Barack Obama. Jeb Bush’s endorsements didn’t stop him from losing to the insurgencies of Donald Trump and to a lesser degree, Ted Cruz. In the end, candidates either win or lose races, regardless of whether they’re favored. I won’t deny that HRC’s edge in endorsements and delegates helped her, but that’s a product of being a household name in politics. Had Bernie Sanders been more like Barack Obama and been a known commodity before 2015, maybe he could have stunned her with some early victories. But like you, I suspect the real problem is that Sanders’ support, despite having a lot of obvious intensity, lacks breadth and lacks broad-based appeal.
What I am trying to tell you is that the Clintons could not win in MIDDLE AMERICA, aka the HEARTLAND, which includes DETROIT and CLEVELAND and CINCINNATI and DALLAS, and yes, their suburbs; you know, FLYOVER COUNTRY, and which you need for the Electoral College. Bill and Hillary are hated there. They are seen as Enemies of the People, and so they *are *enemies of the people, whether they deserve that label or not. The industrial Midwest was one of the richest regions in world history; it was supported by protectionism and subsidy. Clinton (partly through NAFTA) ripped those away and let it fall. Flint is impoverished. Detroit is in ruins. And the ostensible party of the working man did nothing to stop it. Instead they talked about free trade, and happily let the Midwest burn.
So, Hillary was not a good nominee. Not as a good person to hold the job, given her Wall Street-centered view of the economy. Definitely not a good person to lead a party trying to hold onto the Midwest and retake lost ground in the central USA.
Are you now going to join Little Nemo in his dream of a nation where the EC doesn’t matter, and a candidate can win with whole bunches of votes from expatriates and Californians? :rolleyes:
Interestingly all of the cities you just mentioned (even Dallas) voted for Hillary ahead of Trump by a ~2:1 margin.
ETA: Okay, not Cincinnati–she won by a 5:4 ratio there.
No significant number of elected Democrats are going to suffer for endorsing Clinton. The idea that the “Democratic establishment” stole the nomination from Sanders is pure paranoid fantasy. Clinton was a perfectly sensible nominee and members of the party did not engage in any heinous corruption in supporting their preferred candidate. There was also no “cult of Hillary.” Mainstream Demicrays supported her because they believed she was competent, sensible, and had a reasonable chance of winning. Trump pulled in a level of support from white voters (note, not “white working class,” just white) that no one, not even Republicans anticipated.
You’re just pulling this out of your ass. As was already pointed out to you, she won pretty much all of those cities. You really need to stop, as it’s clear you really don’t know what you’re talking about here. You’re just rambling and repeating a refrain that she’s an enemy of the people. It’s not a mantra and saying it for the 100th time won’t make it any truer than it was the 1st time you mentioned it.
I’ve weighed in on that thread and my comments are there in their original form.
Urban America constitutes 90% of the country? Are you serious?:eek::smack:
My bad, and you were right to call me on it. It’s actually about 80 percent that lives in either a city or a suburb. By “urban” I wasn’t necessarily saying that 90 percent of America lives in downtown Chicago or an environment like it. I was just pointing out that the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t live in the sticks but in cities and/or suburbs. Even so, I overstated that figure.
Actually, the number is more like 70%, with another 10% living in what you might call small cities and towns. Not “rural”, but not “urban” as I think most think of that term. I certainly think that people living in Napoleon, Ohio, for example, don’t think of themselves as “urbanites”, even if they aren’t exactly “rural”, either.
This is debatable but you raise a fair point. I read a recent article on 538 that addressed this issue. US Census Bureau officially puts the number at about 80-81%, but as I recall the 538 data geeks raised the exact same question as you just did, and it’s a fair one.
Foolsguinea seems to have forgotten their history. Detroit and Flint began declining long before NAFTA - hell, even “Roger & Me” was released *four years *prior to NAFTA becoming law and dealt with a decline that even then was decades in the making.
But, sure, whatever fake history fits your “Bernie would’ve won, but…” narrative.
Exactly. Industrial facilities and plants began closing and going overseas as early as the 1970s if not before then. The decline of the Rust Belt began in the 1970s, and at least one paper from the Minneapolis Fed suggests that due to various factors, industry in this region began its decline as early as the 1950s, owing to its lack of competition and failure to innovate. By the 1960s and 70s a healthy middle class also increased demand for more imports, which at the time were not always cheaper than domestically-produced goods.
And, I’m sure it’s been noted in this discussion before, but if one thinks that Putin’s disinformation campaign was/is solely aimed at the Right, they are sorely mistaken. His campaign was to harm HRC, and he hit her from the Right and Left.