I will replace “Warren” with “Klobuchar” and otherwise totally plagiarize your post and use it as if it were my own.
She lost a 10% lead in three mid west states because she couldn’t be bothered to land the damn plane there - flew over them enough times.
That and the incalculably grotesque ‘deplorables’ observation.
She lost because she made lousy calculations about the American electorate.
She lost because people were lied to.
And were gullible enough to believe those lies.
There were lies during an election? OMG! Really?
She was a poor candidate that ran a poor campaign. She picked a worthless running mate on top of that. She lost to a freaking orange troll that constantly embarrassed himself and yet somehow was slightly more likable to middle-america. The Rust Belt never should have been lost by the Dems, especially to the likes of Trump. It boils down to nobody but the party faithful actually liked HRC.
Hillary was an unlikable candidate, saddled with completely unwarranted baggage, who ran a poor campaign. Yet she still managed to get more popular votes.
Any other Democrat at the head of the ticket would have crushed Trump like a bug.
Back to Elizabeth Warren.
I think she’s very smart. She’s certainly persistent (ha!), and she strikes me as someone who does her homework. She’s also quite knowledgeable about many economic issues, and though I would not describe her as a particularly impressive orator she can be an effective spokesperson for her goals and political philosophy. Her wing of the Democratic Party is not known for pragmatism, but she’s more pragmatic and a more flexible thinker than some in that corner. And I know a number of people who absolutely love her… All of which is good.
That being said, some drawbacks:
–I do think she’s awfully old. Like others, I’d love to see some newer blood.
–She represents Massachusetts. Since 1984, only two Democratic presidential candidates have lost the popular vote; maybe it’s a coincidence that both hailed from Mass but I’m not so sure. MA has a reputation of being “different” and following a road that many people in other states don’t have a desire to follow. I think it’s very easy to tag a Mass politician with a “tax-and-spend” label or a “not like us” label and make it stick, in a way that’s much tougher for a candidate from New Mexico or Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Tennessee.
–She comes across as quite…professiorial, I think someone said. Well, okay, Obama did too, and that worked for him. I’m less sure that it’ll work for Warren. I think the electorate may not like that so much in a woman. Sexist, yeah, and unfair, but maybe true, especially against a black-and-white plain-spoken fella like Trump.
–Like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, she practices the politics of resentment. I’m not much enamored of this way of thinking, though yeah, I know it can be effective: Sanders did a lot better than anyone expected, and we all know about Trump. But I really don’t think it’s a winning strategy for a Democrat. Both Sanders and Warren are especially interested in working class white voters, but I think those voters have largely cast their lot with Trump’s resentments instead of the progressives’–they’ve chosen to be angry at immigrants and Muslims and “political correctness” rather than banks and billionaires and Wall Street. I don’t think they’re coming back to the Dems easily, and I think that it will take a more positive and less populist campaign to get them to do so; Warren isn’t going to run that kind of a campaign.
–By the same token, I wonder about her ability to attract minority voters. As we know, Sanders had a dismal record among African Americans in the 2016 primaries, and some of that was Sanders but I think some of that was the overall message. Warren represents a heaVily white state, not as heavily white as Vermont of course, nothing is, but she has not shown that she can rally nonwhites to her message. Maybe she can, but it’s a legitimate worry in my book.
–And while some people love love love her, she is also a lightning rod for a bunch of people who hate hate hate her. Trump will demonize anyone who runs against him, so maybe it doesn’t matter, but nominating someone so intensely disliked by so many people seems to be risky…especially after the 2016 results.
So she’s not my first choice, and she probably won’t be my second, or third, or maybe even fourth. Would I vote for her if she were the nominee? Damn straight.
Just to add that I’m very suspicious at this point of any claim that “the Dems must nominate a woman/a minority/must not nominate a woman/a minority/must choose Biden/must not choose Harris/etc/etc/etc.” We don’t know the landscape yet, we don;t know what the issues are necessarily going to be, we don’t know how effective the campaigns are going to be. A lot can happen. Hardly anyone thought Trump would win the nomination, let alone the presidency, after all… While I suspect that Warren will be very far from an ideal candidate in 2020, I could easily be dead wrong.
While I too am suspicious of suggestions that they MUST do one specific thing or another, the fact is, Trump’s term is actually flying by, it will be 2020 before we know it, and while a lot CAN happen, I actually doubt that it will. In terms of where we stand on foreign policy, the state of the economy, and the general cultural climate of America, I think it will be essentially the same as it is right at this very moment. Trump won’t have caused the country to collapse, and he won’t have caused it to become “great again”, he won’t really have caused any effects that will be discernable on a ground-level sense to the average individual in America. But he will in fact have the advantage of being the incumbent, who usually wins.
Part of the problem is we don’t know the solution.
After Romney lost in 2012, the GOP researched and decided they needed to be more friendly to minorities to win the presidency. Then Trump came along and did the exact opposite, and won the presidency.
As I mentioned I think a big reason Hillary lost is lower support from black voters and lower support from whites w/o a college diploma. How to fix these issues? I don’t know.
But it is also possible that even if the next candidate doesn’t do better among these groups, maybe they will win due to some other reason. Maybe younger voters will turn out more. Maybe liberals will be less willing to vote 3rd party or stay home. Maybe college educated whites will move further away from the GOP.
Point is, I don’t think we know for sure how to fix this issue.
But yes, something is deeply wrong with the GOP, especially the president. For those of us who see it, it is very confusing and demoralizing that so many people do not see it. And the GOP has run on hostility to the left and everything it includes for decades, and it hasn’t hurt them in the polls at all.
The deplorable observation is true. That is the problem. About half of the GOP have become so radicalized that they do not share western values anymore (living in a factual universe, free press, freedom of assembly, freedom to vote, etc). I’d wager about half of the GOP think pizzagate is real but also think all the accusations against Roy moore and Donald Trump are fake news. What other word than deplorable are we supposed to use for these people? People who make excuses for sexually abusing women and children because it supports their white nationalist agenda?
Also, Trump has committed so many insults and it never cost him any support.
Where is this mentality that the GOP can do anything they want, but the democrats have to be nice all the time? Trump insulted endless people and it never cost him support. Hillary says ‘deplorable’ and it was a campaign killer.
The GOP can insult hte left all they want, they can make their entire campaign running against Obama. But the left can’t do the same to the right.
Who makes these rules.
Uh, just speaking for myself, if I were tasked with devising a strategy for fixing those issues, I think I’d suggest that the Democratic ticket:
-
have a white guy who can speak off-the-cuff to crowds in the kind of language and cadence that white people without college diplomas use
-
have a black person.
I’m not trying to imply that either white people without college diplomas, or black people, are just mindless herds who will vote for anyone who is like them, but making a personal connection with people is how to win votes, and those two things would make a personal connection with those two demographics, full stop.
Very well stated.
Isn’t the reality that Trump is not a Republican, he is basically an Independent running on the GOP ticket.
The reason that makes sense is because enough of the public are so sick of the political class they reregistered i order to vote for the Independent who sounded like he got them. They didn’t rereg to vote GOP - hell, half of them were left behind by the Democrats a decade or three ago.
For them Trump is ‘the resistance’. That’s the point of him.
Trump started his campaign with xenophobia, bragged about assaulting women, exhibited racism, encouraged physically assaulting people, and lied damned near every time he opened his mouth. All this could have been ignored if he actually had policies that would help the American working class - of all ethnicities, religions, and genders - and workable plans for implementing them, but he didn’t, and everyone who voted for him knew he didn’t. If this is the person who ‘gets’ you, you should take a long, hard look in the mirror.
And the American ‘working class’ was left behind closer to fifty years ago, when they fell for voodoo economics and a good slogan. You know what was so great about The Greatest Generation? They paid taxes and the US took that money and invested in itself, in infrastructure and education and research. Investment means money and that means taxes.
And Trump did very well among all white men, not just Evangelicals and non-college educated.
tbf, the majority of white women voted for him - against the first female president ‘in waiting’. THAT’S how bad a candidate she was.
Do you have a cite for that which breaks down by religious affiliation? Because I seem to recall that non-Evangelical white women voted for her in numbers very close to black women.
no dude, but you can look it up.
FWIW, CNN Politics now has Warren as the top likely Dem nominee. Waaaaaaay too soon to say for sure, though: There's a new No. 1 among 2020 Democrats | CNN Politics
Just name rec at this point. Shrug.
Stormy all the way. She even get the white lady vote.