In the US, or in any other country that has had elections, did anyone ever win an election who was telling the voters a hard truth, i.e., a fact that none of them wanted to be true, but that s/he was offering to try to help deal with while not simply denying it?
An example would be someone telling a community of coal miners that coal power is going away, and what needs to happen is not to “bring back the coal jobs” but to help them find new jobs and have a safety net in the meantime.
bill Clinton won on telling people that factory jobs weren’t coming back but hed do stuff to help them find other jobs via training plans and such
Well there is Trump. “Make America Great Again” means we aren’t great anymore and that isn’t something I remember any president saying before.
Oh shit, Clinton did that?
Because I’ve been thinking that’s similar to something Hilary Clinton should have been doing this time around 
Joseph Smallwood, the premier of Newfoundland from 1947 to like forever, told people that the fishery had no future, and he forcibly shut down 300 fishing villages and resettled the 30,000 inhabitants in larger towns. And the economy kept getting worse and worse, with no alternative industries taking up the slack. And he won election after election, once without the opposition winning single seat.
He was right, and after Smallwood was voted out of office, the government of Canada banned the fishery in Atlantic waters, with not a single codfish left to catch, and the Grand Banks fishing grounds are still barren.
Is Trump’s strategy really all that different from all the other opposing-party candidates who have campaigned by playing up how things have gotten worse under the incumbent’s administration?
Your example is exactly what Maggie Thatcher did in the 1987 general election, following the coal strike of 1984-85. She was convinced that the nationalized coal mines were unproductive and had to be scaled back. She won the strike and won the general election, in the process ensuring that in certain parts of the UK, her name was a swear word, unusable in polite company.
Jean Chrétien in Canada was elected in 1993, looked at the books, and started a major retrenchment process to get Canada’s finances back in the black. He ran in 1997 on a platform of continuing the austerity measures, and won, by a very narrow majority.
Reagan’s “Morning in America” slogan was meant to show pretty clearly that the last 4 years had been the dead of night. Cold, dark, and bad. Everything was about to get better. But only if you elect Ronnie.
It was more subtle than Trump’s slogan. But Reagan was a more subtle guy for a more subtle time.
The 1984 “Morning in America” ad was anything but about how bad things had become in four years, but about how much better things were after four years with Ronald Reagan in the White House.
Something I remembered from the 1980 campaign was the question, “Are you really better off than you were four years ago?” See Are You Better Off?
Since this is a political question, let’s move it to Elections.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Trump stole this from Reagan.
She did, but it was twisted against her. :mad: She gave the following speech:
[QUOTE=Hillary Clinton]
Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.
So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?
And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.
Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.
So whether it’s coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America. We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the '90s, more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history.
Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.
So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work.
[/QUOTE]
Three guesses which minuscule and out-of-context sentence from this speech was truncated into a pro-Trump ad! :eek:
Reagan also used “Make America Great Again.”
The obvious situation would be wartime situations. Perhaps Churchill in World War II? Anyone know the details of his election?
Churchill didn’t get elected in World War II in a general election. There was a Cabinet/parliamentary crisis in 1940, with Neville Chamberlain losing so much support that he had to resign as PM. Instead of an election, the Conservative Party chose Churchill over Lord Halifax. Churchill then gave his “I have nothing to offer but blood, sweat, toil and tears” speech to the Commons. He held power for five years without a general election, and then lost to Atlee in the 1945 election.
Churchill only led the winning party in a general election once, in 1951. And, even then, he lost the popular vote; he only won a majority of seats because of the vagaries of the first-post-the-post system employed in the UK. He led the Conservative Party in two other elections, 1945 and 1950, and lost both of them.
David Cameron won the 2015 General election in part because of his austerity platform.
True, but he never directly spelled out that people who voted for him would themselves see cuts (although of course they did). The rhetoric was that there were “strivers” and “scroungers” and only the scroungers would suffer from austerity. There was definitely an element of “we have to take our medicine” but Cameron and Osborne shied away from spelling out “you, a hard-working striver, are going to lose in-work benefits if you vote for us. Please vote for us.”
Politicians always try to put the best light on things, don’t they? Anyone with half a brain cell saw that everyone would be affected.
It even made it into the Primary Colors movie in one scene.
Er, no. He won the 2015 General election because Labour were useless. Miliband didn’t run an anti-austerity platform; he ran a vague flappy-handed “we’re going to do some stuff that might be different to the Tories but sort of the same so vote for us because we’re not them” platform. And the LibDems were cast out into the wilderness for abandoning every priniciple they had in return for the tiniest smidgen of power.
The SNP ran a strong anti-austerity platform and did just fine, and when Labour finally put forward a clear anti-austerity candidate people suddenly flocked to the party to vote for him even though that candidate was Jeremy Corbyn (who didn’t even want the job). The country is not clamouring for more austerity.
