Since pollsters started asking the question Trump polled as the most disliked candidate ever. The second most disliked candidate ever was Hillary Clinton.
Is Clinton better than Trump? Obviously but don’t act surprised that the second most disliked candidate ever didn’t excite people to go to the polls to vote for her.
And despite what her cheer-leading squad here would have you believe there are legitimate reasons to not like her as a candidate that have nothing to do with Russian propaganda or misogyny.
And we will never be able to take power back from Trump and the GOP if we can’t get over this and start working against the enemy rather than against each other. The Republicans all got behind Trump even if they disliked him personally because they knew it was about more than the person on the ballot. Some Democratic voters went the other way, and now we all pay the price for that.
It honestly feels like the Russians don’t even need to bother continuing their campaign to divide us and sow discord, since we are doing such a bang up job keeping that going ourselves…
I think what we saw in the last election was a repudiation of the status quo in Washington. Trump beat a huge field of republican contenders. How? He was not the status quo candidate when the rest were.
Clinton was the embodiment of the status quo in Washington. It’d be more of the same and few wanted that. Additionally the DNC was in the bag for Clinton and it hurt her in the end.
And the DNC is STILL working against people in its own party (see below). So I am hard pressed to be enthused by a party run by people akin to John_Stamos’_Left_Ear who expect me to vote for the candidate they picked because they know best. Fuck 'em. Let the people pick their candidates and I’ll get back on board with the party.
Saying that voting for Hillary was the obviously rational choice when she was the only possibility to be president other than Trump is not == cheerleading. It’s just stating an objective truth. My evidence is everything we’ve seen happen since November 2016, as well as gestures broadly around what we have right now.
Also, there were legitimate reasons to not like Bernie as a candidate as well. Socialists don’t generally win many elections on a Federal level in this Country. You know that word would have been played up as much as or more than “her emails”. He also was not doing very well at all with the AA vote which would have been essential to win the general election.
I know that I will be doing everything I can to help the Democrats win the midterms. I hope that we can at least agree that we all should want that.
By the way you said “Let the people pick their candidates and I’ll get back on board with the party.” - Which people? Hillary got 3.7 million more votes in the primary. Are those not real people? Do their votes not count? Do we just go with whoever you declare is entitled to the nomination?
I agree Clinton is objectively better than Trump but what you stated is hindsight. Still, it is about what I expected and as I have already stated I voted for Clinton because of this for which JSLE derided me as not destined for hell but purgatory.
If you don’t like Sanders fine but while we can never know for certain the good money is that Sanders would have beat Trump in the election.
Even his own pollsters think so:
I was speaking of the primaries mainly. The DNC had its thumb on the scale for Clinton all along as did the MSM (and seems to be doing it again in some races as noted in my earlier post). Despite this Sanders ran pretty close for a bit. Who knows what might have happened if the DNC and MSM hadn’t taken sides? Sanders might well have been another dark horse candidate. Had that happened we would not have president Trump but president Sanders which, I am sure you would agree, would have been a better result.
This is the kind of thing I was getting at in my first post in this thread. The election (primary phase) wasn’t close. Minor ways in which the DNC may have favored Clinton wouldn’t have had the impact you seem to think. And “the MSM” (what a stupid fucking term that is) is not a monolithic entity and didn’t favor Clinton in any meaningful way.
This is where I get irritated. The voters of the Democratic party selected Clinton as their nominee. Sanders supporters didn’t like it, so we’ve been hearing these ridiculous conspiracy theories ever since, and the bad-will that stirred up was relevant in the general election.
If it wasn’t completely obvious to you at the time, you have no one else to blame. It was, shall we say, extensively discussed. IOW cut the shit.
That was, too. Cut that shit too.
Yes, the Democrats supported the Democrat. The “rigging” charge is, however, unfounded, given that Sanders got a *higher *percentage of delegates than votes. More shit you can cut.
And monkeys might … Oh, never mind, your mind is permanently made up.
Well, yes. That does make these people hard to distinguish from Trumpies. For both, the guiding principle isn’t making our country and our world better, but just hating Clinton.
I didn’t say I didn’t like Bernie. I would have gladly voted for him had he won the nomination, but he didn’t. My point is that no candidate is perfect, all candidates have flaws. You seem to be averse to acknowledging that this applies to Bernie too.
And I don’t agree that it was certain that he would have beaten Trump. You don’t know what would have happened once the GOP turned its knives toward him, and once the Russian trolls started doing what they did to Hillary to help Trump.
What conspiracy theories? I have backed up everything I have said so far. Have you?
Perhaps more insidious though was the media including superdelegates when counting how many delegates Sanders had compared to Clinton. This heavily skewed the results suggesting Sanders was light years away from winning while Clinton was a shoe in. That has a variety of effects such as suppressing turnout for Sanders (why bother if he can’t win) and a well known bias in general that people want to vote for the winners.
The conspiracy that the DNC and media worked to install Clinton as the nominee. Remember you said this?
That is not a thing that happened. What actually happened is that we had a long, drawn-out primary election, and Democratic party voters (and independents in some states) selected Clinton. It was in a few of the papers.
This always cracks me up. That the DNC favored the Democrat other the Democratic Socialist is a feature, not a bug. If a third party candidate you didn’t like switched parties just for a shot at president and hijacked a functioning party’s process, how would you feel about it?
Also, and I have to keep coming back to this- Bernie was as hard on ‘identity politics’ as any right-winger I have encountered. White dudes loved him, I get that. But the vibe that minorities of several different stripes (including Black Americans, the backbone and moral compass of the party) got from Sanders was that they would be much better protected by a Clinton administration. And I don’t blame them.
You are invited to set your Search function to 2016 and find an extremely extensive and in depth discussion of this and all related topics regarding the primary and general election, including all the cites you could ever hope for. It’s a shame you slept through it all, but that’s nobody else’s fault.