Yeah, and let’s not confuse your experience with the rest of the world. I grew up in the heart of red state America and believe me, most of those I know are red meat, frothing at the mouth conservatives. Look at who’s in the White House right now, tomndebb. Do you see any democratic socialists there? Do you seen any moderates there? Any political centrists? No, you see Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Wilbur Ross, Tom Pruitt, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. Do you think the people who voted for Trump didn’t know this was going to happen? Do you think the majority of people who voted for Trump are just dirt poor saps who got fooled and have major buyer’s remorse? Do you think that this is not a 1000% rebuke of Barack Obama and progressives? Sorry, but you guys are all just showing how much you do not know about politics - or your own country for that matter.
And Trump is nowhere near as much of a conservative as Cruz or Rubio or a couple of others. In the Spring of 2016 I was pointing out that the Republicans appeared to have shot themselves in the foot by running so many candidates. Trump did not beat any serious conservative candidate one-on-one, but simply outlasted opponents who regarded the overall crowd as unbeatable.
Conversely, Sanders arrived late to the party and was beaten by a solid machine.
Liberal and conservative played little roles in the Republican melee or the Democratic slugfest.
My experience was an anecdote to note one aspect of the election. While your frothing associates almost certainly voted for Trump in November, throughout the country, Trump pushed on his outsider status and rarely promoted his “conservatism” in the campaign.
You are also flailing about in your arguments. I have made no claim that there is not a strong conservative element in the country (which tends to play center-right on the world stage). However, if Trump’s conservatism was the true draw, why cannot he keep his adoring electorate in line, now, with an approval rating below anything Obama every managed? And, again, you ignore the enormous rejection of both candidates by the voting public. That is not a rebuke of Obama. That was a rejection of Clinton.
Without a strong conservative element in the country, it is true that Trump could not have been elected. On the other hand, if the country was as conservative as you claim and if that was the single reason that Trump won, then he should have won in a landslide rather than squeaking in through fewer than half a million votes deciding the Electoral College.
You seem to be really wound up on this point while ignoring all counter evidence, so I will leave you to your simplistic beliefs.
And yet he won the conservatives over – that is my point. It does not matter whether he actually was a conservative; what matters is that conservatives could see him implementing a conservative platform. How else can you explain the fact that Donald Trump, a New Yorker with a past of saying moderate things, was his strongest deep in the heart of Dixie? Trump should have lost to a Ted Cruz or another ‘real’ conservative in South Carolina. He should have lost in Louisiana, Alabama, and Missisippi. He didn’t - he dominated. He could not have won if conservatives, be they bible toting bigots or just plain bigots, were not convinced that he would follow through and execute conservative legislation. They assumed Trump would deliver a conservative justice to the Supreme Court. They assumed he would deregulate Wall Street. They assumed he would try to slash taxes for those earning six figures. They assumed he would deregulate the environment. They assumed he would defund Planned Parenthood. They assumed he would repeal Obamacare. They assumed he would curb illegal immigration and even legal immigration. I could go on. People who are truly centrist and moderate don’t vote for this, which is my point: a majority of the people in this country are conservative. They are not going to vote for someone who promised to raise taxes for more social programs. We as a country are not there yet. Maybe if we have an economic crisis that causes widespread banking panics that even FDIC can’t cover, yeah, maybe then this country will be ready for Bernie Sanders or one of his acolytes. But that was not true in 2016, and it’s probably not true even today, although I would concede he would be in a much better position now given the sheer incompetence of Trump and his GOP ‘allies’ in congress. But we’re not talking about now, we’re talking about 2016. We’re talking about what people imagined Trump, Clinton, Sanders, and all of the other candidates to become.
I would acknowledge that Trump has messages for people who were not as ideologically conservative as his base, but the backbone of his support was conservative. And as I mentioned above, I question the description of the so-called “independents” or the “centrists” who voted for him. I certainly doubt that these are people who are capable of voting for someone like Bernie Sanders. This is the logical problem that people are having when they claim that Bernie Sanders would have stood a better chance against Trump than Clinton. Bernie Sanders may have been more popular among independent voters than Hillary Clinton, but his politics would not be that popular once they saw the light of day in a mainstream election. You can pull out whatever poll you want, but the fact is that this country has basically voted for a conservative congress 4 times in a row, and it has now voted for a conservative president, and you could make the argument it voted for a conservative court, too. Polls don’t have consequences (ask Hillary Clinton’s campaign about that one), but votes do. This country didn’t vote for a democratic socialist. The only two times progressives have won an election since 2008 are with Barack Obama, which brings up another problem for Bernie Sanders: he didn’t do that well with African American voters. For all of the talk about how Bernie would have won more white votes, it ignores the problem of how badly he would have performed in swing states with more black voters. It’s possible now and going forward that he might be taken more seriously and become more of a mainstream candidate, but in 2016, he hadn’t really made any kind of inroads with the black voting community. This is just a cold, hard fact.
That’s easy – because Obama actually ran the office pretty well and Donald Trump is quite obviously not well suited to the job. In 2016, people voted for what they thought Donald Trump would become. He was an imagined president. Now a lot of people see the real president and they don’t like it. And even some conservatives are disappointed because they assumed that Obamacare would be dead by now. Still, they got Gorsuch and they might be waiting to see what else they can get before writing him off completely.
It wasn’t exactly an enormous rejection. The voter turnout was somewhere close to the historic median and it was almost a record number of total voters who participated. Hillary Clinton, the popular vote winner, received more than 48% of that popular vote, which is almost as much as John F Kennedy received (49%) when he defeated Nixon in 1960. She got a lot more of the vote than her own husband did in 1992, if you want to talk about a rejection of both candidates. Many people did reject both candidates but still voted for them because in the end, people pretty much thought they knew whom and what they were voting for.
And also, that all these bad trade deals killed your jobs. Trump is going renegotiate and get your jobs back. Hillary loves these trade deals, except when she flip flopped. “Hey auto workers, go back to school if you want a new job” says Hillary.
Without bothering to go through all the data (and keeping in mind that looking at races from before the period when primaries were the primary deciding factor is comparing apples and oranges), I’ll compare three sets of data:
2016, 2012, 2008.
Although Clinton’s results were better than Romney’s, I’ll contend Romney ran a better campaign, solely because his numbers are the result of losing to an incumbent, who he almost managed to beat (the election didn’t get lost until very late in October), and the incumbent he lost to ran two very good campaigns. However, I’ll assert that McCain’s campaign was worse than Clinton’s, though we may never know exactly how much of his loss can be attributed to one moment of madness: selecting a little-known, unpredictable female governor from Alaska as his running mate.
Now, anyone who wants to posit that Clinton ran a decent campaign has to accept as a corollary that Trump ran a very good campaign. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain the result, given the fact that, as unpopular as she was, Clinton was still more popular than Trump (so far as we can tell). Until you can establish that Clinton did not throw away a winning position, claiming that she ran a decent campaign lacks much rationality.
So far, the most consistent claim being made in her favor is that she managed to obtain a plurality of votes cast on Election Day. But, as has been argued numerous times, that alone doesn’t mean she ran a good campaign, since it’s an irrelevant statistic. And that horse is beaten to death. So are there any other indications that she ran a good campaign? What are the neutral experts saying? What decisions that she made w/r/t her campaign demonstrate good choices? What other evidence of a competently run campaign is there?
As I said early on in this thread, I don’t personally think Hillary ran a “terrible” campaign. But that’s pretty subjective, and I can see where some people would think she did (losing to Trump). McCain, OTOH, did run a terrible campaign and that’s partly explainable by his willingness to take big risks, like choosing Palin as a running mate. It also doesn’t help when you can’t remember how many houses you own.
I still say, though, that a huge part of winning the presidential race is being the candidate that people like. McCain isn’t particularly likable, nor is Hillary. Trump is this weird bird whom people either hate or love. He somehow managed to get enough of the love vote to win.
Hillary was a largely unlikable candidate who ran, at best, a mediocre campaign. Probably not terrible, but definitely mediocre. If that makes any of her die-hard supporters feel better, I guess you have to get your jollies where you can.
Look, hypothetical match-ups are meaningless for any purpose other than assessing the general mood of the electorate. You can say that Sanders would have beaten trump, or whatever you like. But, bottom line, you can’t know it because such a poll does not and indeed can not tell you what would happen once the full and considerable weight of the GOP/FSB propaganda machine were brought to bear against him.
They certainly did not run a successful, or winning, campaign.
People can claim that Hillary ran a wonderful campaign, or ran a not-terrible campaign, or ran a lovely campaign, but Team Hillary didn’t win what they needed to win and that was a majority of Electoral College votes. In order to win a majority of Electoral College votes Team Hillary needed to win the popular vote in enough of the 50 States to carry her over 270.
Hillary ran a terrible campaign and the proof of that is the fact that she lost.
All of these runner-ups ran unsuccessful campaigns.
1900 - William Jennings Bryan – Adlai E. Stevenson - 45.5% - 155
1904 - Alton Parker – Henry Davis - 37.6% - 140
1908 - William Jennings Bryan - John Kern - 43.0% - 162
1912 - Theodore Roosevelt - Hiram Johnson - 27.4% - 88
1912 - William Taft - Nicholas Butler - 23.2% - 8
1916 - Charles Hughes - Charles Fairbanks - 46.1% - 254
1920 - James Cox - Franklin Roosevelt - 34.2% - 127
1924 - John Davis - Charles Bryan - 28.8% - 136
1924 - Robert La Follette Sr. - Burton Wheeler - 16.6% - 13
1928 - Al Smith - Joseph Robinson - 40.8% - 87
1932 - Herbert Hoover - Charles Curtis - 39.7% - 59
1936 - Alf Landon - Frank Knox - 36.5% - 8
1940 - Wendell Willkie - Charles McNary - 44.8% - 82
1944 - Thomas Dewey - John Bricker - 45.9% - 99
1948 - Thomas Dewey - Earl Warren - 45.07% - 189
1948 - Strom Thurmond - Fielding Wright - 2.41% - 39
1952 - Adlai Stevenson - John Sparkman - 44.3% - 89
1956 - Adlai Stevenson - Estes Kefauver - 42.0% - 73
1960 - Richard Nixon - Henry Cabot Lodge - 49.55% - 219
1964 - Barry Goldwater - William Miller - 38.5% - 52
1968 - Hubert Humphrey - Edmund Muskie - 42.7% - 191
1968 - George Wallace - Curtis LeMay - 13.5% - 46
1972 - George McGovern - Sargent Shriver - 37.5% - 17
1976 - Gerald Ford - Bob Dole - 48.0% - 240
1980 - Jimmy Carter - Walter Mondale - 41.0% - 49
1984 - Walter Mondale - Geraldine Ferraro - 40.6% - 13
1988 - Michael Dukakis - Lloyd Bentsen - 45.6% - 111
1992 - George H.W. Bush - Dan Quayle - 37.45% - 168
1996 - Bob Dole - Jack Kemp - 40.7% - 159
2000 - Al Gore - Joe Lieberman - 48.4% - 266
2004 - John Kerry - John Edwards - 48.3% - 251
2008 - John McCain - Sarah Palin - 45.7% - 173
2012 - Mitt Romney - Paul Ryan - 47.2% - 206
2016 - Hillary Clinton - Tim Kaine - 48.2% - 227
If the object of their campaigns was to win the Electoral College vote and therefore the Whitehouse, they all ran terrible campaigns.
If the object of their campaigns was to look good, or feel better about themselves, meet chicks, or make business contacts, someone might think that they ran a not-terrible campaign.
If the object of their campaigns was to become President and Vice President, then, based on the results, they ran terrible campaigns.
Don’t leave us hangin’ doorhinge! What was the object of their campaigns?!?
Ask them. You’ll need a Ouija board, or shovel, for most of them but go ahead and ask them.
Romney and McCain aren’t taking my calls. I thought you might have more luck.
You want a cite that Clinton voters may have been as spiteful as bernie bros? I don’t have that handy, as it would require an alternate universe.
You contesting that bernie bros stayed home or voted for trump or for third party? Here ya go.
I live in the middle of conservative-ville, and work in the heart of it. Most of my neighbors and clients are pretty heavy republican supporters. Unfortunately, I don’t talk politics with any of them very often, as I like to keep peace in my neighborhood, and don’t want to get in fights with clients, 'cause that’s never good for business.
I do talk politics with my parents. My mother voted for trump because she hated clinton, and my father voted for trump because he like the racist rhetoric he put out. But, when I mentioned sander’s name, it was like I had lit a fart on fire.
You are criticizing voters for not voting for the candidate that got fewer votes, because you believe that he would have gotten more votes if they voted for him? That actually makes sense, even if in a completely absurd way.
I didn’t see that speech. Can you show me where that quote came from?
Campaigns got objects? Next you’ll be telling me clams got legs!
That’s what we in the talking game call “paraphrasing”. Do you need a cite that Clinton was pushing retraining instead of just bringing back jobs?
No, but your “paraphrasing” was not exactly fair to her actual message. Also, those in the game know that
indicates an exact and verbatim quote, not a paraphrase. A paraphrase would be
An actual direct quote would be something like
How’s this, then, “Hey auto workers, you know how you are being laid off by the companies that you work for? It is a free market, and I cannot stop the corporations that you work for from doing that, but I have good news, I am working on training and educational programs that will allow you to get better paying work than the auto factory paid.”
That would be much closer and less derogatory, even though it is not actually a quote.
The fact that “quotes” like yours get bandied about as though they are her actual thoughts and policies is one of the big reasons that she is disliked. There has been created a caricature of her that people like to see, that does not resemble her in the slightest.
People complain about her being impersonal or out of touch, and then use made up misquotes like yours to justify it.
But, tell you what. Go on to her campaign website (which is still up…?)and tell me what part of it is accurately even paraphrased the way you misquoted her.
Where as the corresponding trump non-quote would be: “We’ll bring back your old jobs so you won’t have to learn new stuff. Because I know learning new stuff is hard for you. Heck, it’s hard for me too.”
Ok you guys are right. Hillary didn’t say those words. It really doesn’t affect my point, but golf claps all around.
Your point was that trump promised to bring back their old jobs, and hillary promised to prepare them for jobs in the future, and that that message is why they voted for trump.
I’ve actually re-read your post I initially responded to a bunch of times now, and I can’t tell if you were agreeing with the sentiment, or being sarcastic. My initial impression was that you were agreeing with it, but now that I suspect that you were being sarcastic in your post, I am not sure that we are at odds.
I am not arguing either position’s merits, though I did sarcasticly put a Trumpian spin on the Hillary paraphrase. If you go back to the beginning of my back and forth with asahi, we were talking about left-right positioning of the candidates and whether that was a valid way to categorize them at all.
But I guess I’ll add: yes, Trump position was bullshit and yes I think it worked. I think traditional Blue collar Dem voters were turned off by a retraining promise and either stayed home or voted for the guy who promised jobs coming back.