Work in absolutes much? Ever heard of the color “grey”? :rolleyes:
Some candidates in the list ran poor campaigns. Some ran average campaigns, but lost to the other campaign because of factors not in their control (could be the other campaign was better, could be that there was a third-party candidate that siphoned votes off, for example, 1912). Some ran decent campaigns, but were beaten by candidates who ran better campaigns, or who were steamrolled by the elements.
Which of these categories Hillary Clinton is in is the issue up for discussion. Many postulate the first category, and cite as evidence the campaign she lost to.
If anything ‘worked’ it’s that Trump’s campaign actually took the time to go into the heart of the heartland and actually campaign there while Hillary Clinton’s campaign decided to spend time in cities and entertained the idea of trying to flip Arizona and other traditionally red states, believing she was on the verge of a blowout. I never disagreed that she ran a bad campaign; I just disagreed with the idea that a guy who lost primaries by 4 million votes would have somehow performed better. Sanders might have performed better with certain demographics, but he also would have performed worse with others. We’re not going to agree, though, and that’s fine.
I don’t necessarily think Bernie would have won where Hillary lost, but just looking at the popular vote in the primaries is fraught with about as many problems as is looking at the popular vote in the general. You have to look at how they did against each other in the battleground states. I have not done that analysis, so I honestly don’t know. But winning big in the CA, NY and even TX primaries doesn’t mean shit. The Democratic candidate is going to win the first two and lose the last one.
Oh? You think Trump visiting made a difference? His visiting garnered him some angry xenophobes that were sitting on the fence? Angry white xenophobes is what you said is what this election was decided by after all.
I obviously would prefer Bernie over either competitor ( acknowledging I’m not American ); however what a pity the DNC only narrowed the primary down to two candidates — or one person to be discarded before selecting Hillary.
Whilst the strong choice of different morons the RNC fielded was a bit too much, one might think a nation of 300 million + might offer enough suitable persons with views varying all the way from Bitter Old Right-Wing Blue Dog to Rabid Mentally Ill Trotskyist for the Democrats to discriminate between before making the final choice of champion.
A combination of factors. Not just his visiting, not just Clinton’s not visiting.
Did Trump win over some centrist Democrats who fell for Trump’s bullshit about bringing coal and steel jobs back to Wheeling, West Virginia? Uh, yeah, maybe some did fall for it. But then again, those voters were probably negated by the centrist republicans with an education who were horrified at the thought of a republican sucking up to Putin. I am not arguing that Hillary Clinton ran a good campaign - in fact somewhere in this thread I think I agreed that she didn’t. I also acknowledge that maybe her campaign kept some center-left and left voters on the sidelines. The only thing I’m pushing back against is this idea that someone to the left of Clinton would have outperformed her. Nobody can provide any evidence to show that Sanders would have been a better candidate than Clinton. People can pull out whatever poll they want, and they can use anecdotal conversation with friends. But the votes are the evidence. And Bernie’s 4 million votes of having any sort of evidence that would remotely suggest that the Democrats made a mistake in voting for Clinton over him. As I’ve said before, the Democrats’ mistake was not having a deeper bench of candidates. They had 8 years to think about Clinton’s 2008 campaign (and even Joe Biden’s previous tries at the White House for that matter) and these are the only two names they could come up with?
Okay then, look at Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina – look at those. Look at Nevada, too.
Bernie Sanders supporters will bring up Michigan and Wisconsin, and the latter was the only really convincing win for Sanders. I would absolutely concede that Michigan was a stunning and painful defeat for Clinton and it should have been a wake-up call. Moreover, that’s a wake-up call that inexplicably went unanswered. I never said she ran a great campaign, just that Sanders would have been no better and probably worse. Maybe not as bad as I think but still worse.
Your thesis is also that this matters in any way shape or form. That it has any legal or moral relevance.
Its trivia. Its about as relevant as noting that the team with more yards almost always wins the superbowl but those seahawks managed to lose with 5% more yards than the patriots.
:rolleyes: I can’t even imagine what “proof” you think could possibly exist.
FDR?
Do you understand that the Democratic primary and the general feature two different electorates?
I read all three cites, and I don’t see anything that says Sanders supporters stood out among other groups of Democrats for failing to show up on Election Day. Can you direct me to it?
Sure, I can see that. Kentucky may be different in that, until recently, it was both heavily conservative and heavily Democratic. Still, think of those Blue Wall voters who defected, or Republicans who hated both Trump and Clinton - they could easily be a path to a Sanders victory.
Huh? No. I am criticizing voters for nominating a candidate who was widely hated outside of their bubble, embroiled in a scandal, and free of charisma or the common touch.
As that was not even close to my argument, no, I don’t feel the need to do so.
My argument is simply that they did not show up on election day to vote for hillary, even though bernie asked them to, not that they “stood out” by doing so. If they had voted for clinton, as the person who they thought had the proper judgment to be president asked them to, then she would have won.
If you want to know how they were different from other groups of democrats that did not show up, well, they were engaged enough to show up to vote for the democrats in the primary, but then refused to vote for democrats in the general.
People that stayed home for both require reach out and engagement, hardcore bernie supporters needed a completely different message to be reached.
I’m not really interested in adding anymore to the thread – the Hillary post-mortems have been done to death. She obviously did run an unsuccessful campaign in 2016, and I seriously doubt she runs again. The Clinton era would appear to be over, so the purists in the democratic party and the nut bars on the right can rejoice.
What will the Democratic party do to ensure that voters vote against someone as horrendous as Donald Trump? I don’t really know if I have the answer to that one. A more important question is what are we going to do about the stupidity of the American voter? George W Bush and Donald Trump weren’t comets that struck earth; they were voted into power by tens of millions of uninformed voters.
That’s exactly the question they shouldn’t ask, and was a big part of why Hillary’s campaign failed. Like people keep saying, the Democratic party should be looking for a candidate people want to vote FOR, not just someone who tries to win with ‘look how awful the Republican is’. The fact that Democrats keep running people who lack significant popular appeal if left to their own devices (Obama and Bill Clinton both fought their way into the spot, they weren’t just picked by the establishment in their first terms) and who don’t offer a compelling platform for for president is a major issue for the party.
“What you said happened through your political bias does not match what I believe happened through my own political bias”
Or, as the colloquialism goes “History is written by the victor”. The implication of which is that the victor will then alter historical records to look favorably on the side of the victor and less favorably on the side of the loser.
Which is why we’re STILL arguing on who the actual victor was… let alone the idea that 2% one way or the other is a major difference.
If you lived in a country where 46% of all people voted to publicly execute people of your political party… and 48% of all people voted AGAINST that… only someone with a death wish would run around screaming “Hey you 46%rs, most of us don’t think you should publicly execute us”
**Regardless of how you want to spin the story… what really is going on is a heavily divided nation. **
Really, the best we can hope for is for the thesis and the antithesis to combine into a new synthesis and bring about a change in zeitgeist. Persisting in more of this puerile them vs us mentality accomplishes nothing.
I was for a moment trying to cease being a political analyst and just trying to be real. Yes, I get that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party establishment aren’t popular and don’t ‘connect’ with a significant portion of the American people, especially the vaunted inscrutable “white working class” whose pain democrats have ignored for decades but will no doubt be better served by a billionaire con artist who hasn’t paid income taxes in decades and probably already has several counts of money laundering on him :rolleyes: This thread and others like it are trying to explain the inexplicable, trying to analyze an election result that simply shouldn’t have happened in a democracy with educated, informed, and politically involved citizens. The two presidential candidates are unpopular, congress is unpopular. Who’s to blame? Maybe it’s time we stop looking for everyone else to blame for our corruption and start blaming ourselves instead.
But if it makes everyone here feel better, yeah, Hillary Clinton ran a shitty campaign. But she shouldn’t have needed to do anything to defeat the likes of Donald Trump. The fact that it requires a really sophisticated campaign to defeat a con artist isn’t an indictment of Hillary Clinton or frankly not even her republican counterparts who lost before her. It’s a reflection on us. And until we start analyzing our own gullibility as voters and stop whining every time we don’t get some magic man who promises to blow up corruption in one fell swoop, we’re gonna to continue to suffer.
You’re seriously rolling your eyes at the concept that a party trying to win an election needs to actually connect with the voters, and at the same time consider it ‘inexplicable’ that said party (which also seems to roll its eyes at the concept) managed to lose an election to someone who made a lot of effort to connect with voters. That’s how elections work, you have to actually make an effort to appeal to voters, you don’t get to just say “I’m good, you are obligated to vote for me now.”
It amazes me that people in general don’t get how elections work, and especially that a political party filled with people who’s jobs are all about winning elections don’t.
The Democratic party and it’s proponents would be well-served to ditch the entitled attitude and stop thinking they can simply anoint anyone they want as a presidential candidate and the voters will turn out for them. Anyone who wants to be President of the United States of America needs to do a lot of work, anyone who thinks they shouldn’t need to do anything to get the office should not win it, even if their opponent is worse.
I don’t even know what you’re trying to say here. That at least 1 Sanders supporter didn’t vote in the general? That no Sanders supporters voted in the general?
If all Clinton supporters had voted for her in the general, she’d have won. Do I get to blame them for Trump?
You gave me a cite that said turnout was lower among young people, and one that said some Sander supporters said “I told you so” when Clinton lost to Trump. What am I supposed to take from those?
It perfectly served Trump’s narrative about unaccountable elites, and Washington corruption and stupidity. One more nail in Clinton’s coffin.