Whatever you do don’t change the rhetoric that anyone that disagrees with you (or the party) on some or all of your positions is stupid, racist, sexist, brownshirt loving Nazi’s, etc. etc…
That’s a terribly effective strategy and one I hope continues far into the future.
That you think it’s “inexplicable” says more about the problem than you know.
I’m absolutely not rolling my eyes at the idea of working to connect with voters - I wish Hillary had done that. I was rolling my eyes at the idea that there was really ever a serious choice between the two candidates. Voters rejected Hillary because they didn’t like what they saw on their TV screens, which is not to say that she didn’t have flaws, but there the equivalency between her and the disaster in chief we have now was a false one. It’s obvious I don’t hold conservative voting habits in high regard but I’m increasingly becoming disillusioned with the left as well. People are just voting with emotions and anger and they’re mad because they’re not able to vote for an ideal. But they’re making the wrong choice again and again. Speaking of not knowing how elections work and how democracy works, I think that’s something well worth pointing out and thinking about for a while.
And as I’ve said previously (forgive me for repeating myself), a lot of those who were angry at “Republican Lite” Hillary Clinton had their chance to speak at the mid-term elections when Barack Obama was actually trying to follow through and make good on his progressive agenda – they failed to do that not once, not twice, but in three congressional voting cycles during his 8 year term in office. Sorry to all of the Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein and even Barack Obama (but #neverHillary voters), but voting for your favorite presidential candidate doesn’t just magically make all of your problems go away. You gotta vote down the ballot. You gotta show up and vote again in the mid-terms. You gotta vote for governors races and mayors races, too. You might even have to occasionally go out and canvass neighborhoods and make phone calls on your own dime once in a while. That’s how democracy works. It’s not some app you can download on your smartphone and play with; it requires sustained effort and attention.
I highlighted the bold because it exemplifies what I’ve been talking about on this thread. This is fallacious thinking that has been borrowed and repeated over and over again to the point where it has become a “truth” - a false truth but a truth nevertheless.
The Democratic party never ‘anointed’ anyone. There were elections in which Hillary Clinton and several others competed for votes, and when it was over, Hillary Clinton received nearly 4 million more votes than her nearest challenger, Bernie Sanders. I personally don’t take umbrage to this, but I think it’s offensive to dismiss these votes as being nothing and the product of party corruption. I suspect this is one of the reasons why some black voters in particular really had a hard time embracing the largely white Sanders movement and probably would have not turned out to support him in places Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. The voters anointed Clinton, not the party. As I’ve said before, if you want to take the Democrats to task for not trying to develop a deeper bench, I’ll agree with you a thousand percent on that one. The party utterly failed to look beyond the Barack Obama years, assuming that either Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton would carry Obama’s torch. As it turned out, Biden never ran and Hillary was the lone household name in late 2015. But you also ought to blame Bernie Sanders for waiting so late to make a name for himself. If he had been serious about running in 2016 he should have at least tried to get some recognition in 2012. He’s been nothing but a gadfly senator who attaches amendments to bills and makes occasional appearances on progressive talk radio shows on the West Coast that hardly anyone in mainstream America listens to. So if we want to talk about understanding how elections work, consider what’s been written above.
In any case, I probably haven’t said anything in this post that I haven’t said somewhere else.
I’ve heard it said that the opposition doesn’t win elections; rather, the government loses them.
One of the things I remember about Clinton’s campaign was how deceptive she was. For example, she talked about ‘gun safety’ but meant gun control and she refused to acknowledge her ill-health. Trump, of course, lied outrageously, but we knew they were lies and we knew that he knew we knew (etc down the rabbit hole) that they were lies. But Clinton was deceptive, and that’s worse.
Worse in what sense? You mean worse in terms of trying to win people over and persuade them in an election, or do you mean that telling outrageous falsehoods and assaulting the very notion of truth itself is somehow worse than dissembling? If it’s the former, I’d say you’re spot on. People already knew that Trump was a bullshitter; people disliked Clinton’s lies because she was evasive and evasiveness naturally makes people feel uncomfortable, and beyond that it shows weakness. But if you’re actually arguing that the lies themselves were in any way comparable, well, that’s nonsense.
At this point, I’m resigned to the fact that nothing I say is going to change your mind at all, Sir Hewey. I won’t say I don’t care, because if I didn’t care I probably wouldn’t be sitting here typing away on a message board with people I don’t know.
But I feel like the spouse of an alcoholic. All of my lecturing isn’t gonna do a damn bit of good in changing the way people think or vote. Only when we collectively bottom out, will that Eureka moment even be possible.
I asked Human Action when was the last time a democratic socialist won a presidential election, to which he replied FDR, which was exactly my point. It’s been 85 years since this country went from mainstream republican style capitalism to FDR’s new deal. That’s a pretty long time ago, and the country has been reverting back to the 1920s ever since. It will take something extraordinary for this country to get the kind of progressive it wants and needs – extraordinarily bad, most likely.
Sir Hewey?
You’re doing it again. And after talking about how your side needs to consider why it lost - it’s interesting in your analysis of your party you don’t mention yourself as being apart of the problem, as if you’re better than that, all the while talking about how stupid the American public is.
And there is my point. Your party, your side, did more to alienate people to your cause than I think you or the party will ever admit to. It’s inconceivable, inexcusable, inexplicable.
I feel like a sellout to my party giving advice to the adversary, but I know it will go undressed and be ignored because it hasn’t been paid attention to yet. Even by you.
Calling those that disagree with you stupid, hay-seeds, racist, rednecks, deplorable, sexist, traitors, ad naseum, pushes more people away from your party and side than embracing their concerns, fears, interests, etc. and dealing with them later. Once their on your side.
But you don’t even let them get that far. You tell them to fuck off before they even get close.
Trump embraced anyone who was willing to go against Hillary and the democrat platform, be it her policies, her personality, her history, whatever. There was never an air of 'You’re stupid if you don’t believe in me and my ideas". It was the exact opposite.
He won because of it.
BTW - Despite my strong English lineage and fondness for the country and its terrific people, I’ve never been knighted or even met the Queen.
Among other reasons I should have said, most of which have been addressed perfectly by others in this thread.
You said: “There was never an air of 'You’re stupid if you don’t believe in me and my ideas”"
Right it was a different thing. It was “You are stupid enough to vote for me based on my saying nothing to you except old dog whistles and things you know aren’t going to happen.”
Unless you are really trying to say that the goldfish was respecting the intelligence of his audience? Were you doing that?
And that’s the problem in a nutshell - Democrats seem to literally think that people have no choice but to vote for one of two candidates, and that people who don’t like the Republican candidate will automatically vote for whoever the Democrats put forward, no matter how awful they are, in spite of the fact that more people did not cast votes for neither major party candidate than voted for either one in the last election.
The fact that she’s around 7 on a scale of badness where Trump is like an 8 doesn’t mean she automatically gets to be president. Yeah, you’re upset that people actually have standards for who they’ll vote for and don’t just vote for whoever the Democrats put forward regardless of how awful of a person or candidate they are, but that’s the actual world.
They picked her and even cheated to help her win the primaries. She didn’t launch a real campaign for the position against opposition (it’s pretty obvious that deals were made to keep challengers away), and there wasn’t a big groundswell of popular support for her. Same with boring losers like Mondale, Dukkakis, and Gore, they got picked by the party, had minimal opposition in the primaries, and failed miserably at actually winning an election. Hillary’s campaign seriously floated the idea of using “It’s her turn” as a slogan, and while they avoided saying it directly the attitude was obvious.
Bernie Sanders was pretty obviously making a primary run that he didn’t expect to win in an attempt to push the Democrats to his way of thinking and get more exposure for ideas, it’s not uncommon in presidential elections - I don’t think Jesse Jackson actually thought he’d get the nomination back in the day either. The fact that a campaign that pretty obviously didn’t think it had a real shot at the nomination came close to winning the primary should have given Clinton pause, and should make the Democratic party rethink a lot of things. Instead, people just complain that mean 'ol “Bernie Bros” lost them the election by some means, though it’s not really clear how.
There you go again calling anyone who disagrees with you (and your candidate) stupid.
A lovely strategy that will get you far I’m sure.
I think we can safely say that Trump dialed it up to 11.
And she still lost.
I didn’t realize that Sir could be offensive, but I guess I’ll make a note of it from now on.
It’s a problem if people don’t have enough intellect to differentiate between someone who assaults the concept of truth and someone who lies within the boundaries of what is considered normal. It’s a problem if people can’t distinguish between someone who has served as a US senator and Sec of State and knows something about how government runs and an opponent who has never served a day in public office and whose only qualification in the eyes of voters is that he’s a great businessman when all off the evidence is to the contrary. I’m not going to entertain your idea that they’re both equally bad when the factual evidence demonstrably says otherwise. You, Hewey, and others can call that ‘elitist’ or ‘arrogant’ if you want. But I’m not going to live in your world of false equivalence, false facts, and post-truths. And I’m not going to fucking pander to you in the hopes that I’ll change your mind, and I think one of the reasons (among many) why politics in the United States is so fucked beyond repair is that too many people WILL do just that. That’s not how you support democracy; that’s how you destroy it.
I am sure you realize that the Democrats are not responsible for every raging partisan on the internet nor is that where party strategists look for their talking points. So drag dog isn’t getting far or anywhere with any of his “strategies”, which of course are not strategies. Just shit he wants to say.