None of your responses appear to do that. To which are you referring?
Clinton could only win the general if she ran unopposed in the primary? Interesting proposal. Not particularly flattering to Clinton, though.
Um, no. But primary candidates usually concede gracefully and don’t have rallies like Sanders did.
Sanders: “The Democratic Party…”
Crowd: BOO!!!
Sanders: Rigged!
If Bernie would have bowed out gracefully, that would have given a lot more time to heal. His poison continued right up until the convention with him being Hamlet and vacillating if he would support Clinton or not.
He did concede gracefully, just not as early as you - a Sanders hater - preferred. As long as there are superdelegates, why should anyone concede at a point when they can still win?
And let’s not forget, Sanders was right:
"There are a lot of delegates out there who are looking at the general matchup. And what they’re seeing in polls is that Bernie Sanders is running a lot stronger against Donald Trump than is Hillary Clinton.”
The tragedy is that he couldn’t persuade enough delegates of this, or we’d have avoided Trump in the White House. Clinton loyalists put forward a wildly unpopular nominee, and they need to own that fact.
How does visiting a state help anymore, in the age of television and internet?
I mean, it’s cool and all, and I’ve seen the last 3 Democratic nominees in person when they came to cincinnati, but I was going to vote for them anyway. Most people in the crowd were going to vote for them anyway. I really don’t know why you would show up at a campaign event if you weren’t already pretty sure where your vote was going to go.
Before TV and internet, it made more sense, people couldn’t hear your message if yo didn’t go to them. Undecided voters probably showed up at such events to see what the candidate stood for, see what they had to say, but is that the case anymore?
You still need to craft your message for particular parts of the demographic, but I don’t know why it is so necessary to visit. So, she didn’t go to michigan. Is that why people there didn’t vote for her, if she had showed up at an event or two, would the people who didn’t vote for have even attended?
I think that Hillary was boring, did not inspire people in the same way that Obama or Bill did, but more like Gore or whatsisname in 2004 did. I do think that age worked against her, I was much more excited about her in 2008 than this last go around. Not that 62 is a puppy, but it is 8 years younger than 70.
I can’t think of anything she said in her speeches or slogans that was memorable, except for the bits that were taken out of context to mean the opposite of what she said and repeated constantly on right wing media.
She ran the campaign that a competent boring politician should run. Unfortunately, the voters do not look for competent and boring anymore, they want excitement. They want a candidate that is interesting and dynamic, and that was not her.
Trump owned the deplorables, whatever percentage those were, Clinton wasn’t getting them. He owned the single issue voters, anyone who cares mostly about guns and abortion or gays are not going to vote for a democrat, no matter what she does.
What Clinton should have picked up, but didn’t, was the economically anxious, the people who were struggling to get ahead, and not seeing any fruit for their efforts. They’ve been struggling for decades now, but the crash of 2008 and slow recovery exacerbated the issue. She had policy idea on how to fix the problem. Complex, convoluted policy that could very well work, but requires more attention span to fully grasp than most voters were willing to spend.
Trump got those through lies. He said things that people wanted to hear, even if they knew that they weren’t true. Desperation gives people hope, and hope makes people gullible. Trump played on that.
Showing up indicates you give a shit. You really think just doing speeches in front of a blue screen is the wave of the future in politics?
Showing up, physically, in a state often inspires a wave of local news stories about your visit too. It’s that same sort of “free media coverage” that people complained Trump got too much of.
The cynic in me says that showing up is just to show you give a shit, not proof that you actually do.
That’s true. I didn’t really think about local news as much, as I don’t watch it on TV, but on the internet, so I more choose what news stories I hear. Actually watching the broadcast, more gets pushed.
There are obviously things that need to be done. My point is that the Democrats need to build on their strengths not start over.
True. Does anyone know anything about Dewey except that he lost to Truman?
What do you see as their strengths, currently?
The cynic in me says that a lot of politics is like this, with tons of faked sincerity and empathy / anger.
When people with a particular political orientation keep repeating a claim that is patently false and its falsehood has been known and reported on for months, and other people with the same orientation chime in to defend them making the false claim, it’s a lie in my book. If you don’t want people to think you’re lying, don’t keep repeating a claim that is false and easily proven false.
It indicates that you actually even care that the state exists. If you don’t even bother to show up, people aren’t likely to show up to vote for you. Hillary had no message for people in those states (no, “I’m with her” doesn’t cut it) and didn’t even bother to show up. Why should they bother to show up for her? A campaign strategy of “Well, we’ll run whoever we want, because the Republicans are running someone worse, and we’re entitled to your vote for reasons” isn’t a very good one, as shown by Clinton’s decisive loss of the election.
Clinton could only win the general if she ran unopposed.
FTFY
You will be hearing from the late President Truman’s lawyers.
Post #49. You are only looking at one aspect of visiting a state-- trying to flip voters over to your side. That’s just part of the story.
Let’s look at the numbers.
Trump got fewer votes in Wisconsin than Romney did in 2012. Of course, Hillary got even fewer than that.
Trump got almost 300,000 fewer votes in Michigan than Obama did in 2012. But he still beat Hillary by about 10,000.
It’s not like Trump put up Ronald Reagan numbers. Either Hillary was a terrible candidate who ran an acceptable campaign, she was an acceptable candidate who ran a terrible campaign, or she was a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign. That isn’t much of a choice.
The realist in me says that HD is exactly correct on this.