Even easier (and what actually happened) is openly appealing to racist, anti-science, fearful, authoritarian-loving voters. No trickery involved. They knew what they would get, they got it, and they loved it (and so they voted for it again, four years later).
I. Just. Don’t. Get. this “hoodwinked” narrative (Liz Cheney did awesome work during the Jan. 6 hearings, but she tried to appeal to fence voters with this same hogwash in her closing remarks a week ago).
Trump has always been as clear as day about who he is and what he represents. He’s no trickster. To claim otherwise lets anyone who voted for him off the hook WAY too easily.
Except it was a dearth of voters problem. Given the current geography of our demographics and politics, Democrats need
millions and millions more popular votes just to eke out a victory in the Electoral College. We all know what happened in 2016, but few seem to acknowledge is how desperately close Biden’s victory in '20 was. It’s a false comfort to look at the Electoral College outcome of 306 - 232 and conclude that Biden won handily, because if you look at how he got to 306, it’s clear that it came down very small margins in the battleground states. They couldn’t even call some of those states until the next day because they were so close.
I’m not saying that anyone would say this in so many words. It’s through their actions or lack thereof that they said it. Nobody knew for sure that Trump would completely flip the Supreme Court, but it was the epitome of naiveté to ignore that possibility. IMO any progressive voter who refused to vote for Clinton in the 2016 general election because she was too centrist effectively placed their political ideology ahead of protecting the progress that had already been made, and if anyone would be harmed by that, well, sucks to be them. And now we’ve already seen the loss of Roe, the loosening of gun restrictions, and the gutting of the EPA’s ability to regulate power plants.
I would love to hear the conversation between a poor pregnant Mississippi woman who already has three kids and no legal recourse to abortion, and a progressive who abstained or voted for protest’s sake.
If we couldn’t even unite to keep Trump out of the White House in 2016, nay, if the anti-Clinton Democrats and other progressives still stand by their votes then, despite everything we’ve seen since, then I truly despair of this country’s future and wish I had the opportunity to emigrate.
Agreed. And this is because of this one significant difference between the two parties with regard to their behavior as voters: I’m convinced that disaffected Republicans are more likely to hold their noses and vote for their candidate regardless, then their Democratic counterparts are. Along with the Electoral College being tilted in favor of small states, this is why every election, for Democrats, is becoming a desperate all-hands-better-be-on-deck white-knuckle business. We can’t afford protest votes.
And you don’t think that the left wing Democrats and other progressives who refused to vote for Clinton didn’t also enable Trump? It’s not like anyone, in the fall of 2016, could look at how the Republicans had been operating and expected them to play fair. They had just stolen a seat on the Supreme Court that should have been Obama’s to fill, and by their own justification as of the spring of 2016, they would ultimately steal another seat that should have been Biden’s to fill. Except that time, since replacing RBG was too good an opportunity to pass up, they said they had just been kidding back in 2016, and there was no reason for a sitting president not to seat a new Justice in an election year, after all.
Politics can’t always be about what we want to achieve. Sometimes we have to consolidate, or even just defend, the gains we have already made. It would have been great to have a progressive government actively working on the advances that are important to us, but instead we are now sliding back towards a situation similar to a century ago. Even if Hillary Clinton had just sat on her hands for four years, and done nothing but fill the seats currently occupied by Kavanaugh and Coney-Barratt, we’d be far better off today.
My post is taking this conversation in a little different direction. But it belongs in this thread.
I have a very good friend of 33 years. A woman. She was/is a VERY big Sanders supporter. And voted for him.
A few months before the election I saw that it looked like Trump might have a chance. I mentioned that to my friend, but she said that she was going to vote for Sanders and to not worry the women of America will save us from Trump.
Ummm… You’re in that group my friend.
Maybe she voted for Clinton at the last minute, but I sort of doubt it.
I get it. I really do. We need some changes with the way elections work. BUT, throwing away your vote is not the way to do it. Thinking people had a very real choice. And anyone that did not see Trump for the disaster that he was and still is, threw away their vote.
Voting for Bernie was making the choice to row for the shipping lanes where you might be saved (or run over) by a ship when there was an island of hope in front of you. People that did not vote at all, decided to row their boat right in front a container ship that will and cannot stop.
Democrats and Clinton herself, and Bernie Sanders and his supporters have done some dumb things, and are responsible for the dumb things they’ve done. But they didn’t get Trump elected. Trump voters, Trump supporters, Trump endorsers, Trump enablers, etc. – they got Trump elected. Hillary should have campaigned better in WI, PA, and MI. She’s responsible for her campaign performance, and she bears some responsibility for losing her election. But she didn’t get Trump elected – Trump’s voters and co did. Bernie perhaps could have done a better job of campaigning for Clinton (this is probably unknowable). But he and his supporters didn’t get Trump elected. This is an important distinction. The ones to blame for Trump are Trump, his supporters, his enablers, and his voters, not those who tried hard but made some mistakes in trying to defeat him.
Someone that I have know for 33 years is not my “friend”. I trained her in a previous job and we stay close. We both work for different county governments.
She is one of my dearest friends. Not “friend”. Fuck you and your air-quotes.
I don’t see Miller declaring himself as a moderator so he’s posting as a poster. And he’s being rude in the Pit, oh noes! Call him an asshole, sure, but I don’t see any rule that a moderator needs to be Mary Poppins all the time. Hell, the Pit is an outlet for everyone, mods included. They vent here as much as anyone.
About twelve states (Ballotopedia and Daily Kos gave slightly different answers), allowed voters to enter a write-in vote and have it potentially count, even without that candidate having registered as a write-in candidate or paid the fee. So it’s not unreasonable to suggest that possibility.
Exactly. I’ll add to your list people who didn’t vote or voted third party. I personally think that the majority of Trump voters are unreachable. They’re like the anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers on a ventilator dying of covid. The people who have a clue of what’s going on around them should be voting out republicans like their lives depend on it (and, really, they do).
If they weren’t delusional enough to vote for Trump, they should have voted for Clinton like their lives depended on it. It’s that serious. It might not matter anymore though. I’m kind of thinking we’re doomed.