There are people who could not support Trump but whose conscience would not let them vote for Clinton, because they genuinely thought she was corrupt due to all of the negative press about her. I was one of those people. Trump was so bad that he convinced me, a lifelong Republican voter, to not vote R for once in my life. But I could not bring myself to vote for Clinton. I really believed (and know now that I was wrong) that she would be embroiled in scandal and I didn’t want to be someone supporting that.
Saying “you must have found him acceptable to not vote for Clinton” is fucking asinine. There are people who didn’t find either acceptable.
It is objectively true to say that anyone who didn’t vote for Clinton helped Trump. Of course, that’s just common sense. But to imply that it represents any kind of support for Trump is insulting. Fuck off with that smug bullshit.
But you did find him acceptable as compared to the alternative. Or at least you found them of comparable acceptability (or unacceptability). Otherwise, you would have voted for one of them. If there’s another explanation, I can’t fathom it.
“If you don’t eat the dogshit, you must find the diseased rat meat acceptable.”
No, I asked for a ham sandwich, and got diseased rat meat instead.
After the fact I’ve come to accept that the dogshit was actually chocolate pudding. I feel foolish but that doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t want that rat meat.
I believed the alternative was between an incompetent asshole and a savvy criminal. It turns out that I ended up with an incompetent criminal asshole.
The last 4 years have made me a Democrat. This is pretty personal to me though. I went from being someone who was indoctrinated into the right wing to a person who finally saw the light and saw who the Republicans are. It’s tiring to have people basically say, “Fuck you anyway for ever being on the right.”
If being that smug and righteous is so important to you, well okay then. I guess intolerance really is a bipartisan thing.
You’re still misinterpreting what I wrote. I’ll try again, using your own metaphor – in your mind, dogshit and diseased rat meat were of relatively equal acceptability (or unacceptability). You found them both unacceptable, and both equally unacceptable (more or less), so you chose neither.
That you were wrong about the diseased rat meat doesn’t change that, at the time, you believed they were of roughly equal acceptability/unacceptability.
Not to hijack this, but: that conclusion didn’t leave you thinking “fuck, I guess ‘savvy criminal’ is sooo much less bad than not-just-an-asshole-but-an-incompetent-asshole” when it came to, say, questions about who should have their finger on the button?
I can’t say with 100% certainty but if that email scandal hadn’t come out right when it did, I may have voted for Clinton. I think that was what convinced me not to. I got fooled. I can’t be totally confident though. It was 6 years ago. I do remember that there was no chance in hell that I was going to vote for Trump. I wrestled with whether or not to vote for Clinton.
One other thing that factored in as well was knowing that my vote was unlikely to matter much. I live in a pretty solid blue state. She was always going to win Washington and didn’t really need my vote. It turns out she didn’t win it overwhelmingly (she won by something like 15%), but she did win.
The problem with that argument is that the people who are saying that Sanders supporters staying home had no effect on the outcome of the election because they didn’t live in swing states are also saying Sanders would have been a better nominee than Clinton because he would have attracted millions of swing state voters that Clinton didn’t.
Contrasted against the equally bizarre notion that some number of Sanders supporters pivoted and voted for Trump? Or that it’s somehow the fault of Sanders voters that Clinton wasn’t worth putting in the work to vote for? Or… or…
Take your pick, really. This whole line of argument that anyone other than Trump voters are responsible for Trump being elected is fucking batshit. And may I remind you that this thread—not originally intended for the pit—was started in bad faith to smear Sanders supporters?
You guys are assuming a much higher level of sophisticated voting if every member of the public than is justified. People can have non-policy reasons for voting for candidates. Famously Kennedy did way better on TV than radio because he was(apparently) good looking and charismatic. It’s not always a left-right comparison of policy positions.
You’re missing the fact that a lot of Trump voters wanted to shake up the system, for whatever reason. Being anti establishment in 2016 was right time right place for Trump to cash in on that sentiment. This made running Clinton even worse than usual because she essentially is the embodiment of the establishment.
There were a lot of people who did not like how things were going and wanted to shake things up. Trump played into that. Bernie completely undercut him as someone who was also anti establishment and radical but was also a good person and had good policies. Bernie would have got a lot of those anti establishment votes and undercut that support from Trump. But obviously Clinton could not - she was the establishment that they were voting against.
Bernie would’ve done better against Trump than Clinton did for that and plenty of other reasons. You guys are looking at this from a 2022 perspective after they’ve had years to turn it all into a cult. Trump was still a fringe joke that everyone thought was going to lose and might suck the Republican party in 2016. It was considered a long shot that he could possibly win. Picking Clinton to run against him was a uniquely poor choice and quite possibly one of the few people in the entire country Trump could beat. This was very much a “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” moment.
And since you guys are so happy to be passing around blame, I certainly think pushing one of the few, maybe only candidate that Trump could beat is more directly responsible for his win than some Sanders supporter that unenthusiastically voted for Clinton.
You know, there’s a kernel of truth in this, like the fact that the vast majority of people have more than the average number of eyes. The average number of working eyes is something like 1.998 or so, and 99% of the people have two working eyes, so yes, the vast majority of people have more than the average number of eyes, but why is that relevant?
Well my perspective is the same as yours, SenorBeef.
I don’t doubt that the number of Sanders supporters that chose not to vote Clinton is greater than zero, but I have no reason to think this was a particularly significant factor beyond all the other strategic errors and events of 2016.
(And anyway, if we were being consistent here, shouldn’t we be giving the Sanders supporters credit for Biden’s election? Which would make the answer to the OP’s rhetorical question “Pretty damn good, thanks”.)
It’s doubly annoying for me because, on the one hand, it’s people looking for simple explanations instead of trying to understand the full situation correctly.
And, on the other, it feels to me like even some on the left have bought into the general “commie” nonsense of American political discourse. The progressive wing of the Democrat party are “the enemy within” instead of, you know, just some people with legitimate disagreements on some issues.
Oh, that is something you’d just figure would happen – I mean, the Democrats have been running away from the mere word “liberal” for at least 40 years now. So many on that side of the spectrum have become conditioned to accept that America is an intrinsecally right-leaning polity and there’s no hope in moving left.
I suppose that’s a valid argument, with respect to that portion of the electorate comprising the lot of people who did not like how things were going and wanted to shake things up. I have yet to be persuaded that that particular lot was large enough to have changed the 2016 outcome.
ETA: I will allow as to how things actually have been “shaken up.”