It was Trump’s idea of a landslide.
Electoral Vote:
Trump 304
Clinton 227
Percentage of popular vote:
Clinton 48.2%
Trump 46.1%
In Trump’s estimation he lost in a landslide, since he won by almost an identical margin in 2016. (In the Electoral College; he lost the popular vote.)
Stoid and her male counterpart whose name I forget, used to post fairly unexceptional progressivoid stuff which was aimed mostly at racking up perceived style points, but hardly proclaimed themselves to be Communist.
The current OP apparently is a brain fart out of a badly overgrown left field. Don’t expect any followup.
Hey y’all… knew I could count on you to answer my completely sincere question. (The mod said only pitworthy, not my idea. I just wanted an answer to the question, so if it had to be in the pit that was OK with me.)
Kaylasdad: not a communist, never have been. Politically liberal my entire life. And I was Stoidela for about a year or two 23 years ago. God it’s amazing we’ve been doing this this long.
I’m very glad somebody finally brought up the fact that Hillary did in fact have more Americans vote for her than for Trump, which would never have happened with Bernie, Trump would’ve got the landslide he imagined he got. In that hilarious fantasy land where Bernie actually got the nomination.
And FTR: I am not at all thrilled with The Democrats, not by a long shot. I’m not exactly sure what was possible but it would’ve been nice to have at the very least heard some fucking screaming when Scalia died and Mitch McConnell did the most horrifically nauseating thing any politician has ever done since the dawn of time in my personal opinion.
At the end of the day I think we’re still living in a situation of “blacklash”, big time, very much including Roe v. Wade being overturned.
And finally, my deep deep loathing for this board software continues.
Well, I guess one out of two is better than whiffing entirely. Apologies for the memory glitch.
I have exactly one data point–a Bernie Bro friend of mine. In short, she’s in denial, blaming everyone but the people that sat at home. And now she’s doubled down with a “voting doesn’t matter” attitude.
Nothing wrong with supporting Bernie. Nothing even wrong with thinking the primary was stolen from him. All that matters is that you then go on to vote.
It comes from a lack of strategic thinking. The Supreme Court is not a democratic institution and never was. The only thing that matters is the makeup of the SC, and the president controls that (with some influence from the senate). Even an “outsider” like Trump nominated the standard Republican slate from the Federalist Society.
Clinton, Bernie, whoever–it’s irrelevant. What’s important is that the president is not a Republican, and that was even more important in 2016 given the current and near-future vacancies.
Politics is not a game, but it plays like one. A huge swath of Democrats are too stupid to see that. Republicans, too, but at least they fall in line.
Every Democrat in a swing state that stayed home or made a protest vote is exactly 50% as culpable for the current state of affairs as the worst Trump voter. If a Trump voter is a 14-inch piece of shit, a I’m-just-not-motivated-enough-to-vote-for-Hillary is a 7-inch piece of shit. And a Trump voter in a non-swing state is a dry, odorless fart in comparison–obnoxious, but ultimately irrelevant.
I can’t think of any area of politics where voting matters more. Annoyed with your congressperson not pushing progressive enough policies? Fine, who the fuck cares. Stay home, do whatever. But when it comes to choosing the party of the president when the SC can be completely remade? VOTE.
I have to disagree here. The Republicans have been cleaning up in state houses, governorships, school boards, and local elections, because the Democrats are having so much trouble getting their shit together. This is now allowing Republicans to enact legislation to lockup their positions with anti-voting and gerrymandering on a state by state basis.
In many districts, it would only take a few hundred or thousand non-voting Democrats voting to swing all of the local and state elections.
After Obama’s first victory, the Democrats had a great machine ready to keep people engaged and push back in all races during his term. Maybe in another universe they used it effectively.
I was being a little hyperbolic, of course. Those races matter too. My point is that if someone is in a situation where their local Democratic politicians really are behaving no differently than Republicans for the things that matter to the person–then fine, do what you wish. I’m not going to argue against that. But for the presidential race, and in particular the one in 2016, policy was probably the least important thing. What mattered the most was simply that a Republican didn’t control the nominees. That’s it. We are now facing the inevitable consequences of Democratic voters not grasping (or not caring about) that crucial point.
The Trump cult wasn’t in place in 2016. Lots of Republicans hated him at the time. But they still voted for him because it meant decades of Supreme Court wins ahead. And not just RvW.
Yeah, I get that. I think of it as not so much perfect being the enemy of good, but perfect being the ally of evil. If people don’t vote because they disagree on some things with the Democratic candidate, then at least think of it as a vote against the candidate who is openly racist and wants to murder transgender kids.
I get it. I strongly disagree with right-of-center-anywhere-but-the-US Democrats on lots of stuff,
When I recently met the Democratic nominee for my congressional district, I told her, “you have my vote, please don’t say or do anything so I have to hold my nose while I fill out my ballot.” She laughed, said something reassuring, but forgettable, and went on to work the room.
Agreed, with a caveat.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone, but I don’t like the “hold your nose” characterization of voting for a less-favored candidate. You’re never going to get everything you want. You will, at best, get some of the things you want and not others.
Every candidate should be seen simply as a different combination of positives and negatives. Yes, it’s hard to separate out the moral/ethical factors, and some of those attributes may themselves carry moral weight. But in the end, every candidate can be put on the same scale, with some better than others. There was never a need to hold your nose to vote for Clinton, because she lacked the massive negative of nominating people from the Federalist Society lists. For the typical Democrat, that quality should have been more than enough.
If you’re playing a board game, you don’t intentionally make suboptimal moves and then whine about losing. It sucks that politics works like a game but with consequences up to and including death, but it’s wishful thinking to pretend otherwise.
There are those that will say that even if Democrats are better than Republicans, we need a revolution of sorts, and if that means the Democrats lose races, so be it. That is at least strategically defensible, but I will still count the people they sacrificed to the Republicans against them. And until they actually achieve a win, there are no positives to account. They rate the same as actual evil. Whether that makes them an “ally” is a moral statement that I don’t need to make. It’s enough to say that the outcomes are the same.
I’m reminded of loony ‘’‘leftists’‘’ in Europe in the 70s and 80s that wanted fascist takeovers of their government because it would force the masses to, finally, support the revolution they wanted, they succeeded . . . in getting a lot of innocent people killed.
That would be nice. 
Seriously, as a Clinton-supporter-who-didn’t-vote-for-Clinton-in-the-primary, I agree with your post except I don’t really see the point of getting mad at fellow Democrats at all, from any point on the political spectrum within the party. They’re not the ones deliberately trying to destroy democracy and cheat other Americans out of their rights and their vote.
Yeah, I wish Republicans in general weren’t being such anti-democracy bigoted assholes, and of course I wish that Democrats’ attempts to thwart their machinations were guaranteed to succeed. And I’m sure that if I tried, I could Monday-morning-quarterback all sorts of things that various Democrats might have done that might have succeeded better.
But ultimately, the problem we’ve got is not of Democrats’ making and I’m not going to blame Democrats for it. ISTM that that’s just a case of looking for the lost keys under the lamppost because that’s where you could see them, not because that’s where you lost them.
You’re right. It was a poor choice of words, written in haste. Instead of “angry,” I should have said that I hope people will get active over what non-voting Dems (and other left-leaning citizens) are failing to do now, and proceed accordingly.
I’ve never heard of that. I don’t doubt that there were people who thought that, but when you say they succeeded in getting a lot of people killed, what exactly happened in Europe in the 70s and 80s that you’re referring to?
I’ve read speculation that the “Brabant Killers” who were active in Belgium during the 80s were false flag attacks of some kind, but other than that, I’m not familiar with what you’re talking about. (I only know about that from the Unresolved Mysteries reddit.)
As to whether Sanders could have beaten Trump there were polls you could look at. Here is one from March, 2016 were Sanders was stronger than Clinton against the Republicans:
I think a lot of people forget just how surprised many of us were that Trump won. I thought Trump was a joke candidate and Hillary’s victory was all but assured.
“Between 1970 and 1994, however, terrorist attacks in Europe were much more common. From Northern Ireland’s Irish Republican Army (IRA) to Spain’s Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) to Italy’s Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead) {among many other groups}, extremist political groups organized bombings in each of those countries {…} The peak was reached in 1979, when 1,019 attacks were perpetrated in Europe, but all through the 1970s, 1980s, and mid-1990s attacks occurred with an average frequency of about 10 per week.”
I’m a progressive, and I don’t feel trolled.
All she did was go after those progressives who fought against Clinton. If you admitted she was the least bad of the two choices and voted for her, then I don’t see how you could be the target of her ire.
And, well, if you did pull that BS, then her ire is deserved. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good just means evil wins.
Sure, those people aren’t the bulk of the problem. But they are the ones who are most likely to actually feel bad—the ones who might be reachable. Just like those who supported the narrative about voter fraud in the Vegas primary. And a few others, including both Bernie and Clinton themselves. (The former for weakening Clinton so much and the latter for not going after those other states.)
I hope everyone who isn’t a pro-lifer feels bad if they didn’t fight to make sure we got a Democrat in the White House in 2016. That was the only way to save Roe after they refused to seat Garland. So I’m okay with an “I told you so” post.
Glad you brought up weakening Clinton. THAT’s the part that really gets me, the attacks tearing her down were viscious (and undeserved) and I am absolutely certain they kept some from voting at all in the end.
I’m feeling about fucking sick of the right-wing (sorry, “centrist”) Democrats blaming ME for their failures.
Cite? No, he didn’t. He just didn’t have huge ego-stroking virus-bomb rallies.