I agree that Biden does have some perks. As a white man who can be kind of crude, he isn’t threatening to whites w/o a college degree the same way a woman or non-white would be.
Plus he has the name recognition and he is associated with the Obama years.
But Hillary did win 66 million votes. She just lost 80,000 in three midwestern states. And she was running for a third democratic term, its not common for one part to control the white house for 3 terms in a row. Democrats don’t need to win high school educated whites, but if we can lose them by 30 points (a 65-35 loss) rather than a 40 point loss (70-30), then that will make winning much easier.
So we’d have to find that 5% of high school educated whites who voted for Trump but would be willing to vote democratic.
Stop trying to play the game of stealing elections with electronic vote counting. You’ve lost that game. Get on board with hand-counted paper ballots, everywhere.
(Oh, and you should have done this ten years ago, and you didn’t, and it’s already too late, so it’s possible that everything else I say is meaningless and you will lose.)
Go populist, not racist but lower-economic class populist,* hard.* Your best candidate is Bernie Sanders. Give people a leader who represents hope for the little guy.
(But the actual presidential candidate, while important, is less important than the next point.)
Go for a progressive Congressional majority.
. 3a) Yes, progressive.
. 3b) Yes, majority.
You put economic progressives up in every district, even ones you have “no hope” of winning. You’ll get a few just because you showed you gave a damn. They don’t have to be “Justice Dems,” but they do have to be more “New Deal” than “Democratic Leadership Council.” This will drag the White House along, even if the next prez is Amy Klobuchar or something.
(Optional but you should do it anyway.) Have a funeral for the name “Democratic Party” and come up with a new name. The Democratic Party tore itself apart in 2016. It’s dead now. Be the “Progressive Party” or something. Also, Howard Schultz is not invited.
Joe Biden has said that he’s going to cure cancer. Not fix climate change, which is more necessary and mostly doable, but cure cancer, because he thinks it’s 1979 and that somehow that’s still what we’re afraid of.
Joe Biden trotted out “If you like your insurance you can keep it,” after that infamously blew up in Obama’s face.
Biden won’t get through the primary unless Democrats are super-dumb, and he won’t get through the general if this is his spiel.
And in any case, if Berniecrats were mad about Hillary sewing up the nomination, how do you think they will respond to Biden getting named before a single primary?
A demographic you left off…union voters. Clinton’s margins with the demographic were way down in those states. She even lost the union household vote in Ohio. Nationwide they aren’t a key demographic but regionally they are still huge in the general election. It’s hard to win those northern midwest states without winning strongly among them. Clinton didn’t.
Clinton didn’t lie to them and tell them, like trump did, that he’d get them their factory jobs back. After four years and the factory jobs arent back, those people wont be happy and wont believe those lies again.
My take on this is going to be controversial, but I do think there’s some truth to it:
Don’t assume that union & working-class voters will see the light and dump Trump. They are likely to, but there is a wrinkle: While they’ve been sold out by both parties, Trump courted them and the Clintons didn’t.
I expect a large chunk of union voters won’t want to vote for a Clinton, nor someone like a Clinton, nor someone with ties to the Clintons. Ross Perot was a brittle weirdo, but his protectionism was appealing. By comparison, Bill & Hillary were seen as betrayers by labor voters.
So you don’t want a Clinton Democrat, which means, to play it safe, you should be leery of an Obama Democrat, anyone with an Ivy League degree, or anyone who ever worked for Hillary. (Elizabeth Warren has an interesting problem here: Is she going to run as someone who got burned by Clinton & Obama. which she can? Or as the conciliatory unifier who works with moderates, as she seems inclined to do now?)
Why do you think Pete Buttigieg is a thing? The moderates were trying to find someone young & obscure enough that he’d never worked for Hillary & gotten her stink on him.
Will you all pull your heads out of your asses? The problem was Clinton, pure and simple. People hated her, swore that they would never vote for her because, She never did a damn thing except try to usurp power as first lady, and killed the healthcare reform effort of the 80s as a drama queen. The moderates of the country spent 25 years telling you they would never ever vote for her under any circumstances on principle. But you all refuse to accept that your responsibility as dumabasses putting her on the ballot is what got Trump elected. For fuck sake.
So many people were so confident in the poll numbers, that she had it without question,
they decided that as much as they hated Trump, they would be safe to not have to not dirty their hands voting for the corruption of democracy that Hillary was. Trump would not have won a re-vote on 11/09/2016, let alone in 2020. Stop stressing, FULL STOP Trump cannot win, FULL STOP and the GOP knows this. Unless people panic.
You know, most of this is false. First of all, Hilary wasnt hated while she was Secy of state. Not until the bernie bros, the GOP and the kremlin started posting shit about her 24/7/265.
And the moderates did vote for her, in droves, both during the primary and the general elections.
But yes, you are right, that the poll numbers did convince many to not vote for her.
I don’t know that “moderates” is the right word, but there were some of us who hated being put into the position of having to vote the Clintons back into the White House. Bill was not really a good leader for the Democratic Party, and the 1990’s were a rough time in some ways. A Hillary presidency would have been a lot of fun for the National Enquirer, and probably not that much fun for the rest of the party.
who was the last incumbent to lose with a good economy? Over 100 years ago? LBJ probably would have lost if he ran in 68 but Vietnam was the big issue then.
