An IRL friend noted that the absolute surest way to guarantee that Donald Trump won’t be re-elected would be for Mitt Romney to have an attack of conscience and run as an independent. I suspect that would work. Anything else? Who knows. I gave up on trying to understand how people vote in November 2016.
Mostly what I remember was a lot of “WTF does she think she’s doing? She’s the First Lady, not the President or even a member of Congress. She has no business being involved with the business of governing.”
It wasn’t personal hatred- nobody really knew her in 1993, but it sure put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.
How does it taste in the Trump era?
Per this link, Ted Kennedy began his “long campaign for national health insurance” in 1971. This effort continued through the '80s, '90s, and '00s.
I know Hillary Clinton championed universal health care after her husband was elected President in 1993 (and chaired a health care reform task force), but it seems unfair and disingenuous to blame the failure of the 1993 plan completely on her. The plan was ultimately killed by strident opposition from “conservatives, libertarians, and the health insurance industry.” Similar opposition prevented Ted Kennedy from ever getting universal health care passed during his lifetime, although he was able to lay some of the groundwork for the legislation that became the ACA.
As for your main point, you do realize that the reason why Hillary Clinton was supposedly so unpopular with so-called moderates and independents was because Republicans spent 25 years demonizing her. She surely made some missteps in her career, but she never deserved all the vitriol that was and continues to be directed her way.
Heck, I’m a moderate who disliked her in the '90s (because the demonization of her apparently worked on me at the time), but my opinion of her was greatly improved by her performance as a senator and Secretary of State, and I enthusiastically voted for her for President in 2016.
Hillary lost not because of her policies, but because she was deeply hated by a significant portion of the electorate. It was her personality, not her politics. The leftist echo chamber around here gives a skewed version of reality.
To win, you need a candidate that appeals to moderates and independents. You can safely ignore the progressives…they ain’t gonna vote GOP no matter what. Pushing gun control will cost you. Avoid the abortion debate to the extent possible.
Or…on a completely different tact…make sure whoever you nominate is squeaky clean, then make the election all about character. We need an honorable person in the White House, and we damn sure do not have one now.
A few thoughts:
Trump barely won against Clinton primarily as a protest candidate against politics as usual with the understanding that he wouldn’t win so voters could safely vote for him or stay home. That attitude changed November 7th 2016. I don’t think there is a Liberal alive in the US who isn’t motivated to vote against Trump. All thing being equal, there is no reason that A Democratic candidate shouldn’t win handily.
The key being “all things being equal”. With a thoroughly partisan Department of justice, a Federal Election Commission that is gridlocked to irrelevancy, and a Republican Party that sees Democracy as a hindrance to their political goals, we should expect that there will be wide spread attempts to do use every dirty trick in the book to prevent Democrats from voting, or from counting when they do vote. These efforts need to be identified and countered as quickly as possible, and also publicized as evidence of the anti-democratic nature of the Republican party.
Which brings us to my third point. I am going to go counter to conventional wisdom and say that after the primaries Democrats should not concentrate on a clear positive message for what policies they will bring to the country. Policies are by their nature complicated and imperfect. Any realistic policy will include pluses and minuses. Republicans will find those minuses and focus all attention on what they are. So that instead of being the anti-global warming candidate, the Dem will be the the pro high gas price candidate. You can try to argue back and forth about which is true and which is a bigger problem but it ends up being at best a draw. 2016 showed that empty promises with no details are just as good if not better than complicated policies, but that the real vote getter is fear. People vote with their amygdala, not their cerebral cortex.
I would recommend concentrating on the president’s corruption, lies, contempt for any checks and balances, and autocratic tendencies. Make it clear that what Trump has been normalizing is anything but normal and that if we continue down this road, we may go past the point of no return. It is easy to cobble together the statements that Trump as made to indicate that he wouldn’t be satisfied with just two terms. We want to leave the impression that the 2020 election is all that stands between us and the world of the man in the high castle.
This is not how elections work. In reality, few voters vote for presidents from different parties and those who do are, as a category, the lowest-information voters–so a candidate’s policy positioning doesn’t really affect them.
The correct analysis is not about swing, it is about turn-out. For the relatively small fraction of voters for whom policy positioning matters, going to the left gets better turnout among the left and going to the center gets better turnout from the center-left.
The question, of course, is which positioning as between the two gets better turn-out, and that isn’t answerable a priori. More to the point, since policy positioning is less important than other candidate variables (like insider-outsider, demographics, media coverage), it makes little sense to try to argue electability based on policy positioning.
Bullshit. You nominate AOC or another of her ilk, and you’ll make the Reagan-Mondale election look like a real squeaker. Trump will win in a landslide. All that radical leftist/socialist/progressive crap just doesn’t fly with mainstream America. Ivory tower liberals always forget they they are the fringe elements.
Somehow this analysis works with supposedly far-left Democrats (AOC isn’t 35 yet so couldn’t run), but not with demonstrably far-right Republicans like Trump. Trump turned out people who hadn’t voted much recently, and Hillary didn’t excite progressives and thus many of them stayed home. The relative extreme (racist/misogynist/etc.) won in 2016 over the relative moderate.
I see no reason why this should be considered any better than a guess. There are millions of progressives who didn’t vote in 2016. Getting them to vote should be the primary mission of the Democratic primary.
The difference being that Trump’s rhetoric is disgustingly popular with unfortunately large numbers of people that 1) Vote and 2) Give him money.
In my state, all of the GOP candidates except one are running how how deeply they’ve taken Trump’s cock. Dude might be bigger than Jesus down here, at least during the runup to the election. The GOP candidate that isn’t sucking Trump cock is the subject of an attack ad, where his opponent outlines how the candidate dared to not support Trump until after the convention, and even after that just wasn’t goosestepping high enough. Makes me wanna puke.
Let’s approach this from the opposite end. How can they NOT win it?!
First of all, they DID win in 2016, even with a very unpopular candidate, but the Electoral College which, by its very definition, is an UNdemocratic entity, defeated the popular majority of voters.
Secondly, we’ve had two years to observe the dragon rear it’s head and display itself in all of its misogynist, racist and hateful glory.
Amen, Brother.
A lot of people seem to be say this thinking that because Biden and Hillary might have comparable positions on the issues that that makes Biden himself and Hillary herself comparable. It doesn’t, and they’re not. trump is going to do his stupid schtick no matter who the Dems nominate, but Hillary was uniquely vulnerable to it since the entire weight of the Republican smear machine (gee, dare we call it a vast right-wing conspiracy) had been focused on her since before her husband had even been elected President. (That’s 25 years folks.) And, in what passes for logic amongst our friends on the right, the fact that she was still “at large” after all that time did not constitute proof of innocence, but rather proof of the depths of her guilt. So stop it with the Biden=Hillary 2.0 crap. Biden is not Hillary. Biden is Biden and there’s good and bad along with that, but we all deserve the chance to be considered in our own right and not through the fun-house mirror of somebody else’s issues.
Those may well be true with a charismatic relative leftist in the Democratic party too – we just don’t know, because we haven’t nominated Bernie or someone like him. You don’t know, and neither do I.
It is indeed vomit-inducing.
If we want to peel off the hard core Hillary haters, we should run Elizabeth Warren, and point out that electing Warren president would be the ultimate insult to Clinton. It would demonstrate conclusively that she didn’t lose for being too liberal, or old, or female. She lost because people just. Don’t. Like. Her.
How can the Democrats win the election?
I used to naively believe that the strategy should simply be to get more votes, but that shit don’t fly.
Still bad, but not as bad as Trump.
All very much true. I’ll take it even a step farther - run last election same exact turnout and shares per demographic segment, with 2020 demographic numbers, and you’d have a D in the White House.
A D nominee who does exactly the same as HRC did per group would in fact win in 2020.
But no one running is HRC and people trying to say that her loss proves that someone with her positions can’t win, or with her establishment cred can’t win, or her gender, or whatever … is being very foolish. A different woman can win, a different person of the same policies can win … or lose … but based on their own strengths and weaknesses, how they appeal to and repel various segments of the voting public, and how well their own campaigns are executed.
You win by getting more votes … where you need them on election day. You lose by less than before in the demographics you lose and win by more with more turnout in the demographics you win, again, where you need them.
You get Obama level turnout and share of Black voters and/or only lose by his level of loss with white working class voters and/or get unprecedented ahistoric turnout of younger progressive voters. Hit *any *of them and you likely win the states you need to win. Hit more than one and it is a blowout. Hit them all and it is a mandate level election with Senate winning coat tails.
Ignore none of them.
Yep, because of the EC you have to be sure you get the most votes in the right places. David Axelrod understood that in 2008 and 2012. I’m pretty sure no one in HRC’s campaign understood it.
Axelrod was responsible for making the main theme of Obama’s first campaign “change”. He knew that being seen as a Washington insider was a big negative with the public. This is still an issue today and is part of why DJT was able to win in states everyone, including Hillary, thought would go to the Democrats. Bernie was also seen as an agent of change in 2016 which is what attracted people who wouldn’t normally be drawn to a candidate so far to the left. I also think the desire for major change explains some of the popularity of a candidate like Buttigieg.
I’m not so much concerned with the Democrats picking a nominee who is a centrist, moderate, progressive or leftist as I am with them choosing someone who will be able to credibly run as an agent of change, get people excited and to the polls, particulary in the states needed to get a majority in the Electoral College.
I’m not sure any of the Democrats seem to really get this. Bernie is a deeply flawed candidate and I don’t see how Biden can credibly make the argument he would be an agent of change given how “inside” he has been for decades.
Until one of the others is able to connect with voters on this level I will continue to think it more likely than not that DJT will be reelected.
Sure, by the far right, who hate all “demon-rats”. But her numbers were fairly good until the attacks came when she was the obvious candidate.