That’s not necessarily a bad tact to take. Charismatic white guys tend to do pretty well, especially in places were non-Charismatic folks or non-white guys have difficulty - Bill Clinton for example was able to get away with a ton because of it.
Chris Pratt in 2020!
Dems aren’t going to win the white working class no matter what policy proposals they come up with. The best goal is to lose them by smaller margins. Instead of losing them by 39 points like they did in 2016, shoot for losing them by 26 points like Obama did in 2012.
As to how to get the WWC to switch to the dems, no idea honestly. I’m sure a white man who doesn’t have 30 years of right wing propaganda against them like Hillary Clinton would be a good start. But the WWC were only lost by Obama by 14 points in 2008 and about 26 points in 2012. So it really doesn’t even need to be a white man.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out how the dems used to be a national party 40+ years ago. Back then young people weren’t turning on the GOP, women weren’t turning on the GOP and non-whites made up about 10% of the electorate. But despite it all, the dems still got 50% of the vote somehow.
A big part of why the dems lost 2016 IMO is the following factors:
People underestimate the ‘never Clinton’ vote
People who felt Clinton had it in the bag stayed home or voted 3rd party.
Clinton would’ve been a 3rd democrat term in a row (which is rare for one party to hold the presidency 3 terms in a row)
Trump ran as an outsider and anti-establishment
Trump was viewed as a living hand grenade that people who hate the system felt they could throw into the gears.
I’m hoping the dems win in 2020. But who knows anymore.
The main problem is that the Dems got steamrolled by team Clinton. You should have given O’Malley a chance instead of voting to have an albatross around your neck. So we can mainly blame Clinton voters in Iowa.
You are flatly wrong on two points. For one thing, the Supreme Court did not rule in the case at all. It sent the case back to a lower court for reconsideration. There has been no final ruling.
Second, if you believe that “the court allowed them to do was dictate their religious beliefs on others”, then you obviously don’t have any idea what the case is about in the first place.
Under Obama, the HHS Department is attempting to make employers purchase health insurance that completely covers birth control. An exemption is provided to religious organizations, but the exemption was defined so narrowly that it barely covered any employers and omitted many religious employers including the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic Charity that provides nursing home care for elderly persons too poor to pay for it. The Little Sisters of the Poor provide health insurance to their employees and in agreement with Catholic teaching that insurance does not cover birth control. They had done so for many decades, and nobody in all that time had ever said that selling insurance which doesn’t cover birth control was “dictating religious beliefs”, because it obviously is not.
There is no evidence that even one single employee of the Little Sisters of the Poor is dissatisfied with the insurance provided. But if there ever was an employee who wanted birth control, they would have three obvious options: 1) Buy birth control directly, or get it from one of the many places that give it away for free. 2) Buy insurance from some other source. (Admittedly that’s getting pretty expensive under Obamacare.) 3) Get a new job. So the claim that anyone is having their religious beliefs dictated by the Little Sisters of the Poor is clearly untrue.
It is worth pointing out the obvious: they are a charity organization dedicated to helping the poor. If the Democrats want to get votes from the poor, perhaps they should avoid lengthy legal battles against charity organizations dedicated to helping the poor. This one could have been avoided very easily, if the Obama Administration had just chosen to slightly expand the existing exemption.
Because the Democrats of 1970ish were not the Democrats of 2016. Same goes for the Republicans. Both parties at that time still had full-spectrum members…liberal, moderate and conservative. Since roughly Carter, there’s been a double-filter effect going on…all the liberals and moderates have generally moved to the Democratic party and all the conservatives (and a smaller number of moderates) have moved to the Republican party. Obviously, “all” is a general descriptor. There are outliers still in both parties but they’re pretty rare at this point.
Again you totally ignore both the hypothetical polling and the actual election results in the service of your ethereal phantasies. Sanders wouldn’t have sustained the sort of historic losses among the white working-class that Clinton did.
Lmfao, the chance either way was 0% given that no Democrat would have retaken control of Congress unless you think so little of Mrs. Clinton that she’d have sold the Dems down the river to strike a “Grand Bargain” with the Republicans. The difference is with Sanders you’d have moved the conversation decisively to the left.
It’s because your “communism” doesn’t translate into a roadmap for action. I’m just an old-school social democrat/New Deal liberal but I have a roadmap for decisively reshaping the political order unlike you.
Citation needed
Yes, it’s ok to vote for the Iraq War or to talk about gutting Social Security but God forbid if you dare compromise on a highly controversial moral issue in which unlike virtually every other cultural issue from gay marriage to civil rights to marijuana legalization there has been very little shift in societal attitudes on! And once again you erase all of Bernie’s supporters who weren’t “cishet white men”.
If only Joe Biden had chosen to run, I think he could’ve done it. 
Hubris.
All the “Biden could have won” and “Sanders could have won” theories are dependent on an impossible premise: that the quantity and intensity and viciousness of attacks on Biden or on Sanders that were actually taking place during the general election—essentially none—are equal to the quantity and intensity and viciousness of attacks on Biden or on Sanders that would have taken place had either been the Democratic nominee.
That’s not the way it works.
Biden had been rejected by his party every time he’d run for President. The affection for him that built up during his Vice Presidency, and the sympathy he garnered over the death of his son, would have dissipated the moment he left the Elder Statesman position and declared he wanted the Presidency. He would then be only an ambitious politician, out for himself. And the GOP would have gone to town on his tendency toward gaffes, on his image as a bit of a space case, and on the aforementioned numerous rejections by his own party. 'If the Democrats have discarded him every other time he’s tried to become President, why should any American want him, now?'…etc.
And the hatchet job they’d have done on Sanders would have been absolutely brutal. Old ditsy Commie guy who’s never run anything other than a small city, and that was decades ago–he has no record of achievement in the Congress–he’s been a parasite on the taxpayers for practically his whole life…etc.
The white workingmen who rejected Hillary would not have been Bernie’s champions. Very little about him speaks to them. He would have lost in a landslide.
Sanders would have polled a lot worse than Hillary, which would have ironically made him run a much more defensive campaign focused entirely on the blue wall which might have ended up working better than what Hillary did. Of course the only known fact about how Bernie Sanders would do in a real campaign is that he lost to Hillary Clinton in a democratic primary, which really makes me doubt he had any chance at all.
Sanders did, in fact, consistently poll much better than Clinton. Right up to the end of the race, polls showed he would have handily beaten Trump, while Clinton would be in a very close race against him. It’s amusing to see how the Clinton apologists either ignore the existence of those polls, as you seem to be doing, or handwave them away as Sherrerd is doing by claiming that that lead would certainly not have held up under real election conditions. Because, y’know, Clinton supporters have a lot of credibility when it comes to identifying winning candidates and reading the mood of the electorate.:rolleyes:
As opposed to Hillary’s strong record of losing the primary to Obama.
And Sanders supporters consistently ignore this point:
As noted already, those polls you mention were conducted in the context of massive amounts of flak being aimed at Clinton and relatively little being aimed at Sanders. Had Sanders been the frontman and thus the main target of the Firehoses of Bullshit, he’d have been slaughtered in November.
Wait, you’re accusing me of ignoring the point which I was specifically responding to?
Obviously we can never know for sure about what would have happened, but I think it’s more reasonable to assume that public opinion would NOT have massively shifted over a six month campaign than that it would have.
Your argument basically rests on your assertion that you are wise in the ways of politics and able to accurately predict the future. And if you thought nominating Hillary Clinton was a good idea, well…
I generalized it to “Sanders supporters” but you did effectively handwave it away.
You think it reasonable to assume that the polls would have been the same if the electoral landscape were completely different?
Doesn’t that describe your post as well?
Yes, that’s why I said that, oh wait, I didn’t.
I do think Sanders, in the position of Democratic nominee, would have faced a level of character assassination from Republicans that made the Democratic primaries look like the Mickey Mouse Club, and Bernie didn’t exactly prove himself to be levelheaded under fire in the first place. If Bernie been the nominee I would have supported him too, but I disagree with all the post-election Bernie Bros whining about how the Democratic Party happened to favour an actual Democrat over a non-party member (albeit a sympathetic one), and I disagree that those poll numbers would have withstood the reality of the campaign.
Personally I had hoped O’Malley would be a strong contender but his campaign got starved of oxygen thanks to the Clinton & Sanders Show. Lessig, Webb and Chafee were non-entities. Biden didn’t last (for understandable reasons) and has never been a great campaigner. Warren wasn’t interested and didn’t have enough experience (although in hindsight it appears that nobody cared about experience). Left with Clinton and Sanders as the last candidates standing, I felt Clinton was better prepared to weather the shitstorm that American presidential races have become. I’m not sure that rises to the level of “good idea” - it’s more of a “best of a bad lot” choice - but it’s what we got.
Trumpo the Magnificent attracted a lot of ex-Obama voters and a lot of young voters.
It seems rather more likely they just couldn’t stomach Hillary more than being attracted to his ideas — without her, most would have preferred Sanders to Trump even if the Right Wing machine proclaimed him Bernard, the Fifth Crown Prince of Hell.
All this shows the Democrats holding to their reputation, when they need a firing squad they form a circle.
No, he didn’t. Clinton cleaned up among young voters. Sanders likely would have done even better, but you can’t blame the millenials for this mess.
@Gyrate: polls throughout the primaries consistently showed that Sanders would beat Trump by about 10 points. The same polls consistently showed that Trump vs. Clinton would be a very close race. Since they correctly predicted the outcome of the election that did occur, isn’t it reasonable to assume that they would probably have been right about the one that didn’t occur as well?
By the time the primaries concluded, anyone who was paying attention had a pretty good idea of who Bernie Sanders was personally and politically, and most of them liked what they were seeing; today, he is still the most popular politician in the country. I think to assume that the GOP bullshit machine could have easily reversed that trend is to give them far too much credit.
Sure, nobody can know how the general election campaign would have unfolded. It’s possible that Sanders would have blown his 10 point lead, but I don’t know why you’d think that’s any more likely than that he would have won by 20.
We are both hypothesizing based on scanty data, but the difference is that all the available data supports my position.
No. It’s exactly as reasonable as saying ‘an octopus at the zoo, shown pictures of Trump and Clinton, touched the picture of Trump. That same octopus, shown pictures of Sanders and Trump, touched the picture of Sanders. Since the octopus was right about Trump versus Clinton, we can assume the octopus was right about the outcome if Trump had run against Sanders.’
Sanders is and was popular because the GOP was saying nice things about him. (They were delighted by the way he was tearing down Clinton for them.)
You are assuming that would have continued OR that GOP negative campaigning against Sanders would have had no effect. Ask John McCain about that–in 2000 he was doing pretty well until the pro-Bush part of the GOP machine started in on him. His fall in the polls is a textbook case of the effect of negative campaigning.
In all this, too, we haven’t even mentioned the black vote, which Clinton got in massive numbers. That portion of her support contributed greatly to her popular vote win. Would black voters have been as enthusiastic about Sanders? You are simply assuming that they would have been–without basis.