Yes, these would be harder to categorize. But that they might be harder to organize and categorize shouldn’t be an excuse to pretend they don’t count just so you can say that liberals are more violent.
Right, I think to most North Carolina voters HB2 was just seen as a very stupid overreaction to a law Charlotte passed. So you go from a minor kerfluffle that affects one city in North Carolina, to a big shit storm that cost the state something like over 1,000 high paying tech sector jobs and over $100m in lost economic opportunity.
Even really socially conservative North Carolinians who don’t live in Charlotte were probably dubious about making (literally) a national issue out of something Charlotte was doing.
Hillary and Trump had such a close election that you can basically fill a hat up with reasons she lost and Trump won, pull one out, and any one of them you can make a compelling argument for, the core truth is that all of those the reasons people have named mattered to varying degrees–and in a super close election even something that only mattered a little bit could’ve been decisive if handled slightly differently.
I’ve found it interesting to see liberals first decry how they’ve forgotten the white working class, a group that used to primarily vote Democrat, and then other liberals struck back saying “but they’re bigots who don’t understand us.” I think both are true, but mostly unimportant to the issue of the Presidential race. We’ve seen good evidence a Democrat that actually works at appealing to a broader base of voters (Hillary’s campaign did far less work than Obama '12 in a lot of the important states she lost by small margins), and one who doesn’t make 90% of her ad buys attack ads on the opponent’s “meanness/bigotry”, can probably win the EC, especially because demographics is on the Democrat’s side; just not to the degree necessary to overcome Hillary’s flawed ad strategy and lower outreach campaign. But even with the strategic missteps Hillary made if she was someone other than Hillary I think it’s pretty obvious they’d have won 300-330 electoral votes and a 2m+ popular vote victory.
Easy. A lot of people are against globalism, free trade and the like. They feel that it exports American jobs overseas. A lot of people are against illegal immigration. A lot of people are against established Washington elites (the proverbial “swamp”). And to most of these people, they’re far more concerned with how the potential POTUS was planning to deal with these issues than whether or not one said a few moderately bigoted things.
In other words, you go try and tell a construction tradesman (plumber, electrician, etc…) in the Southwest that he should vote for the candidate who doesn’t propose a hard crackdown on illegal immigration, because the other guy said something bigoted. A lot of those guys are being run out of business by unlicensed illegal immigrants doing the grunt work that was formerly done by apprentices and journeymen. It doesn’t make a hill of beans to them if Trump says he’s going to eject the Muslims, so long as he’s doing something about that which is more immediately important to them.
If so, this reflects very poorly on them. This kind of prioritizing is, unfortunately, probably very common through history, such as Germans who thought Hitler would bring their economy back and didn’t care what he said about the Jews, but it’s a lesson that hopefully humanity will learn one day. Shame on those humans who haven’t yet learned it.
So, because people believed Trumps lies, and his lies were good enough for people to ignore the hateful things that he said. Got it.
So all Hillary had to do to win was tell them what they wanted to hear and promise them the moon? Basically, that’s all Trump did-he stroked their egos and made promises, and they were willing to overlook the fact that he was a con artist with a long history of fucking over the little guy, a man with NO history of looking out for anyone but himself. I ask this question for the umpteenth fucking time: Why does anyone believe a thing that crawls out of his mouth? What makes ANYONE think that he took this job to benefit anyone but himself?
“I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll be there again,” as Neil Young once sang. But before I admit I’m wrong, for some odd reason I feel a need to understand what I’m supposedly wrong about.
- Sure, they’re different types of Republicans, but only in the limited sense of having somewhat different areas of interest and emphasis.
But is there anything they disagree on? If Pence had to break a 50-50 Senate tie, is there anything he’d vote differently on than Ryan would?
- And sure, they’re both very different from Trump; I’m not saying otherwise. The question is, is there anything Trump would veto that Ryan would try to pass, if Ryan managed to get it through Congress?
I say you won’t see it happen. Do you disagree? If so, name a particular issue where you think this is likely.
Do you not realize that most people think ALL politicians, especially Presidential hopefuls are full of shit and hot air in varying degrees? I mean, they routinely say they’re going to DO things that the President has no jurisdiction to actually “do”. At best, they can champion a bill or series of bills meant to accomplish some task. But that doesn’t translate into actually being able to “do” very much at all by simple fiat, like their campaign propaganda claim.
I suspect that a great many people didn’t believe either of them, but at least Trump’s bullshit was more in line with what they wanted to hear. It’s not like Hillary was perceived as any more trustworthy.
And I’m not saying that these people’s voting rationale is necessarily right or proper, but merely trying to explain it. It’s more a question of the perceived imminence of the issue; some kind of vague, future racism against some “other” group like Muslims is far less imminent than the threat to a journeyman plumber’s job posed by low-wage illegal Mexican construction workers. Especially when (I’d wager) most people in the US have never actually met a real Muslim.
So it may not be morally right exactly, but it’s understandable, and that’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s not some kind of mass craziness where people went off the rails en-masse. It’s a fairly predictable thing, but the pollsters and media failed to imagine it’s magnitudel.
Yeah, because even though the GOP had a file on him a foot thick, they wouldn’t have used any of it if he’d been the nominee.
Like that video of Bernie applauding Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega down in Nicaragua as Ortega was launching an anti-American verbal fusillade. That alone would have killed Bernie’s campaign, but I’m sure the GOP would have said, no, it wouldn’t be fair to use this.
You seem to have excellent hindsight for a person who can’t figure out what went wrong to begin with.
This election needs to be placed in the greater context of what’s happening worldwide, which is the collapse of the post-World War Two American - Allied geopolitical and economic system. People in America and Europe have lost faith in that system, much of the rebellion owing to the residual aftershocks of the failed Middle East military campaigns and the financial crisis of 2008. Those produced major headwinds coming into the election for Hillary Clinton, as did a good, solid 8 year period in which a lot of White Americans were confronted with a palpable fear that their country was slipping away from them.
Even with all of that being said, this was a winnable election for Hillary Clinton. She could have won the race if she had run a better campaign. But we’ve seen in two separate election cycles that campaigning is just not her thing. Her ultimate weakness - her Shakespearean flaw - is her stubbornness. Ignoring the advice of others in setting up her private email server the way she did. Never really addressing the email controversy head-on once it became a public concern. Giving tortured, lawyerish explanations about these concerns in interviews. Picking Tim Kaine, whom I like but was seriously mismatched with the energy of her party’s base of voters. Confining her campaign to ‘states that really mattered’. All of these factored in the end.
So basically, she’s an idiot?
She probably made some idiotic political decisions.
People are complicated.
Thought I’d get in one place all of the wisdom our exemplar of a taxicab alternative has shared with us so far:
'Nuff said. 
Those grapes will start tasting less sour over time. Thanks for the re-post! A little added emphasis doesn’t hurt.
I thought he was a hate filled racist. Or is all racism a political statement?
I mostly agree with that. Plus she was a corrupt globalist plutocrat and she beat the anti-gun drums during the primary to get to the left of Bernie on an issue and never tacked back to the center during the general. She didn’t lose because North Carolina didn’t vote for her, she lost because a few hundred thousand people in the rust belt states felt that she was worse than Donald bobblehead Trump!!!
Mistakes were made.