I feel like if we go by this post, the Democrats are pretty much just fine – we don’t need to do anything differently but pick a better candidate.
I think this would be a very bad idea for Democrats to think like this. We should identify all those things that went wrong, not just Hillary’s mistakes.
It sure wouldn’t look like it, considering the way he excoriates those that did.
I disagree. The Republicans have been serving up a menu of bullshit with a side of bigotry for most of my life. What they couldn’t handle was that Trump broke the rules about portion size and noone knew if they could go full bigot or if that would kill their political career. Well it might hurt you in a general election but when you are in field of 17 candidates, and polling at 20% makes you the frontrunner, then you can be the frontrunner on the racist vote alone. And you can get that just by saying out loud what Republicans have been implying for fucking decades.
Throw in some populism and bullshit political promises and BAM The Republicans get hoisted by their own petard.
He didn’t win the general election that way. Am I the only one that noticed that he dialed back the blatant racism during the general? He knew that you were right, there is a limit to how racist you can be in a general election.
If there is anything I posted prior to Hillary’s embarrassing loss that would make you think i would have voted for anyone other than Bernie or Hillary, please cite it or stop trying to shut down criticism by accusing me of voting for Trump. Because you are doing the SDMB equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalalalalalala.
So your argument is that Trump won because he out-bigoted everyone?
Really?
BTW, where do i say that any of that is OK? I am refuting your claim that he won because of bigotry rather than because Hillary was a horrible candidate.
Let me just repeat, we elected a black dude named Barack Hussein Obama TWICE. Trump is not some fucking invincible candidate of destiny, he is a bobblehead and he beat Hillary. That’s how fucking bad hillary was.
Part of why he won is bigotry. It doesn’t excuse Hillary’s mistakes, but it is still true.
So what went wrong that wasn’t a Hillary mistake?
Ignoring the growing populism we saw in both Trump and Bernie’s popularity?
Ignoring the swing states to go rake huge money leads on Trump in places like San Francisco and Manhattan?
Taking 99% of the money from joint fundraising events so that the state candidates were left with fucking nothing for local campaigns?
Having a corrupt primary.
Going crazy with the gun issue because you felt the need to get to the left of the socialist on something, ANYTHING, even though you winning anyway.
Calling half the Republican base a basket of deplorables (who cares if its true, are you a politician or not?)
I mean wtf did the Democrats do wrong that wasn’t Hillary related?
You have been a democrat since 2003. Were you voting for this mound of bullshit before that?
I don’t excoriate those who voted for her. I excoriate those who insist on making excuses for her loss. I voted for her in the general because wtf else was I gonna do? I don’t blame anyone for voting for her, I blame people for saying “ZOMG she lost because the Russians” or “ZOMG it was racists” or “ZOMG it was fucking anything but because Hillary was a shitty canddiate”
Yes, its true but its also part of why every fucking Republican since the cultural revolution has won.
Yes, but Trump had a particular resonance with bigots. No recent Republican has had such prominent endorsements from white supremacists. And at least some of these folks had removed themselves from the political process in recent elections, until Trump.
You think he’s listening? Hearing slightly nuanced data and normalizing don the con are mutually exclusive behaviors.
They’ve been creeping back in since the tea party. See, John Birch Society.
WTF is it with the notion that we are normalizing something. You can’t say that I approve or support his behaviour so you say I’m normalizing it. WTF does that even mean? That I accept that he was elected and that he will be our next president? Isn’t that just accepting reality? Like the fact that Hillary was a shitty candidate and has noone to blame but herself.
Now we’re just arguing rate of change. I think it picked up astronomically since Trump’s campaign started, and he brought out a lot of bigoted people who hadn’t been voting in recent elections, by their own words.
If we’re going to go by their own words, then we can also believe that a shitload of gun rights folks were turned off by Hillary’s emphasis on gun control. And a shitload of THEM came out to vote that had not voted in a long time, or ever.
The fact of the matter is that America is not David Duke’s America. If you can’t overcome whatever headwind that is created by the mobilization of the David Dukes of the world then doesn’t that make you a pretty weak candidate?
You’re almost saying that its not Hillary’s fault because Trump put up a fight.
I agree that there are a myriad of factors but none of them excuses Hillary’s loss. She owns that. You don’t get to lose to Donald Bobblehead Trump and blame someone or something else.
Jesus. I think we’re done here. I’ve said over and over again that she sucks and deserves a lot of blame. I’m just saying that there’s more to this story, but you’re not interested in it. So we’ll just have to disagree – you think nothing significant happened more than “Hillary sucks”, and I think that happened plus a lot of other significant things happened.
I hope the Democrats consider all the possibilities and not just that we had a bad candidate.
This whole “Hillary was an especially bad candidate” bullshit hasn’t gotten any less bullshittier between DA’s incessant trumpeting and iiandyiiii’s acceptance of it ‘just with some other causes please.’
Mrs. Clinton was the most highly qualified candidate we’ve had in generations, and one of the least objectively dishonest. But she is not charismatic, and she is not a natural campaigner. And the reality of the 2016 general election campaign is that she needed to have been exceptional at campaigning and extraordinarily charismatic, because the political reporting was heavily stacked against her and the electorate has been trained away from complexity and independent thought. Both left and right (even if more so on the right).
Looking for charismatic Presidential candidates instead of working to rebuild a strong party in every state is a recipe for more electoral disaster. There was nothing wrong with our 2016 candidate and a whole lot of things that were very right.
I think that’s going too far the other way as well. I think Hillary turned out to be a bad candidate, but on the level of Gore and Kerry (who were both pretty shitty), not some unbelievable worst-candidate-in-history. The Democrats should recognize we need a candidate with some ability to connect, and not a garbage truck full of baggage (whether that baggage is fictional or not).
To effectively “connect” with a large electorate via available media, a candidate must have either a strong combination of two concentrations of effort or an overwhelming advantage against their opponents regarding one or the other: 1) a facility to communicate emotionally, including the ability to frame positions within simple concepts that resonate with a target audience that is itself large enough and involved enough to sway an election, and 2) an audience that is already primed in the paradigmatic or mythological structures and institutional biases underlying the positions and rhetoric of the candidate.
The Republicans can enjoy the fruits of literally decades of very skillful work shoring up their advantage in the second concentration. And they have at least a parity with the Democrats in the first. In fact, broad or deep comprehension of complex issues may actually hinder a candidate’s ability to ‘connect’ with an increasingly less engaged and impatient electorate unless that candidate can subvert her/his tendencies toward accuracy and completeness. Which conveys a disadvantage for Democrats.
Candidates like WJC and BHO who can exhibit deep knowledge but also that ability to connect are pretty rare. Candidates like HRC are also rare, but are more common within the Democratic bullpen, and can be cultivated more readily. I worry that any preoccupation with finding charismatic figures tends to reinforce the neglect shown by the Democratic Party on a national level for the nitty gritty full-time work of organizing and communicating.
Even if we can continue to find the rare camera-ready ‘connectors’ who can excite the base and attract the vacillators, the best result is a few highly popular Dems within a majority GOP government. And we often handicap our successful ‘connectors’ through infighting between pragmatists and the purists who are dissatisfied because such candidates are necessarily inclusive of opposing ideological considerations.
We have to do the hard work at the grassroots level and stop looking for heroes and paladins on the national level.