It wasn’t a joke, and I didn’t think it was funny either. ObamaCare was sold to America on the back of a huge and oft-repeated lie: that if we liked our health insurance, we’d get to keep it. I REALLY liked my pre-ACA health insurance plan. Obama and the Dems wrecked that for me.
And, from what I’ve heard, there’s at least a decent chance that Republicans will keep the guarantee-issue portion of the ACA, so I’m not sure Translucent Daydream needs to fret just yet.
Nope, I’m not distorting her words at all, I’m simply pointing out what the court decision she objected to said and what the laws she supported leaving in place actually entailed. You want to characterize her position as ‘mild’, but her actual words show that she wants something that is very much not ‘mild’, and that she was not campaigning on a ‘mild’ position. And this is a president who’s going to get multiple supreme court nominees, so her position on court rulings is not just an abstract theoretical worry.
I already quoted her saying that she opposed Heller, and supporting the DC gun ban. Even your own quote about the DC gun ban shows her saying she’s not opposed to a complete ban on handguns and having guns available for self-defense. The fact that her official party platform is milder than her campaign statements doesn’t change that.
“Some sort of gun control” is a useless phrase, as has been pointed out to you before - the NRA supports ‘some sort of gun control’, and has been in favor of ‘some sort of gun control’ for decades (they were the ones who pushed to create the national instant check system over the objections of gun control groups). What your poll shows is that a lot of democrats like to see themselves as pro-gun-control when they answer polls, it doesn’t mean that they consider radical gun control measures like the DC gun ban ‘mild’.
And you haven’t provided anything supporting your contention that pro-gun people will always, 100% vote Republican. And you won’t be able to, because there have been plenty of pro-gun democrats elected, and plenty of pro-gun people who vote for democrats despite their position on gun control. Just people in this thread disprove your ‘always, 100%’ statistic, though I’m sure that won’t stop you from repeating it.
Only by taking her words out of context.
Look,.here is her position:
Show me “opposed Heller, and supporting the DC gun ban”* there*. You can’t.
I answered the question a day before you asked it.
No, it’s perfectly in context to take her words about the Heller decision as being about the Heller decision. The idea that taking her comments about a particular SC decision as being about the decision is somehow taking them ‘out of context’ is just bizarre.
If I had claimed that she stated that on that specific page, you’d have gotten me. But I never made any such claim, so I’m not sure what you think you win by bragging that I can’t show something I never claimed. I think I’ve supported my case on her position well enough, and you’re clearly not going to change your mind, so I’m not going to keep requoting her.
But if you think that pro-gun people read her statements about Heller and DC as being in favor of “mild” gun control like you do, you’re grossly mistaken.
The issue is not that people who voted for Stein would have voted for Clinton. The issue is that there is no rational reason for them to have voted for Stein instead of Clinton, because Clinton gives them more of what they want, while Stein, who couldn’t win, gets them nothing. And Trump gets them the opposite, since Stein ran on the left
And their states were not remotely safe, so it wasn’t a state to try and get Stein the 5% needed to get the Green Party funding next year.
The point is that we need to drive this lesson home. Voting third party only results in the viable candidate winning who you supported the least. Stein voters very much did help Trump win the White House. And while neither Clinton nor Trump are Green, Clinton was far, far closer. Clinton’s presidency would have guaranteed that progressive achievements would not be undone.
I tried my best to explain the Supreme Court issue to Greens. And, while that was apparently enough for the White Evangelicals, the Greens didn’t seem to care. They just made up excuses.
Unfortunately, I worry that only having stuff reversed like Roe v. Wade will actually wake these people up to reality. Even now, with Trump winning, I’ve seen them make excuses. And that should have been a nightmare scenario for them if they actually support the Green Party platform.
The perfect can never be the enemy of the good.
The NRA is not pro-gun control. Just because they pushed for such things in the past doesn’t mean they are pro-gun control. The NRA deliberately misrepresents any attempt at gun control as gun confiscation, and rallies people against it.
They completely reinvented themselves as the anti-gun-control lobby, and they get their power by claiming that all gun control is just as slippery slope to having your guns taken away. They risk losing everything if they honor gun control. They’d get the same reaction Bernie Sanders got when he endorsed Clinton–people assumed he’d been taken over by the conspiracy.
“Hey Trump said he was in favor of Gun controls too!” “Well, that’s not his official opinion, that was some time ago, here’s his* real* position: Trump on guns.”
(post shortened, underline added)
The issue seems to be that you can find no rational reason for voters to vote for Stein, or Bernie, or Trump, instead of Clinton. The voters obviously found a reason, which apparently didn’t include taking your advise.
Are you saying that you convinced many White Evangelicals to vote for Trump?
I remind people of this thread.
Stein voters
People who sat out
People whose votes were suppressed by the Republicans
All of those were factors that helped us elect a Nazi.
Can you remind us again why we would need to be reminded of that thread?
I’m not going to read through the whole thread. I’m confused: let’s assume that nearly all Jill Stein voters, had they not voted for her, would have voted for Hillary Clinton (an untested assumption, and probably unwarranted, since there were a fairly large number of people nationwide who didn’t vote for ANY presidential candidate, despite going to the polls). So now we think, “Aha, had Jill Stein not run, Hillary Clinton would be president!”
But there were many, many more people who voted for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson. Now, if he hadn’t run, or if people who voted for him had listened to reason and voted for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, can we not presuppose that the vast majority of them would have voted for Donald Trump? And if that’s the case (and I submit it’s just as logical as the Stein votes migrate en masse to Hillary case), then wouldn’t Ms. Clinton still be a loser?
Has this not already been pointed out? Or is it the case (not unknown here on the Board) that it has, but it is being blithely ignored by people who supported Ms. Clinton, like BigT and BigAppleBucky?
It is just as disingenuous for people to claim that third party candidates (Stein in particular) caused Clinton to lose as to blame the known imbalances in the Electoral College for her loss; in both cases, the impact was pretty well understood before the election, and by failing to focus on the needs and concerns of centrists middle class voters in “flyover country” or address the legitimate concerns about her ethical lapses which were spun into a tapestry of conspiranoia, Clinton, and by extension the DNC leadership that backed her in obtuseness to her public reputation, lost the election.
Third party candidates have been and will remain a fixture in American politics, and while they rarely have any real chance of substantially influencing an election (nor, can it be argued, that they did so here against such pathetically narrow margins) they provide service as a bellwether of public dissatisfaction with the status quo. The real problem was that the Republican nomination was captured by what was essentially a third party candidate in a display of disaffection for the GOP mainliners, and he did so with what I can’t bring myself to term it brilliance but a sort of rude panache, a completely unvarnished and unabashed crudeness that got to the core of what a large selection of the voting public is upset about. That he did so without coherent policies is no surprise–certainly, neither Stein nor Johnson had much in the way of detailed, rational policy–but that Trump was able to hijack the entire Republican agenda merely by adopting it and adding an unapologetic demagogue spin upon it showed just how dissatisfied the public was with the various and multiple options given to them by the Republican leadership.
That Clinton was not able to trounce this fatuous buffoon and the fractured politics he gathered in his stubby-fingered hands was an indication of how deeply disliked and untrusted she was by a significant segment of the public, both by reason (her hawkishness on international affairs, ties to banking interests, and her come-lately embracement of progressive causes) and emotion (negative association with her husband, manufactured or inflated scandals, her general failure to appear concerned or warm to voters). The rationale that if Factor X or Y hadn’t played into the election, Clinton would have scraped by a victory in the Electoral College misses the point that any decent candidate should have sent Trump whimpering back to his penthouse, tweeting lame insults all the way. Setting aside the dirty tricks and manufactured scandal which legitimately damaged her momentum at critical points late in the campaign, Hillary Clinton lost because Hillary Clinton was never more than a marginal candidate, and complaining that a few thousands of voters voted for a anti-science candidate with a tenuous grasp on basic economics only points out that Clinton was not a strong or appealing enough candidate to get those voters to pragmatically swing to her camp.
Stranger
Agreed.
I’d say this takes the responsibility away from the average voter to have any understanding of anything whatsoever.
Surely in almost every instance, Johnson took more votes away from Trump than Stein took from Hillary?
Johnson, as well as Stein, also got far more votes than he would have in a normal election cycle. Most of the people I knew planning on voting for him was because of his stance on drug legalization. People that would have solidly voted for a democrat, as republicans are not exactly drug friendly.
So, instead of a candidate generally friendly to marijuana, like Clinton, you got Trump who has appointed a guy who will totally ban it even at State levels. Good Job!:rolleyes:
Hillary Clinton is “friendly to marijuana”? Well, sorta. And that kind of sums up much of the problem with Clinton as a candidate in a nutshell; she took a centerist (or no) position on many salient issues, or at least waited way too long to take a position such that it was obvious pandering, and then took strong positions on inherently polarizing issues. It’s not wrong to take strong positions on issues that a candidate is championing, but you have to recognize that taking strong positions is going to alienate single issue voters and adjust accordingly to foster support on voters who are not decided on that issue.
Marijuana legalization is a good example because there is little value to a progressive candidate in taking a soft position (e.g. non-enforcement) versus a strong position (decriminalization for recreational use and regulated legalization for medical application) given that the people who are not already in opposition to her other stances don’t generally care and it would have catered to crucial demographics, and also would have just been the right thing to do from an ethical standpoint (stop persecuting adults for using a substance quantifiably less dangerous than legally available medications and intoxicants).
There are single issue and identity voters out there, and if you don’t give them a solidly hopeful reason to vote for you then you can’t be surprised that they “throw away” their vote on a hopeless third party candidate. And I say this as someone who held my nose and voted for Clinton because she was pragmatically not just the best of the two major party candidates, but the best of a sad lot of all available candidates. Clinton ran a poor campaign that pandered to her suburban base and just assumed that voters who selected Obama or generally vote Democratic would vote for her by default. She certainly had some help in her floundering but stupid questions about email servers and her husband’s infidelities wouldn’t have had nearly as much traction if she’d had a solid message and broad base of support. She did not have this from the beginning, nor did she make a good effort to build it, and the responsibility for that failing falls directly upon her campaign.
Stranger
Yes, I am surprised. I generally think poepel are rational. And given a choice between “cant win but supports my position 100%” vs "may win but supports me only 50%’ and “can win but will make my life a living hell on earth” I think rational people would go for the compromise.