Jill Stein was irrelevant. Hillary lost because she ran the stupidest electoral campaign in history. Terrified for some reason that Trump would win the popular vote while she won the electoral college (who the fuck cared if Trump won the popular vote?) she concentrated her campaign on states that didn’t matter while ignoring those that did.
Really, her campaign should be studied by future politicians as a lesson on what not to do if you want to win an election.
So, I showed polls that support my position, that pandering to gun owners will hurt her base of Democratic voters. You have showed nothing.
Again, I dont care for her stance here. But she was pandering to her base, not to GOP voters who wouldnt vote for her anyway.
Do you consider Iran a “nuclear power”?
I’ve already posted the cite for it in this thread. Hillary Clinton clearly stated that she believes that Heller was wrongly decided, and that the DC gun ban should have been upheld. The Heller decision ruled both that a complete ban on a class of firearms and a ban on having a firearm in condition suitable for self defense are unconstitutional, and that background checks, restrictions based on criminal or mental health history, licensing, and registration are not constitutionally restricted. The DC gun ban included a complete ban ordinary people possessing handguns or having any firearm in a condition suitable for self defense.
Anti-gun people want to ignore that she explicitly supported the DC gun ban and explicitly opposes a court ruling that only prevents complete bans, not the ‘mild’ gun control she says she wants, but it’s at odds with reality.
The 77 Aye votes enabled the war, Clinton’s was one of them. That means she did enable the war. The logic behind the idea that you can vote to enable something as a senator but not count as enabling it if it’s not a 51-50 vote is… lacking.
Cite for Trump supporting acts of war against a nuclear power. Here’s a cite for Clinton supporting the creation of no-fly zones for Russian aircraft. While she dodges a lot, creating and enforcing a no-fly zone requires shooting at aircraft that violate the zone, which would entail US aircraft shooting down Russian aircraft, which is a clear act of war against a nuclear power.
On your quotes:
That’s a ‘yes’.
That’s also a clear support of the DC ban. The ‘under any circumstances’ is just weasel words - any ban in the real world has some exceptions, even the UK’s handgun ban doesn’t apply in Northern Ireland so would be fine with ‘any circumstances’ loophole.
Actually, what you showed was a poll of the different party members support for types of gun control. This does absolutely nothing to address your claim that Clinton’s gun positions had no negative impact on her election results. Do you see the difference?
The rest of her base doesn’t matter - the only thing that could have made a difference was WI, MI, and PA. She doesn’t have to pander to the GOP voters, but she does have to energize the Democratic voters. Something about her candidacy did not motivate previously Democratic voters to support her. I think it’s within the realm of reasonableness that part of that was her gun positions.
You’re wrong. You have her exact words, but you distort them
Here is her website. Show me where it sez that:
*"As president, Hillary will:
Expand background checks to more gun sales—including by closing the gun show and internet sales loopholes—and strengthen the background check system by getting rid of the so-called “Charleston Loophole.”
Take on the gun lobby by removing the industry’s sweeping legal protection for illegal and irresponsible actions (which makes it almost impossible for people to hold them accountable), and revoking licenses from dealers who break the law.
Keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, other violent criminals, and the severely mentally ill by supporting laws that stop domestic abusers from buying and owning guns, making it a federal crime for someone to intentionally buy a gun for a person prohibited from owning one, and closing the loopholes that allow people suffering from severe mental illness to purchase and own guns. She will also support work to keep military-style weapons off our streets."*
Those are her official positions. Taking off hand answers out of context does not show her positions.
Now, if you wanna say her answer:
*Q: But what do you support?
A: I support sensible regulation that is consistent with the constitutional right to own and bear arms.
Q: Is the DC ban consistent with that right?
A: I think a total ban, with no exceptions under any circumstances, might be found by the court not to be. But DC or anybody else [should be able to] come up with sensible regulations to protect their people.
*
was weasel worded, was political gobbledygook, was framed in such a way it could mean many things- sure. Hillary was and is a consummate poltico. She talks like one.
But There, in a web site is her official position. Show me where is sez “Heller was wrongly decided”, show me where it sez “ban all handguns”, show me- *any of the stuff you claim she has said. *
No NET negative impact, yes. Show me the voter base that would have voted Clinton had she just stayed silent on gun control- they would have just parroted and taken out of context things she said in the past to “prove” she wants to 'take away our guns". Hell, right here in this very thread it is happening- ignore what her position officially is, instead take out of context and misquote offhand remarks.
But I can show you the voter base she would have lost- right there in the polls.
Ah, so if Hillary had a Crystal ball, and could have knows that those three states were the only critical ones…
Yes, “Something about her candidacy did not motivate previously Democratic voters to support her. I think it’s within the realm of reasonableness that part of that was her gun positions”…**.that she wasn’t strong enough on gun control.
**
Let me ask this- did you vote for Clinton or Trump?
Pantastic: same question.
No, you can’t. Because your polling cite doesn’t show what you claim. Not even remotely close.
Lots of democratic voters are against gun control in various forms. Several of them posted in this thread. The only way to support your claim is by cherry picking various poll responses, and assuming a consequence based on no evidence.
For your claims to be true, you have to assume the number of people who would have voted for Clinton but chose not to vote because of her positions on guns is less than the number of people who would not have voted for her if she had softer positions on guns.
I’m not saying what Clinton should have done - I’m glad she lost. I said early on in this campaign that I hope she pushes her anti-gun agenda hard because I hoped it would cost her. I don’t know to what extent it did, but I don’t think you do either.
It’s almost like you slavishly believe what’s on the official website, and not the words that come out of her mouth. This is part of why Clinton had a credibility problem.
You think that changing her stance on guns would have made difference? There are people in this very thread looking at stuff from many years ago, suggesting that those statements she made mean that she is going to take everyone’s guns away.
About believing what’s on her website, rather than what comes out of her mouth? That’s pretty disingenuous. What’s on her website is specifically what came out of her mouth. She helped write it. What you hear that comes out of her mouth are out of context snippets that are dressed up to sound the way you want them to, even though they have very little to do with her actual positions. I think it is you, my friend that is choosing the entirely wrong narrative to listen to.
The reason that she had a credibility problem is that people lied about what she said, and other people believed those lies. As a believer yourself, I am sure you can’t see the problem, but if you could actually look at those things she said in the context in which she said them, and have something of an open mind about it, I think that you could come to a whole new conclusion. What an epiphany you could have.
Yes, but that would mean Donnie would be Senior Class President if he were more popular, and he was a bad boy, and she wanted to do all sorts of keen stuff, like having compulsory book clubs with the books she liked, and regular lectures on drugs, and banning smoking and drinking, and group hikes run by her methodist church with hearty singing, and she had charts 'n stuff to show why her ideas were the best, and she would rather die than be less popular, and she was born to be Senior Class President.
Losing the US presidency was a price worth paying if she got the popular vote.
Yeah, but it shouldn’t be. The situation you describe basically describes the Democratic party until 2010 or so when all the conservative Democrats were voted out of office (and we can debate why that happened), but for some reason the DNC was fine with tons of pro-life Democratic State legislators, governors, House members and Senators for ages, fine with leaving same sex marriage as a matter of conscience and etc. Harry Reid for most of his career was pro-life until he kind of got “fuzzy on it” late. There’s a few remnant Democrats of this mould still left (Sen. Manchin of WV, Rep. Collin Peterson in the MN 6th), Jim Webb is an example of one of them too (he was pretty popular in Virginia but basically quit after one term in the Senate.)
Did these Democrats magically become unelectable in most of the rural districts where they had been electable for some 40 years after the signing of the Civil Rights laws and the “Southern Strategy” that is often blamed for their demise, or has some more recent series of mistakes been the cause of their downfall.
FWIW, Peterson of MN claims that at least part of the problem is Democratic primary voters. He says if he wasn’t a 14 term incumbent, he’d never win a Democratic primary, because they insist on running far left liberals even in districts like his which the Cook Political survey lists as being R+5. I think there’s at least a decent chance Democrats are creating too much issues on which you “must agree” with the national party and it’s making it so they aren’t competitive in places they had been competitive for years. I’ve been pointing to the NY 19th (Cook report lists as D+1), they ran Zephyr Teachout in a winnable district for Democrats, when she’s more of a candidate for a D+30 district like you’d find in NYC, a district that is pretty close to a push, you need a moderate Democrat, but progressives had massive boners for her and celebrated her candidacy wildly right until the day she lost by a large margin to middling Republican John Faso.
The Republicans have become similarly recalcitrant in primaries, but I think they’re benefiting more from it because when you look at the geographical distribution of house seats and senate seats, even though a lot of liberal ideas are fairly mainstream in terms of “total population of America that supports x”, liberals have tremendous “clumping” on the coasts and within highly urbanized cities outside of the coasts, and this means these views are “disproportionately bad” politics in the rest of the districts, districts (and States) without which the Democrats will struggle to even control congress again.
That’s one good reason that wouldn’t work well. The other is the obviously limited effect of strict gun laws in one state in a union with no border controls between states.
Eg. the effectiveness of strict gun control in a state like mine, NJ, has long been directly affected by how easy it is to buy guns in other states. If abortion were legal in NJ but not in AL, that wouldn’t as directly affect NJ abortion rights.
Anyway the idea of the Democrats favoring whatever gun control could pass in a given state is basically the same as saying they just back away from gun control. There isn’t some urgent agenda to greatly further tighten gun control in NJ for example (again there’s a real limit to what you can do with open state to state borders and other states with hardly any gun control compared to what we already have). And OTOH the Democrats would never win back the 30 some states basically controlled by the GOP by pushing more gun control in them than the little they have. It’s just a losing issue politically IMO. The US is a ‘special snowflake’ on guns politically.
Unenumerated rights should be up to the states, or the people. I agree with you about that. But the right of the people to keep and bear arms is an enumerated right.
The extent to which the DNC was fine with pro-life Democrats was influenced by the strategy they have found successful, of taking abortion out of the hands of legislators, especially state legislators, and putting into the hands of the Supreme Court. As long as you can get five Justices to say that nobody gets to legislate abortion except them, it doesn’t matter what a Democrat’s position is - he or she isn’t going to be able to do much to enact that position into law. And the DNC knew it.
That’s much of what I meant about the dangers of putting anything back to the state level, including gun rights. Because everyone, pro-choice, pro-gun, anti-both, is going to ask for the principle on which they base the belief that such-and-such a right should be a matter for the Supremes, and why. The GOP controls both houses in 30 of the 50 states, and they aren’t going to limit themselves to just the issues the DNC wants to leave to the states.
Regards,
Shodan
I can’t believe that the pussy grabber got more of the white evangelical vote than Bush. Wow!
Its pretty much anybody’s fault as long as we don’t have to take a long hard look at ourselves and the people we nominate.
I’m talking more about political strategy than practicality. Voters don’t listen or understand things like “he supports or opposes x, but it’s an issue that’s largely been decided by the Supreme Court and couldn’t be changed without a new Supreme Court composed of justices willing to overturn the old decision or a constitutional amendment” they stop shortly after “pro-life” or “pro-choice.” Pro-Life dems and pro-gun dems are quite valuable for the Democrats at winning in districts that they need to win some of if they want to win back the House, and states they need to win if they want to win back the Senate.
Philosophically I think the framework in Heller is pretty reasonable on guns, State’s shouldn’t be able to outright ban guns but I’m fine with California or New Jersey style restrictions that are based on the wishes of their people. I wouldn’t want such restrictions on my firearms ownership here in Virginia, but I’m not super worried about that anytime in my lifetime. Democrats who want to push national gun legislation (like a resurrected Assault Weapons Ban) are wasting political capital and making it harder for local/regional Democratic candidates to appeal to the voters in their areas.
She was pushing he assault weapons ban as she toured the country with Newtown parents bashing Bernie for his vote on the PLCAA. She wen on to mischaracterize the PLCAA as total tort immunity for gun manufacturers.
I fully expected her to mitigate this position by leaking photos of her duck hunting with Bill or Ed Rendell but she didn’t.
I’ve voted party line Democrat since we invaded Iraq.
I know a shitload of gun owners who rarely vote to begin with. They think its a waste of time, but they voted in the last election.
Being too strident on the gun issue can hurt Democrats. Don’t believe me? How about Bill Clinton?
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/bill-clinton-to-democrats-dont-trivialize-gun-culture-086443
Democrats will end up throwing every other issue and several elections under the bus over the gun issue until they realize its an explicit constitutional right. Something the right to abortion is not.