I don’t even want to think about who would follow Moore, assuming both that he were allowed to take office and that he would allow a further-right-than-trump successor to take office. Because that’s the worry isn’t it. The pendulum swings and we’re all used to that, but it isn’t supposed to swing further and further each time. How long before someone says: “Enough with this stupid pendulum.”?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure Trump got the idea while being roasted at that correspondent’s dinner. Remember OBama taking shots at him? Go back and look at his face. He’s steaming.
That, right there is when Donald decided he’d show all of them!
That’s my opinion. Romney? A walking cardboard cut out AND a Mormon, wearing funny underwear! He never had a shot, but he wasn’t bad looking and some people kinda liked him in his home state.
I was unaware there was any real response to Romney. I definitely don’t remember any racism allegations or calling him a Nazi or anything. He was just boring and said some dumb things. The binder full of women thing hit for the same reason “basket of deplorables” did. It appeared to confirm preexisting biases. Same with him saying that some people were unreachable because they sucked on the government teat. Not exactly the right thing to say when you’re though of as rich and aloof.
I mean, I guess Trump did try to play to the lowest common denominator to combat his billionaire image. But I see no sign that he actually changed anything about how he had been presenting himself before.
And if you want to say that hyperbole in the past made Trump bulletproof when he actually was that bad, then I think you’d have to pick a different candidate.
I’ll be honest–while I voted for Obama, I honestly would not have minded had Romney won, as long as we kept the Senate. It’s congressional Republicans I was upset with at the time, not Romney himself. McCain I was more worried about, because of Palin.
I’ve literally never called any presidential candidate any of the stuff I’ve called Trump. I’ve never thought any of them were evil before Trump, so I tried to look at their good sides. I admit I was worried about Cheney, but that’s about it.
You misspelled “any.”
The motivation behind the crying-wolf tactic is understandable - you want your side to win every game.
Unfortunately, this is akin to a head coach pulling out every trick play in his playbook long before the Big Game arrives. By the time the real Big Game arrives, his opponent(s) have been watching the game film and analyzed his tendencies. He’s toast.
I don’t think that the left was necessarily wrong in pointing out past examples of sexism and racism, and I don’t think that this is why the left lost. I think that it lost because it failed to understand the anxieties among many white Americans, even those who don’t necessarily fit into the category of solid right wing republican but perhaps just right-leaning independent. They failed to understand that America because they wrote it off after Barack Obama’s election victory in 2008. They believed that if they just got out their base of urban cosmopolitan progressives that they’d retain their position in rust belt country. They failed to recognize that urban cosmopolitans weren’t all aboard the Hillary train and that they had been steadily losing rapport with white moderates in blue wall country.
Republicans are always accusing the Democrats of pandering to special interest groups like black voters or female voters or Spanish voters or gay voters. But when Republicans do the same thing, they’re understanding the anxieties of white voters.
I will say this for Republicans; they chose the most powerful group to pander to. Our system is designed so white people get more votes than non-white people. Naturally, Republicans think the system should work that way; people who support Republicans should get more votes than people who support Democrats. That’s part of the entitlement I referred to.
I too reject the OP’s hypothesis. But I’ve got nothing to add that others haven’t already said.
I just want to say a word about the ‘binders full of women,’ though. The problem was that the ‘binders full of women’ were just that: names and resumes in binders. These weren’t women whose abilities and experience Romney was familiar with, either personally or by reputation.
That was the takeaway that many women, especially educated women, had to ‘binders full of women.’ A man with Romney’s experience knowing few capable women, and filling the gap through that sort of research, may have been OK in 1980, but not in 2012.
Also, nobody seems to have mentioned the infamous ‘47%’ remark. That cost him a few votes too.
It’s not fair, but that’s the system we have. FWIW, I think it would be a terrible mistake, both morally and politically, for democrats to pander to centrists in an attempt to soothe anxieties over a multicultural and pluralistic society. The Dems are at their strongest when they talk economics and have economic ideas that appeal to middle class people. Hillary and Democrats had opportunities to do that during the campaign but whiffed, in no small part because she was constantly put on the defensive. If the Democrats can get someone who can talk more about economic anxieties that many people are facing, such as healthcare, fair taxation, and education, those are issues they can exploit. If they simply talk about how much of a racist Trump is, though, they’ll lose. People vote for what they think is in it for them, plain and simple.
Bingo! That 47% remark was the kiss of death for Romney. Think about how he had been characterized: a guy born into a rich family, a private equity guy who liked firing people. Some people could have gotten away with that statement, but not Melba Toast Mitt.
How so?
Yeah, you can almost see the thought balloon that says: “Fools, I’ll crush them like insects.”
I think there are hyperbolic attacks on every candidate, especially at the presidential level. Remember the nuclear-bomb ads from the 60s (against Goldwater, IIRC – not that I was alive then)? Nothing new now, with Romney or anyone else.
Speaking of Romney, he publicly courted Trump’s endorsement and had a public announcement with him, even though Trump had been touting his birther bullshit for years.
Shame on Romney. Sure, he’s been right on Trump this year and last year, but he should never have courted his endorsement in 2012, and should have harshly denounced him for the birtherism nonsense.
I suspect the OP decided in advance on his conclusion and looked for supporting evidence.
Designed? I would say it is ‘designed’ such that everyone over 18 can vote. It just so happens that there are more white people in the country than non-white people.
One could argue that it is more the case that the majority white population is the designed part, not the voting mechanism per se. The Andrew Jackson types wiped out the Native ‘majority’, then kept immigration within certain limits over the decades to ensure a majority white population. Everybody still gets to vote, in contemporary times anyway.
The flaw in that plan is that white people have to believe that voting in a bloc is important in order to advance a “white agenda”. Some of the techniques used to persuade people of that start to look Really Ugly, see Current Events as my cite. But, treating Romney as a racist is what led to Trump? Really? I think he came across as “Forces of White”, sure, but not racist, and anyway he did not have GWB’s sensitivity to the projection of compassion required to overcome the coldness of such an appearance.
Romney just wasn’t that great. He didn’t deserve to beat Obama. I don’t think their was anything especially underhanded about that either, taken in the broader context of American politics.
The “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” told outright blatant lies about Al Gore’s record for months. Was this a perfect set up for the 2004 campaign?
In the last few election campaigns, the Republicans have been more dishonest than the Democrats.
This is why I get cranky when the left decides to exaggerate about their opponents. There’s a real cost to that, and it might be a higher cost than the Republicans face. (Certainly higher than the costs Trump faced.)
You are confusing Al Gore with John Kerry.
This isn’t about how many people voted. It’s about the Electoral College.
65,853,516 people voted for Hillary Clinton on Election Day. 62,984,825 people voted for Donald Trump. Clinton got almost three million more votes than Trump got.
But Trump won the election. Because the vote on Election Day doesn’t decide who wins the election. It just chooses Electors and those Electors vote for who wins the election.
And some voters get more Electors than others. A lot more. 142,741 voters in Wyoming equals one Electoral College vote. It takes 519,075 voters in New York to get one Electoral college vote. So Wyoming voters get well over three times as many votes as New York voters get. cite
428,223 voters in Wyoming get three votes in the Electoral College. Statistically, 92.7% of those people are white and 1.6% are black. As noted above, 519,075 voters in New York get one vote in the Electoral College. Statistically, 65.7% of those people are white and 15.9% are black. So one third of the black people and three times the votes.
Just a coincidence? Let’s compare some more states at each end of the spectrum. 496,509 Vermonters get three Electoral College votes. Vermonters are 94.3% white and 1.0% black. 510,318 Floridians get one Electoral College vote. Floridians are 57.9% white and 16.0% black. 522,720 North Dakotans get three Electoral College votes. North Dakotans are 88.9% white and 1.2% black. 508,344 Californians get one Electoral College vote. California is 40.1% white and 6.2% black. (I got all these demographic numbers and the election results off Wikipedia.)
Are you saying that the Electoral College system was “designed” to favor whites?
Please explain how the Electoral College designers managed to foresee (and make sure that the discrepancy is maintained in perpetuity) that tiny states will have a higher proportion of whites than the biggest ones - and not only that, but that these tiny states will disproportionately vote for one side in the elections.
Those are some strong points, Little Nemo. What are you going to do? Have justice imposed?