I see nothing but nastiness ahead for Obamacare, because, without 60 seats in the Senate, the Republicans can cripple the Affordable Care Act, but they can’t completely repeal it. They can repeal those parts of the Act that were passed with budget reconciliation, such as the Medicaid expansion, but they can’t repeal the substantive requirements of the Act, such as no medical underwriting and the requirement that insurers spend 80/85 cents of every premium dollar on healthcare. However, they can repeal or rewrite CMS’ implementing regulations and they can appoint administrators who are, shall we say, much less enthusiastic about enforcing the Act. I can only see this resulting in continuing loud media fights with little prospect for compromise.
If they dump the mandate, then the insurance companies will have to lower prices or customers will revolt en masse and dump them.
The mandate is already ineffective. Young healthy folks are either getting their insurance through their employer or paying the penalty, which is a lot cheaper than an Obamacare policy. That’s why the death spiral has already begun. Without a strong mandate you don’t get young healthy people in the pool, so you get a sick pool with premiums escalating out of control.
At some level, it kind of doesn’t matter?
What the turnout numbers have shown, is that you don’t really need that section of the vote.
Trump didn’t win with some huge turnout. He got less votes than Romney. There’s no secret white vote. That didn’t happen.
What happened was that Democrats didn’t vote.
I mean, you can try to convince the trump voters of things, but quite frankly? I don’t think that’s necessarily possible at all. They don’t seem to accept reality.
It seems to be hard to deter Republicans from voting, even if the candidate actively does despicable things on TV.
It seems to be pretty easy to deter Democrats from voting, if the candidate is not charismatic.
I think it’s pretty hard at this stage to say to what extent it was charisma, scandal, policy, tone or other aspects of Clinton’s candidacy that didn’t bring out Democratic voters.
It would be interesting if somebody could run the numbers to see what the effect of Voter ID / restrictions had on the electorate.
Not in a sour grapes way, because what’s done is done. Just as an intellectual curiosity.
And then we can try to repeal those laws ASAP regardless, because fuck disenfranchisement.
This. I am sure it was a mix of factors, an eternal fuck you to Assange for some of that, but this is the one thing that is somewhat controllable. What were the net results of voter restriction laws? Did it depress turnout symmetrically across a state (doubt it, but plausible), did it have an impact in urban Milwaukee and Raleigh big enough to swing those states?
What part of the missing voters can be explained by laws meant to remove the franchise, and what can we do to combat that. This is my number one interest and target for answers. Because while Julian Assange and Vladmir Putin are douche canoes, there is little we can, or should, do about their garbage. Politicizing the FBI further is a bad idea. But this is something eminently achievable.
Agree, but all I have seen from Dem nonvoters FB so far is: some deterred by scandals (including many which I would characterize as right-wing fantasy scandals), and some “Or Bust” bros saying we told you so. Given the amount of airtime alone, I would give Wikileaks at least 80% of the credit for her loss. Trump did very well to almost meet Romney’s numbers, but many who voted for downballot Dems were too suspicious of HRC to vote for her.
One thing I never expect the establishment media to cover much, is how much of the electorate considers their news products to be not just irrelevant but deliberately deceptive. Alternative news with no curation is absolutely driving an electorate with divergent versions of reality.
(I was editing to add in my wikileaks comment when Ginger_Yellow was replying)
Not just alternative news. The stat about the network news spending more airtime on Clinton’s emails than all policy issues combined says it all. Even to the extent Clinton was talking about the legitimate concerns of the white working class, you’d never know about it from watching the news.
While many laughed and scoffed at Bernie supporters being upset with the inside baseball of the DNC and essentially what Debbie Wasserman Schultz represented, we now know they were right (albeit only through an ignorant serendipity). Fighting hard for a '90s-era Democratic establishment just handed the GOP everything. Now I have no idea how Bernie would have fared but the party needs to pivot in that direction and fast.
Income/wealth inequality, living wage, college tuition/debt concerns, under-employment, job creation through infrastructure improvements, etc. These issues would have resonated (and were resonating) with many who later voted for Trump. Ultimately pave the path towards universal guaranteed income even if that is a long ways off for the US.
Time to pivot hard left on economic issues Dems.
Every once in a while, I think it’s probably valuable to remember that what’s actually true doesn’t matter as much as what people think is true. I’m not talking purely about our post-reality propaganda media world, as this was always the case.
Knowing what we know now, it’s hard not to pin a great big pair of goat horns on Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook.
I know an awful lot of Democrats–myself included–who came out of the conventions thinking that the vision of the country they were offering was clearly superior. America is already great. Things are looking up. Remember how bad things used to be? Now they’re better, and Hillary’s going to make them even more better. Sunrise in America!
And if you watch Trump’s ads or Trump at the convention, he was selling a bleak version of America as it is. A scary, frightening, alien place of bleakness. How the hell is that going to work with voters?
Well. That second version is what voters in rural areas and in exurbs in the midwest and south recognized. That was what they connected with because it corresponded to their mindset. And so when you have these two competing visions and you think things are going poorly for you still (whether or not they actually are or aren’t), and you see one ad that says “Hey, things are great,” and that ad features a bunch of younger, urban professionals in settings you don’t recognize, you’re not going to say “Oh, I guess I was wrong.” You’re going to think that the candidate running those ads is out of touch and doesn’t care about you. You’re either going to stay home on election day or decide “Screw it, other guy’s a jackass, but at least he knows what’s going on out here.”
They got beat in Michigan in the primaries and never seemed to grasp how that might have happened. The campaign saw it as a weird anomaly, not as the single most important problem they had to reconcile.
Absolutely. This goes back to the rural/rust belt voter discussion we’ve been having in other threads.
“Jobs are up!” - Not my job.
“The economy is doing really good!” - I’m having trouble putting food on the table.
“BLM!” - That’s not me.
“Gay marriage!” - I don’t care.
Really that’s what it boils down to. HRC and Democrats failed - and I squarely share the blame - failed utterly and completely to pay attention to this until it was too late. The four key states flipped because we stopped giving a crap about their concerns. So, they rightly turned to whomever claimed to be listening to them.
It’s relatively easy and comforting to point the finger at racism and misogyny as being the sole culprits of the outcome. It’s a lot harder to take an honest look at what happened and realize that some of this is our fault. We failed to connect.
“I used to be something of a skeptic when it came to claims of “filter bubbles”. But I’ve come to think that the rise of fake news — and of the cheap-to-run, ideologically driven aggregator sites that are only a few steps up from fake — has weaponized those filter bubbles. There were just too many people voting in this election because they were infuriated by made-up things they read online.”
So, my own batshit hate-dance aside, this really sort of confounds me.
Democrats are and have been the party of labor, of worker’s rights, of education, of safety nets, of the little guy, of stopping the basest impulses of large businesses intent on squeezing profits, like blood, from the stone of the worker.
Those concerns are exactly what the DNC’s platform was addressing, and has been addressing for decades now. It’s all there, in black and white, all over Hillary’s page (well, assuming it’s still up). Sure, decades of Republican obstructionism and hate have stymied the effort more than a little, but hey, they’re monsters–that’s what monsters do.
If the media was too busy reporting another goddamn email “scandal” to report on that, so be it, but it strikes me as deeply disingenuous to suggest that Democrats weren’t presenting anything to disaffected, put-on workers in Michigan.
Keep in mind that we had eight Obama years to make things better for the people in those areas. Guess what didn’t happen? Then HRC shows up and says, “Hey, look how great Obama has been for the country!” If you’re one of those people, then you’re response is “WTF? Why would I vote for more of that?”
Do you think that what the Democrats were proposing would have solved the problem? Actually turned things around, rather than just slowing the rate at which things were getting wrose?
In the UK, Labour is the part of worker’s rights, and were in government for over a decade. They did a lot of good things, but generally speaking, the post-industrial towns that got gutted under Thatcher are still gutted now. Maybe there are no good solutions to the problem, at least without imposing a command economy, but people are going to judge you by results, not intentions.
EDIT:
To be more specific and constructive, lets take a hypothetical Rust Belt town that used to be based around an industry that is now no longer there, that has had no other economic activity to replace it. Can anyone propose a policy or set of policies that could realistically be enacted in the US (so probably no nationalised government run factories) that could potentially turn things around?
Which is why Reagan/Reagan/Bush is the only time one party has held the presidency for more than 2 terms in a row since 1940. There is always more wrong than can be fixed, and it’s always the problem of the incumbent. Even if obstructionism is not the opposition policy.
In fairness, I’ve never been much impressed with Candidate or President Obama, so at the least, I can feel them on that score.
But on the other hand, only the first two years of ineffective waffling were really his fault. The remaining six can be laid squarely at the feet of the party that just took power. But I guess it’s too much to expect people to recognize that.