This is something I never understood. After 8 long years of Dubya I had sky-high enthusiasm for Obama and was really swept up in his candidacy. Even with Dem control of congress “Yes We Can!” kind of withered to “Ugh maybe?” those first 2 years.
Though that scenario gives me hope that the first 2 years of Trump will be equally bewildering and lacking momentum.
A lot of what I fear most from a Trump presidency on a policy level (as opposed to the equally disastrous/horrific “justifying rape culture/racism/sexism/religion-ism/etc.” level) can be done via executive actions–particularly in the form of overturning a ton of Obama’s.
Which was always the downside of his using them to implement good policy in the first place, of course.
True. That is the scary part.
Yep, I’m more or less at the point of nodding along if Obama just refuses to hand over the keys in January. Functional Democracy’s nice and all that, but the second Trump and Pence are in, that’s more or less it in every important way I can fathom.
But then again, my okayness with a benevolent progressive dictator’s a long-established and Timex-aggravating belief system here :P
Yep. It’s horribly ironic that the same thing that defeated GHWB in 1992–a sense that the candidate was totally out of touch with voters–defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. She was George W. Bush in 1992, essentially.
This this this this this this .
The Democrats have failed the people that the party was founded upon and it bit them in the ass.
Yeah, I think this is all fair. Maybe Bernie would have been the right call, we’ll never know. But the failure here wasn’t trying to attract Trump’s voters, it was the 4-6 million Obama 2012 voters who didn’t show up in 2016. Probably because they weren’t excited about Clinton for the reasons above. Maybe Bernie’s aggressively different socialist agenda would have gotten them excited, even though much of it was/is unrealistic.
I don’t know who picks up that mantle now, though. Is Biden going to make a go of it? Gavin Newsome? Corey Booker?
Of course let’s not forget this 1991 Saturday Night Live sketch, which didn’t even include Bill Clinton.The Race to Avoid Being the Guy Who Loses to Bush.
What farmers, slaveholders and states rights advocates? :)
EDIT: To be less facetious, this is a party that has evolved over time in quite an opportunistic manner. I’m not sure any one demographic slice can lay claim to it like that.
Trying to consolidate some of the stuff I’m reading in my head, I think one of the big takeaways is that the only way to combat misinformation is with correct information. There have been studies that show that when confronted with falsehoods, if you just say “No, that’s not true”, it bounces off people. But if you instead say “Actually, this is what is true”, then there’s a much greater chance of the new information sticking.
So, if people say “Oh, there’s so much crime, murder rates are up!”, you have to say “Actually, murder rates have declined X% over a 20 year period” or whatever. And you have to say that every time, consistently, until it replaces the “so much crime” meme. But for that to work, you also need a sober and functional media, which…well.
I hesitate to call it a “strategy” per se, because I don’t think it was calculated, but Trump’s moving target of lies and insane policy proposals kind of made it impossible to do anything but just disagree. When somebody’s starting point is “build a wall with Mexico”, it’s so outlandish and obviously insane that it’s hard to address is seriously. And if you do try, (e.g. it will cost infinite dollars), he just pivots to “Mexico will pay for it!”, which is impossible to refute in any way other than “Uh, no. They won’t”.
A fair point, but the modern Democratic party really started with FDR. He protected and nurtured the unions and gave rise to the middle class.
A really good discussion of how it happened imo. You don’t have to agree with the points they make, but you have to acknowledge that it did, in fact, fucking happen.
In the end, it may all just be Occam’s Razor: Hillary Clinton isn’t very popular. The end.
In other news, water wet, Trump racist, America fucked.
It was a combination of scandal and policy. Hillary was the worst possible Dem candidate. Just about anyone else running would have won.
The DNC leadership owns blowing this election, and they need to be removed forever.
Single payer in marijuana-friendly Colorado got defeated by an absurd 80-20 margin. Russ Feingold’s death spiral started before the DNC was pouring money in on him.
I’m not sure that any other candidate would have won this. Maybe. But there are points that call that conventional wisdom into question.
I can’t help but constantly think of Comey’s letter.
And that 1% is all it would take to swing 75 EVs and completely change the story of the election.
Trump’s team chose to focus on this electorate, partly because it was the only possible path for them. But after Comey, that movement of older, whiter voters became newly evident.
I’ve been in a near fugue state, and probably should keep to my personal pledge to just disconnect from the world. Everything I care about is going to be systematically destroyed; not just because of the next four to eight years, but by an entire judicial branch re-branded by corporate America. By the time it can be undone, I’ll be dead but it will probably be too late then anyway. Feel free to laugh at my morbidity.
As for the postmortems, a lot can be said, but in my opinion, it’s pretty simple: Our politics is defined by selfishness; a country of narcissists elected their Emperor. Human beings in general and Americans in particular are beyond redemption. A significant amount of people to matter do not care about anything other than “Me.”
P.S. This notion that Democrats failed rural white America is just so much bullshit. Keeping dudes from getting married, calling zygotes people and wrecking the environment isn’t going to improve anyone’s lot in life. Republicans appeal to our basest natures, and they won. End of story.,
And with that, I’m out.
The reality is that single-payer can only be achieved on a national level. Vermont tried it and failed, because, no matter what fiscal shape an idividual state is in, they have to balance their budgets and single-payer requires massive government subsidies.
I don’t know what kind of money Russ Feingold got from the DNC, but news radio here in Milwaukee this morning said he got no support from the Clinton campaign. According to the reports, in the last couple weeks of the campaign, he sent desparate “I’m in trouble. I need Hillary here” messages to the campaign and got crickets in return. It’s astonishing how lackadasical, or just plain inept, this campaign was compared to Obama’s two campaigns.
One point I hadn’t considered, made to me today by a NYC Democrat who was no fan of Hillary or Bernie: If Sanders is the nominee for the Democrats in 2016, Michael Bloomberg runs for president and spends almost as much money on it as Clinton did.
Dunno if I buy that or not, but it was an interesting point I hadn’t heard raised elsewhere.