But that didn’t make the dem not vote or the swing vote choose Trump. Hillary’s biggest problem was her past.
Manufactured or not~
Some people deplore change.
It sounds like you would be surprised how easy it is to sway people.
Especially when you bombard people with the same message over and over again.
There are some great studies on this.
Trump is charismatic in a sort of, and I hate myself for saying this, a kind of Hitlerian way. But he also appeals to what I would consider, and the polls showed it, a limited demographic. He probably reached his high water mark last November.
Not just that, but people were lulled in to a false sense of security, and took that as an excuse to not vote, not participate, or do a ‘protest’ vote.
Also, every cold or sniffle of Hillary was high lighted, and issue was magnified, while many of Trump’s flaws were papered over.
Well, there was the tape of Trump talking about “pussy grabbing”. The thing was that nobody cared. There were many negative items brought out about Trump, but nobody cared because he was not going to win anyway.
It was unfortunate for Hillary that she did have some health problems (flu, exhaustion, whatever) during the campaign. But health concerns have stopped candidates before.
Imagine JFK running today.
The difference is that in the 60’s, the conservative movement had men like Bill Buckley who straight up condemned the Birchers.
Everything in the past doesn’t matter, because DT is saved now.
“Radical anti-LGBTQ activist Scott Lively appeared on the “Point Of View” radio program yesterday to discuss his campaign for governor in Massachusetts, during which he claimed to have received “spiritual confirmation” that President Trump has been transformed “into a man of God” and urged Christians to model themselves after Trump.”
A stronghold of idolatry has grown in far too much of the Evangelical churches.
A stronghold of ‘graven images,’ you might even say!
Most of these so called Christians do model themselves after Trump.
They are hateful, adulterous hypocrites. They are largely ignorant of the word of Christ. They judge others while not even attempting to live up to the standard that they sell to impose upon others. They are liars.
They already lived like Trump.
In saying that Trump is godly, they are merely confirming the lies that they already tell about themselves. That they don’t need to try any harder, or actually do any of the things that Christ told them to do.
One thing to be sure, the irony of their path is that they better hope that their faith is wrong, because if it’s not, then their crimes before God are in many ways greater than those of the people they condemn. They believe in God, but explicitly refuse to do as he commanded them. They are essentially a breed of apostate.
Someone, maybe on this forum, once made a comment along these lines:
“Some say that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was getting people to believe he didn’t exist. But I think the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was convincing Christians that they would be able to bullshit God with the same lies they tell themselves about why they aren’t doing what Christ taught.”
Well, I was actually comparing Birchers’ reaction to Kennedy’s election to the American Left’s reaction to Trump today, in the wake of a squeaker election; confident that their party would win a third term and then surprised by the polls.
Dammit people, I wake up to find 60 new posts in the optimism thread and all I get is another rehash of why Clinton lost. Isn’t there a thread for that?
I think that was me, I’ve been saying it for a while now to people, in a slightly shorter version. If it was someone else, then great minds and all that.
Anyone who still supports Trump after Charlottesville is a racist piece of dogshit.
I like that my iPad now types most of that sentence for me.
I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m completely uninterested in re-litigating the 2016 election for the nth time. I’m very interested in getting Trump and his closest allies out of office as soon as possible, or at minimum reducing their ability to hurt the country.
I think calling everybody who voted for Trump, a racist, fascist, piece of shit is really unhelpful for achieving this goal. Although, I certainly agree that large number of Trump voter qualify. @ineffablebob said it very well.
The importance of the WaPo article and the similar articles is understanding what the soft Trump voter doesn’t like about the President. Getting them to stay home is the first step to victory.
One of the interesting things about the article was how many people hate Trump’s tweets. This something I’ve observed from watching focus groups of Trump supporters. Everybody says they wish he won’t tweet as much.
Yet conventional wisdom is that Trump tweets to fire up the base. But a quick analysis of Trump’s tweet reveals a different picture.
First of all, Trump has 51 million followers a very big number, but between the Trump haters like myself that follow him on two accounts, Russia bot, other bots, foreigners, etc. The actual number of Trump voters who follow him is much smaller. Almost certainly at least 10 million, but unlikely much more than 20 million.
More importantly, I see no evidence that his “whiney little bitch tweets” where he complains about the media or the deep state are particularly popular. Looking at last month’s tweets, it seems that Trump’s tweet average between 80-100K likes. There is a very consistent ratio of 4 times more like than retweets and very inconsistent number of replies. If anything it appears that his non-controversial tweets, many written by Dan Scavino, are actually more popular than his controversial. So for instance, there were only tweets that had more than 200K likes in the past month were written yesterday (except for replying to Kanye).
You raise some excellent and insightful points, but I still can’t cross the bridge you and @Strollen have.
Why engage them if they’re voting only based on an emotional response and they willingly refute any evidence that how they are voting not only doesn’t improve their lot but objectively and materially makes it worse? You have already laid out they’re not voting based on rational thought, and I completely agree with that. But if their emotional response is to scapegoat and blame other people for their travails, what then? They are actively opposing policy positions that would improve their lives, and the lives of their children. ((That said, one aspect of the “trump vote” is probably motivated by (and @triggercut pointed this out in another thread) an anti-establishment sentiment. It’s just beyond ironic they ended up voting for the king of the establishment; the emperor indeed wears no clothes, they just choose to ignore it.))
The trump voter isn’t some powerful voting block that needs to swayed; they’ve made their decision, and further they are unreachable through evidence and facts. I think it’s far more important to reach out to the people who didn’t vote**:
But voter turnout among black voters fell almost seven percentage points, to 59.4 percent, the Census figures show — after hitting an all-time high of 66.2 percent in 2012.
Fewer than half of Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans turned out to vote; 49 percent of Asians and 47.6 percent of those of Hispanic origin showed up to the polls last year.
Demographers point to declining black turnout and relatively low Hispanic turnout — two voting blocs on whom Democrats are increasingly reliant — as two of a handful of reasons Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton fell short in a handful of key battleground states last year.
Black turnout fell 2 points and Hispanic turnout tumbled by a whopping 34 points in Michigan, a state President Trump won by just over 10,000 votes after Clinton fell short of matching President Obama’s vote totals in Detroit.
In Wisconsin, another state Trump barely won, fewer than half of black voters cast a ballot; four years ago, when Obama carried the state, 78 percent of blacks voted.
Turnout among black voters fell seven points in Florida, and turnout among Hispanic voters there, who make up critical voting blocs stretching from Miami-Dade County to Orlando, fell eight points. That ended a streak of four consecutive elections in which black and Hispanic voters showed up in increasing numbers. At the same time, white voters, who disproportionately backed Trump, turned out at a slightly higher rate in Florida than they had in 2012.
**I think [a] reason why Clinton’s campaign missed what was happening in the Mid-West (and maybe FL, though they did pour a lot of resources there) was that their likely voter model was off. I’m no polling expert, but I’d wager Clinton’s data team and their likely voter model informed their decisions late in the campaign. ((Turns out that they were wrong, but they couldn’t (and obviously, didn’t) know that at the time. Robbie Mook led Terry McAuliffe to victory in VA, despite McAuliffe not being terribly popular in that state. I’m sure they would have done things differently had they known what we now know after the fact.))