I’m gonna guess they supported his plan?
Okay, that’s fair enough.
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Interesting choice of words. I would say that anyone who had been paying attention could tell that Trump would win in 2016.
I’m thinking back to my conversations with people during the 2016 election. They thought Trump would never win because he isn’t a polished politician, he isn’t articulate, he isn’t smart, etc. What they didn’t understand is that there is a yuuuge subset of the population that not only doesn’t value these traits, but instantly distrusts anyone who possesses them.
My favorite takeaway from the 2016 election was how many people talked about “low information voters”. Like this is a thing. Like there are people who remain uninformed until the day before the election and then are all “Oh shit, gotta pick up a newspaper and research the candidates!” This isn’t 1960, nobody does this anymore. There are only those who are actively informed from the beginning, and those who are actively misinformed from the beginning. Besides, every time I hear “low information voters” I parse it as “blah blah blah voters”.
Predicting elections is nice and all, but just predict this one instead of last one. Or one back in the 1980s, or from the West Wing universe.
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Say what now? Liberals everywhere were shocked. Most polls had Clinton way ahead. I knew liberals who shed tears of shock when Trump won.
Yes, some people saw it coming, but not “anyone who was paying attention.”
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Then why did I see it coming?
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I dunno. Why do you see yourself as representative of “anyone who was paying attention”?
Agreed. What counts as attractive “charisma” varies, a lot.
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The fixation on prognosticators who got the previous thing super right is just another manifestation on the media focus on outliers and resulting regression to the mean. The people you should be listening to are not the people who fluked into getting 2016 right and then got all pompous and arrogant over their success, but the people with humility and honesty enough to say, ahead of that election, that “it’s a close one and I can’t be totally sure who would win”.
Because 2016 was close, and anyone claiming that they were absolutely sure when a tiny swing (a <0.1% swing in the right places) would have changed the result is lying to you and themselves.
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Because I realize that looking at bullshit polls on HuffPo isn’t “paying attention”, nor is listening to in depth analyses of Trump supporters by someone who has never met a Trump supporter, nor is trying to predict the last election. It’s sinking deeper into the liberal (but not left) bubble. Anyone who put honest effort into trying to figure out what the fuck was actually going on could easily see it.
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I was paying attention, but I was taken off guard. I knew that Biff was charismatic in a certain way (see below), I knew not to trust the polls, I knew what a fragile state the republic was in, and I knew it would be a typically close and polarised race.
What I – and probably a lot of other liberals and progressives – missed was the level of gross incompetence and smug complacency in the Clinton campaign (and I say this as someone who’d had a low opinion of her in that regard since she’d been my Senator during the Cheney Regency). As bad a candidate as I thought she was, I really didn’t think she’d toss aside states like Michigan and Wisconsin in such an entitled and cavalier manner.
Agreed. He’s not going to be charismatic in the way Lichtman or the typical NYT reader or you or I are going to define the term. When we think of charismatic presidential candidates we think of FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton, and Obama. I have no problem saying that Reagan was charismatic, too.
For a certain type of spiteful moron, however, Il Douche is very charismatic (as was Prince Bush). Forgetting that and not understanding that at least a quarter of the electorate is like that is one of the core errors liberals and progressives make about him.
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Even though I knew it was coming I was still taken off guard. I guess I knew it could happen but didn’t want to give up hope.
She did not have the election sewn up, but so many thought that she did. “Ha ha, there’s no more Bernie, and the other guy is Trump, so get in line” is not a cogent political argument, least not if 70% of registered voters do not belong to your party. She didn’t earn anyone’s vote, except maybe Bush Sr voters.
I voted for Hillary, but only because I could see what was happening and I couldn’t honestly advise anyone in a swing state to vote third party.
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She was leading the polls going in. Almost every pundit called it for her and she won by 3 million votes.
I think people can disparage people who believed she was leading if it makes them feel better - I don’t know what help it is to people now.
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Biden is a slightly better campaigner than Clinton but basically holds that same attitude. That’s why I always express a note of caution with predictions like Lichtman’s and with the polls showing him leading by a wide margin. Biden is part of the Dem establishment, and that’s just the entitled attitude they all take.
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Is he? I have no way of knowing. He hasn’t done anything yet.
Probably for the best, because he is really really dumb. Just nowhere near as dumb as Trump though.
I dunno, it seems a little less blatant. During the early stages of the campaign it definitely seemed like he did. By now it feels a little lighter than it did last election, mainly because nobody is talking about Bernie. Instead, there’s damn near three quarters of likely Democratic voters who would rather vote for anyone else, and even the Biden primary voters don’t tend to be stans. So it’s less “get in line” and more “hold your nose”.
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I was completely wrong about 2016. I don’t think we underestimated Trump. I think we overestimated America.
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Right? But I guess those were just “bullshit polls on HuffPo,” which anyone who was really paying attention would’ve recognized as bullshit. 
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Yeah. More experienced, has a better ability to connect with middle-aged and older voters. He did well during his campaigns for VP and Senate. But he has a lot of problems, too – not only the Dem establishment complacency, but the endless gaffes, being beholden to big-money donors, the uninspiring Third Way policies, and his coming off as a doddering old out-of-touch great-uncle to “da youts” (I’m sure there are others). Also, while he clears the low bar of being more charismatic (as we understand it) than Hillary Clinton, he’s nowhere near the rock-star level of Obama or JFK that the DNC counts on.
I’m just not seeing a lot of hunger and urgency and fight in the campaign, and I’m taking the effects of a COVID campaign year into effect. It shouldn’t be either “get in line” or “hold your nose” now, but rather “holy f*ck, if you don’t vote for this latest Third Way mediocrity the DNC is offering up it’s the end of liberal democracy in America for real”.
The GOP always campaigns hungry and hard, as if their backs are up against the wall and their way of life is on the line (because, what with demographics and time, it’s unsustainable whether they like it or not). I haven’t seen Republicans take a presidential race for granted since 1980, even when they had a big lead in the polls. I can’t say the same about the Dems.
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Technically correct, the best kind of correct. She was leading the bullshit HuffPo polls that I mentioned, that gave her like a 98% chance of winning. She was leading in the FiveThirtyEight predictions, but her odds dropped from nearly 90% to less than 70% overnight. Even less if you removed historical data from the predictive model. That model uses Bayesian reasoning, and when a Bayesian model takes a nosedive like that you just know something big happened, even if you don’t know what.
Almost. Not Michael Moore, not Cenk Uygur, just to name a couple. But all the darlings of the Democratic Party establishment called it for Clinton, and everyone else was written off as irrelevant weirdos.
Did she win Michigan and Wisconsin? Why not? Better yet, how the fuck is that even possible?
Oh yeah, that’s how…
Nah, it makes me feel a little worse. But not quite as bad as the people sitting around going “golly gee, who could have possibly guessed” when I’m all:
Here’s what help it is:
Learn from your mistakes. Pay attention to what’s going on around you. Don’t get complacent. VOTE!
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Yup.
TBH, I can’t claim having paid that much attention. But I do remember when it was on the news that the GOP had confirmed him as their candidate my reaction was along the lines of “Oh God no, he’s gonna be the next President, there are more than enough idiots who’ll vote for him”.
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So why not spread that misery around, right?
It’s not like we already have an ample surplus of it, in 2020…
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Great. Rather than shitting on the people you want to vote - what are you doing to win?
What are you asking as actions from others?
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This article discusses it in more depth:
I don’t see the harm in knowing one’s enemy and being prepared. It may require stepping outside one’s comfort zone, and having to metaphorically if not literally shower in bleach, but it’s a small price to pay.
