I can see Bernie having more success in his current situation than he could have hoped for as socialist President with two houses and much of the DNC against him!
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That may be more true of older voters. There’s more than one “US public eye.”
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Silver-lining? Defeat by Trump fairly well ends Clintons, any of them, at least for a generation or two. What Bernie sees would be best, and I agree, could arguably be more difficult otherwise. Surely, bad times ahead, but whatever the fuck it is, it will be change, despite the business-as-usual appointments Trump has made with regard to finance.
The system is ripe for a big breakdown, just like any preassure cooker you’ve decided to rebuild with wingnuts and hairplugs.
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These charts explain who voted for whom but not why. I too suspect older votes to have more conservative and tradition-conscious attitudes but I’m not convinced that younger voters are free from this line of reasoning.
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I think Cruz, Kasich (maybe even Rubio?) would have won more convincingly. I don’t think Clinton ran a campaign that would beat anyone in the rust belt, and I don’t think Clinton was a candidate people wanted to vote for there.
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No, it’s all Bernie’s fault! Every election cycle, the Great Pumpkin Press looks for the sincerest pumpkin patch candidate in the land. When that candidate is chosen, then we all owe our votes to that candidate. Any other candidates within the same party who fail to drop out are traitors to the party, to justice, to America. They’re either dupes working for the betterment of The Opposing Party, or they’re consciously working for the other party. Nader, Jill Stein, Bernie, Dennis Kucinich. I imagine the same line of thinking is used among Republicans, but I don’t care what they think so I don’t have examples. Anyway, now is no time for introspection! It’s time to line up the usual suspects for blame, because it couldn’t have been Hillary’s fault or the DNC’s fault. No no no, fingers in ears, no!
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I don’t think that’s an accurate reading of the situation. There are trumpkin tears being shed over the Steven Mnuchin, and how lukewarm his Carrier deal was.
There are pockets of folks who still believe that message on both sides, but I think one of the things that Trump’s victory shows is that they are a minority.
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Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky 2056!
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Here’s the problem with the whole “identity politics is easy, being brocialist is hard” thesis: the US government is structured to give people in low-population states more of a vote, through the existence of the Senate, and the extra electoral votes that come with it. These low-population states tend to chase brown people, gay people, non-christian people, young people out to the big cities through their provincial tendencies, so yeah, Sanders is right that “identity politics” is going to be a lift, compared to a purely economic message.
The first problem with that thesis is if you are setting identity politics aside for the time being, when exactly are you going to pick them up again? Focusing on economics does nothing to address the structural problems that give low-population-state voters more of a voice, so there will never, ever be a good time to address white supremacy, or rampant misogyny, or islamophobia. Second, identity politics is what the right uses to turn low-population-state voters against economic policies in the first place, by pointing out that all those brown people that were chased out are now getting more than their “fair share”, living as welfare queens and young bucks eating steaks purchased with welfare money. Sanders thinks he would have been able to beat Trump on economics, but Trump always had the upper hand in terms of being willing to race-bait and dog-whistle his way into the hearts of those misunderstood and not-at-all-racist white working class voters. Trying to throw “identity politics” under the bus is not only cowardly, its also condescending to most every segment of the Democratic coalition that exists right now.
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They didn’t need to convince many. 100K across PA, WI, MI…?
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Might happen, but it would be a long time before any lasting impact.
A first or second or third or fourth term House member does not offer much return on investment compared to Secretary of State or POTUS.
Thankfully, Nancy Pelosi is still in charge of the dems in the House, as she has been since 2002. A sure sign that change is in the air.
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Well Ffabian, I’d say a strength of our great nation is our homogenous culture, unlike an unruly place like, say, Germany. Care for a jelly bean?
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Nothing says “party of the people” like giving them one choice and an outsider who didn’t get the memo.
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Eisenhower was a liberal. The GOP and Dems both had liberal and conservative factions. Nixon was part of the liberal Republicans, loathed the Goldwater conservatives, and worked hard to screw them over. It wasn’t until Reagan that the GOP really shifted to a conservative ideological party and the idea of the ‘RINO’ appeared which would have been a meaningless idea through the 70s.
But yeah, the Clinton’s DLC strategy of abandoning labor to win elections from campaign donations by rich donors screwed over the Dems. in the long run. Clinton had a ton of cash, but you can’t always buy elections.
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America has been increasingly ruled by people who have either never spent a day of their life in an actual worker’s shoes or they have long forgotten what it is like to work for a paycheck and have to divide that money in order to have food, shelter and transportation for that pay period. Few if any lawmakers have had any meaningful contact with over 90 percent of the population but they somehow think that they are qualified to make decisions for them. Hillary would have continued with the normal policies and we would have continued living under the rule of elites who know what is best for us even though they are far removed from our reality.
It looks like Trump is going to accelerate and intensify elite authoritarianism to an extent that will horrify the general public and hopefully wake us up to the fact that policies that only serve to make the rich richer and the poor poorer will eventually result in catastrophe. I can only hope that America figures out that the best interests of the 1% do not align well with the 99% before the nut jobs manage to remove civil rights and voting rights from the ill defined “liberals”.
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As ever, Bernie is great in theory and is lousy - and profoundly sloppy, and unready for prime time - in practice. Losing the primary with a strong showing continues to be the best thing ever to happen to him - and by that I mean not just the strong showing, but also the losing.
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That and Comey’s ratfucking.
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And this!
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I’d like to push back on this.
Everyone is dumping on the Democrats for failing to be more progressive. There is no way to prove a counterfactual, but I suspect that Bernie - for all his many admirable qualities - would have lost the popular vote as well as the electoral college. There are a lot of older voters who would be worried about a more progressive agenda, and they would have not voted for him (or for Elizabeth Warren for that matter - a better candidate IMHO).
And at the same time the Democrats are criticized for having “identity politics” - that is, they were trying to bring women and minorities into the game. In other words, they were being too progressive.
Clinton also has innumerable obstacles in her way: her gender, double standard in judging her trustworthiness versus Trump, Clinton fatigue, and so forth.
But a major factor that everyone here is ignoring are the millennials. They did not vote in the same numbers as they did for Obama, even though Clinton (prompted by Bernie) was more progressive than he was. And in the off-years millennials didn’t vote, allowing the Republicans to sabotage Obama’s government. This year voting for Jill Stein as a way to protest the status quo repeated the mistake of Nader 2000.
We’re all pissed off at Trump winning. But I suspect that many of the posters on this page did not vote for Clinton, and they have only themselves to blame. Sometimes the lesser evil is a helluva lot better than the greater evil.
So we have another bite at the apple in 2018. I hope that millennials will realize that this is a chance to stall Trump/Pence, just as 2010 was the Republicans’ chance to stall Obama. It will be unpleasant for many years, but not voting will only allow things to get worse.
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