How jokes won the election

boing
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I would argue that her opponents did an excellent job of projecting the image of her running a sloppy, entitled, tone-deaf campaign. They did such a good job that even folks who might have voted for her now believe that’s why she lost.

She actually ran an incredibly tight, professional campaign, and ran some terrific ads speaking to gay people, women and their daughters, and anyone disgusted by Trump’s attitude towards Muslims.

Unfortunately, her campaign was overconfident; she hugged people as Trump screamed. And when the ‘emails’ thing came up, her campaign stopped talking about her and got stuck in a cycle of defending itself while pointing at Trump and saying ‘but he’s a terrible man!’. They never made the case for her as a progressive candidate with a progressive platform. They let Trump shape her image.

So yes, she did run a pretty crappy campaign in the end; she got unfocused, didn’t know how to deal with Trump, and stuck to the Obama playbook while Trump veered into crazy town. But when she was on message, she was great. Pity that she never figured out how to overcome EMAILS! as what people remembered about her.

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42

as a white man, I feel awkward saying that things not made specially for me don’t suit me.

I also find, as a human, some humor in thinking that tone-deafness was a bigger issue for the (D) in this specific instance or that she had more baggage or entitlement than a self-avowed pussy-grabber who is renown for not paying his bills and gamifying the civic bankruptcy laws for his own profit.

But you may turn whatever tables make sense after the fact, it’s not cognitive dissonance at all, if it helps you cope, right?

I would like to reiterate that, despite the confluence of hundreds of events that conspired to make this happen, we are all deeply saddened by the final outcome.

I would like to reiterate that emotional thinking happens, but it does not make feelings into facts when so.

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43

One problem is that these were generally attacks on Trump as a person, but they weren’t nearly as vicious as Trump’s attacks on her. Everybody already knew what Trump had said; it was all over the news and those who weren’t going to be convinced by that weren’t going to be convinced by the relatively softly spoken criticisms that she gave. Anyone who was actually listening should have seen her calmly destroying his arguments and keeping her dignity, but that wasn’t a great defence against someone flinging bullshit at her without caring whether any of it was true. It does seem to be a series of unfortunate events, or rather missed opportunities – the fact that this didn’t cause the debate to be shut down or at least result in serious consequences is hard to understand:

Things like this, calling her the devil and other actions only had power because everyone let it slide, and that’s certainly not just on Clinton. There was too much outrage and “why isn’t anyone doing anything?” sentiment, and that gets easy to ignore. For all Trump’s talk about her being a nasty woman though, I always got the impression that she was way too nice.

So much of this was a marketing battle, because it there was transparently obvious that Trump had nothing to back up his words and he acted like he could just speak opinions into reality. He lost the popular vote, but he shouldn’t have come anywhere near it. As you say, Clinton had the ability to convince many ambivalent progressive voters in her own right, but she didn’t seem to spend much time fighting the perception that she was only the better of two evils.

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44

Absolutely. Running ads that were gasping “but… but he’s a terrible man!” probably helped him more than hurt him, because frankly, most people have known that he’s a dirty businessman and general asshole for decades; it’s part of his persona. As you say, she was way too nice. Her ads, while beautiful and professional, were smiley and uplifting and nice. They weren’t the get-out-the-vote rally cry she needed. And they were designed to reinforce her, not to invigorate people. They assumed too much.

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45

The trick now is to – like the Ancient Greeks – work under something closer to a democracy but not be taken over later by the Romans now amongst us (read: dictators/emperors)

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On the other hand, there’s never been a worse time to live in America. I’d leave tomorrow if I had a sane option (Brexit Island does not count).

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47

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that conservatives love comedy movies.

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48

Yes, Clinton’s campaign could have dealt more diplomatically with others further to her left - but also there were some on the left who were so determined not to like her, they stopped listening to Bernie Sanders when he (correctly) pointed out that Trump shouldn’t be in office no matter what. This was after the Democratic party adopted the most progressive platform in decades, perhaps of any major party ever.

But again and more to the point, those further to her left are not what cost her the election.

Again, she got 3 million more votes.

What cost her the election was that her campaign didn’t pay attention to 3 midwestern states.

I keep emphasizing this because, as we who aren’t the right go into an analysis stage for how this could ever happen, we need to be focused on the key details.

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49

Stein’s votes in those states were all greater than Trump’s winning margin. The potential was there. Plus, yeah, competent campaigning would have helped.

It’s idiotic that people in those states weren’t able to make a rational decision regardless of how many signs Clinton put up or visits she made, though.

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50

And that is why, despite the catastrophic hardship it will cause myself and my loved ones, when the Republicans eliminate Medicaid and Social Security, I will laugh and laugh and laugh, and make sure to hammer in every single one with a “BUT THAT’S WHAT YOU VOTED FOR”.

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I think you may be confusing Emily Nussbaum (the author of this piece, who is also the New Yorker’s main TV critic) with Martha Nussbaum.

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Yeah, you’re right, thanks. Been losing some sleep thanks to witnessing the Trumpocalypse brought on by many things Emily Nussbaum somehow overlooked in her hot take.

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(emphasis mine)

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54

I hear ya, I would also enjoy that.

But that isnt how this election worked. Trump supporters already see that the nation is on fire and will applaud his decisions that “will eventually fix everything”.

I love the obamas, and maybe my hopes were too great, but i give him failing grades for many things that happened over the last 8 years.
Meanwhile trump has mountains of shit to criticize, but his supporters just defend defend defend…

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I’m looking in from the outside, but it seems to me that the Trump campaign was definitely entitled and therefore not tone deaf or sloppy at all.

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This country is sick. I have a feeling some huge catastophe we be what it takes to cure it.

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57

Go back a year, and ask 10,000 random Americans from all walks of life “Are you happy with how the country is going?”

If the number of people who say “no” is more than half, then don’t pick the single most status-quo, establishment, next-in-line candidate you can find.

That’s why she lost. Because the entire right has gone insane and would vote for literally anyone that promised to end the terrible terrible fascist reign of the tyrant Obamasecretkenyanmuslim, the core liberal base of the Democrats don’t want a continuation of Reagan’s neoliberalism, and the moderate Democrats just figured what’s the damn point anymore?

That left the true believers that small incremental change will solve racism and climate change and wealth disparity, and the people who were so afraid of Trump that they’d vote for a tub of week old tuna salad if it ran against him.

Those are not enough people to win an election. Once again, half the eligible voters stayed home. Almost everybody in this country wants CHANGE- It’s what got Obama elected, it’s the single biggest reason Trump supporters give for voting for him, and everything about Clinton screamed “never gonna happen”.

The important thing is for better or worse, now we have our change, and we need to figure out how to use it to our best advantage.

Trump and the GOP are absolutely going to alienate their base. There is no way that poor whites, rural folks, and the remaining sliver of middle class are going to be doing better 4 years from now. There is going to be a natural surge towards the left as a result of the backlash.

What we need is for as many real progressives to position themselves between now and then to take advantage of that backlash. There is NO WAY the next four years aren’t going to be a complete disaster, do massive damage to civil rights, and hurt a lot of real people. The question is no longer how to mitigate that damage, but how to recover and rebuild.

We need to put progressives into position to take the '18 midterms and '20 general, we need to build a new and trustworthy media model to restore faith in facts, and we need to find a way to bring hope to angry people in a way that fuels constructive change.

I’m sorry, but this battle is lost. We need to think about the greater war, because if you haven’t been paying attention to the climate lately, I have news for you- This is global life or death.

And they will continue to do so until he hurts them badly enough to turn on him. Either they will go deeper into fascist Stockholm self-slavery, or they will wake up and destroy him There is no middle ground there. He needs to be nudged and manipulated into doing something that will fuck over his base in a way they can’t ignore, not just target brown people and “coastal elites”.

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Even if she had won Michigan and Wisconsin, with everything else the same she still wouldn’t have won the electoral vote–Trump got 306 electoral votes and Michigan and Wisconsin together have 26, so Trump still would have won with 280 electoral votes. Are there any other states where Clinton campaigned very little and lost by only a small margin?

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mindfu’s post that you’re responding to said “her campaign didn’t pay attention to 3 midwestern states”, but the three states where Stein’s vote was greater than Trump’s winning margin were Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania–Pennsylvania is not a midwestern state, so either you and mindfu are thinking of a different 3 or you or mindfu are getting something wrong here. Either way, Clinton did a lot of campaigning in Pennsylvania (not quite as many personal appearances there as Trump, but still a lot, and also lots of rallies with surrogates) and put a lot of resources into ads and ground game there, using the same strategy Obama used of running up the totals in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and getting a slight majority in the suburbs, which she actually did more successfully than Obama, as discussed in this article; the problem was an unprecedented jump in the vote in rural areas. So I don’t think the idea that her ideas and messaging and personal appeal were fine, and that her loss should mainly be blamed on an obviously flawed campaigning strategy, really holds up in the case of Pennsylvania (or Florida or Ohio).

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60

I’m really tired of the endless speculation about why the 2016 election _clusterfuck happened the way it did; “hindsight” will not be 20/20 in this particular instance, no matter how hard we may look. (Not to mention, if we survive, it will be analyzed throughout time ad nauseum, by countless people.)

Instead, right now I’m more interested in hearing about solutions and ideas to help us survive this fuckery.

Let’s hear less about HIM, and more about the lawsuits being filed against HIM; the steps being taken to chip away at HIM.

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