I’m thinking a new BBS category would work; whatever threads prove most popular there could be promoted on the blog.
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Anyone talking about how proud they were to stand with Nader in 2000 has no practical solutions. And everyone here talking about a third party is also blind.
Splitting the vote of the left just gets you a Trump or a Bush. Tearing down Hillary (or Gore) for the entire campaign didn’t actually help.
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Up here in Canada we have a viable third party option for all of us progressives to support. About three times over the last century it may have actually made a difference. The rest of the time they serve as a holding pen for all the progressives in the country, where we can feel righteous but don’t actually make any difference. They routinely get shafted by FPTP voting. (They do sometimes run a province or two, but have never taken power federally, and likely never will).
Don’t get caught up in wishing for a third party option. They are not a panacea. Their vote collapsed in the last election because they were too progressive for the so-called mainstream, while at the same time they were trying so hard to appeal to the mainstream that all the progressives decried them for selling out.
Canada is known for some of its relatively progressive policies (Health Care, obviously, but also LGBTQ in the military, gay marriage etc etc.). Almost everything we are known for happened when the Centre party was afraid of the left, and/or forced to cooperate with them. When they are afraid of the right they tend to produce conservative policies.
So you need to make the Democratic party afraid of the left, make them know they can’t take you for granted. Hold their feet to the fire.
If you abandon the Dems for a third party you will spend the next 20 years in the wilderness building a holding pen for progressives to be ignored.
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Given the overall difference between the American “center” and European “center” of politics, Moore becomes a unique phenomenon: a shrill populist entertainment figure who espouses utterly reasonable, mainstream opinions.
We’ve got plenty of very boring politicians in very boring suits saying essentially the same things.
But the idea of smashing politicians’ heads together for science is worth it independently of the exact political opinions involved.
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Ivory Tower? Australia solved this problem in 1924.
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Even with the previous election having two deeply unpopular candidates, the 3rd party vote still was still only like 7% of the total vote.
There was also the roughly 50% “none of the above” (non-voters) bloc.
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Rich old white guy telling people how to deal with a rich old white guy.
I think that’s Trumps plan for the nation as well.
that real change only happens from the bottom up.
This statement is a liberal shibboleth that should be dispensed with (NB: I distinguish ‘liberal’ from ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’)… a kind of “pay no attention to the our Democrat behind the curtain” argument that is prima facie false:
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Ronald Reagan and his crew enacted real change in domestic and foreign policy not from the bottom up.
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George W. Bush and his crew enacted real change in domestic and foreign policy not from the bottom up.
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Trump and his crew will undoubtedly do likewise.
Real change does happen from the bottom, but real change also happens every day—not just once every four years—enacted by those in the halls of power (that’s why we call call them “powerful”). It’s an attempted sop by the “lesser of two evil” crowd who have a poor grasp on elementary game theory (i.e. that only leads to more evil).
I’m to the point of rolling my eyes every time I hear someone say that all liberals are “bewildered”, or “shocked that this could happen.” A lot of us have plenty of relatives and high school classmates on social media who live in red states, and have been perfectly aware of this possibility all along – and that’s why we’ve fought so hard and/or ponied up so much cash. We’re just “shocked” in the colossal-disappointment-in-our-neighbors-and-institutions sense that it came to pass.
That’s very different from being confused or naive about it.
Who me? I’m not defensive, no!
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He hinted that Democratic voters in my part of the country were less than full voters because black
I would be interested to read a citation of that, it seems unlikely to me.
Here you go:
In the South, Democratic primaries are overwhelmingly dominated by black voters. I immediately regretted voting for him.
Support in what way? As soon as he lost, he explained that it was over,
and immediately started directing his voters, activists, and other
interested people to the Clinton campaign. There was a lot of coverage
about this on the net at the time.
Support in the sense of saying “She won and now let’s all get behind her.” He did not explain that it was over. He instead engaged in an extended campaign to convince superdelegates to overturn the results of the vote. He made no public commitment to support her until his convention speech.
But I thought that of the major figures of the election year, Sanders
did a better job than Trump or Clinton of pushing the focus of
discussion to the issues. Since the debates between Trump and Clinton
got quite a bit more personal and nasty, I don’t understand how this
indicates that Sanders cost Clinton the election in any way.
Early, yes. But from about the Southern primaries on Sanders’ campaign was more focused on dark rumors about her speeches and accusations of ethics problems and betrayal of the working class. What happened in the Trump=Clinton debates is irrelevant to this since voters by and large no longer move between the major parties. What is important is how Sanders split the Democratic constituency. They would have been completely unaffected by anything Trump said.
Informed voters have a responsibility to make up their own minds. If a
candidate such as Sanders raises criticisms of another Democrat who is
competing for the same position, then they are doing their job. Also I
think it is disingenuous to characterize Sanders campaign as being
“vitriolic”. He was as rigorous and polite as the situation demanded.
You have a touching faith in the Schoolhouse Rock version of elections.
When Sanders called me a “distortion,” that was uncalled for an offensive. When he called Clinton corrupt in the absence of any evidence, or even contrary to existing evidence that was offensive and unacceptable.
Firstly, since Sanders was quite vocal and genuine in telling people to
vote for Clinton despite his reservations about her as a candidate, he
has no blame there. Some people were never going to vote for Clinton.
That is simply untrue. Sanders is fully responsible for the nasty things he said from mid to late primary campaign. He whipped up the hysterical reaction to Clinton. If he had kept it on the level of policy and dismissed ethics complaints as he did early on, I’ve no doubt things would have turned out differently.
We’ll find out the details of what happened in coming days. But your explanation would cut across all demographic groups and the data don’t show that. Any explanation you offer has to be linked to something particular about young people and that one isn’t. At the end of the day, the data is what it is and you have to accept it whether you like it or not.
Is it that we deserve other people’s votes for those who we personally consider better suited?
No.
It is that you need to stop being a Pollyanna about the nature of change in this country. There are no revolutions. There has only ever been incremental change. You need to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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He didn’t do that. He campaigned for Clinton after he lost, despite getting screwed over.
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Let’s not forget redlining and ghettoization in the north. Racism is not a southern problem, it’s an American problem (and a global problem, actually).
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The campaign did none of that, even if some of the independent voters he pulled in did. He ran a clean, grassroots campaign that prized decency and sought to reach out across class, gender,and racial lines. Clinton’s camp actually had some dirty tricks aimed at Sander’s campaign, not the other way around.
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was the first to claim the election was rigged.
To be fair on that one, we’ve seen that there was definitely some
pro-Clinton bias going on; not surprising given that she’s been way up
in the party since, well, before I was born.
That’s true enough. Parties are private organizations. And Sanders’ character was revealed by the low way he responded to that.
In fact, to the extent the primary was rigged, it was rigged in Sanders’ favor. Caucuses are the least democratic part of the process running away. You have to be able to show up at a specific time at a specific place to be counted at all. People with children and second jobs do not count.
But Sanders had no problem with the caucus system because that is where he won all his votes. That suggests his comments were about expediency, not principle.
Which I personally chalk up to the candidate not being good. I could be
wrong here, of course, but of the people I know who voted for Sanders in
the primary, smack dab in the middle of this age group we’re talking,
everyone but myself held their nose and voted Clinton.
Which is true of, apparently, roughly 85% of that group. The other 15% made the difference and there is a high probability that most people could simply not have any of that 15% in their circle of friends. Anecdotes are not data.
Your explanation would predict that Clinton’s share of the vote would be down from 2012 across demographic groups and it was not. I’m ready to see more detailed data but I’m not ready to dismiss the data that is already available.
I don’t know about Sanders’ condemnation, but the fact that she was a
lukewarm candidate to start with, plus some of the dumb stuff that went
on around her was enough to get me to throw away my vote.
That’s really the long and short of it. Clinton was no Obama: she
didn’t have the same conviction in her rhetoric when she had it,
probably because she’s jumped around in her positions enough that we
know better.
Hilary Clinton has endured 40 years of the most vicious, relentless, hyperbolic scandal mongering of any person in politics since the 19th century. No one does that as a “lukewarm” candidate. That takes commitment to not just chuck it all and cash in.
I respect people whose positions have changed and who can articulate why they changed. That shows a person capable of learning. Clinging to the same positions no matter what happens and what the evidence says is not admirable, it is stupid.
I once was a follower of Ayn Rand. Then I grew up a bit and began to see the complexity of the world. I like to think that is evidence of learning and not of lack of convictions.
At the end of the day, you have to accept the data. I’m sure we’ll get more detailed data eventually, but for right now the available data suggests that Sanders turned off just enough Democratic voters to tip the election and provided them with a reason to waste their vote instead of making the world better.
I blame him for the climate change that is now inevitable.
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No. He did not. Of literally all the candidates, he was the least likely to engage in divisive rhetoric.
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As with every election, there are a bunch of factors that came into play that contributed to the outcome. I kind of agree with some of what you’re saying, since the Sanders campaign resulted in an ugly primary that reinforced a lot of the image problems Clinton had in the general, created the Bernie-Or-Bust nitwits that were committed to aiding Trump out of infantile bitterness, and so on. There were some really bad things that came out of that. But I don’t think Sander’s campaign was really responsible for what some of what his more zealous followers were up to - he didn’t encourage the assholes, and tried to rein them in.
Besides that, it’s just one contributing factor. You could just as easily blame Clinton for running since she was an uncharismatic candidate with a heavy burden of political baggage, a decades old, well-funded hate-machine trailing her every move, and she knew the special rules in the press to spin her as guilty of every accusation by default and paint her as corrupt. You could blame the SCOTUS for gutting the Voting Rights Act which probably lost NC. You could blame the GOP’s mass voter disenfranchisement in FL, WI, and elsewhere that probably lost those states. You could point to a bunch of other shit that went wrong everywhere - it was a perfect storm of fucked up bullshit everywhere on every front.
Now is the time that everyone who is not a Trump supporter, whether leftist, moderate, centrist, partisan Dem., or whatever to come together to fight the goddamn fascist that was elected. That really fucking matters. Pointing fingers at your favorite villain among people who are now on our side, and bickering with people who should be allies is helping Trump. Cut that shit out.
I try not to swear, but Jesus Fuck, this shit has to end - there’s a fucking fascist headed to the WH, and we’re bickering with each other about shit that’s done and over instead of focusing on the tasks ahead. Fuck. That. Noise.
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All this.
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We need to have Ranked Choice Voting! With more than one choice on the ballot, choosing only one makes no sense!
“The game is rigged in America when it comes to third parties. There’s no way that that’s ever going to work.”
