Same here
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Guess we’re all impure. Pragmatically willing to cast our vote for the less-than-perfect candidate to try and stop an abysmal one.
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This is the part that has amazed me. I knew him and the entire family before the presidency. He is an honorable man, but not warm & friendly. Stiff, uncomfortable in social situations, aloof. Good person, not saying anything wrong about him, just that he’s not the kind of guy you would want to have a drink with. And while I didn’t know her, over the course of my life I have known thousands (not exaggerating) of women in politics like Hillary. They’re tough as nails, but much more socially approachable than Barack will ever be.
And I can see this difference between them, in public appearances. It seems so obvious to me. How is it that people have been convinced he’s the down-to-earth one and she’s the snob?
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Sorry, needed the laugh.
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You know, though, I don’t really blame people disgusted by the whole process for staying home. Every poll indicated that it was a virtual lock for Hillary, so why bother sullying your Sanders afterglow with a vote for her?
I imagine though that when the results were coming in, their panic and dismay was a thousand times worse than mine was, and that is saying something.
But we’ll have plenty of time to do a purity assessment when we all get to the gulags.
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Some people just connect and communicate better on a mass scale than they do one-to-one. That’s how it is with a lot of celebrities. In my own experience, sometimes the ones you think it would be awesome to have a drink with based on their public personas turn out to be the coldest and most aloof fish you’ll ever meet.
Perhaps Clinton is warmer and more relaxed in one-on-one or small gatherings (I saw some evidence of this during the campaign), but it didn’t come across elsewhere. Meanwhile, when Obama was “on the job” he could convincingly fake being comfortable in both large and small situations.
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That’s a great way of explaining it.
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My sister also knew Obama before he was famous, and says similar things about him to what you had said.
He’s socially awkward, but I don’t get the feeling he thinks he’s better than anyone. Hillary seems the opposite. Warm, but only when she wants to be.
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I meant I am the wrong nationality. I am currently constitutionally unable to vote in US elections.
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Fair enough. I hadn’t realized that the US population was rising so quickly, but Mr. Clinton won in 1992 with 43.01% of the vote and Ms. Clinton lost by getting 48.04% of the vote.
Yes of course, the EC is what matters for who wins the election, but there’s a lot you can learn by digging in a little bit (or a lot).
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I think you are right about this. Along with another issue which has not been brought up much, which is the TPP deal. Obama supported this trade deal along with the Dems. Working people are rightly distrustful of trade deals, because they are negotiated by big business and big government figures in secret, with minimal participation from representatives in labor. I can’t judge whether the overall effect of the TPP would have been positive, but I note that many GOP including Trump spoke against it. He was lying of course, but I think he saw it as a useful issue.
I think both GOP and Dem working class voters are suspicious of these trade agreements, and this may have been part of the so-called populist backlash which kept some Dems from voting for Hillary, as the candidate of more of the same.
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The analogy that seems to me to capture this idea is, “You wanted a martini, but you were offered a glass of lemonade instead, so you decided to take a drink of bleach”.
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It is you who is in fact ignorant of all history before 2008, since the Democratic Leadership Council was founded in 1985. Have a history lesson:
The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was a non-profit 501(c)(4) corporation[1] founded in 1985 that, upon its formation, argued the United States Democratic Party should shift away from the leftward turn it took in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The DLC hailed President Bill Clinton as proof of the viability of Third Way politicians and as a DLC success story.
Yeah. Rewrite history,
I also voted for Sanders in the primary. But that was before he called my state a “distortion.” He did not, in fact, do what he was supposed to do. He spent a month trying to get superdelegates to overthrow the outcome of the primaries. Then he spent another month and a half after the convention sulking before coming out to half heartedly support Clinton,
It doesn’t matter what you or I did. It matters what they all did. And the data says you’re wrong.
"Relative to 2012, Hillary Clinton did worse among millennials by a considerable amount. They turned out to vote in their usual numbers, but a lot of them abandoned Clinton for third-party candidates. All told, I’d say this cost Clinton about 5 percent of the millennial vote, which amounts to 1-2 percent of the total vote. Trump, meanwhile, did as well with millennials as Romney did in 2012.
“Why? I realize we’re all supposed to move on from this, but I blame Bernie Sanders. He started out fine, but after his campaign took off and he realized he could actually win this thing, he turned harshly negative. Over and over, his audience of passionate millennials heard him trash Clinton as a corrupt, warmongering, corporate shill. After he lost, he endorsed Clinton only slowly and grudgingly, and by the time he started campaigning for her with any enthusiasm, it was too late. I understand that Bernie fans want to deny this obvious reality, but honestly, is it any wonder that Clinton lost a big chunk of the millennial vote?”
"The big surprise here is that Clinton did so much worse with unmarried voters. She underperformed Obama among unmarried men by a whopping 10 points, and among unmarried women by 5 points. "
You may take unmarried as a proxy for millenial and millenial as a proxy for Sanders.
You don’t get to pick your own data. You have to live with the data that is. Enough Sanders voters stayed home to amount to 1-2% of the total. Enough defected to third parties to amount to another 1-2%. That is the victory margin right there. Live with it.
By the way, Sanders would have lost in a landslide.
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I don’t think that was an issue, per se, for most voters. It’s sort of the standard background for national-level politicians. Part of tRump’s appeal is that he (unconvincingly) pretended that he wasn’t like that, but as a specific issue, it doesn’t seem to have had a big impact.
The tarnish on the silver lining is that it didn’t matter. Obama got more votes than any candidate in history, with Hillary getting the second highest number - but it was a relatively small number of voters in a few states that actually determined the outcome. The number of Republican voters has remained flat and the number of Democrats has grown (even if they’re not all voting in any particular election), but the Republicans still won. It makes it really hard to talk about the election - and the failures of the Democrats, or successful strategies - in general terms with that being the case. Any discussion has to be broken down state by state to some degree.
Holy shit thanks for proving my point for me.
If you read that the Democratics shift to the right in the 80s was not driven by the voting record, that there is no proof anprogressive candidate can win on a national stage, and that corporate money has turned nearly every state red - how can you then say it was the Democratic lust for power that prompted them taking up similar political tactics to gain any political seat?
Voters drove the country to the right.
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Does it matter if it is political suicide? Let’s be real here.
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From where I am sitting, the “adversary” is just as much the Democrats.
You seem to assume that if you’re not GOP, you’re either a Democrat or hold out the Democrats as some sort of hopeful and aligned party. The Democrats are right centrist corporate shills in progressive drag. They aren’t the friends of working folks or minorities except inasmuch as they must appear to be in order to get votes. They’re corporate and finance oriented, just like the GOP. They only differ in extremes and a few social issues.
I’m not a Democrat. I’m a Socialist. I want to see the betterment of all citizens, especially those on the lowest rungs of society and a full load of social programs, like full medical coverage and education for all citizens.
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Nice word salad. You may think I proved your point, but whatever. The DLC’s purpose was to get themselves some of that sweet sweet corporate money, so they hijacked the Democratic party in that direction, and it worked for Bill Clinton and no one else. Obama was not a DLC protege, and he won on a progressive platform. Bernie would have likely beaten Trump since Trump won on fighting against the Establishment and economic insecurity, not because Trump was/is a real champion of the Right.
Ha ha ha. Are you serious?
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