No, you may not take unmarried as a proxy for millenial or millenial as a proxy for Sanders. I am unmarried, and 44 years old. If you chose to look around at your fellow Boingers who voted for Bernie, you’d see a much wider range of ages and socioeconomic groups than just “unmarried millenials.” Yes, you have your data. But I trust the stories of the actual people I’ve spoken to, online and off, more than the latest talking-head’s data points. History isn’t just numbers, it’s people and their stories. So me preferring in-person narratives over crunching numbers (which have rarely been accurate this election season) is not me rewriting history, no matter how much you may disagree.
And your feelings are hurt because your state’s results were called a distortion? Try being told by a major Clinton campaign ally that “there’s a special place in Hell waiting for you because you’re not supporting your fellow woman.” Which Hillary never once refuted. Yet, for the sake of the country, I swallowed my anger and voted Clinton… for all the good it did. And I cannot believe I was the only one who did so. --But that can’t possibly be true! According to your data, I don’t exist. Huh. Maybe the reality we are all living with isn’t so neatly or accurately described by your data. Try living with that. The results might suprise you.
You’ve made your choice, though. And you are entitled to your opinion, whether I agree or not. If looking back and blaming Bernie makes you feel better, than go ahead. Have fun with that. I am very much looking forward to all the ways he’s fighting the good fight against Trump’s machinations right now. To each their own.
Saying the DLC was a reaction to public opinion about the Democrats is not word salad.
Obama was never a progressive. His progressive platform was the same “token” platform as the party’s, but Obama is an extremely talented campaigner.
You feel Bernie would win, but there is no proof. He performed extremely well in Michigan and Wisconsin, and if he did win it would have been extremely close.
Trump didn’t just campaign on economic anxiety, to make that claim is an absurdity.
You have to accept that while public opinion polls say the country leans left the GOP has been consistently winning elections with insipid politicians with no personality. The US is conservative and there is no magical bullet to change that.
Socialist or democrat, it doesn’t matter. We have a common enemy. And if you want to see the betterment of all citizens, then doing everything to prevent Trump was the obvious course of action.
The big picture of this vote was that Trump got about as many votes as Romney, but Hillary significantly underperformed relative to Obama. I doubt “traditionally Dem blue collars” were the majority of Obama voters who didn’t like Hillary, but for anyone in this group, there’s a good chance the objections to Hillary would have to do with her being too friendly to Wall Street, too hawkish, and too much a part of the establishment (not to mention a more intangible sense that she comes across as kind of fake and inauthentic–that kind of personality stuff doesn’t matter as much to me but probably does influence a lot of voters), so I suspect they would have been more favorably disposed to an old Jewish socialist.
Edit: actually, it looks like the articles I read about vote totals were from before final tallies were in, it turns out Trump’s total beats Romney’s by significantly more than Obama’s total beat Clinton’s, see here. I still tend to think a more progressive, less establishment candidate could have done better but this does make the argument a bit more ambiguous.
Is this an old circular firing squad or a new one?
Ehn, it don’t matter. Hillary won the popular vote. The sole reason she’s not picking out new wallpaper for the Oval Office right now is because Republicans have literally spent decades gaming the system so the playing field is tilted in their favor. It’s been tilted to the point that having millions of more votes just won’t cut it. It seems that’s what happens when everything wrong with America allies under one banner.
I suppose blaming the Millennials is a lot easier than putting in the decades long from-the-ground-up work that will be required to undo the damaged cause by the slow motion coup the Republican Party successfully pull off.
You guys are standing over the bodies of Bonny & Clyde and arguing over which bullet killed them. All these thing are factors, it’s just easier to quantify the low base turnout than the myriad other factors including the traditional high bar of retaining the White House after 8 years. The main reason for optimism to begin with was the GOP’s spectacularly bad nominee, or so we thought.
Hillary had every advantage. The Sanders campaign was to a large extent under the control of the DNC, which was totally controlled by Clinton supporters. The current president gave full support to Clinton, and she had strong allies at every level of government, many being Clinton appointees. The mainstream media supported her, to the unprecedented extent of giving her debate questions in advance, and reporting that it would be against the law to read the DNC leaks. She had more money, and spent more money on her campaign than any candidate in history. She faced in the general election the candidate that the DNC felt would be easiest to defeat, and whose candidacy they promoted, according to their own communications. They managed to control the narrative to the extent that public support of Trump on college campuses was considered a hate crime. Trump, on the other hand, makes a fool of himself almost every time he makes an unscripted remark. He never had anywhere near the funding Clinton had, nor the support of most members of his own party. Or any political experience.
Hillary had everything going for her. Had the DNC put all those advantages to work for any other viable candidate, Trump would have been obliterated. But it was never about a win for Progressives, or Democrats, or even a great female president. It was only about Hillary. They had been planning a Hillary presidency for years, maybe decades. the election itself was a foregone conclusion. Everything was in place. But she screwed it up. As General Powell said, “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris,”
Nearly the entire comment section here, as well as Cory’s writeup, is depressingly, predictably racist as fuck. Yes, instead of addressing the fact that voter suppression is a real thing, let’s victim blame instead.
No. It sounds sweetly reasonable, but we need to ‘consider the source’. Walsh is a doyenne of the Clintonesque ‘liberal’ elite. She is not interested in seeing the internal power dynamics of the party change despite her nominally progressive stance as an opinion maker.
The Democratic Party is more open to change now than it has been for decades. The grip of the neoliberal centrists has been significantly loosened. Their erstwhile mega-donors will only give them crumbs now that they have been largely cut off from power. The Sanders wing has opportunities to move into positions of control within the party & needs to keep up the pressure on the failing party elite.
Politics is a contact sport. **And it should be **.
(Edited for tone. jerwin was right, it was poorly written.)
