Keep in mind Obama was running against Repub candidates who did not address the illegal immigration issue which Trump made the centerpiece of his campaign.This is a huge issue with middle/lower middle class whites which Sanders wasn’t going to address at all. Right or wrong it’s the reason people voted for Trump no matter what people on the left want to believe.
Some possible truth there.
One thing I don’t see mentioned very much in all these Democrat post mortems is the fact that Trump is the first presidential candidate in our history whose entire career has been spent in sales and marketing.
You think that you spend fifty years getting people to buy property at 10-50% more than its intrinsic value without learning something?
Lots of people got very angry at Scott Adams’ spending months on his blog discussing Trump and the art of persuasion. Too bad for Hillary that she did not check out what Adams was talking about.
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As I said in the message to which you replied, the negative coattails of Obama is the biggest reason for the almost nonexistent Democratic bench.
well, YOU might not like jewish Democratic Socialists, but Sanders would have cut through the bullshit that is Donald Trump in a way that Madam Monsanto just. couldn’t.
potential voters needed an outsider.
except those doing very well in the status quo.
60% of American did not vote. they were unmotivated by these two candidates.
god i would have paid money to see Sanders and Trump in a debate.
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Anti-immigrant xenophobia certainly has electoral appeal, across economic groups. It’s been a perennial winner in my country, to our disgrace.
But, as with Trump, it’s not an exclusively or even predominantly working class phenomenon. The working class, in both America and Australia, is much more ethnically diverse than the wealthier segments of society. They’re more exposed to the economic impacts of unregulated immigration, but they’re also more exposed to personal familiarity with diverse people (which, as the gay rights movement demonstrates, reduces prejudice).
You’ll find just as much bigotry in the middle and upper classes as you do in the working class.
So, yes; anti-immigrant sentiment is an effective tactic for the right, which draws support from diverse economic groups.
But I think that the left can counter that by offering genuine representation of working class economic interests (which, yes, could include things like prosecution of employers who undercut US labour standards by exploiting undocumented workers). Pandering to xenophobia is not necessary.
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I remember Hillary supporters saying she would be a better president (I think think is true), she was solidly winning and a quixotically long campaign risked dividing the base (also true), and she would be the stronger general election candidate (unknown).
[quote=“Sludge, post:51, topic:89411”]
DNC $$ from payday lenders, the bailouts, exec pay combined with this stuff
was impossible to defend and pissed people off across the political
spectrum - especially those who were motivated enough to come out and
vote. [/quote]
Most of these issues were completely common for a politician and only became serious issues when applied to Clinton. Obama finished the election with huge approval ratings despite selling ambassadorships to top donors (as is standard practice).
Because HRC had an insurmountable lead in the pledged delegate count. For a big portion of the campaign her victory was essentially assured.
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I totally agree. I was simply talking about why whites on the lower rungs of the economic ladder would go for Trump over Bernie. They believe these people are taking their jobs or are using social services that should be going to them instead. Trump knew it would have strong appeal to them which is why he launched his campaign with it. If anything Sanders is far more liberal on this issue than Clinton is.
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Obama was an exceptionally talented politician, and the core of his talent lay in convincing people that he represented a hope for change rather than business-as-usual plutocratic corruption.
That talent is gone now. “We’ve always done it this way” no longer works as an excuse for corruption. People are sick of it; they realise that the issues facing the world today make the status quo into a suicide pact.
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Trump would have played to xenophobia against Bernie, sure. I think that Bernie could have overcome that with wages, healthcare, education and economic justice.
But, we’ll never know.
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It just seemed to me he had limited appeal nationally beyond younger white liberals which seemed to be his base. And once he got elected how would he get any of this accomplished without a Dem congress?
This was argued a few thousand times during the campaign; it became a standard part of Bernie’s stump speech. The plan was to use the bully pulpit to raise issues in the public consciousness and drive turnout for a congressional takeover in the midterms.
Long shot? Hell yes. Nobody else had a better plan, though.
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Remember when Bernie decided it was more important to burn the house down than to defeat Trump?
Fuck Sanders.
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Well worth the time to read.
People are completely forgetting that during the primary it was no sure thing Trump would be the candidate come November. I was certain he would find some excuse to drop out even before the debates and be replaced and Sanders would have been up against Cruz or somebody.
I’ve long considered them one and the same.
One can respect a person yet deplore their actions.
The upper classes are just better at disguising their bigotry in fancy words.
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They always find some skeletons in the closet to harp on. In Bernie’s case, the best the opposition has been able to find that had any legs was his wife’s involvement in bankrupting a local college. Shocker, the FBI might have been involved in this story that came out during the primary.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this too. In a normal election year, the right would’ve said “come vote against the socialist” and turned their base out in droves. This wasn’t an ordinary year.
I voted Hillary in the primaries, and you can’t know a counterfactual, but I do wonder.
