This guy learned the hard way. If it’s a choice between taking advice from an armchair quarterback and someone who failed but knows why they failed, I’m taking advice from the “loser.”
It seems like good advice, too - it throws off Trump and erodes the advantage he gets from his constant, unchallenged lying.
Joe Biden obviously had the correct method which would be to beat him at pushups.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a real margin. The electoral college installed the loser. How has that worked?
A candidate could win 50+% of the electoral college by taking 22% of the states by 24% of the popular vote. Thus is another loser installed. Hey, do we have a system, or what?
What is the only way to beat a playground bully? If that one way works, why isn’t it universally applied?
…due almost entirely to population growth.
Turnout percentages in 2016 were substantially down from previous elections. The Clinton campaign failed to mobilise working class voters, particularly working class voters of colour.
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turnout-2016/index.html
Trump is bad, yes. But that does not alter the fact that Clinton ran a spectacularly incompetent campaign in 2016, or that anyone who fails to recognise that point lacks credibility as a political strategist.
Yes, she only won the popular vote (even with massive Russian interference and Comey’s bullshit), and let the rigged machine install the loser. Totally incompetent. 
She was running against the least popular Republican candidate in history, who was installed as the GOP challenger in part due to her own efforts, and lost primarily because of an arrogant refusal to campaign in the key industrial states that were of obvious importance to anyone who bothered to recognise that the electoral college existed.
So, yes, Totally incompetent.
The system installs losers, and it’s the winners’ fault? Fascinating.
Was the antidemocratic structure of American politics a factor in Trump’s victory? Yes.
Was there any excuse for the Clinton campaign to act as if they were unaware of this structural disadvantage? No.
Except that data (from November 2016) didn’t last through the end of 2016, which has been pointed out a bunch of times.
You’ve got me there; I hadn’t picked up on the late surge.
I’d say that the rest of my argument still holds, though. If the popular vote mattered in US Presidential elections, we’d be discussing the legacy of President Gore these days. This is not some shocking new factor that was first discovered in 2016.
The Clinton campaign needlessly shot itself in the feet on a weekly basis, and it cost them the support they needed in the key regions that were known to be necessary to win the election. They lost a winnable election against a widely despised opponent, chiefly through events of their own creation.
Failure to learn from the disaster of 2016 guarantees its repetition.
Hey dude, let’s leave the Jets out of it, OK???
Failure to fix a rigged system guarantees further installation of losers. GOPs in gerrymandered states lose the popular vote but win legislatures. Presidential candidates lose votes but win the rigged game. And as mentioned, too many voting systems are totally non-transparent, so we can have little confidence in announced results.
Fix the system, not the campaign.
tldr: never misunderestimate the…
I think the “no filter” thing, as well as the “lacks vocabulary” thing, it feels good to say it. It makes me feel superior when I am thinking that way even though my own filter is not so great either and I frequently stumble on my own words. And Eichenwald is also saying it on twitter.
However, thinking of Trump only in that way, as if these are vulnerabilities, is something we do at our peril. The things that we find most offensive and that seem the most irresponsible, stupid and off-the-cuff are the very things that grow his base. There is a schooled discipline behind what seems to us as irrational. It is from the Roy Cohn school of political upheaval. Consider:
He started putting Rosy O’Donnell on blast around the time she was vociferously advocating for legally protected gay marriage. For his base, the people who very uncomfortable with it, they don’t think they have an equal voice as the co-host of a morning TV show. They saw Trump as stepping up for them.
Look at it that way with respect to Obama / birther, and that full page NY Times ad calling on NY to kill those black kids.
Getting into it with the congressional POC’s is not meant to engage them in a debate. It’s a display. It is also, per the Cohn method, going after their strengths rather than their weaknesses. They are pushing the democratic party in a direction it arguably needs to go in, and with strong support. Their cultural identities are proudly on display and widely embraced. So that’s what Trump is attacking - not some political nuance like whether the Green New Deal is too union friendly. He’s attacking who they are as people which is the source of their down home appeal to voters.
So that above is meant to go over his supposed lack of a filter. Next, we need to seriously look at and not dismiss or talk down to his stilted vocabulary. It is the vocabulary of poor whites who have been denigrated by hollywood and by northern intellectuals.
Where else has this played out?
The holocaust started as a night of book burning in 1931, after which Goebbels addressed the student and bar-fighting book burners:
“The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit …”
Replacing rigorous intellect with spirit - in what might have been called a “post truth era.” What also replaced scientific rigor was pseudo science (e.g., measuring skulls) and the infantilization of the entire German population by compelling grown men and women to refer to their leader as their father.
In 1962, General Ne Win (which translates to “The Sun”) seized power in Burma. He had an 8th grade education. He repeatedly shut down the schools and universities and gutted them. People in his circle who were more educated than him tended to disappear. Hence, there are a great many Burmese expats with doctorate degrees in the U.S. & Europe. In a great many respects, even to this day, Myanmar is decades behind the rest of the modern world. School children in Burma were also taught to refer to Ne Win as their “father.”
The Khmer Rouge wasn’t just Pol Pot going out and killing millions of intellectuals. It took millions of soldiers, many of them children, all of them uneducated, and an extremely dumbed down portrait of the intellectual: anyone with glasses. But this had started with intellectuals being demoted or expelled from the power structures (hello federal agencies).
It’s not that Trump’s base believes his lies. They believe their own truths as only Trump appears to voice them. So, I am not sure of the answer, but we must be aware that he is queuing up very effectively to win reelection. I think one thing we can do is start talking with his base and, as offensive as we may find much of their thinking, stop talking at them and start really listening to them and even finding our way to their common ground with us.
A final note… He’s not going to win or even try to win by touting his accomplishments (in part because there are so few). Expect a lot more of the victim/underdog approach which will rely on still deeper conspiracy theories. Everything that he doesn’t accomplish plays into this and makes him more sympathetic to his base. Every opposition he faces makes his candidacy stronger. (“They wouldn’t let me build the wall - you saw what they did to make it all but impossible at every turn. But we still stopped them, didn’t we?” etc. etc. etc.).
It’s generally true that people tend not to change their party allegiance. However …
That’s a massive market of potential undecideds and a massive potential shift in the popular vote, even if nobody who voted in 2016 changes their vote (whether than was R, D, or did_not_vote) for 2020.
How many will be disenfranchised or suppressed?
In response to some other people doubting this, I can vouch for the truth of it. As incredible as it seems, there are some airheads out there who have absolutely no idea what’s going on in politics on even the most basic level, yet still bother to go out and vote. I met some while going door to door in 2016 to get out the vote. They seemed to not have the slightest inkling that Clinton and Trump had significantly different policies, and they weren’t those bitter “all candidates are equally bad” people either, they just seemed as though they’d heard the candidates’ names mentioned somewhere and that was all they knew about them. I could easily see one of those people hearing from a friend that someone kicked Trump’s ass in a debate, then shrugging and voting for that candidate.
During the same time I learned of the existence of dedicated Trump voters who are very soft-spoken and polite, even when speaking about politics with a Hispanic activist (my partner during canvassing). I can only assume they’re the sort of people who would be upbeat and sunny and make sure not to say anything offensive even as they slowly tortured you to death.
DEAD CARP 2020
My overall impression was that she ran a fine campaign against Mitt Romney with dementia.
But she ran a shit campaign against Trump.
And then his engorged tough guy proxies will have to vote for the new alpha male, i love this idea.
Exactly. The problem with counting his lies, is he will just mirror that technique. Unless there is a moderator fact-checking continuously, part of his “style” is to mirror. Thus the “Puppet” - “Not a puppet, you’re the puppet!” line.
Set the terms of engagement. No interruptions, your mic is off when it’s not your turn. 3 minute delay to the broadcast for fact-checking, with live feedback and penalties for lying. If he doesn’t accept the terms, publicly shame him and turn the chicken line on him.
“Donald Trump is afraid to debate me without being able to rudely interrupt and to lie without repercussion - as he’s lied over 10,000 times publicly since he took office. He’s fundamentally a bully and a coward - unless he’s willing to debate on the issues as my campaign has laid out terms for.”
