Not sure how Bernie would have done in Pennsylvania. But, the signs are not good:
There is a little detail which seems to be missing in this thread. Racism and Misogyny played a huge part in this election and while the misogyny bit might have been curtailed by a Sanders candidacy, the racism would have most likely been fueled. A large section of the intellectual elite vilified by Trump i.e.WSJ & NYT columnists are Jews and they didn’t fare particularly well. Very optimistic to suggest that a Jewish intellectual like Sanders would have been spared.
If this election showed anything it is that racism including anti-semitism is alive and well in America.
EDIT: to add another thing. Tuesday has discredited political polling for good. So to argue that according to polls 6 months ago x would have happened is the equivalent of reading tea leaves.
Why all the strawmen? The people are the Democratic Party. We’re arguing that we, collectively, made a bad choice. And in 4 years if we’re looking at another choice between a traditional, pro-corporate, rich career politician and somebody who’s resonating with the young and disenfranchised we should give the latter a long hard consideration, even if our personal preference is for the status quo. Nobody is saying Bernie should have been named by fiat. Some of us would have liked a more level playing field, but fundamentally people are trying to reflect on why the democratic voters picked a candidate that, in retrospect, looks like such a bad choice for the national political environment.
[quote=“fluffitfluffit, post:16, topic:89110”]
The Democratic party did not run anyone. People volunteered themselves to run and then the public voted on them. [/QUOTE]
The Democratic party nominated Hillary Clinton to run for President. In doing so, they nominated a candidate who had been demonstrated to be less electable in certain regions of the Rust Belt that, in reality, ended up losing her the presidency. It’s not idealism to speculate that this could’ve gone differently, it’s trying to learn so that this is the last time something like this can happen.
It’s not randos from the public who run - it is people that the party knows, that have cause to believe they could win, and who have some experience in the party already. And the DNC obviously had a favorite that they actively advocated for. That bias could very well be a contributing factor to Trump’s America.
I think that’s a reasonable fear, but remember: the white people who voted for Trump this time around voted for Obama the last time around. The people scrawling those swastikas didn’t. Hillary lost those voters, and she didn’t lose them by being black.
Indeed. It’s more jarring to see taking control of the state here, but resurgent populist nationalism been metastatising on for a while elsewhere in the world.
The irony is that it’s progressing in concert with the growth of inequality and corporate sovereignty, resulting in a situation where the wealthy will be able to continue to exist as transnational entities (albeit more skittish and circumspect ones) while everyone else devolves to a more provincial, peasant-like existence.
I feel that this election is a death knell for the modern, centrist left. Not only have we failed to meaningfully advance progressive causes, the right has consistently fought back and won. Now for the first time they are poised to wontonly roll back whatever advances were made.
America is a conservative country.
Thirty years of progressivism has proven one thing: liberal values are ironically incompatible with multiculturalism. As soon as the dominant culture feels threatened, they pack up their toys and stop sharing with everyone else.
It’s happened in Northern Europe. England. The rest of the continent is now imperiled.
The Rust Belt, including Pennsylvania, voted overwhelmingly for a black man in two consecutive elections. I’m not saying that proves that there are no racist Pennsylvania voters.* Of course they are. They are just capable of overcoming their racism and voting for a candidate who represents them.
In this case, unfortunately, nobody represented them. Trump didn’t, but he resonates with low-information voters. Hillary didn’t, and in her case, her disdain for low-information voters and her tone-deafness to class issues is palpable.
*Does a vandalized South Philly storefront prove anything, even anecdotally?
That’s not my understanding of the numbers. The people who voted for Obama didn’t vote for Clinton. They didn’t vote. That was the issues especially in battle states.
Clinton wasn’t able to convice that her message was one of a positive future and that every vote mattered. Which is unsurprising, given that she was on the front line of politics for 30 years and so had ample opportunity to dirty her hands. Obama didn’t, he was an unknown. And it seems the American people prefer unknowns to people who actually do the dirty work of pragmatic politics.
I am increasingly convinced, that Clinton’s biggest mistake was to accept Secretary State post. Had she been in the political background rather than practicing politics, she would have been fine. As a woman, this is depressing.
My analysis is that politics in the US are more usefully characterized in a two dimensional way, like alignments in D+D than a single Left-Right line. So we have an economic (progressive - corporatist) axis and a social (liberal - conservative) axis. In the Post WWII period the parties were coalitions largely based on the economic axis So you had socially conservative union members as an important part of the Democratic coalition. The Republican party capitalized on LBJ’s support for the civil rights act with the “Southern Strategy.” Reagan doubled down on this with his talk of “Less government.” This was the perfect dog whistle that played two tunes, because the bankster class heard that as “lower taxes and less regulation” and Southerners heard it as "less interference with de facto segregation. Then Bill Clinton managed capture a large amount of the corporatist vote with policies like welfare reform. With Obama’s economic policies, the transformation was complete.
The party coalitions are now primarily along social lines. And with the increasing importance of money, both parties have been busy sucking up to the wealthy elites, those for whom the economy has been working. Which meant that both parties had a large cohort of voters that were economically abandoned by both major parties. Which is why we had the Trump and Bernie insurgencies. Two people who were not beholding to the parties whose nomination they were seeking. The lesson that I draw from this is that we’ve gone about as far as possible into the money-seeking corporatist mold, and that eventually a majority of the dispossed have been able to counterbalance some of the power of money. It remains to be seen what lesson the political parties will draw from this.
Again misinterpreting the numbers. The Obama voters just didn’t vote this time, they didn’t run over to Trump. That wouldn’t make no sense.
Look at this thread. Racism as a motivator in this election is very real. Far more real than disgruntlement with neoliberalism or some obscure trade deal. People need to get this. Not liking / hating those who are different from self is an innate human response to uncertainty. It is easy to exploit hard to restrain. That is what we have civilization for.
Poland and Hungary are already there, the next two, uh, interesting stations are France (presidential elections, scheduled for April 2017, Marine Le Pen has realistic chances) and Germany (general elections, August 2017, will AfD as successful as on state level?)
In my experience of living in post Brexit Britain as a European Immigrant, yes. The Tone in the UK definitely changed, palpably so. And in my case it is pretty hard to know that I am not English.
So don’t want to know what it is like in the US at the moment to be visibly different. And in a country where there is NO gun control.
Based on the votes of millions of people which selected party delegates who then voted for her at the convention. It would’ve worked the same way for Sanders, if he didn’t fail to get more votes than Clinton.
It’s not randos from the public who run - it is people that the party knows,
Literally anybody can run. You declare yourself as a candidate, file some forms with the party and you’re off and running.
And the DNC obviously had a favorite that they actively advocated for
Show us the data that shows the DNC had any effect at all on anybody’s vote.
Hillary WON the popular vote, and would have won the election if not for voter suppression.
Yes, the DNC and Wasserman-Schultz are awful, and should have been dropped. Yes, the ground game should have focused more on the disaffected, not to move right, but to get them to move away from Trump.
It should never have even been close. It wasn’t an awful campaign, but it could have, and SHOULD have, been so much better. Too much preaching to the choir, not enough work against the Hillary hate.
That said, the biggest problem is not the DNC, it’s the dirtbags on the other side. Never forget that.
I agree and disagree. Certainly among too many voters blacks are stealing their money through welfare and Mexicans are stealing their jobs and the jews are conspiring on Wall Street to close their factories down. But on the left I think we’ve been too eager to say “great, a bunch of racists, ignore them.” and “we’ve got to protect those groups (which we of course do)” and not “why are these people so afraid? How can we restore their confidence in America? Are there legitimate issues underpinning this fear?” Trump got too many votes for this to just be garden-variety wacko’s.
if the DNC did not have the deck stacked against Bernie
Can you link to the data that shows that the DNC twisted people’s arms, coerced them, or otherwise effected anybody’s vote? If the DNC controlled literally millions of voters, there should be ample evidence of it.
How many people were removed from the Democrat Rolls prior to the closed primaries in their states?
Do you think everyone that got screwed by policies that have been in place forever was a Sanders supporter ?
Why were all the debates on Saturday,
Who cares?
and why was no other candidate allowed to participate in other debates?
Candidates have to receive a certain minimum level of support in polls in order to qualify : 1% (!). This has always been true.
Why the hell did AP call it for Clinton before California even voted, and with the exact number?
Sanders wasn’t going to win CA.
The Superdelegates didn’t vote until July, and their preferences should not have been advertised until the rest of us voted.
This is just silly.
And then he’d be our next president.
And unicorn pony farts would scent the air from here to there…
The more I look at the results of this election - and the roaring unease of the entire country - the more I’m convinced that the malaise that elected Trump and Occupy Wall Street are angry about the same damn thing. The only divide that separates them is culture - Occupy being mostly urban and Trump supporters more rural.
Look at this article - it hits is dead on - [quote=“doctorow, post:1, topic:89110”]
As Steven Brust writes, the fact that Trump supporters vehemently denied that he is a racist (he is a racist) also means that “even they think racism is a bad thing and should be denied.”
[/quote]
What people voted for was someone to burn the house down - why they did this and elected incumbents I don’t understand - but the Trump angle overwhelmingly was people pissed about the lack of jobs. Not just the lack of jobs - the lack of good paying jobs. This is - in essence - exactly the inequality that Occupy was upset with - it’s the same thing that drove the Bernie camp - and it’s the reason people are still pissed that banks were bailed out but home-owners were left to hang.
Trump has no choice but to follow through with his promises now - the big question is going to be if he ‘gets’ what drove his election. Overwhelmingly people said they didn’t give a shit about the wall, or Muslims - but jobs. Frankly I’m sceptical that the president - or the republican agenda - will produce jobs that people desire. One things is for sure - they control everything - we’ll see if that means they actual govern for a change.
All I’m saying is if racism were a deciding factor, the state wouldn’t have overwhelmingly voted for a black man in not one Presidential election but two.
I realize they didn’t run over to Trump. If they were bigots, they would have. They just didn’t flee Trump. They just didn’t show up for Clinton, and not because they’re bigots. It was almost certainly because they were put off by neoliberalism, or rather, neoliberalism combined with the dictionary definition of a limousine liberal.
Obama brought people to the polls, and Clinton chased them away.
By the way, the TPP is not an obscure trade deal. If you think it is, you’re part of the problem.
I’m from a blue-collar Midwestern background myself. I get it better than most of the people posting here do. Are there bigots in the Midwest? Yes, certainly, because they’re everywhere. But this race is about far more than bigotry, and saying otherwise is deliberate scapegoating.
