Thank god the DNC and the HRC campaign and people like Sam Bee or numerous comics didn’t blow it by taking a portion of their base for granted, playing weak games they didn’t need to play (like getting the death penalty debate question. Who needs to cheat to beat Trump?), refuting themselves behind closed doors, treating potential allies with the most hostile and alienating language possible because that’s the way you negotiate with people in their 20’s, and basically doing enough dumb shitty stuff to validate all the wackadoo conspiracy nonsense in a nation that almost 50% believed the POTUS was a secret Muslim.
A bunch of first time voters are going to get the blame for a system that all the prior voters established.
They didn’t even give a shit. Gender was the least of things in this election (race, yes). Sarah Palin could have gotten away with it too. Stop shifting the blame or you’re dead in the water in 2018 as well.
will it happen? after early-ballot-envelope-opening-gate and unsticky-glue-gate I just read yesterday that it’s possible in some areas to get postal vote documents with a faked identity number?
You (and a lot of us, often me included) are still thinking in pre-millennial terms, “left”, “right”, “socialism”… We have to stop trying to read the present with these failed, constricted labels that are the preserve of the chatting classes, and use actual terms people on the street can understand.
Man, I’ve had this debate so many times in Italy, after Berlusconi. We lost against him and we lost again and again, because we kept attacking him on the political level while he was busy giving people hope with populistic slogans and measures. When we talk of socialism or clintonism or any other -ism, we are not giving people hope, we are playing a game they are not interested in.
We need to go out boldly and say: this and this is not acceptable, we’ll ban it, fuck Wall Street. This and this has to get better, we’ll pay for it, fuck the debt. In clear terms, no weaselling. Once in power, there will be time to smooth terms, but when you campaign, you have to be bold and give people hope that their tomorrow will be better than their today. And you need someone who people like, of course, but that’s difficult to spot - I mean, there is still people convinced Clinton was extremely popular today, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Bullshit. They went after Hillary based on her husband’s infidelities. Sexism wasn’t the only issue tipping the scales for this election but it was a pretty goddamn big one.
Sexism absolutely played a part. Racism absolutely played a part. But at the end of the day, I think it boiled down to two things:
First, the Democrats chose the weakest possible candidate. I’m not talking about her qualifications- Hell, she’d probably have been a pretty decent president- but as a candidate she was shit. Yes, at minimum 80% of her baggage was fabricated, but it’s been a long time since American politics were anything but a popularity contest. Reality matters a hell of a lot less than perception of reality, and people’s perception of her, whether deserved or not, has been largely bad. Her campaign started from the position of having to counteract 30 years of character assassination and bad publicity. They deliberate chose to fight an uphill battle when they could have chosen a candidate that would have started from square one.
Second, they built their entire campaign around the message of not letting the other guy win. In this case, yeah, the other guy is a literal Nazi and not letting him win is a really solid point, but it still meant that both campaigns were running fear based oppositional strategies-
And the Republicans are fucking masters at that. It’s what they do. They’ve been perfecting those tactics for 40+ years. It’s the hallmark of their entire political strategy.
How did anyone think this would turn out any differently?
Well I for one have reconsidered my position on gun ownership in the US. If you are female, black, LGBT, or leftist and in the US, I don’t think that you can rely upon the protection of the institutions of civic society any longer.
I woke up this morning and fired up the Guardian Quick Crossword at the bus stop. A pop up headline told me that Theresa May was congratulating Trump on his victory. 1 Across on the puzzle was, “Beyond words (15)”.
At least now, intelligent Americans can stop making fun of us Brits over Brexit. The yahoos have spoken brayed.
It was the same in Italy vs Berlusconi. Any time the left fielded “old” candidates and shouted “the other guy is corrupt”, Silvio was winning hands down.
Only guy who could beat him? Someone free of political baggage, with a message of hope, economic competency and social moderation - something that went beyond “the other guy is bad”. (He was promptly fucked over by the political class, of course. Back to the old ways, back to losing…)
Eh, that passport thing smells of bullshit. AFAIK, the voting right only goes via the central population register (as in DE, I think). You should have some ID at the booth, but it doesn’t have to be a passport. So you might get a voting letter with a wrong passport ID; but you still only get one as per your name and adress and social security number.
The glue seems to be kinda sucky again though. Good lord.
You can stop trying to convince us - the election is over, and internally maybe you can jockey for Hillary 2020 by playing these denial games, but if you do you’re going to lose terribly once again. It’s terribly clear to us since we’ve been telling you this for over a year and getting sneered at for it.
Stop blaming ‘them’ and think how you can positively reach out to everyone you’ve alienated since Bill’s term. Downshift, you don’t have to reflexively close ranks around her any more.
These labels are still toxic in the US in a way they are not in Europe. Likewise, hatred of Wall Street is not just hatred of the way the financial industry has screwed us - the message from people like Warren and Sanders - but also hatred of “elites”, which doesn’t mean wealthy (most Americans see themselves as potentially wealthy, so this isn’t a bad thing). Whatever the label, the Trump brand of populism would be very difficult for a Sanders or a Warren to overcome…especially Warren, who has been a college professor, the epitome of what the Trump base despises. I think the degree and power of American anti-intellectualism is hard for someone outside the country to wrap their heads around.
I agree that the right response is not to just go further to the right, but when people say the Democrats need to “learn a lesson” they forget that moving to the right is exactly the lesson Party leaders learned from the big losses to Reagan, and moving to the right succeeded spectacularly, so positively reinforced the party.
As a matter of fact, in a way it was - they built their defenses pretty idiotically. If they had not left their flank so spectacularly open, maybe Adolf would have gone after easier pickings down South.
What alternatives were there? Please don’t say Sanders or Biden. Sanders was McGovern. Biden is a great VP but that’s all. The democrats just didn’t have a deep bench.
You can’t blame the democrats for America being a dysfunctional country.
The only fault of the democrats is in actually being stupid enough to think America wasn’t a stupid, racist, callow country. The fault of the democrats is they actually believed in America having a better nature.
