Seriously I feel like I'm watching history repeat itself here. I'm having flashbacks to Gore when people played the Nader blame game. If we're going to continue to point fingers everywhere but at ourselves, we will continue to lose. It's quite simple. There will not always be a Barack Obama waiting in the wings to bail us and our poorly-thought out electoral strategy out.
It would catch a couple atheist I suppose but there aren't a ton of us.
I have an extremely unfavorable view of most denominations (to use a probably wrong term) of islam. That view is comparable, though more intense, to my view of pentacostal or evangelical christianity.
It says nothing whatsoever about my feelings toward the various races of people that practice those religions.
Unfortunately there is only one Obama, and he's leaving the presidency. What he did was going to be difficult to replicate under the best of circumstances. Not to mention the circumstances are different when it's tried by a white woman like Hillary Clinton, who has to be less subtle with messaging for minority voting blocs.
Great but it has nothing to do with the post to which you responded
It did in that what Obama did was not something your average politician would do, otherwise he wouldn't be an exception. Politicians of Obama's pedigree are rare. Without someone liked that trying that approach the chances of that succeeding lower considerably.
I feel like this entire angle is subtly constructed to allow an argument that voting for Obama doesn't prove anything about the racism of a group of people, while simultaneously saying that voting for Trump is sufficient to accuse people of racism regardless of evidence to the contrary including that they also voted for Obama.
That doesn't seem like a legitimate set of positions to hold.
You keep using racism as outright conscious hatred when no one else is. Voting for Obama does not mean you aren't racist. I am racist despite having voted for Obama and Clinton.
The white Obama voters who voted for Trump use it that way. scheck's defs #2 and 3 are each more rarified and academic, and therefore more divorced from the common parlance.
I'm (I thought obviously) talking about people on this forum, with which we are having a conversation.
Seriously I feel like I'm watching history repeat itself here. I'm having flashbacks to Gore when people played the Nader blame game. If we're going to continue to point fingers everywhere but at ourselves, we will continue to lose. It's quite simple. There will not always be a Barack Obama waiting in the wings to bail us and our poorly-thought out electoral strategy out.
I think it's important to acknowledge the reality of the situation, which includes addressing failure points.
Did Stein voters fuck up? Yeah. Did people who stayed home fuck up? Yeah. Did the media fuck up? Yeah. Did racists fuck up? Yeah. Did Rs as a whole fuck up? Yeah.
We lost. Knowing who we could blame doesn't in and of itself make us win, if all we do is point a finger and scream.
But that information can inform a victory next time. We need to delve into the data and identify places we can win votes without losing sight of what we're trying to do.
It's important to remember that the bell of the ball here (non college whites) mostly don't think that being white helps them at all.
Yeah and telling people who are struggling to keep up or flat out falling behind how much privilege they have isn't a winning strategy. Even if it's true!
Stop crying over spilled Brexit. There will always be a Stein, and there will always be Stein voters.
WI 2012 Stein voters 7,665
MI 2012 Stein voters 21,897
PA 2012 Stein voters 21,341
Yes, clearly Hillary should have done a better job of getting those voters on board.
I think that blaming the people who didn't vote for Hillary or the media is possibly the most spectacularly useless things we can do right now. The media will still be around next time. What does bemoaning its existence accomplish? What does shaking your fist at the people that our party failed to effectively rally do, other than assuage our own egos and prepare us for another paddling?
By blaming the media we can figure out WHY the media failed, and figure out how to exploit it to our advantage in the elections to come.
By blaming the people who didn't vote, we can then figure out WHY they didn't vote and then get in there and get them on our side if they are worth fighting for.
Pointing to the reasons we lost is not throwing up our hands in the air and accepting that as inevitable, it is helpping to understand why we lost. The conversation doesn't just go "the media and racists screwed us, oh well." There are many steps following those proclamations and we are less than two weeks out from the point it happened so give us some time to craft and strategize.
I've seen it put forward on more than one occasion that Stein voters are why we failed. This, to me, betrays an alarming lack of sorely-needed introspection.
Stein voters aren't why we failed. We failed by not giving them enough of an affirmative reason to vote for Hillary. The DNC focused a huge part of their strategy on, "Look at what an asshole Trump is" (seriously, many of Hillary's ads were just children in front of a TV watching Trump do stupid shit)!
We failed to have a robust, competitive primary. We failed to nominate a candidate that wasn't historically unpopular with the general electorate. We failed to convince that electorate that she had reinvented herself and that she would go to bat for them.
We. Failed.
Nobody voted for Stein because they seriously thought she had a chance. They voted for her because they didn't like what Hillary was offering. Maybe next time we offer them something they like. Maybe they won't get on board just because we tell them how much they suck for voting Stein instead of the candidate that is so self-evidently the best one for them, because we know best.
Seriously I feel like I'm watching history repeat itself here. I'm having flashbacks to Gore when people played the Nader blame game. If we're going to continue to point fingers everywhere but at ourselves, we will continue to lose. It's quite simple. There will not always be a Barack Obama waiting in the wings to bail us and our poorly-thought out electoral strategy out.
One thing that is very important to remember is that part of what makes Trump so fucking awful is the simple fact that he's going to give the go-ahead to congressional priorities that any Republican president would also be happy to endorse.
We can't bank the future of the country on winning every Presidential election. If everything can fall apart when a Republican wins, we're up shit creek.
I mean like, we are. Right now. But the point is, we need to start building the structures that will let us uphold important legislative work without the Presidency.
Whether you call it white fragility or something else, there does not appear to be a good way to discuss the concept of racism or unconscious bias with a white person. I had the only serious fight I've ever had with my dearest sister when I was trying to describe unconscious bias, and I went into that conversation with the complete belief that the racist sentiments she's expressed to me were not as a result of hatred in her heart or any sort of intent and with a strong belief in her natural goodness. It still ended with her in tears. Granted I did gain some ground with her, and I might gain more, but we're two people who love each other and have a good solid relationship. I have no idea how I would do this with anyone I was less close to.
Camb I know this is an emotional topic for you but listen to what you're saying.
There's no good way to talk about racism with a white person? I don't think that, when statements like this are OK for you, that you're going to make a lot of headway with people.
Read it as: There is no good way to talk about unconscious bias with people that are not subject to the ill effects of this bias (worse yet with people that receive benefits from it).
In America, that group happens to be white people, it happens to be men, it happens to be straight, etc.
Why is it only when 'our side's phrases something, I shall call for the sake of argument, unfortunately we're suddenly scrambling to put dramatically more compatible and arbitrarily nuanced explanations front and center?
If a Trump voter did this they would be drowning in domesticated canines right now.
I really have no idea what you mean by this. Can you give me an example of a phrase used by Trump supporters that we are misinterpreting? I have a hard time believing that the reason I find their views abhorrent is because we are talking past each other but if that's true I would be extremely pleased.
It's important to remember that the bell of the ball here (non college whites) mostly don't think that being white helps them at all.
Yeah and telling people who are struggling to keep up or flat out falling behind how much privilege they have isn't a winning strategy. Even if it's true!
But it's even worse than that really.
To me it would seem like any programs that tried to help minorities would alienate them if that's what they think.
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cptruggedI think it has something to do with free will.Registered Userregular
I find the discussion on if Hillary was the right candidate interesting.
The way I see it, she was perfectly qualified. BUT. We literally chose the candidate that the Republican war machine had had in it's sights for over a decade. They were ready for Clinton. They had all stories and distrust built up and had a plan. And they knew it would be Hillary. Cause they knew the Democrat old guard system was gonna put her up cause she had paid her dues and it was her turn.
Does this mean we shouldn't have chosen her? I dunno really. But I don't think there was another candidate that the Republicans were more ready to take on than Clinton. They were locked and ready for this one.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Think of it like rape culture. Rape culture doesn't mean everybody rapes; it means a few people rape, and many others make excuses for them, or downplay its importance, or simply don't care.
Voting for Trump doesn't make you a rapist, but it does make you an active participant in rape culture, because it means you made excuses for or didn't care about his history of sexual assault.
Likewise, voting for Trump doesn't automatically make you a racist. But it does mean you participated in "race culture," because you made excuses or didn't care about his racist views.
Have you ever considered throwing oil on a fire? I'm positive it will be an effective method of fightin fires.
I feel like you skipped a step there because I'm not sure how your metaphor relates to my post. Could you explain?
You've invoked another just as if not more contentious concept in order to attempt to garner support for implicit racial bias on steroids.
You couldn't be playing to the choir any harder right now :biggrin:
It's important to talk about Stein and Johnson and the slim margins because it's important to teach people to how to vote effectively in a FPTP system. Apparently it's a lesson that needs repeating every 15 years or so.
This was a very slim loss and the margin is overdetermined--there are many reasons for it, and they all contributed. That means we need to address them all. One of those is third party voting. Let's not shut down useful discussion fo fear of whining or turning off people who aren't in this thread (seriously, any Stein voters here?).
I've been probing the interest in, and the procedures for, a ballot initiative on moving Florida to ranked voting.
The pushback I keep getting is "too complicated, people would be confused."
Not that they would be confused. That "people" would. How does one combat this? Because FL requires a fuuuuckload of signatures from all over the damned place, and if I can't convince the locals, I'm not sure it's worth my time to run it up the flag pole with the parties.
Whether you call it white fragility or something else, there does not appear to be a good way to discuss the concept of racism or unconscious bias with a white person. I had the only serious fight I've ever had with my dearest sister when I was trying to describe unconscious bias, and I went into that conversation with the complete belief that the racist sentiments she's expressed to me were not as a result of hatred in her heart or any sort of intent and with a strong belief in her natural goodness. It still ended with her in tears. Granted I did gain some ground with her, and I might gain more, but we're two people who love each other and have a good solid relationship. I have no idea how I would do this with anyone I was less close to.
Camb I know this is an emotional topic for you but listen to what you're saying.
There's no good way to talk about racism with a white person? I don't think that, when statements like this are OK for you, that you're going to make a lot of headway with people.
Read it as: There is no good way to talk about unconscious bias with people that are not subject to the ill effects of this bias (worse yet with people that receive benefits from it).
In America, that group happens to be white people, it happens to be men, it happens to be straight, etc.
The problem with reading to read into a phrase a definition that defangs the phrase and changes it's common meaning is that mostly people don't do it. People should say what they mean and not trade in insulting shorthand that is itself, when read plainly, racist.
I mean, I think you're still exhibiting racial bias with your rephrasing and I don't appreciate being lumped in with millions of others as "white people" and then painted with a bunch of insulting traits, but at least I'm not actively angry about the conversation.
I agree that the phrasing is problematic, but if you understood the intended meaning there's no reason to shut down the conversation to correct it except as an aside to mention that it may not be a good idea for marketing purposes in other conversations. If you didn't, then the aside was required but shouldn't derail the original conversation entirely - just redefine and continue.
I'm genuinely curious as to how the rephrasing is racially biased.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Unfortunately there is only one Obama, and he's leaving the presidency. What he did was going to be difficult to replicate under the best of circumstances. Not to mention the circumstances are different when it's tried by a white woman like Hillary Clinton, who has to be less subtle with messaging for minority voting blocs.
Great but it has nothing to do with the post to which you responded
It did in that what Obama did was not something your average politician would do, otherwise he wouldn't be an exception. Politicians of Obama's pedigree are rare. Without someone liked that trying that approach the chances of that succeeding lower considerably.
I feel like this entire angle is subtly constructed to allow an argument that voting for Obama doesn't prove anything about the racism of a group of people, while simultaneously saying that voting for Trump is sufficient to accuse people of racism regardless of evidence to the contrary including that they also voted for Obama.
That doesn't seem like a legitimate set of positions to hold.
You keep using racism as outright conscious hatred when no one else is. Voting for Obama does not mean you aren't racist. I am racist despite having voted for Obama and Clinton.
The white Obama voters who voted for Trump use it that way. scheck's defs #2 and 3 are each more rarified and academic, and therefore more divorced from the common parlance.
I'm (I thought obviously) talking about people on this forum, with which we are having a conversation.
I reject the academic labels as useful, as do others both within the academy and within the thread and forums.
I am also deeply sceptical of the rigor with which people diagnose these things.
There will always be third party voters; looking at the outcome and going "it's stein's fault" is dumb because 1) there are many complimentary causes and 2) stein voters were likely not voting for a democrat anyway.
I mean they're voting for Jill "quantitative easing for student loans" Stein; nobody needs to pretend that an appeal based on rational voter theory would persuade them.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Think of it like rape culture. Rape culture doesn't mean everybody rapes; it means a few people rape, and many others make excuses for them, or downplay its importance, or simply don't care.
Voting for Trump doesn't make you a rapist, but it does make you an active participant in rape culture, because it means you made excuses for or didn't care about his history of sexual assault.
Likewise, voting for Trump doesn't automatically make you a racist. But it does mean you participated in "race culture," because you made excuses or didn't care about his racist views.
Have you ever considered throwing oil on a fire? I'm positive it will be an effective method of fightin fires.
I feel like you skipped a step there because I'm not sure how your metaphor relates to my post. Could you explain?
You've invoked another just as if not more contentious concept in order to attempt to garner support for implicit racial bias on steroids.
You couldn't be playing to the choir any harder right now :biggrin:
Are we:
-Talking about what we think is the case about the way the world works
-Talking about how we would deploy rhetoric to convince other people to do things we would like them to do
If the response to
"Man, [x] sucks."
is just
"And that's why no one who likes [x] will ever support you! Only people who agree that [x] is bad will like you if you say [x] is bad!"
Stop crying over spilled Brexit. There will always be a Stein, and there will always be Stein voters.
WI 2012 Stein voters 7,665
MI 2012 Stein voters 21,897
PA 2012 Stein voters 21,341
What argument are you actually intending to put forward here? You seem to believe that your point of view is so self-evident that you can drop in graphs and raw data without event attempting to explain. But I am looking at the exact same data as you and I suspect that the conclusions I draw are very different from yours.
The increase in Stein voters from 2012 to 2016 was a sufficient number of voters to change the outcome of the election in two states had they voted for the viable candidate who clearly is more in line with their expressed positions and ideology, and with a small majority of Johnson voters to swing the entire election? That voting for a third party is effectively not voting or voting for the viable candidate least in line with your ideology?
Perhaps the way to reduce Stein voters is to appeal to them, rather than telling them they're dumb and the worst and just obviously they should have voted for Clinton, even if they didn't like her, because surely that's definitely all of their second choices rather than not voting or whatever?
I am not certain where the future of the democratic party lies if everyone assumed that all the problems are everyone else is idiots with a trillion biases but we aren't.
It is simultaneously true that Stein voters are dumb and the worst and that we should at least try to appeal to them.
There are always issues with that though as the main distinguishing feature of Stein voters is to see voting as some sort of personal moral statement about oneself. They are difficult to deal with at the best of times.
Unfortunately there is only one Obama, and he's leaving the presidency. What he did was going to be difficult to replicate under the best of circumstances. Not to mention the circumstances are different when it's tried by a white woman like Hillary Clinton, who has to be less subtle with messaging for minority voting blocs.
Great but it has nothing to do with the post to which you responded
It did in that what Obama did was not something your average politician would do, otherwise he wouldn't be an exception. Politicians of Obama's pedigree are rare. Without someone liked that trying that approach the chances of that succeeding lower considerably.
I feel like this entire angle is subtly constructed to allow an argument that voting for Obama doesn't prove anything about the racism of a group of people, while simultaneously saying that voting for Trump is sufficient to accuse people of racism regardless of evidence to the contrary including that they also voted for Obama.
That doesn't seem like a legitimate set of positions to hold.
You keep using racism as outright conscious hatred when no one else is. Voting for Obama does not mean you aren't racist. I am racist despite having voted for Obama and Clinton.
The white Obama voters who voted for Trump use it that way. scheck's defs #2 and 3 are each more rarified and academic, and therefore more divorced from the common parlance.
I'm (I thought obviously) talking about people on this forum, with which we are having a conversation.
I reject the academic labels as useful, as do others both within the academy and within the thread and forums.
I am also deeply sceptical of the rigor with which people diagnose these things.
OK, so what term would you use to describe people who are willing to stop-and-frisk all POC and register all Muslims if it means they can get four years of job security? I'm willing to change my terminology but I don't think the connotation of racist is inappropriate in the context of a forum where we gripe about how shitty humanity is.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Whether you call it white fragility or something else, there does not appear to be a good way to discuss the concept of racism or unconscious bias with a white person. I had the only serious fight I've ever had with my dearest sister when I was trying to describe unconscious bias, and I went into that conversation with the complete belief that the racist sentiments she's expressed to me were not as a result of hatred in her heart or any sort of intent and with a strong belief in her natural goodness. It still ended with her in tears. Granted I did gain some ground with her, and I might gain more, but we're two people who love each other and have a good solid relationship. I have no idea how I would do this with anyone I was less close to.
Camb I know this is an emotional topic for you but listen to what you're saying.
There's no good way to talk about racism with a white person? I don't think that, when statements like this are OK for you, that you're going to make a lot of headway with people.
Read it as: There is no good way to talk about unconscious bias with people that are not subject to the ill effects of this bias (worse yet with people that receive benefits from it).
In America, that group happens to be white people, it happens to be men, it happens to be straight, etc.
Why is it only when 'our side's phrases something, I shall call for the sake of argument, unfortunately we're suddenly scrambling to put dramatically more compatible and arbitrarily nuanced explanations front and center?
If a Trump voter did this they would be drowning in domesticated canines right now.
I really have no idea what you mean by this. Can you give me an example of a phrase used by Trump supporters that we are misinterpreting? I have a hard time believing that the reason I find their views abhorrent is because we are talking past each other but if that's true I would be extremely pleased.
Sorry, on my crap phone and the typos make that harder to understand.
I don't have any particular Trumpism in mind and I don't think it would be useful to bring up as it would just turn into a litigation of the validity of that reaction.
You're cutting a lot of slack toward phrasing that you wouldn't in any other instance. The reaction where someone explains "oh but I really just mean X" is just not accepted as a justification or explanation for some impolitik utterance.
I find the discussion on if Hillary was the right candidate interesting.
The way I see it, she was perfectly qualified. BUT. We literally chose the candidate that the Republican war machine had had in it's sights for over a decade. They were ready for Clinton. They had all stories and distrust built up and had a plan. And they knew it would be Hillary. Cause they knew the Democrat old guard system was gonna put her up cause she had paid her dues and it was her turn.
Does this mean we shouldn't have chosen her? I dunno really. But I don't think there was another candidate that the Republicans were more ready to take on than Clinton. They were locked and ready for this one.
Looking at the information coming out right now... Hillary's loss was a perfect storm of utter shit of factors both intrinsic and external to her.
Certainly it did not help that she was a visually flawed candidate with a breathtakingly high disapproval rating (the likes of which were only topped by Trump). Nor did it help that she had the goto e-mail scandal that forces like Comey's FBI could hang around her neck.
However, the nearly unprecedented miss by almost all polling, and flawed conventional wisdom about the blue firewall, lead to the Democrats severely underestimating how tenuous their mid-west numbers were. They were too focused on running up the score to bother thinking about hedging their bets, and the polling data supported this plan.
Hillary didn't lose by much; it's possible that if one less thing had gone wrong, we'd be looking at President-Elect Hillary right now.
Undead Scottsman on
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Stop crying over spilled Brexit. There will always be a Stein, and there will always be Stein voters.
WI 2012 Stein voters 7,665
MI 2012 Stein voters 21,897
PA 2012 Stein voters 21,341
What argument are you actually intending to put forward here? You seem to believe that your point of view is so self-evident that you can drop in graphs and raw data without event attempting to explain. But I am looking at the exact same data as you and I suspect that the conclusions I draw are very different from yours.
The increase in Stein voters from 2012 to 2016 was a sufficient number of voters to change the outcome of the election in two states had they voted for the viable candidate who clearly is more in line with their expressed positions and ideology, and with a small majority of Johnson voters to swing the entire election? That voting for a third party is effectively not voting or voting for the viable candidate least in line with your ideology?
Sure. The original point was "if she [Hillary Clinton] had changed the mind of 55,000 people in three states, she would have won." You have helpfully pointed out that way more people voted for Stein this year (by a factor of almost 15 in Wisconsin!). So if you are going to try and persuade more folks, Stein voters seems like a good place to start. They are, as you say, already ideologically in line.
Blaming the voters is exactly the kind of shit Trump would have done.
Its always the voters. For one, anything else makes democracy meaningless. If an election isn't the expressed will of the voters, its a meaningless circle jerk. The voters are what is morally relevant and who actually decide. That's where the credit and blame belongs. This is impolitic for an actual politician to say, but the reason Trump is going to be President is not Clinton, its not Podesta, its not even Trump, Stein or Putin. Its the voters who chose him in sufficient numbers in sufficient states. And that sufficient number was determined by who didn't show up and who didn't vote for a viable candidate as much as who voted for Trump or Clinton. Everything else is obfuscation.
There will always be third party voters; looking at the outcome and going "it's stein's fault" is dumb because 1) there are many complimentary causes and 2) stein voters were likely not voting for a democrat anyway.
I mean they're voting for Jill "quantitative easing for student loans" Stein; nobody needs to pretend that an appeal based on rational voter theory would persuade them.
I really don't think you can just declare 2 to be true. If you compare Green party votes from 2012 to 2016, there are some shockingly large rises in the number of votes that frankly cannot be explained as natural growth. The easiest explanation is that there were voters who were unwilling to vote for either Trump or Clinton, but believe the environment is an important issue so went ahead and voted Green this time. A huge chunk of them probably have no idea what the Green party platform consists of other than being good for the environment.
The polling miss isn't unprecedented; national polls weren't wrong by that much and in hindsight a lot of state polls should have been warning signs (ex: Iowa.) turnout was lower than expected for Clinton in several relevant states and maybe slightly higher than expected for trump in the same, and there's your margin
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Whether you call it white fragility or something else, there does not appear to be a good way to discuss the concept of racism or unconscious bias with a white person. I had the only serious fight I've ever had with my dearest sister when I was trying to describe unconscious bias, and I went into that conversation with the complete belief that the racist sentiments she's expressed to me were not as a result of hatred in her heart or any sort of intent and with a strong belief in her natural goodness. It still ended with her in tears. Granted I did gain some ground with her, and I might gain more, but we're two people who love each other and have a good solid relationship. I have no idea how I would do this with anyone I was less close to.
Camb I know this is an emotional topic for you but listen to what you're saying.
There's no good way to talk about racism with a white person? I don't think that, when statements like this are OK for you, that you're going to make a lot of headway with people.
Read it as: There is no good way to talk about unconscious bias with people that are not subject to the ill effects of this bias (worse yet with people that receive benefits from it).
In America, that group happens to be white people, it happens to be men, it happens to be straight, etc.
Why is it only when 'our side's phrases something, I shall call for the sake of argument, unfortunately we're suddenly scrambling to put dramatically more compatible and arbitrarily nuanced explanations front and center?
If a Trump voter did this they would be drowning in domesticated canines right now.
I really have no idea what you mean by this. Can you give me an example of a phrase used by Trump supporters that we are misinterpreting? I have a hard time believing that the reason I find their views abhorrent is because we are talking past each other but if that's true I would be extremely pleased.
Sorry, on my crap phone and the typos make that harder to understand.
I don't have any particular Trumpism in mind and I don't think it would be useful to bring up as it would just turn into a litigation of the validity of that reaction.
You're cutting a lot of slack toward phrasing that you wouldn't in any other instance. The reaction where someone explains "oh but I really just mean X" is just not accepted as a justification or explanation for some impolitik utterance.
Double standards and all that.
The extent to which I'm willing to cut slack is directly proportional to my belief in the sincerity of the clarification. Obviously this is going to be biased towards views I believe. I like to think that I would extend the courtesy to anyone posting here that I believe is posting in good faith (which is just about everyone).
Stop crying over spilled Brexit. There will always be a Stein, and there will always be Stein voters.
WI 2012 Stein voters 7,665
MI 2012 Stein voters 21,897
PA 2012 Stein voters 21,341
Yes, clearly Hillary should have done a better job of getting those voters on board.
I think that blaming the people who didn't vote for Hillary or the media is possibly the most spectacularly useless things we can do right now. The media will still be around next time. What does bemoaning its existence accomplish? What does shaking your fist at the people that our party failed to effectively rally do, other than assuage our own egos and prepare us for another paddling?
By blaming the media we can figure out WHY the media failed, and figure out how to exploit it to our advantage in the elections to come.
By blaming the people who didn't vote, we can then figure out WHY they didn't vote and then get in there and get them on our side if they are worth fighting for.
Pointing to the reasons we lost is not throwing up our hands in the air and accepting that as inevitable, it is helpping to understand why we lost. The conversation doesn't just go "the media and racists screwed us, oh well." There are many steps following those proclamations and we are less than two weeks out from the point it happened so give us some time to craft and strategize.
I've seen it put forward on more than one occasion that Stein voters are why we failed. This, to me, betrays an alarming lack of sorely-needed introspection.
Stein voters aren't why we failed. We failed by not giving them enough of an affirmative reason to vote for Hillary. The DNC focused a huge part of their strategy on, "Look at what an asshole Trump is" (seriously, many of Hillary's ads were just children in front of a TV watching Trump do stupid shit)!
We failed to have a robust, competitive primary. We failed to nominate a candidate that wasn't historically unpopular with the general electorate. We failed to convince that electorate that she had reinvented herself and that she would go to bat for them.
We. Failed.
Nobody voted for Stein because they seriously thought she had a chance. They voted for her because they didn't like what Hillary was offering. Maybe next time we offer them something they like. Maybe they won't get on board just because we tell them how much they suck for voting Stein instead of the candidate that is so self-evidently the best one for them, because we know best.
There was a robust competitive primary. There was just also the perception that there wasn't because of targeted leaks and grousing by the losing candidate over it.
They voted for Stein because it's a way for lefties to "stick it to the man" and reject the current system and as a way to assert their own moral superiority because it's not their problem because they remained pure and righteous.
You can peel some of them off with an inspiring candidate but they won't vote for the Democratic candidate just because of how bad Trump is. That's the key distinction. They need to be convinced that voting for the Democratic candidate makes them special.
There will always be third party voters; looking at the outcome and going "it's stein's fault" is dumb because 1) there are many complimentary causes and 2) stein voters were likely not voting for a democrat anyway.
I mean they're voting for Jill "quantitative easing for student loans" Stein; nobody needs to pretend that an appeal based on rational voter theory would persuade them.
I really don't think you can just declare 2 to be true. If you compare Green party votes from 2012 to 2016, there are some shockingly large rises in the number of votes that frankly cannot be explained as natural growth. The easiest explanation is that there were voters who were unwilling to vote for either Trump or Clinton, but believe the environment is an important issue so went ahead and voted Green this time. A huge chunk of them probably have no idea what the Green party platform consists of other than being good for the environment.
I did speak to one person who was very concerned about Clinton having maybe approved of fracking, and was therefore voting Stein.
Blaming the voters is exactly the kind of shit Trump would have done.
Its always the voters. For one, anything else makes democracy meaningless. If an election isn't the expressed will of the voters, its a meaningless circle jerk. The voters are what is morally relevant and who actually decide. That's where the credit and blame belongs. This is impolitic for an actual politician to say, but the reason Trump is going to be President is not Clinton, its not Podesta, its not even Trump, Stein or Putin. Its the voters who chose him in sufficient numbers in sufficient states. And that sufficient number was determined by who didn't show up and who didn't vote for a viable candidate as much as who voted for Trump or Clinton. Everything else is obfuscation.
When the Son of Man returns in all his glory, with his holy angels with him, and sits upon his glorious throne, he will summon all the voters of the earth before him. He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. He shall set the responsible voters on one hand and the irresponsible voters on the other. To the responsible he will say, "Come ye blessed, inherit the liberal democracy with mixed-use urban zoning and fiscally prudent social assistance programs, prepared for you from the foundation of the world." And the irresponsible he will send to everlasting punishment.
But until the second coming, the voters have the final say in our democracy. It is the job of political actors to persuade them, the responsible and irresponsible alike. And in a true democracy, we are all political actors, not just the candidates and their campaign staff. We all have a duty to persuade.
It's hard to read but I think it makes some good points. The left has been using the "[Republican candidate] is racist, fascist, and hates women" lines for so long that they've become extremely ineffective. I heard a lot of this during 2000 and 2004. IDK if McCain really ever had this argument used against him, but Sarah Palin and Romney definitely did. Now in this election it was the main argument against Trump, but the knife isn't sharp enough anymore.
I also think this logic applies to the "White billionaire doesn't care about you / didn't pay his fair share!" argument that was used heavily against both Romney and Trump. The left needs to rely less on these personal attacks.
I don't know, the point of the boy crying wolf story was that there was no wolf, not that the wolf turned out to be a Husky who just had a wolf as his cheif strategist and whose son was half coyote.
Unfortunately there is only one Obama, and he's leaving the presidency. What he did was going to be difficult to replicate under the best of circumstances. Not to mention the circumstances are different when it's tried by a white woman like Hillary Clinton, who has to be less subtle with messaging for minority voting blocs.
Great but it has nothing to do with the post to which you responded
It did in that what Obama did was not something your average politician would do, otherwise he wouldn't be an exception. Politicians of Obama's pedigree are rare. Without someone liked that trying that approach the chances of that succeeding lower considerably.
I feel like this entire angle is subtly constructed to allow an argument that voting for Obama doesn't prove anything about the racism of a group of people, while simultaneously saying that voting for Trump is sufficient to accuse people of racism regardless of evidence to the contrary including that they also voted for Obama.
That doesn't seem like a legitimate set of positions to hold.
You keep using racism as outright conscious hatred when no one else is. Voting for Obama does not mean you aren't racist. I am racist despite having voted for Obama and Clinton.
The white Obama voters who voted for Trump use it that way. scheck's defs #2 and 3 are each more rarified and academic, and therefore more divorced from the common parlance.
I'm (I thought obviously) talking about people on this forum, with which we are having a conversation.
I reject the academic labels as useful, as do others both within the academy and within the thread and forums.
I am also deeply sceptical of the rigor with which people diagnose these things.
OK, so what term would you use to describe people who are willing to stop-and-frisk all POC and register all Muslims if it means they can get four years of job security? I'm willing to change my terminology but I don't think the connotation of racist is inappropriate in the context of a forum where we gripe about how shitty humanity is.
Humans.
I think a major issue is that the language we use on forums like these leaks out into greater public discourse. Or do you think that Trump voters haven't heard that liberals think they're "racist" just for voting for Trump?
Also, I'm guessing no small number of Trump voters figured his chances of positively influencing their economic outcomes were better than his chances of, say, actually making a Muslim registry happen. Or building a wall, for that matter.
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It's hard to read but I think it makes some good points. The left has been using the "[Republican candidate] is racist, fascist, and hates women" lines for so long that they've become extremely ineffective. I heard a lot of this during 2000 and 2004. IDK if McCain really ever had this argument used against him, but Sarah Palin and Romney definitely did. Now in this election it was the main argument against Trump, but the knife isn't sharp enough anymore.
I also think this logic applies to the "White billionaire doesn't care about you / didn't pay his fair share!" argument that was used heavily against both Romney and Trump. The left needs to rely less on these personal attacks.
I don't know, the point of the boy crying wolf story was that there was no wolf, not that the wolf turned out to be a Husky who just had a wolf as his cheif strategist and whose son was half coyote.
No I think it is totally fair to say that we, in the name of messaging, made McCain and R-money out to be much more monstrous than they really were, and as a result we could not actually call someone a monster who actually WAS one without people recalling our words from campaigns past.
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Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Stop crying over spilled Brexit. There will always be a Stein, and there will always be Stein voters.
WI 2012 Stein voters 7,665
MI 2012 Stein voters 21,897
PA 2012 Stein voters 21,341
Yes, clearly Hillary should have done a better job of getting those voters on board.
I think that blaming the people who didn't vote for Hillary or the media is possibly the most spectacularly useless things we can do right now. The media will still be around next time. What does bemoaning its existence accomplish? What does shaking your fist at the people that our party failed to effectively rally do, other than assuage our own egos and prepare us for another paddling?
By blaming the media we can figure out WHY the media failed, and figure out how to exploit it to our advantage in the elections to come.
By blaming the people who didn't vote, we can then figure out WHY they didn't vote and then get in there and get them on our side if they are worth fighting for.
Pointing to the reasons we lost is not throwing up our hands in the air and accepting that as inevitable, it is helpping to understand why we lost. The conversation doesn't just go "the media and racists screwed us, oh well." There are many steps following those proclamations and we are less than two weeks out from the point it happened so give us some time to craft and strategize.
I've seen it put forward on more than one occasion that Stein voters are why we failed. This, to me, betrays an alarming lack of sorely-needed introspection.
Stein voters aren't why we failed. We failed by not giving them enough of an affirmative reason to vote for Hillary. The DNC focused a huge part of their strategy on, "Look at what an asshole Trump is" (seriously, many of Hillary's ads were just children in front of a TV watching Trump do stupid shit)!
We failed to have a robust, competitive primary. We failed to nominate a candidate that wasn't historically unpopular with the general electorate. We failed to convince that electorate that she had reinvented herself and that she would go to bat for them.
We. Failed.
Nobody voted for Stein because they seriously thought she had a chance. They voted for her because they didn't like what Hillary was offering. Maybe next time we offer them something they like. Maybe they won't get on board just because we tell them how much they suck for voting Stein instead of the candidate that is so self-evidently the best one for them, because we know best.
There was a robust competitive primary. There was just also the perception that there wasn't because of targeted leaks and grousing by the losing candidate over it.
They voted for Stein because it's a way for lefties to "stick it to the man" and reject the current system and as a way to assert their own moral superiority because it's not their problem because they remained pure and righteous.
You can peel some of them off with an inspiring candidate but they won't vote for the Democratic candidate just because of how bad Trump is. That's the key distinction. They need to be convinced that voting for the Democratic candidate makes them special.
Sorry but no. The primary was effectively between the lady that the Republicans had been prepping the American public to hate for decades and a nationally unknown, desiccated socialist with crazy hair and a penchant for yelling.
If you're going to argue that Webb, Chafee, and O'Malley were also running, I will point out that technically Vermin Supreme also ran, but that doesn't mean there was a viable and robust third party run in his candidacy.
From the sounds of things, it wasn't even Trump's message, it was just that he HAD a message directed at them, and being an outsider, didn't have the track record of failing to address the issue in the past.
Yes, if Clinton had been more convincing to voters she would have won the election.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Blaming the voters is exactly the kind of shit Trump would have done.
Its always the voters. For one, anything else makes democracy meaningless. If an election isn't the expressed will of the voters, its a meaningless circle jerk. The voters are what is morally relevant and who actually decide. That's where the credit and blame belongs. This is impolitic for an actual politician to say, but the reason Trump is going to be President is not Clinton, its not Podesta, its not even Trump, Stein or Putin. Its the voters who chose him in sufficient numbers in sufficient states. And that sufficient number was determined by who didn't show up and who didn't vote for a viable candidate as much as who voted for Trump or Clinton. Everything else is obfuscation.
Yep. Democracy sucks when you lose.
So either posse up and get it right next time or get out of the game.
Stop crying over spilled Brexit. There will always be a Stein, and there will always be Stein voters.
WI 2012 Stein voters 7,665
MI 2012 Stein voters 21,897
PA 2012 Stein voters 21,341
Yes, clearly Hillary should have done a better job of getting those voters on board.
I think that blaming the people who didn't vote for Hillary or the media is possibly the most spectacularly useless things we can do right now. The media will still be around next time. What does bemoaning its existence accomplish? What does shaking your fist at the people that our party failed to effectively rally do, other than assuage our own egos and prepare us for another paddling?
By blaming the media we can figure out WHY the media failed, and figure out how to exploit it to our advantage in the elections to come.
By blaming the people who didn't vote, we can then figure out WHY they didn't vote and then get in there and get them on our side if they are worth fighting for.
Pointing to the reasons we lost is not throwing up our hands in the air and accepting that as inevitable, it is helpping to understand why we lost. The conversation doesn't just go "the media and racists screwed us, oh well." There are many steps following those proclamations and we are less than two weeks out from the point it happened so give us some time to craft and strategize.
I've seen it put forward on more than one occasion that Stein voters are why we failed. This, to me, betrays an alarming lack of sorely-needed introspection.
Stein voters aren't why we failed. We failed by not giving them enough of an affirmative reason to vote for Hillary. The DNC focused a huge part of their strategy on, "Look at what an asshole Trump is" (seriously, many of Hillary's ads were just children in front of a TV watching Trump do stupid shit)!
We failed to have a robust, competitive primary. We failed to nominate a candidate that wasn't historically unpopular with the general electorate. We failed to convince that electorate that she had reinvented herself and that she would go to bat for them.
We. Failed.
Nobody voted for Stein because they seriously thought she had a chance. They voted for her because they didn't like what Hillary was offering. Maybe next time we offer them something they like. Maybe they won't get on board just because we tell them how much they suck for voting Stein instead of the candidate that is so self-evidently the best one for them, because we know best.
There was a robust competitive primary. There was just also the perception that there wasn't because of targeted leaks and grousing by the losing candidate over it.
They voted for Stein because it's a way for lefties to "stick it to the man" and reject the current system and as a way to assert their own moral superiority because it's not their problem because they remained pure and righteous.
You can peel some of them off with an inspiring candidate but they won't vote for the Democratic candidate just because of how bad Trump is. That's the key distinction. They need to be convinced that voting for the Democratic candidate makes them special.
Sorry but no. The primary was effectively between the lady that the Republicans had been prepping the American public to hate for decades and a nationally unknown, dessicated socialist with crazy hair and a penchant for yelling.
If you're going to argue that Webb, Chafee, and O'Malley were also running, I will point out that technically Vermin Supreme also ran, but that doesn't mean there was a viable and robust third party run in his candidacy.
Sorry, yes. Or have we forgotten how long the primary went on or how many votes Sanders got? But I guess as soon as it would help your argument, Sanders is suddenly all sorts of negative things.
I mean, Clinton won decisively but trying to pretend like there wasn't an overall competitive primary (at least messaging wise) between two candidates is Trump-esque rewriting of history.
Posts
That might be more what you are looking for.
I'm (I thought obviously) talking about people on this forum, with which we are having a conversation.
I think it's important to acknowledge the reality of the situation, which includes addressing failure points.
Did Stein voters fuck up? Yeah. Did people who stayed home fuck up? Yeah. Did the media fuck up? Yeah. Did racists fuck up? Yeah. Did Rs as a whole fuck up? Yeah.
We lost. Knowing who we could blame doesn't in and of itself make us win, if all we do is point a finger and scream.
But that information can inform a victory next time. We need to delve into the data and identify places we can win votes without losing sight of what we're trying to do.
Yeah and telling people who are struggling to keep up or flat out falling behind how much privilege they have isn't a winning strategy. Even if it's true!
I truly hope you guys do.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
One thing that is very important to remember is that part of what makes Trump so fucking awful is the simple fact that he's going to give the go-ahead to congressional priorities that any Republican president would also be happy to endorse.
We can't bank the future of the country on winning every Presidential election. If everything can fall apart when a Republican wins, we're up shit creek.
I mean like, we are. Right now. But the point is, we need to start building the structures that will let us uphold important legislative work without the Presidency.
I really have no idea what you mean by this. Can you give me an example of a phrase used by Trump supporters that we are misinterpreting? I have a hard time believing that the reason I find their views abhorrent is because we are talking past each other but if that's true I would be extremely pleased.
But it's even worse than that really.
To me it would seem like any programs that tried to help minorities would alienate them if that's what they think.
The way I see it, she was perfectly qualified. BUT. We literally chose the candidate that the Republican war machine had had in it's sights for over a decade. They were ready for Clinton. They had all stories and distrust built up and had a plan. And they knew it would be Hillary. Cause they knew the Democrat old guard system was gonna put her up cause she had paid her dues and it was her turn.
Does this mean we shouldn't have chosen her? I dunno really. But I don't think there was another candidate that the Republicans were more ready to take on than Clinton. They were locked and ready for this one.
You've invoked another just as if not more contentious concept in order to attempt to garner support for implicit racial bias on steroids.
You couldn't be playing to the choir any harder right now :biggrin:
I've been probing the interest in, and the procedures for, a ballot initiative on moving Florida to ranked voting.
The pushback I keep getting is "too complicated, people would be confused."
Not that they would be confused. That "people" would. How does one combat this? Because FL requires a fuuuuckload of signatures from all over the damned place, and if I can't convince the locals, I'm not sure it's worth my time to run it up the flag pole with the parties.
That doesn't work too well as an argument against doing it when Trump won.
Not that I think blaming the voters is useful.
Identifying failure points is, which sort of overlaps but obviously has very different connotations.
I agree that the phrasing is problematic, but if you understood the intended meaning there's no reason to shut down the conversation to correct it except as an aside to mention that it may not be a good idea for marketing purposes in other conversations. If you didn't, then the aside was required but shouldn't derail the original conversation entirely - just redefine and continue.
I'm genuinely curious as to how the rephrasing is racially biased.
I reject the academic labels as useful, as do others both within the academy and within the thread and forums.
I am also deeply sceptical of the rigor with which people diagnose these things.
I mean they're voting for Jill "quantitative easing for student loans" Stein; nobody needs to pretend that an appeal based on rational voter theory would persuade them.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Are we:
-Talking about what we think is the case about the way the world works
-Talking about how we would deploy rhetoric to convince other people to do things we would like them to do
If the response to
"Man, [x] sucks."
is just
"And that's why no one who likes [x] will ever support you! Only people who agree that [x] is bad will like you if you say [x] is bad!"
There's not much conversation happening.
The increase in Stein voters from 2012 to 2016 was a sufficient number of voters to change the outcome of the election in two states had they voted for the viable candidate who clearly is more in line with their expressed positions and ideology, and with a small majority of Johnson voters to swing the entire election? That voting for a third party is effectively not voting or voting for the viable candidate least in line with your ideology?
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
It is simultaneously true that Stein voters are dumb and the worst and that we should at least try to appeal to them.
There are always issues with that though as the main distinguishing feature of Stein voters is to see voting as some sort of personal moral statement about oneself. They are difficult to deal with at the best of times.
OK, so what term would you use to describe people who are willing to stop-and-frisk all POC and register all Muslims if it means they can get four years of job security? I'm willing to change my terminology but I don't think the connotation of racist is inappropriate in the context of a forum where we gripe about how shitty humanity is.
I don't have any particular Trumpism in mind and I don't think it would be useful to bring up as it would just turn into a litigation of the validity of that reaction.
You're cutting a lot of slack toward phrasing that you wouldn't in any other instance. The reaction where someone explains "oh but I really just mean X" is just not accepted as a justification or explanation for some impolitik utterance.
Double standards and all that.
Looking at the information coming out right now... Hillary's loss was a perfect storm of utter shit of factors both intrinsic and external to her.
Certainly it did not help that she was a visually flawed candidate with a breathtakingly high disapproval rating (the likes of which were only topped by Trump). Nor did it help that she had the goto e-mail scandal that forces like Comey's FBI could hang around her neck.
However, the nearly unprecedented miss by almost all polling, and flawed conventional wisdom about the blue firewall, lead to the Democrats severely underestimating how tenuous their mid-west numbers were. They were too focused on running up the score to bother thinking about hedging their bets, and the polling data supported this plan.
Hillary didn't lose by much; it's possible that if one less thing had gone wrong, we'd be looking at President-Elect Hillary right now.
Sure. The original point was "if she [Hillary Clinton] had changed the mind of 55,000 people in three states, she would have won." You have helpfully pointed out that way more people voted for Stein this year (by a factor of almost 15 in Wisconsin!). So if you are going to try and persuade more folks, Stein voters seems like a good place to start. They are, as you say, already ideologically in line.
Its always the voters. For one, anything else makes democracy meaningless. If an election isn't the expressed will of the voters, its a meaningless circle jerk. The voters are what is morally relevant and who actually decide. That's where the credit and blame belongs. This is impolitic for an actual politician to say, but the reason Trump is going to be President is not Clinton, its not Podesta, its not even Trump, Stein or Putin. Its the voters who chose him in sufficient numbers in sufficient states. And that sufficient number was determined by who didn't show up and who didn't vote for a viable candidate as much as who voted for Trump or Clinton. Everything else is obfuscation.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I really don't think you can just declare 2 to be true. If you compare Green party votes from 2012 to 2016, there are some shockingly large rises in the number of votes that frankly cannot be explained as natural growth. The easiest explanation is that there were voters who were unwilling to vote for either Trump or Clinton, but believe the environment is an important issue so went ahead and voted Green this time. A huge chunk of them probably have no idea what the Green party platform consists of other than being good for the environment.
And if I stand under the shower and turn the knob I get wet.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
The extent to which I'm willing to cut slack is directly proportional to my belief in the sincerity of the clarification. Obviously this is going to be biased towards views I believe. I like to think that I would extend the courtesy to anyone posting here that I believe is posting in good faith (which is just about everyone).
There was a robust competitive primary. There was just also the perception that there wasn't because of targeted leaks and grousing by the losing candidate over it.
They voted for Stein because it's a way for lefties to "stick it to the man" and reject the current system and as a way to assert their own moral superiority because it's not their problem because they remained pure and righteous.
You can peel some of them off with an inspiring candidate but they won't vote for the Democratic candidate just because of how bad Trump is. That's the key distinction. They need to be convinced that voting for the Democratic candidate makes them special.
I did speak to one person who was very concerned about Clinton having maybe approved of fracking, and was therefore voting Stein.
When the Son of Man returns in all his glory, with his holy angels with him, and sits upon his glorious throne, he will summon all the voters of the earth before him. He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. He shall set the responsible voters on one hand and the irresponsible voters on the other. To the responsible he will say, "Come ye blessed, inherit the liberal democracy with mixed-use urban zoning and fiscally prudent social assistance programs, prepared for you from the foundation of the world." And the irresponsible he will send to everlasting punishment.
But until the second coming, the voters have the final say in our democracy. It is the job of political actors to persuade them, the responsible and irresponsible alike. And in a true democracy, we are all political actors, not just the candidates and their campaign staff. We all have a duty to persuade.
I don't know, the point of the boy crying wolf story was that there was no wolf, not that the wolf turned out to be a Husky who just had a wolf as his cheif strategist and whose son was half coyote.
Humans.
I think a major issue is that the language we use on forums like these leaks out into greater public discourse. Or do you think that Trump voters haven't heard that liberals think they're "racist" just for voting for Trump?
Also, I'm guessing no small number of Trump voters figured his chances of positively influencing their economic outcomes were better than his chances of, say, actually making a Muslim registry happen. Or building a wall, for that matter.
No I think it is totally fair to say that we, in the name of messaging, made McCain and R-money out to be much more monstrous than they really were, and as a result we could not actually call someone a monster who actually WAS one without people recalling our words from campaigns past.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Sorry but no. The primary was effectively between the lady that the Republicans had been prepping the American public to hate for decades and a nationally unknown, desiccated socialist with crazy hair and a penchant for yelling.
If you're going to argue that Webb, Chafee, and O'Malley were also running, I will point out that technically Vermin Supreme also ran, but that doesn't mean there was a viable and robust third party run in his candidacy.
Note who you give agency to there.
Clinton is the subject, the actor. The voters become the object, that which is acted upon.
The reality is the voters are the ones with the power and the candidates are the supplicants. Its illusion of control self-comforting crap.
There isn't a world in which Trump could have convinced you to vote for him. Most of the people in this thread feel that way. But we're the special ones with agency, and beliefs. The non-college educated whites, they just had to be persuaded better. They don't really believe in what Trump espouses, it was just Clinton needed to convince them better.
The voters made their decision in those states. They weren't tricked. There wasn't insufficient information. Some chose sanity and rationality. Some chose to not participate in society. Some chose to throw their vote away. And a plurality of those who showed up in enough states willfully chose a hatemonger to be President.
Everything else is smoke
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Yep. Democracy sucks when you lose.
So either posse up and get it right next time or get out of the game.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Sorry, yes. Or have we forgotten how long the primary went on or how many votes Sanders got? But I guess as soon as it would help your argument, Sanders is suddenly all sorts of negative things.
I mean, Clinton won decisively but trying to pretend like there wasn't an overall competitive primary (at least messaging wise) between two candidates is Trump-esque rewriting of history.