Sanders handled a number of things rather poorly in the primary. Starting from his response to suddenly being viable on any level and run throughout with his unwillingness to shitcan Weaver. I have yet to see compelling evidence that Sanders cost Clinton any substantial number of general election votes that she would have otherwise gotten, however.
The problem is he did not need to cost her a substantial amount of voters. He cost her a few thousand voters in a few states that mattered with this rigged election nonsense.
The loss had many contributing factors, and in recounting them it's important not to contribute to their repetition. E.G, by alienating those who should be your political allies.
After reading that I have no idea what the author suggests as an alternative.
I think there's a lot of resistance to the idea that's pretty self-evident from my perspective. We're fucked until conditions change. It might be that they change before 2018 or the reduction in Republican advantage among educated whites this cycle results in better mid-term performance, but Republicans control everything and have shown no qualms about using the power of incumbency.
And "conditions change" means more or less thousands of Americans die, millions lose their jobs and/or have their rights impinged, and/or billions are stolen due to the Trump kleptocracy. We need organization, but the well has been poisoned against that. We definitely need some moderates/centrists who aren't willing to sign on to a platform that sees Clinton and Obama as too far to the right, and we need the far left, some of whom are unwilling to sign on to a party that doesn't strongly center on their positions.
Pants, you're absolutely correct that implicit biases exist and are particularly powerful in specific instances like women in powerful positions. I have spent a lot of time over the last 15 or so years actively policing myself for these sorts of things. When I moved to Philadelphia, for instance, I was passively racist in the way that a small-town white boy from the midwest often is. Not ill-meaning, but definitely wrong in ways that mattered. Over the time I spent in Philly working with people who weren't like me, whether ethnically or in background, I came to understand that people are people and everybody deserves a fair shake to show you who they are. I also worked, within the Democratic party and for associated organizations, under a lot of women. This was never a thing that bothered me in the least. A lot of the orgs I boosted for were entirely staffed by females, in fact. I made a lot of mistakes during that period, casually using terminology I'd grown up with ("girls" to refer to the women I was personally close to on the job, for example) that were quickly, firmly and, usually, compassionately corrected by women around me that I deeply respected. Many of whom were old school feminists who had earned their stripes coming up as activists through some pretty heavy shit. Once, at a national conference of orgs in Boston, I got called out on the conference floor in front of basically everyone attending, most of whom knew me as a voice on the telephone troubleshooting their websites, for using a term I had thought was harmless but have never used since now that I have proper context.
Basically, I know that I'm coming from behind due to a lot of cultural stuff (though my upbringing softened some of that since my parents were by and large pretty awesome about it). And my experience has led me to constantly police myself about this sort of thing. I understand that it's a problem and that, as a white dude, I live in a sort of bubble where I can basically expect people to treat me with a baseline of respect and decency, regardless of what station I may currently hold. And I work every day to be better, not just on this specific thing but on every instance where my prejudice could impact the accuracy of my worldview or my effect on another person's quality of life.
All that said, dropping a personal accusation like that into a larger discussion only serves to shut it all down. So please cut that shit out.
The whole thing is worth reading (its short), but some excerpts:
The candidate should win by qualifications alone. Political office is compared to brain surgery. Look at this study that shows that members of the other party are less educated. Watch this video of a supporter saying something laughable. The other candidate is pathologized; he is mentally ill, or on drugs, or has a sub-normal IQ. Rather than argue right vs. wrong, the battle is the smart vs. the stupid.
This puts off and alienates a majority of people. Most people didn’t make good grades or even like school. Most people don’t work in jobs with a clear ladder to climb based on educational and professional qualifications. Most people kind of like to see the experts shown up (think of clickbait that begins “Doctors hate this.”) In every movie, the slobs beat the snobs. Most people resent being talked down to, and are more keenly aware of it than the person doing the talking down.
...
However, there simply aren’t enough success-driven educated professionals with lives similar to Hillary’s. Careerist ambition is not always an appealing personality trait to those who do not share it. Even white women, who would be expected to most see themselves in Clinton, did not vote for her in a majority.
Sexism, is of course, to blame for a lot of this. Ambitious women are not trusted or liked, and while this is unfortunate, it is a well-known social phenomenon. The campaign’s attitude seemed to be “well, they’ll get used to it.” The sexism of the public was not something to be countered with a different narrative, to be persuaded away, but rather something to be triumphed over. Those deplorable idiots would be proven wrong rather than won over.
...
In the end, the snobs lost to the slobs, but true to the character of the well-educated, they simply will not hear criticism that does not come from the similarly credentialed. The loss is the fault of every stupid person. The voters were racist and sexist, those stupid hippy millennials didn’t turn up, morons believed fake news. The front of the class don’t need to change a thing, they’ve made good grades their whole lives, they’re never wrong, and they’re going to just keep on being right and losing fights.
After reading that I have no idea what the author suggests as an alternative.
I see it as a call for strategic change. Things like:
-Don't base your campaign on how much of an idiot the other guy is. Focus on how you're going to help your constituents.
-Nominate a candidate who empathizes with the majority of voters. Ideally, someone who's been in their shoes, and can speak from lived experience. Try to avoid nominating people who come across as "the elite."
-Don't talk down to the voters or insult them. Take their views seriously and when necessary, present a competing narrative that will come across as plausible to them (the sexism thing is a good example of this.)
-Focus on ideas, not credentials, language, or social cues.
Sanders handled a number of things rather poorly in the primary. Starting from his response to suddenly being viable on any level and run throughout with his unwillingness to shitcan Weaver. I have yet to see compelling evidence that Sanders cost Clinton any substantial number of general election votes that she would have otherwise gotten, however.
The problem is he did not need to cost her a substantial amount of voters. He cost her a few thousand voters in a few states that mattered with this rigged election nonsense.
Let us say you're right and this is the case. My reply is that if you have constructed so fragile a house that a light breeze toppled it, the fault is more with the house you built than the wind.
I made several posts on this back in the primary days, to the effect that Hiliary supporters wanted it both ways: she was somehow both a powerhouse politician with an unbeatable arsenal of ground game, $$$&, etc., but was also some how a house of cards that could be staggered by any faint touch so please fall in line and do not dissent lest all is lost.
Did Bernie cost her some voters? Maybe. Probably. But focusing on those few he cost her seems pitiful when you put it next to WHY it came down to that. Those votes should have never mattered. That she was in a position to be toppled by so slight a breeze should be of more concern imo.
He got here largely because of the prejudices against Mexicans, Muslims, women, etc that him and his base share. We're talking about someone who was endorsed by the KKK and who, after November 8th, witnessed the same thing that we all did: people emboldended to commit hate crimes because of the win of their preferred presidential candidate. That is what his win inspired.
Weird, I thought he got there because people were sick of being unemployed because their jobs were being sent overseas.
*shrug*
whadda i know.
You do realize that the voters who cared the most about the economy voted for Hillary right?
I don't realize that because I don't think it's true, but that's just my opinion and I have no consensus data so it'd be conjecture at best on my part.
Your sentence. . . it makes no sense.
It's one of the few reasons I support him, but I can't speak for everyone else that supports him because I didn't go out and poll them.
You have been conned.
Maybe a few thousand manufacturing jobs will return to the United States. It will look good in headlines. What will not show up in the headlines is the accelerating collapse of labor protection and wages and the return of Gilded Age exploitation of labor you once thought was only allowed overseas, except with less purchasing power than ever before. Meanwhile, the cost of health care will rise at a higher yearly rate than ever before as insurance pools once again return to silo'd pockets of The Very Sick and Old, fatalities and QOL lost to preventable conditions rise, and insurance companies are freed from the onerous burden of providing coverage for medical conditions that your sky-rocketing premiums allegedly paid for.
You're welcome to your low-paying, marginal right to work that will sicken you, impoverish you, and add next to nothing to society or GDP, for the sake of a pleasant headline.
I hope in 8 years we can revisit this comment and you'll be wrong.
If you're right though, then I blame Obama for telling me not to vote for Hillary
Obama repeatedly and enthusiastically campaigned for Hillary, can't blame him.
After repeatedly and enthusiastically campaigning against her in 2008.
you're not really this clueless are you?
I don't feel that I am clueless. Why are you attacking me personally?
What was the thing that Obama said to convince you that Hillary was awful?
Would you accept a PM? I don't think we're supposed to talk about the election in this thread.
@imdointhis I found a thread for election talk! I am genuinely curious about what swayed your thinking.
The whole thing is worth reading (its short), but some excerpts:
The candidate should win by qualifications alone. Political office is compared to brain surgery. Look at this study that shows that members of the other party are less educated. Watch this video of a supporter saying something laughable. The other candidate is pathologized; he is mentally ill, or on drugs, or has a sub-normal IQ. Rather than argue right vs. wrong, the battle is the smart vs. the stupid.
This puts off and alienates a majority of people. Most people didn’t make good grades or even like school. Most people don’t work in jobs with a clear ladder to climb based on educational and professional qualifications. Most people kind of like to see the experts shown up (think of clickbait that begins “Doctors hate this.”) In every movie, the slobs beat the snobs. Most people resent being talked down to, and are more keenly aware of it than the person doing the talking down.
...
However, there simply aren’t enough success-driven educated professionals with lives similar to Hillary’s. Careerist ambition is not always an appealing personality trait to those who do not share it. Even white women, who would be expected to most see themselves in Clinton, did not vote for her in a majority.
Sexism, is of course, to blame for a lot of this. Ambitious women are not trusted or liked, and while this is unfortunate, it is a well-known social phenomenon. The campaign’s attitude seemed to be “well, they’ll get used to it.” The sexism of the public was not something to be countered with a different narrative, to be persuaded away, but rather something to be triumphed over. Those deplorable idiots would be proven wrong rather than won over.
...
In the end, the snobs lost to the slobs, but true to the character of the well-educated, they simply will not hear criticism that does not come from the similarly credentialed. The loss is the fault of every stupid person. The voters were racist and sexist, those stupid hippy millennials didn’t turn up, morons believed fake news. The front of the class don’t need to change a thing, they’ve made good grades their whole lives, they’re never wrong, and they’re going to just keep on being right and losing fights.
After reading that I have no idea what the author suggests as an alternative.
I see it as a call for strategic change. Things like:
-Don't base your campaign on how much of an idiot the other guy is. Focus on how you're going to help your constituents.
-Nominate a candidate who empathizes with the majority of voters. Ideally, someone who's been in their shoes, and can speak from lived experience. Try to avoid nominating people who come across as "the elite."
-Don't talk down to the voters or insult them. Take their views seriously and when necessary, present a competing narrative that will come across as plausible to them (the sexism thing is a good example of this.)
-Focus on ideas, not credentials, language, or social cues.
Ah, good to see the left shits themselves over unintentional/casual/ingrained sexism being pointed out just as much as the right does.
"Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}."
Ah, good to see the left shits themselves over unintentional/casual/ingrained sexism being pointed out just as much as the right does.
Please, enlighten us all as to how wonderful a head of the DNC DWS was. Please explain how the only way you can think she was self-serving and bad at her job is to be a casual misogynist.
I feel like I'm going insane. Are we really trying to argue that DWS was good at her job and that we only thought she wasn't because we aren't checking our privilege? Is that seriously happening? On these forums?
Ah, good to see the left shits themselves over unintentional/casual/ingrained sexism being pointed out just as much as the right does.
"Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}."
Just curious is there anyone who actually qualifies as any of the above in your view?
I think any useful lessons aren't going to take the form of 'run this candidate instead of this one' or even 'move further to the left/right' Any and all course correction should, above all else, involve ways to properly convey to the public that the values of the Democratic party are of benefit to the populace. If there's one thing this election has definitively taught us, is that if you can get the people on your side, they'll literally vote for anyone you put in front of them.
In a lot of the ways that actually matter, the party is very weak. And has been for a while.
The issue on "the left" wasn't how strong the party was, so much as how insular it seemed from the outside.
I don't agree. There was loud, repeated complaints about closed primaries for instance. There were many complaints about "establishment" candidates, and not just Clinton. For a party to be strong, it has to have some power, which means they have to be able to make decisions that actually are relevant. The two biggest jobs of the DNC and the national party infrastructure are fundraising and candidate recruitment. The former resulted in explicit complaints and literal protests. The latter requires the party itself to have some influence in candidate selection, which results in "rigged" complaints.
And those complaints were, in almost every example, about the perception that the party was doing something to keep the rank and file from having their say. Closed primaries and arcane registration rules kept those on the periphery out of the process. Double primaries made it look like voting didn't actually matter and the party was just going to pick their own candidate from within. Super delegates were the party essentially signposting their intent to do so. Etc.
The party can be plenty strong without looking like it's dictating results. The left doesn't want weakness, just to feel like it's got a fair shake when compared to political insiders.
So you want a strong party, just one that doesn't have any power. The party officials are the political insiders. Those "on the periphery" are those who refuse to be in the party. Anything the party does can be spun to "keep[ing] the rank and file from having their say." You're proving my point by implicitly asserting that anything that gets away from direct democracy in terms of party decisions is something that garners legitimate complaint.
Authoritarianism isn't the only measure of strength.
I want a party that contests more seats. That organizes properly so we don't lose blue states in an election. That can at least pretend to push the things we were sold on when we have control of two houses of Congress.
What I don't want is to have the presidential nominee dictated to me before the process even starts, then get told to fall in line for my own good. It's not the existence of insiders that is the problem, it's the impression that they're calling the shots come hell or high water and that it's incumbent on me to get on board rather than in them to sell a product that anyone actually wants.
You're not going to convince"the left" to line up with the party by taking the appearance of control away from them. But you can get them in board by making them feel heard. More than anything else, that's where the Democratic party is falling down on the job right now. Nobody believes they have anyone's interests at heart but their own, specifically their own desire to hold power. The primary was just that feeling bubbling over and coalescing behind the most awkward avatar ever.
No. The strength of an office (head of the DNC) is directly related to its authority. That's literally the definition of an office's strength.
Decentralized control of a party is not a fundamental characteristic of "the left." Indeed, its generally been antithetical to its approach in government, political action and labor negotiation. "No one believes they have anyone's interest at heart" is massive projection form certain segments on the left. Do you think Obama doesn't have other people's interest at heart? He's been the head of the party 8 years. Its that very narrative that fucks us.
It's not even about de-centralized power, though. It's about a lack of dictatorial nature.
There are so very many things that the DNC needs to be doing that are essentially candidate agnostic. Voter outreach, organizing, etc. I don't want Ellison picking winners anymore than I wanted DWS doing that, because that's not their job. Build the party. This is the part of the game that has been neglected for far too long in favor of elevating specific candidates.
And whether you think it's projection or not, it's the Democrats' problem with big chunks of their base right now. And people who would be voting Democrat if they didn't feel like they were being disrespected by the process. The whole primary this year was one long story of people feeling like everything was shady and unfair, whether that was true or not. We need to fix that impression, or we're going to have this same fight every time out and Trump is just the start of our problems.
You keep using far right terms like "authoritarianism" and "dictatorial" and its BS and frankly its disingenuous. Was Howard Dean an authoritarian dictator of the party? Of course not. He did, however, dictate a party strategy that was both much more centralized in its strategy, very aggressive in candidate recruitment and pretty damn organized. Was he villainous as a crooked party insider establishment boogeyman? No, because he was seen as an ideological ally of that chunk of the base you're referring to. You don't bitch about the refs unless you think you're losing and that's all the anti-DNC complaints are. And you don't act like the DNC chair is the head of the party unless you want to blame someone and the actual head of the party (Barack Obama) is too popular to go after. DWS was probably not in the top 10 most powerful and impactful figures in electoral Democratic politics in the last 6 years, most of the House and local losses came before she took the position and she wielded less power than Dean. But you can't blame Obama, or god forbid the voters, and obviously a more complex understanding that no single figure caused the return to the pre-Katrina balance of power so....
You couldn't be missing the point any harder if you were looking through the scope sideways.
Dean didn't pick winners and losers. And he definitely didn't appear to have been, nor did he seem to be using his position in the DNC leadership to be furthering his career. Could he have been doing those things? Maybe, if done well it's kind of hard to tell. And you're correct in one way; Dean had a fair amount of goodwill from exactly the kind of people we're discussing here and they were willing to cut him a fair amount of slack.
It's not things like the 50 State strategy that are the problem. That sort of centralization and coordination isn't a bad thing. The problem comes when the voters feel like they're not being respected in the process. The Democratic primary this year was that coming to a head in a very real way.
I've already said so very many times, and I'm adding it here again so it doesn't wind up being used as a smokescreen to deflect from the actual problem as we all know it would be, that Hillary Clinton won the primary fair and square as the rules dicated. That happened. I feel like I need to put this shit in my sig, because it gets used as a fucking cudgel every time. CLINTON WON THE PRIMARY WITHOUT CHEATING. There. Done.
The problem was that to a bunch of Democratic voters (if not, specifically, registered Democrats) the process seemed arcane, the options looked like they were hand-picked to guarantee a specific candidate and every step of the actual race highlighted another weird thing that didn't make sense to casual observation and thus reinforced the idea that things weren't quite right. New York's weird registration deadlines for non-Democrats, the double primaries, the way we kept hearing about how Super Delegates were going to guarantee Clinton the nomination but they didn't actually matter but they totally did because they were insurmountable. All of this fed into the appearance of impropriety and the party running essentially a show primary to line up their chosen candidate, who was already not exactly beloved by the wing of the party that was going to react poorly to the way that whole shitshow went down. Then the emails came out to confirm suspicions about preference (though not collusion, for the love of gawd). It was a mess.
In politics, perception is reality. When a bunch of your voters get the feeling that you don't actually want to hear what they have to say, they're not going to be super on board with whatever you decided to go with. And, frankly, they don't owe you their votes. Would they be better off having voted for you? Sure. But voters at large are irrational creatures and you can either moralize about how terrible that is or work the fucking problem. One of these two options might lead to winning more elections at some point, the other one almost definintely won't.
Yes. And one of the main points people have been making since before the primary was even over is that Sanders played on these issues for his own gain to the detriment of the Left in america as a whole.
The Left are generally a fractious bunch and prone to sulking when they feel they haven't gotten what they wanted. This is a quality a left-wing political party has to work around. Part of that is not making the issue worse. The primary process certainly needs to be better but Democrats also need to not delegitimize the process either as that just kills left-wing politics in the US.
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FakefauxCóiste BodharDriving John McCain to meet some Iraqis who'd very much like to make his acquaintanceRegistered Userregular
I think any useful lessons aren't going to take the form of 'run this candidate instead of this one' or even 'move further to the left/right' Any and all course correction should, above all else, involve ways to properly convey to the public that the values of the Democratic party are of benefit to the populace. If there's one thing this election has definitively taught us, is that if you can get the people on your side, they'll literally vote for anyone you put in front of them.
That only works if the left and the center-left have shared values beyond the most superficial level. This thread, frankly, is making me doubt that.
I think any useful lessons aren't going to take the form of 'run this candidate instead of this one' or even 'move further to the left/right' Any and all course correction should, above all else, involve ways to properly convey to the public that the values of the Democratic party are of benefit to the populace. If there's one thing this election has definitively taught us, is that if you can get the people on your side, they'll literally vote for anyone you put in front of them.
That only works if the left and the center-left have shared values beyond the most superficial level. This thread, frankly, is making me doubt that.
I don't see how. There's no lack of shared values here. Just as their was the same values during the primary this year. Just as their was the same values during the primary back in 2008.
The arguments are all over things like process. Incrementalism vs Idealism and shit like that. There's very little, frankly basically zero, argument over what values are actually important.
Shit all the arguments you see in this thread are basically entirely over groups and people with very different ideas about how this primary went down. Like fucking 90% of the arguments in every thread on this topic since the later half of the democratic primary can be boiled down to one single argument. One side feels Sanders behaviour was very obviously a factor in killing enthusiasm for voting for Clinton in the election and the other side doesn't think that is true to any degree that mattered. And neither side has been willing to budge on that one point for months now. Queue arguments.
Ah, good to see the left shits themselves over unintentional/casual/ingrained sexism being pointed out just as much as the right does.
"Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}."
I don't know where you got that from. My point is that the left has just a visceral reaction to being accused of sexism/racism as the right does, something the left tries to pretend isn't true but most definitely is. It plays into what Tube's saying, in that if the left's going to react this way it's obvious why the right does when it happens to them.
Ah, good to see the left shits themselves over unintentional/casual/ingrained sexism being pointed out just as much as the right does.
Please, enlighten us all as to how wonderful a head of the DNC DWS was. Please explain how the only way you can think she was self-serving and bad at her job is to be a casual misogynist.
Case in point. Pointing out casual sexism has created an opportunity for deflection and focus on that accusation rather than engaging. It's a fact women are held to a different standard when it comes to ambition but bring that up and there's a visceral negative reaction. As I mentioned earlier, it's patently clear that bringing up sexism and racism is off limits going forward, the Democrats need to attack from different directions.
Shit all the arguments you see in this thread are basically entirely over groups and people with very different ideas about how this primary went down. Like fucking 90% of the arguments in every thread on this topic since the later half of the democratic primary can be boiled down to one single argument. One side feels Sanders behaviour was very obviously a factor in killing enthusiasm for voting for Clinton in the election and the other side doesn't think that is true to any degree that mattered. And neither side has been willing to budge on that one point for months now. Queue arguments.
Beyond the argument itself being intractable, I don't even either side really says anything actionable moving forward.
We can sit here and moralize at each other, exacerbating the split along this thing that we can't go back in time and fix, or we can actually fix the thing that we all agree on; the party needs to get its shit together to oppose Trump.
Unless relitigating the primary is going to produce some amazing insight, which seems rather unlikely at this point, it's just throwing around blame and accomplishing nothing but extending the rancor.
I'm going to put up some numbered premises and then put my thoughts in parentheses, separated by line breaks.
1) Democrats need to run everywhere. This is the Dean model.
(I don't think this is controversial.)
2) There was a long simmering tension between the Clintons as representatives of the party establishment and activists on the left as a result of some of the compromises Bill Clinton felt he was forced to take during his Presidency due to the Republican Congress and the compromises Democrats in Congress (symbolized by but not limited to Hillary's Iraq vote) made with the Bush Administration prior to the social security fight in 2005.
(I think the existence of this is uncontroversial, its accuracy and fairness is and is something to discuss. Personally, I think Clinton was a mediocre to shitty President but that narrative is overstated by erasing Newt Gingrich from the narrative. As for the compromises with Bush, I think that was a fractured Democratic Party not knowing what to do after it overreacted to a narrow electoral college loss and panicked. This is not encouraging. Hillary's Iraq vote in particular was both her genuine interventionist stance and a pressure to look "tough" knowing she'd run for President someday and a fear that would be a vulnerability as both a liberal and a woman.)
3) Clinton was the overwhelming establishment favorite in 2008. And was beaten by an upstart who had the support of the activist wing of the party.
(No controversy here, I don't think. This is where I disagree with the narrative @OptimusZed and others are pushing about how it felt like the DNC and the establishment had picked the winner and the left was asked to get in line broke down. The same dynamics were in play in 2008, and the establishment lost. Admittedly, once in a generation political talent who could dominate the black vote without becoming the "black candidate" but fundamentally that primary was the establishment losing.)
4) Clinton voters were bitterly disappointed by this result and also got in line by the convention.
(Again, no controversy in this statement. How did this happen? I credit Hillary herself with this significantly, but also the dire situation we were in that summer and especially fall. It's probably also worth noting the conventions were an additional month later, giving time for feelings to cool before the big national event.)
5) Some of the activists who supported Obama were disappointed by him.
(Anyone who remembers 2009 and 2010 can acknowledge the truth of this. Why is important, and to my mind, extremely frustrating. Obama had a number of major tasks when he took office. The first was to navigate the immediate crisis he inherited. The second was to work on winding down the Iraq War, his major campaign promise. Third, he had to rebuild almost the entire regulatory state after Bush had quietly dismantled it. Doing all that while wrangling a major health care bill out of a Congress more interested in protecting their own skins than helping the country AND facing unprecedented obstructionism in the form of the permanent filibuster requiring Democrats to get all 60 - for the brief time they had 60 - of their members to pass anything and not allowing them to protect their more vulnerable members. UGGGGGGGGGH.)
6) Democrats suffer crushing losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterms.
(Combination of #5 above, the traditional lower turnout rates in midterms for everyone but especially large parts of the Democratic base like young people, America's usual discontent and desire to punish whoever is in the White House in midterm elections, the parallel Koch operation being incredibly well funded, and a couple factors I will mention in the next point.
7) The Supreme Court radically alters election law with Citizens United and Shelby County. As well as the follow up decisions to Citizens United.
(Major contributor to point #6 above and 2016's loss.)
8) Which brings us to the 2016 Democratic primary. The field is smaller with just Clinton as a well known national candidate. Martin O'Malley is the only other semi-viable establishment wing candidate, while Bernie Sanders decides to pursue the nomination from the populist left.
(The crushing losses in 2010 and 2014 and downticket candidates underperforming compared to Obama in 2012 mean there are fewer people from the traditional bid launching positions of Governor and Senator to choose from. Additionally, Clinton has the backing of the Democratic establishment and wins the race for the best staffers and fundraisers. This knocks out a number of ambitious people like Andrew Cuomo, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker; each of whom run largely in similar circles to Clinton as they all represent the New York/New Jersey region. Meanwhile, Beau Biden's death leaves Joe emotionally drained and not in the best frame of mind to run.)
9) Sanders taps into the frustration with establishment Democrats from members of the activist base and especially with young people. He runs an unexpectedly strong campaign, winning in early states in ways that remind people of Obama. However, Clinton wins the African-American (especially but not limited to older voters) decisively and keeps her Hispanic support from 2008. This wins her the primary.
(You can see how points 2 and 5 above create this dynamic. Bernie did better than I expected, but I wanted him to do relatively well to push Clinton to the left and force her to deal with the reality that there was a strong liberal component of the party that needed reckoning with. Which he did and she responded by moving to the left to reflect this. Did Sanders stay in the race too long? I think that's the wrong question. I think after he had clearly lost he made some errors in judgment about how he campaigned more than anything else.)
10) Tensions continue to simmer between Sanders and Clinton camps.
(As evidenced by how many times that conflict got threads locked like this one is in danger of. I think there are lots of things going on here. First, there's a - to my mind completely legitimate - frustration among the left that they often feel like they're Cassandra and no one listens to them despite consistently being right on the merits. Second, Sanders really did play up the narrative that the whole system was working against people and keeping them down, including the corrupt Democratic establishment. This reinforced the above reasonably valid narratives and made it a little darker to my mind. Third, and I don't think there's a nice way to say this, but the hardest core Sanders supporters got played - hard - by Wikileaks, which is to say Russia. There are other factors, but I think those are the major ones.)
11) Things are not yet hunky dory at the convention, unlike 2008.
(I think the quick turn around between the last primary and Sanders' concession and the convention is an underrated factor here. If the DNC is in July in 2008 instead of August, might the hard feelings over that primary have erupted into something obnoxious and disruptive? More likely than it ended up being in August. Bernie did a lot of work that week to try to slow things down, to his credit. But the feelings were still pretty raw.)
12) None of this shit should have mattered, except James Comey staged a fucking coup d'etat.
(The worst thing Democrats can do in the face of the Trumpening is to fracture like they did after the Rehnquist coup installed our last Republican President. A key part in not fracturing is to not overstate our differences. We all basically stand for the same stuff: civil rights, universal health care, environmental protection, a more equal distribution of wealth, etc. It's just a matter of degrees and methods.)
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Shit all the arguments you see in this thread are basically entirely over groups and people with very different ideas about how this primary went down. Like fucking 90% of the arguments in every thread on this topic since the later half of the democratic primary can be boiled down to one single argument. One side feels Sanders behaviour was very obviously a factor in killing enthusiasm for voting for Clinton in the election and the other side doesn't think that is true to any degree that mattered. And neither side has been willing to budge on that one point for months now. Queue arguments.
Beyond the argument itself being intractable, I don't even either side really says anything actionable moving forward.
We can sit here and moralize at each other, exacerbating the split along this thing that we can't go back in time and fix, or we can actually fix the thing that we all agree on; the party needs to get its shit together to oppose Trump.
Unless relitigating the primary is going to produce some amazing insight, which seems rather unlikely at this point, it's just throwing around blame and accomplishing nothing but extending the rancor.
I put an easy one just a few posts above. This primary can show us alot of things about what needs to be done going forward.
Number one is don't delegitimize the process. Don't feed into preexisting biases within the Democratic and left-wing base that encourage a lack of participation. The Democratic party and left wing politics in general in the US, live or die on participation. Turnout is a win for progress. Don't discourage voters.
On point three, I think there are two very important factors that make 2016 different than 2008.
The first is the proliferation of rapid-fire social media platforms that thrive on conflict. Obama supporters and Clinton supporters got pretty shitty to each other, but they typically did it either in person, where having faces to actually talk to softened the edge of the conflict somewhat, or in their own segregated portions of the internet that crossed over much less often. DailyKos vs MyDD is the go to example here, and also, I think, a great example in how important it is for political media to side with the winner. Major media, meaning the papers and news shows, were also much less interested in internet rancor because they didn't know how to capitalize on it and nobody took it at all seriously. It was a very different environment.
The second is that the person who was viewed as the underdog won, and the candidate viewed as the insider lost. This leads to very different dynamics in terms of how weirdness in the primary is received, and how the injured parties react after the fact. Clinton's supporters were also significantly older in 2008 than Sanders' were in 2016, and young people are pretty prone to "fuck it, I'm out" anyway, compared to people on social security.
On point three, I think there are two very important factors that make 2016 different than 2008.
The first is the proliferation of rapid-fire social media platforms that thrive on conflict. Obama supporters and Clinton supporters got pretty shitty to each other, but they typically did it either in person, where having faces to actually talk to softened the edge of the conflict somewhat, or in their own segregated portions of the internet that crossed over much less often. DailyKos vs MyDD is the go to example here, and also, I think, a great example in how important it is for political media to side with the winner. Major media, meaning the papers and news shows, were also much less interested in internet rancor because they didn't know how to capitalize on it and nobody took it at all seriously. It was a very different environment.
The second is that the person who was viewed as the underdog won, and the candidate viewed as the insider lost. This leads to very different dynamics in terms of how weirdness in the primary is received, and how the injured parties react after the fact. Clinton's supporters were also significantly older in 2008 than Sanders' were in 2016, and young people are pretty prone to "fuck it, I'm out" anyway, compared to people on social security.
Fair enough, but I don't see why we have to play into it and get our threads locked.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
(The worst thing Democrats can do in the face of the Trumpening is to fracture like they did after the Rehnquist coup installed our last Republican President. A key part in not fracturing is to not overstate our differences. We all basically stand for the same stuff: civil rights, universal health care, environmental protection, a more equal distribution of wealth, etc. It's just a matter of degrees and methods.)
i think the fracture is already happening. the DNC should have already been a warning sign. whole sections of the DNC voiced loud opposition, and the DNC leadership reacted by turning the lights off in the protesting area sections.
later, Donna Brazille refused to recognize the frustration of Party staffers.
instead of just coming out and taking the frustrations of Bernie supporters head on, the DNC barrelled on like everything was fine.
part of this was clearly fueled by polling, which to this day is still shocking in how wrong it all was. but part of it reflects an intractable party machine unwilling to listen and unwilling to give up the reins of power. that has to stop. if it takes the implosion of the Democrat party for that to happen, so be fucking it..
I feel like I'm going insane. Are we really trying to argue that DWS was good at her job and that we only thought she wasn't because we aren't checking our privilege? Is that seriously happening? On these forums?
I mean, I'm hitting agree on your posts so at least now we've found our common ground.
Giggles_Funsworth on
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11) Things are not yet hunky dory at the convention, unlike 2008.
(I think the quick turn around between the last primary and Sanders' concession and the convention is an underrated factor here. If the DNC is in July in 2008 instead of August, might the hard feelings over that primary have erupted into something obnoxious and disruptive? More likely than it ended up being in August. Bernie did a lot of work that week to try to slow things down, to his credit. But the feelings were still pretty raw.)
12) None of this shit should have mattered, except James Comey staged a fucking coup d'etat.
(The worst thing Democrats can do in the face of the Trumpening is to fracture like they did after the Rehnquist coup installed our last Republican President. A key part in not fracturing is to not overstate our differences. We all basically stand for the same stuff: civil rights, universal health care, environmental protection, a more equal distribution of wealth, etc. It's just a matter of degrees and methods.)
Shit all the arguments you see in this thread are basically entirely over groups and people with very different ideas about how this primary went down. Like fucking 90% of the arguments in every thread on this topic since the later half of the democratic primary can be boiled down to one single argument. One side feels Sanders behaviour was very obviously a factor in killing enthusiasm for voting for Clinton in the election and the other side doesn't think that is true to any degree that mattered. And neither side has been willing to budge on that one point for months now. Queue arguments.
Beyond the argument itself being intractable, I don't even either side really says anything actionable moving forward.
We can sit here and moralize at each other, exacerbating the split along this thing that we can't go back in time and fix, or we can actually fix the thing that we all agree on; the party needs to get its shit together to oppose Trump.
Unless relitigating the primary is going to produce some amazing insight, which seems rather unlikely at this point, it's just throwing around blame and accomplishing nothing but extending the rancor.
I put an easy one just a few posts above. This primary can show us alot of things about what needs to be done going forward.
Number one is don't delegitimize the process. Don't feed into preexisting biases within the Democratic and left-wing base that encourage a lack of participation. The Democratic party and left wing politics in general in the US, live or die on participation. Turnout is a win for progress. Don't discourage voters.
I would prefer to simply remove the points within the process that only serve to exacerbate such arguments. Because we're going to argue about this stuff, anyway. It's what we do.
I've forgotten the bad stuff Mrs. Wasserman-Schultz did
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
(The worst thing Democrats can do in the face of the Trumpening is to fracture like they did after the Rehnquist coup installed our last Republican President. A key part in not fracturing is to not overstate our differences. We all basically stand for the same stuff: civil rights, universal health care, environmental protection, a more equal distribution of wealth, etc. It's just a matter of degrees and methods.)
i think the fracture is already happening. the DNC should have already been a warning sign. whole sections of the DNC voiced loud opposition, and the DNC leadership reacted by turning the lights off in the protesting area sections.
later, Donna Brazille refused to recognize the frustration of Party staffers.
instead of just coming out and taking the frustrations of Bernie supporters head on, the DNC barrelled on like everything was fine.
But in terms of policy y'all won a number of major victories. The 2016 Democratic Party is as left economically since what, 1968? And socially it's so far to the left that LBJ's head would explode. Hell, King's head might explode. Clinton pushed for hire taxes on the rich, expanding social security, improving the ACA to make it better and more universal, combating climate change, significant aid for tuition, unapologetically gave the pure feminist answer on abortion, embraced gay rights more than any presidential candidate ever, talked significantly about racial justice, etc. The party is moving left, you made that happen. I genuinely don't understand and this is what really causes the frustration with the "left" among the rest of us.
part of this was clearly fueled by polling, which to this day is still shocking in how wrong it all was. but part of it reflects an intractable party machine unwilling to listen and unwilling to give up the reins of power. that has to stop. if it takes the implosion of the Democrat party for that to happen, so be fucking it..
This ignores all the pain and suffering about to happen or that happened from January 20, 2001 until hell, like nine months ago is when we finally got out from under the financial collapse Bush helped cause. I hate accelerationist talk because it commits the sin I hate the media for: treats this like a game without real effects on real people.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
8) Which brings us to the 2016 Democratic primary. The field is smaller with just Clinton as a well known national candidate. Martin O'Malley is the only other semi-viable establishment wing candidate, while Bernie Sanders decides to pursue the nomination from the populist left.
(The crushing losses in 2010 and 2014 and downticket candidates underperforming compared to Obama in 2012 mean there are fewer people from the traditional bid launching positions of Governor and Senator to choose from. Additionally, Clinton has the backing of the Democratic establishment and wins the race for the best staffers and fundraisers. This knocks out a number of ambitious people like Andrew Cuomo, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker; each of whom run largely in similar circles to Clinton as they all represent the New York/New Jersey region. Meanwhile, Beau Biden's death leaves Joe emotionally drained and not in the best frame of mind to run.)
This is a hugely underappreciated part of the process, to my mind. What little bench we had in terms of legitimate candiates was either unwilling or unable to give Clinton a decent run, so we ended up with Socialist Abe Simpson as the avatar of dissent. And he was not even remotely ready for prime time as an opposition candidate in a party primary.
Third, and I don't think there's a nice way to say this, but the hardest core Sanders supporters got played - hard - by Wikileaks, which is to say Russia.
This was also a huge problem. We lost a bunch of activated voters over foreign propaganda because the party's credibility was shot. Whether you want to blame this on the DNC or Sanders, it can't happen again. Our next primary has to look pristine and above board the whole way.
To be perfectly honest, a lot of the anger I'm hearing from progressives at this point is ex post facto "of course she was going to lose, we knew that in April" stuff. Which I have to admit to having had my own fair amount of, to be honest. The reality is, though, that we didn't know that. We all kind of thought that the Democratic primary was the big race (especially in that month or so after Iowa) and that the GOP clown car would be a walkover. So we fought our hearts out in what we thought was a battle for the soul of the party, and a lot of us are know claiming prior knowledge re; the Trumpocalypse. Which is plainly false, since I know of exactly one person who took him seriously a year ago.
I've just finished watching a Today Show video series interviewing Trump voters in areas that voted for Obama: The first video shows how both a Union and a person who supported Bernie can switch to support Trump due to feeling neglected and just how much of a mistake it was for Clinton to not visit those states. It shows how someone can acknowledge Trump is a terrible person but still vote for him.
The second video shows how a big part of Obama winning was due to him being perceived as an outsider, different, and an arbiter of change and how Trump used the same feeling to win. How women who proclaim themselves as pro-choice and acknowledge Trump as pro-life are still okay with voting for him. How Clinton's cruft meant they had something they could point at as bad while for Trump all of the bad things were external to politics and easy to ignore.
The third and most current video that shows how the religious could pick someone like Trump due to the perception that Christians are under attack from the left. How the interviewer drops the ball on bringing up the Muslim ban when someone talks about religious freedom. How they acknowledge he's a terrible person but are okay with him being in power as long as it means they won't be persecuted.
In all of the videos there's indications that they're annoyed by his post-election behavior and have low expectations that he'll actually do what he says he would.
This ignores all the pain and suffering about to happen or that happened from January 20, 2001 until hell, like nine months ago is when we finally got out from under the financial collapse Bush helped cause. I hate accelerationist talk because it commits the sin I hate the media for: treats this like a game without real effects on real people.
the problem is, the DNC leadership did exactly this.
i'm not talking about accelerationism, i'm talking about basic coalition building. Obama was hugely successful on this front in part because he focused on taking care of reaching across to as many groups as he could. this didn't result in many policy wins, but it was a hell of a political strategy.
Clinton used old-school Clinton politics, which considering what was happening with both the GOP and the Dem sides, it should have been obvious that that would no longer work. the emails were the last straw; i saw nothing incriminating or illegal in them, but i did see a top-down approach which kept being perpetuated by DWS and by Brazille. once those came out, the Clinton campaign should have immediately addressed them and full-stop reached out to Bernie supporters and others. but no, instead they shut the lights off sections at the DNC, stayed mum about the emails, and flat out refused to change course. that is a strategic error of gigantic magnitude, and it was possible only because the DNC leadership empowered it.
The whole thing is worth reading (its short), but some excerpts:
The candidate should win by qualifications alone. Political office is compared to brain surgery. Look at this study that shows that members of the other party are less educated. Watch this video of a supporter saying something laughable. The other candidate is pathologized; he is mentally ill, or on drugs, or has a sub-normal IQ. Rather than argue right vs. wrong, the battle is the smart vs. the stupid.
This puts off and alienates a majority of people. Most people didn’t make good grades or even like school. Most people don’t work in jobs with a clear ladder to climb based on educational and professional qualifications. Most people kind of like to see the experts shown up (think of clickbait that begins “Doctors hate this.”) In every movie, the slobs beat the snobs. Most people resent being talked down to, and are more keenly aware of it than the person doing the talking down.
...
However, there simply aren’t enough success-driven educated professionals with lives similar to Hillary’s. Careerist ambition is not always an appealing personality trait to those who do not share it. Even white women, who would be expected to most see themselves in Clinton, did not vote for her in a majority.
Sexism, is of course, to blame for a lot of this. Ambitious women are not trusted or liked, and while this is unfortunate, it is a well-known social phenomenon. The campaign’s attitude seemed to be “well, they’ll get used to it.” The sexism of the public was not something to be countered with a different narrative, to be persuaded away, but rather something to be triumphed over. Those deplorable idiots would be proven wrong rather than won over.
...
In the end, the snobs lost to the slobs, but true to the character of the well-educated, they simply will not hear criticism that does not come from the similarly credentialed. The loss is the fault of every stupid person. The voters were racist and sexist, those stupid hippy millennials didn’t turn up, morons believed fake news. The front of the class don’t need to change a thing, they’ve made good grades their whole lives, they’re never wrong, and they’re going to just keep on being right and losing fights.
After reading that I have no idea what the author suggests as an alternative.
I see it as a call for strategic change. Things like:
-Don't base your campaign on how much of an idiot the other guy is. Focus on how you're going to help your constituents.
-Nominate a candidate who empathizes with the majority of voters. Ideally, someone who's been in their shoes, and can speak from lived experience. Try to avoid nominating people who come across as "the elite."
-Don't talk down to the voters or insult them. Take their views seriously and when necessary, present a competing narrative that will come across as plausible to them (the sexism thing is a good example of this.)
-Focus on ideas, not credentials, language, or social cues.
And so on.
literally the opposite of how Trump won
Elections aren't simple puzzles where there's only ever one solution that's going to work.
This ignores all the pain and suffering about to happen or that happened from January 20, 2001 until hell, like nine months ago is when we finally got out from under the financial collapse Bush helped cause. I hate accelerationist talk because it commits the sin I hate the media for: treats this like a game without real effects on real people.
the problem is, the DNC leadership did exactly this.
i'm not talking about accelerationism, i'm talking about basic coalition building. Obama was hugely successful on this front in part because he focused on taking care of reaching across to as many groups as he could. this didn't result in many policy wins, but it was a hell of a political strategy.
Clinton used old-school Clinton politics, which considering what was happening with both the GOP and the Dem sides, it should have been obvious that that would no longer work. the emails were the last straw; i saw nothing incriminating or illegal in them, but i did see a top-down approach which kept being perpetuated by DWS and by Brazille. once those came out, the Clinton campaign should have immediately addressed them and full-stop reached out to Bernie supporters and others. but no, instead they shut the lights off sections at the DNC, stayed mum about the emails, and flat out refused to change course. that is a strategic error of gigantic magnitude, and it was possible only because the DNC leadership empowered it.
What, concretely, should they have done? Again, she moved way left. She was unapologetically liberal in the general election campaign in a way Obama never was but people assumed him to be.
It's all this desire for vaguely symbolic stuff while throwing away real victories that makes me frustrated with a subset of lefty activists.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Shit all the arguments you see in this thread are basically entirely over groups and people with very different ideas about how this primary went down. Like fucking 90% of the arguments in every thread on this topic since the later half of the democratic primary can be boiled down to one single argument. One side feels Sanders behaviour was very obviously a factor in killing enthusiasm for voting for Clinton in the election and the other side doesn't think that is true to any degree that mattered. And neither side has been willing to budge on that one point for months now. Queue arguments.
Beyond the argument itself being intractable, I don't even either side really says anything actionable moving forward.
We can sit here and moralize at each other, exacerbating the split along this thing that we can't go back in time and fix, or we can actually fix the thing that we all agree on; the party needs to get its shit together to oppose Trump.
Unless relitigating the primary is going to produce some amazing insight, which seems rather unlikely at this point, it's just throwing around blame and accomplishing nothing but extending the rancor.
I put an easy one just a few posts above. This primary can show us alot of things about what needs to be done going forward.
Number one is don't delegitimize the process. Don't feed into preexisting biases within the Democratic and left-wing base that encourage a lack of participation. The Democratic party and left wing politics in general in the US, live or die on participation. Turnout is a win for progress. Don't discourage voters.
I would prefer to simply remove the points within the process that only serve to exacerbate such arguments. Because we're going to argue about this stuff, anyway. It's what we do.
Your second point here is the reason your first is inadequate. As you said earlier "In politics, perception is reality." It's not enough to remove the parts of the process that create this perception, one has to actively not cultivate that perception as well. Just cause it's not real doesn't mean people won't believe it if you hammer that point.
This ignores all the pain and suffering about to happen or that happened from January 20, 2001 until hell, like nine months ago is when we finally got out from under the financial collapse Bush helped cause. I hate accelerationist talk because it commits the sin I hate the media for: treats this like a game without real effects on real people.
the problem is, the DNC leadership did exactly this.
i'm not talking about accelerationism, i'm talking about basic coalition building. Obama was hugely successful on this front in part because he focused on taking care of reaching across to as many groups as he could. this didn't result in many policy wins, but it was a hell of a political strategy.
Clinton used old-school Clinton politics, which considering what was happening with both the GOP and the Dem sides, it should have been obvious that that would no longer work. the emails were the last straw; i saw nothing incriminating or illegal in them, but i did see a top-down approach which kept being perpetuated by DWS and by Brazille. once those came out, the Clinton campaign should have immediately addressed them and full-stop reached out to Bernie supporters and others. but no, instead they shut the lights off sections at the DNC, stayed mum about the emails, and flat out refused to change course. that is a strategic error of gigantic magnitude, and it was possible only because the DNC leadership empowered it.
What, concretely, should they have done? Again, she moved way left. She was unapologetically liberal in the general election campaign in a way Obama never was but people assumed him to be.
It's all this desire for vaguely symbolic stuff while throwing away real victories that makes me frustrated with a subset of lefty activists.
actual concrete things:
- released the damn emails - should have done this at the start. lets the press pore through them at the start of the election cycle, burn out the narrative that "she's hiding something", defang that whole argument.
- immediately apologize to Bernie Sanders supporters on the questionable strategies thrown around.
- recognize the protests going on at the DNC and embrace them.
- release the transcripts from her paid speeches. it looks a shit ton better when YOU release them and control the narrative, rather than having the media hunt them down and speculate endlessly.
this election came down to "who was more authentic". voters (wrongly) coalesced around Trump because they (wrongly) believed he was just telling the truth. of course he wasn't. but put him next to a candidate who was stonewalling every potentially controversial pain point and was doing nothing to sell what the Dems could do for America, and of fucking course people won't vote for Clinton. i don't care that she moved her positions to the left, she never campaigned on that.
if anything, i remember stating really clearly right after the DNC that Clinton should have stopped her focus on attacking Trump and instead on the positive messages the DNC put out. her polling numbers were STUPID HIGH right after the DNC, and that's because the DNC remembered for a second that they should be telling Americans what they would do for them, not just how terrible Trump is!
The party platform looks like a Progressive's dream board, with a few exceptions. We won that fight. The candidate we ran was whatever to a lot of people, but now the likes of the senate minority leader are backing strong Progressives for leadership positions.
By and large, the people in the party that aren't interested in continuing to litigate the primary for their own purposes are finding progressive religion. Now is definitely not the time to be bailing on the Democratic party.
Posts
The problem is he did not need to cost her a substantial amount of voters. He cost her a few thousand voters in a few states that mattered with this rigged election nonsense.
I think there's a lot of resistance to the idea that's pretty self-evident from my perspective. We're fucked until conditions change. It might be that they change before 2018 or the reduction in Republican advantage among educated whites this cycle results in better mid-term performance, but Republicans control everything and have shown no qualms about using the power of incumbency.
And "conditions change" means more or less thousands of Americans die, millions lose their jobs and/or have their rights impinged, and/or billions are stolen due to the Trump kleptocracy. We need organization, but the well has been poisoned against that. We definitely need some moderates/centrists who aren't willing to sign on to a platform that sees Clinton and Obama as too far to the right, and we need the far left, some of whom are unwilling to sign on to a party that doesn't strongly center on their positions.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Basically, I know that I'm coming from behind due to a lot of cultural stuff (though my upbringing softened some of that since my parents were by and large pretty awesome about it). And my experience has led me to constantly police myself about this sort of thing. I understand that it's a problem and that, as a white dude, I live in a sort of bubble where I can basically expect people to treat me with a baseline of respect and decency, regardless of what station I may currently hold. And I work every day to be better, not just on this specific thing but on every instance where my prejudice could impact the accuracy of my worldview or my effect on another person's quality of life.
All that said, dropping a personal accusation like that into a larger discussion only serves to shut it all down. So please cut that shit out.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I see it as a call for strategic change. Things like:
-Don't base your campaign on how much of an idiot the other guy is. Focus on how you're going to help your constituents.
-Nominate a candidate who empathizes with the majority of voters. Ideally, someone who's been in their shoes, and can speak from lived experience. Try to avoid nominating people who come across as "the elite."
-Don't talk down to the voters or insult them. Take their views seriously and when necessary, present a competing narrative that will come across as plausible to them (the sexism thing is a good example of this.)
-Focus on ideas, not credentials, language, or social cues.
And so on.
Let us say you're right and this is the case. My reply is that if you have constructed so fragile a house that a light breeze toppled it, the fault is more with the house you built than the wind.
I made several posts on this back in the primary days, to the effect that Hiliary supporters wanted it both ways: she was somehow both a powerhouse politician with an unbeatable arsenal of ground game, $$$&, etc., but was also some how a house of cards that could be staggered by any faint touch so please fall in line and do not dissent lest all is lost.
Did Bernie cost her some voters? Maybe. Probably. But focusing on those few he cost her seems pitiful when you put it next to WHY it came down to that. Those votes should have never mattered. That she was in a position to be toppled by so slight a breeze should be of more concern imo.
@imdointhis I found a thread for election talk! I am genuinely curious about what swayed your thinking.
literally the opposite of how Trump won
"Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}."
Please, enlighten us all as to how wonderful a head of the DNC DWS was. Please explain how the only way you can think she was self-serving and bad at her job is to be a casual misogynist.
Just curious is there anyone who actually qualifies as any of the above in your view?
Yes. And one of the main points people have been making since before the primary was even over is that Sanders played on these issues for his own gain to the detriment of the Left in america as a whole.
The Left are generally a fractious bunch and prone to sulking when they feel they haven't gotten what they wanted. This is a quality a left-wing political party has to work around. Part of that is not making the issue worse. The primary process certainly needs to be better but Democrats also need to not delegitimize the process either as that just kills left-wing politics in the US.
That only works if the left and the center-left have shared values beyond the most superficial level. This thread, frankly, is making me doubt that.
I don't see how. There's no lack of shared values here. Just as their was the same values during the primary this year. Just as their was the same values during the primary back in 2008.
The arguments are all over things like process. Incrementalism vs Idealism and shit like that. There's very little, frankly basically zero, argument over what values are actually important.
Shit all the arguments you see in this thread are basically entirely over groups and people with very different ideas about how this primary went down. Like fucking 90% of the arguments in every thread on this topic since the later half of the democratic primary can be boiled down to one single argument. One side feels Sanders behaviour was very obviously a factor in killing enthusiasm for voting for Clinton in the election and the other side doesn't think that is true to any degree that mattered. And neither side has been willing to budge on that one point for months now. Queue arguments.
Case in point. Pointing out casual sexism has created an opportunity for deflection and focus on that accusation rather than engaging. It's a fact women are held to a different standard when it comes to ambition but bring that up and there's a visceral negative reaction. As I mentioned earlier, it's patently clear that bringing up sexism and racism is off limits going forward, the Democrats need to attack from different directions.
We can sit here and moralize at each other, exacerbating the split along this thing that we can't go back in time and fix, or we can actually fix the thing that we all agree on; the party needs to get its shit together to oppose Trump.
Unless relitigating the primary is going to produce some amazing insight, which seems rather unlikely at this point, it's just throwing around blame and accomplishing nothing but extending the rancor.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
1) Democrats need to run everywhere. This is the Dean model.
(I don't think this is controversial.)
2) There was a long simmering tension between the Clintons as representatives of the party establishment and activists on the left as a result of some of the compromises Bill Clinton felt he was forced to take during his Presidency due to the Republican Congress and the compromises Democrats in Congress (symbolized by but not limited to Hillary's Iraq vote) made with the Bush Administration prior to the social security fight in 2005.
(I think the existence of this is uncontroversial, its accuracy and fairness is and is something to discuss. Personally, I think Clinton was a mediocre to shitty President but that narrative is overstated by erasing Newt Gingrich from the narrative. As for the compromises with Bush, I think that was a fractured Democratic Party not knowing what to do after it overreacted to a narrow electoral college loss and panicked. This is not encouraging. Hillary's Iraq vote in particular was both her genuine interventionist stance and a pressure to look "tough" knowing she'd run for President someday and a fear that would be a vulnerability as both a liberal and a woman.)
3) Clinton was the overwhelming establishment favorite in 2008. And was beaten by an upstart who had the support of the activist wing of the party.
(No controversy here, I don't think. This is where I disagree with the narrative @OptimusZed and others are pushing about how it felt like the DNC and the establishment had picked the winner and the left was asked to get in line broke down. The same dynamics were in play in 2008, and the establishment lost. Admittedly, once in a generation political talent who could dominate the black vote without becoming the "black candidate" but fundamentally that primary was the establishment losing.)
4) Clinton voters were bitterly disappointed by this result and also got in line by the convention.
(Again, no controversy in this statement. How did this happen? I credit Hillary herself with this significantly, but also the dire situation we were in that summer and especially fall. It's probably also worth noting the conventions were an additional month later, giving time for feelings to cool before the big national event.)
5) Some of the activists who supported Obama were disappointed by him.
(Anyone who remembers 2009 and 2010 can acknowledge the truth of this. Why is important, and to my mind, extremely frustrating. Obama had a number of major tasks when he took office. The first was to navigate the immediate crisis he inherited. The second was to work on winding down the Iraq War, his major campaign promise. Third, he had to rebuild almost the entire regulatory state after Bush had quietly dismantled it. Doing all that while wrangling a major health care bill out of a Congress more interested in protecting their own skins than helping the country AND facing unprecedented obstructionism in the form of the permanent filibuster requiring Democrats to get all 60 - for the brief time they had 60 - of their members to pass anything and not allowing them to protect their more vulnerable members. UGGGGGGGGGH.)
6) Democrats suffer crushing losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterms.
(Combination of #5 above, the traditional lower turnout rates in midterms for everyone but especially large parts of the Democratic base like young people, America's usual discontent and desire to punish whoever is in the White House in midterm elections, the parallel Koch operation being incredibly well funded, and a couple factors I will mention in the next point.
7) The Supreme Court radically alters election law with Citizens United and Shelby County. As well as the follow up decisions to Citizens United.
(Major contributor to point #6 above and 2016's loss.)
8) Which brings us to the 2016 Democratic primary. The field is smaller with just Clinton as a well known national candidate. Martin O'Malley is the only other semi-viable establishment wing candidate, while Bernie Sanders decides to pursue the nomination from the populist left.
(The crushing losses in 2010 and 2014 and downticket candidates underperforming compared to Obama in 2012 mean there are fewer people from the traditional bid launching positions of Governor and Senator to choose from. Additionally, Clinton has the backing of the Democratic establishment and wins the race for the best staffers and fundraisers. This knocks out a number of ambitious people like Andrew Cuomo, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker; each of whom run largely in similar circles to Clinton as they all represent the New York/New Jersey region. Meanwhile, Beau Biden's death leaves Joe emotionally drained and not in the best frame of mind to run.)
9) Sanders taps into the frustration with establishment Democrats from members of the activist base and especially with young people. He runs an unexpectedly strong campaign, winning in early states in ways that remind people of Obama. However, Clinton wins the African-American (especially but not limited to older voters) decisively and keeps her Hispanic support from 2008. This wins her the primary.
(You can see how points 2 and 5 above create this dynamic. Bernie did better than I expected, but I wanted him to do relatively well to push Clinton to the left and force her to deal with the reality that there was a strong liberal component of the party that needed reckoning with. Which he did and she responded by moving to the left to reflect this. Did Sanders stay in the race too long? I think that's the wrong question. I think after he had clearly lost he made some errors in judgment about how he campaigned more than anything else.)
10) Tensions continue to simmer between Sanders and Clinton camps.
(As evidenced by how many times that conflict got threads locked like this one is in danger of. I think there are lots of things going on here. First, there's a - to my mind completely legitimate - frustration among the left that they often feel like they're Cassandra and no one listens to them despite consistently being right on the merits. Second, Sanders really did play up the narrative that the whole system was working against people and keeping them down, including the corrupt Democratic establishment. This reinforced the above reasonably valid narratives and made it a little darker to my mind. Third, and I don't think there's a nice way to say this, but the hardest core Sanders supporters got played - hard - by Wikileaks, which is to say Russia. There are other factors, but I think those are the major ones.)
11) Things are not yet hunky dory at the convention, unlike 2008.
(I think the quick turn around between the last primary and Sanders' concession and the convention is an underrated factor here. If the DNC is in July in 2008 instead of August, might the hard feelings over that primary have erupted into something obnoxious and disruptive? More likely than it ended up being in August. Bernie did a lot of work that week to try to slow things down, to his credit. But the feelings were still pretty raw.)
12) None of this shit should have mattered, except James Comey staged a fucking coup d'etat.
(The worst thing Democrats can do in the face of the Trumpening is to fracture like they did after the Rehnquist coup installed our last Republican President. A key part in not fracturing is to not overstate our differences. We all basically stand for the same stuff: civil rights, universal health care, environmental protection, a more equal distribution of wealth, etc. It's just a matter of degrees and methods.)
I put an easy one just a few posts above. This primary can show us alot of things about what needs to be done going forward.
Number one is don't delegitimize the process. Don't feed into preexisting biases within the Democratic and left-wing base that encourage a lack of participation. The Democratic party and left wing politics in general in the US, live or die on participation. Turnout is a win for progress. Don't discourage voters.
The first is the proliferation of rapid-fire social media platforms that thrive on conflict. Obama supporters and Clinton supporters got pretty shitty to each other, but they typically did it either in person, where having faces to actually talk to softened the edge of the conflict somewhat, or in their own segregated portions of the internet that crossed over much less often. DailyKos vs MyDD is the go to example here, and also, I think, a great example in how important it is for political media to side with the winner. Major media, meaning the papers and news shows, were also much less interested in internet rancor because they didn't know how to capitalize on it and nobody took it at all seriously. It was a very different environment.
The second is that the person who was viewed as the underdog won, and the candidate viewed as the insider lost. This leads to very different dynamics in terms of how weirdness in the primary is received, and how the injured parties react after the fact. Clinton's supporters were also significantly older in 2008 than Sanders' were in 2016, and young people are pretty prone to "fuck it, I'm out" anyway, compared to people on social security.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Fair enough, but I don't see why we have to play into it and get our threads locked.
i think the fracture is already happening. the DNC should have already been a warning sign. whole sections of the DNC voiced loud opposition, and the DNC leadership reacted by turning the lights off in the protesting area sections.
later, Donna Brazille refused to recognize the frustration of Party staffers.
instead of just coming out and taking the frustrations of Bernie supporters head on, the DNC barrelled on like everything was fine.
part of this was clearly fueled by polling, which to this day is still shocking in how wrong it all was. but part of it reflects an intractable party machine unwilling to listen and unwilling to give up the reins of power. that has to stop. if it takes the implosion of the Democrat party for that to happen, so be fucking it..
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
I mean, I'm hitting agree on your posts so at least now we've found our common ground.
I think I'd add to 12 that Hillary also had what is becoming clear to have been an abysmally run campaign.
That, I think, is a much bigger factor than Comey.
I would prefer to simply remove the points within the process that only serve to exacerbate such arguments. Because we're going to argue about this stuff, anyway. It's what we do.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
But in terms of policy y'all won a number of major victories. The 2016 Democratic Party is as left economically since what, 1968? And socially it's so far to the left that LBJ's head would explode. Hell, King's head might explode. Clinton pushed for hire taxes on the rich, expanding social security, improving the ACA to make it better and more universal, combating climate change, significant aid for tuition, unapologetically gave the pure feminist answer on abortion, embraced gay rights more than any presidential candidate ever, talked significantly about racial justice, etc. The party is moving left, you made that happen. I genuinely don't understand and this is what really causes the frustration with the "left" among the rest of us.
This ignores all the pain and suffering about to happen or that happened from January 20, 2001 until hell, like nine months ago is when we finally got out from under the financial collapse Bush helped cause. I hate accelerationist talk because it commits the sin I hate the media for: treats this like a game without real effects on real people.
This is a hugely underappreciated part of the process, to my mind. What little bench we had in terms of legitimate candiates was either unwilling or unable to give Clinton a decent run, so we ended up with Socialist Abe Simpson as the avatar of dissent. And he was not even remotely ready for prime time as an opposition candidate in a party primary.
This was also a huge problem. We lost a bunch of activated voters over foreign propaganda because the party's credibility was shot. Whether you want to blame this on the DNC or Sanders, it can't happen again. Our next primary has to look pristine and above board the whole way.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
The first video shows how both a Union and a person who supported Bernie can switch to support Trump due to feeling neglected and just how much of a mistake it was for Clinton to not visit those states. It shows how someone can acknowledge Trump is a terrible person but still vote for him.
The second video shows how a big part of Obama winning was due to him being perceived as an outsider, different, and an arbiter of change and how Trump used the same feeling to win. How women who proclaim themselves as pro-choice and acknowledge Trump as pro-life are still okay with voting for him. How Clinton's cruft meant they had something they could point at as bad while for Trump all of the bad things were external to politics and easy to ignore.
The third and most current video that shows how the religious could pick someone like Trump due to the perception that Christians are under attack from the left. How the interviewer drops the ball on bringing up the Muslim ban when someone talks about religious freedom. How they acknowledge he's a terrible person but are okay with him being in power as long as it means they won't be persecuted.
In all of the videos there's indications that they're annoyed by his post-election behavior and have low expectations that he'll actually do what he says he would.
the problem is, the DNC leadership did exactly this.
i'm not talking about accelerationism, i'm talking about basic coalition building. Obama was hugely successful on this front in part because he focused on taking care of reaching across to as many groups as he could. this didn't result in many policy wins, but it was a hell of a political strategy.
Clinton used old-school Clinton politics, which considering what was happening with both the GOP and the Dem sides, it should have been obvious that that would no longer work. the emails were the last straw; i saw nothing incriminating or illegal in them, but i did see a top-down approach which kept being perpetuated by DWS and by Brazille. once those came out, the Clinton campaign should have immediately addressed them and full-stop reached out to Bernie supporters and others. but no, instead they shut the lights off sections at the DNC, stayed mum about the emails, and flat out refused to change course. that is a strategic error of gigantic magnitude, and it was possible only because the DNC leadership empowered it.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
Elections aren't simple puzzles where there's only ever one solution that's going to work.
What, concretely, should they have done? Again, she moved way left. She was unapologetically liberal in the general election campaign in a way Obama never was but people assumed him to be.
It's all this desire for vaguely symbolic stuff while throwing away real victories that makes me frustrated with a subset of lefty activists.
Your second point here is the reason your first is inadequate. As you said earlier "In politics, perception is reality." It's not enough to remove the parts of the process that create this perception, one has to actively not cultivate that perception as well. Just cause it's not real doesn't mean people won't believe it if you hammer that point.
actual concrete things:
- released the damn emails - should have done this at the start. lets the press pore through them at the start of the election cycle, burn out the narrative that "she's hiding something", defang that whole argument.
- immediately apologize to Bernie Sanders supporters on the questionable strategies thrown around.
- recognize the protests going on at the DNC and embrace them.
- release the transcripts from her paid speeches. it looks a shit ton better when YOU release them and control the narrative, rather than having the media hunt them down and speculate endlessly.
this election came down to "who was more authentic". voters (wrongly) coalesced around Trump because they (wrongly) believed he was just telling the truth. of course he wasn't. but put him next to a candidate who was stonewalling every potentially controversial pain point and was doing nothing to sell what the Dems could do for America, and of fucking course people won't vote for Clinton. i don't care that she moved her positions to the left, she never campaigned on that.
if anything, i remember stating really clearly right after the DNC that Clinton should have stopped her focus on attacking Trump and instead on the positive messages the DNC put out. her polling numbers were STUPID HIGH right after the DNC, and that's because the DNC remembered for a second that they should be telling Americans what they would do for them, not just how terrible Trump is!
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
By and large, the people in the party that aren't interested in continuing to litigate the primary for their own purposes are finding progressive religion. Now is definitely not the time to be bailing on the Democratic party.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.