The other thing we need to think about is if we actually have lost the rust belt, we need a new map. And we need it in 4 years.
Florida/North Carolina.
We lost Florida last night, too. I don't know that it makes more sense as a target than the Rust Belt.
Well, Wisconsin is salvageable I think. That election was very close. Ohio though is gone. We got blown out there, and polled badly all election. Michigan - I have no idea. @enlightenedbum can hopefully shed some light on why turnout was down so much there.
Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia are all encouraging results. Though Pennsylvania now being a true battleground is immensely disappointing.
The truth, though, is that we are ignoring rural America.
And when I say this, I don't mean we need to pander to the policies they think they want. We need to educate them. We need to show that we even care what they think at all! Treating them like the enemy will never work.
Clinton wasn't. She was speaking passionately about transitioning them into new jobs in industries like clean energy and putting forward tax changes that would have lifted over a million kids out of poverty.
It's a shame nobody seems to have been listening.
She spoke passionately about them to other people, but I don't think they felt they were spoken to directly.
For what it's worth all those vehicle manufacturering jobs are still around. They're just in Smyrna, TN and Huntsville, AL and Birmingham, AL. I think there are a few plants in KY too.
They went to where labor costs were lower. They took yer jerbs. Should be directed to the same people they allied with electing Trump.
The truth, though, is that we are ignoring rural America.
And when I say this, I don't mean we need to pander to the policies they think they want. We need to educate them. We need to show that we even care what they think at all! Treating them like the enemy will never work.
I struggle with this. I never want to dismiss the reality that a large part of Trump's vote was bigotry, plain and simple. While, yes, it wasn't the most politically savvy thing to say, the 'basket of deplorables' comment was in no way wrong. And the uptick in violence against minorities is pretty much proof positive of this.
But there are, anecdotally, people who genuinely just wanted change. People who voted for a black president, twice. People in the rust belt who, whether realistically or not, wanted to see factories full of their friends and jobs coming back to an area that had largely lost them. And Hillary's policies did address this, but I guess the question is - was that enough? Or did we need to have people from that area, who knew that area, specifically campaigning there and saying 'hey, those jobs aren't coming back, and that sucks and we know it, but here's how we're going to create new jobs that won't disappear overseas.'
There's bad populism, where you blame the other and make promises that you can never keep. That's the kind of thing Donald Trump just rode to victory. But there's good populism, too. Populism that involves letting people know that they do matter to you, and that your message can reach them, and that you won't ignore them. That's what Obama was so good at, and that's what needs to happen again.
That's the entire problem, we've been spending all this time thinking we have no control over the media environment, that's it's some unassailable monolith. Why the fuck are some of the most solid and vital structures in America things that can't even be touched by democratic action? That's wrong, on so many levels.
There's a way to take down the media complex. We just need to expand our thinking.
Never, ever again nominate a career Wall Street politician in one of the greatest surges of anti-elite, anti-estblishment sentiment the country has ever experienced.
I think that's one way to look at it.
I think the other way to look at it is this: we ran a female candidate with high negatives and a lot of baggage. We thought we could overcome that but unfortunately we were wrong. The truth is that we need to run a male candidate that inspires Dems to show up. For whatever reason our side needs to feel like they are part of something, like they are spearheading a movement.
The Republican side will show up pretty much no matter how awful or terrible their candidate is. High negatives are meaningless to them.
There was a big long post from a new anonymous poster in the OTHER post-election thread that touched on this. I'll add that, it's become increasingly obvious that the Republican base is not the same as the Democratic base in how it's structured and ordered, and that Democrats should not be looking at Republican strategies and trying to replicate them. The Republican base is primarily composed of single-issue voters, which makes them rather easy to shepherd with a platform. The Democratic base wants all sorts of unholy shit, and trying to cobble together a platform out of that isn't very effective, and it's made all the more difficult when the Democrats try to shift rightwards to claim the centre.
It may be that the short-term strategy for Democrats is to run HOPE AND CHANGE every 4 years, but that's also not a viable long-term strategy. People were already becoming disillusioned with Obama's lack of delivery on the HOPE AND CHANGE front, partially due to Republican congressional intransigence. I don't know how to overcome all of that.
The truth, though, is that we are ignoring rural America.
And when I say this, I don't mean we need to pander to the policies they think they want. We need to educate them. We need to show that we even care what they think at all! Treating them like the enemy will never work.
Clinton wasn't. She was speaking passionately about transitioning them into new jobs in industries like clean energy and putting forward tax changes that would have lifted over a million kids out of poverty.
It's a shame nobody seems to have been listening.
Again, it's not a problem of who was listening, it was a problem of who was talking.
Anyone who comes away from this election thinking anything but "the media needs to burn" needs to dwell very seriously on how any of this even happened.
The problem wasn't who was talking, the problem was that one candidate was constantly rewarding for barely reaching competence while the other was crucified for never being perfect.
And that was a theme that resonated constantly on all levels of this election, from Republicans to undecideds to single issue voters to the media to, it seems, Democrats.
btw Sanders vs Trump is an impossible counterfactual; I would have liked to see Sanders nominated but there's not necessarily any reason to assume he'd have done better. He came in with less 'baggage' or whatever but he also didn't have six months of media focus and Republican attacks; even during the primaries such as Trump tended to be pretty hands-off or even complimentary with Sanders because they assumed they'd be running against Clinton, in the same way Dems tended to be with Kasich.
There's a lot of interesting potential attack lanes against Sanders if you think about it; I think the Rs definitely would have tried to make a joke of his age/appearance and tied him to 'effete' northern liberals in the manner of John Kerry. The rhetoric and conspiracy coming from the 'deplorable' Trump supporters would've been just as bad if directed at an actual Jew. The 'socialist' label would've come back at full volume as an epithet, which might've stuck since he actually was/is a socialist. Even the photos of Sanders getting arrested at civil rights protests that we all love could easily have become a way to tie him to BLM/hating police/etc.
Also how effective a campaign would he have run? His campaign didn't exactly cover itself in technical glory in the primary, and he's only really ever run local stuff in a small, homogenous state.
There was a story of him literally getting kicked off a hippe commune for being lazy. And his writings in his 30s were as conspiracy ridden and included claims that all men fantasized about rape, that the government was putting drugs in the water to control behavior and that mandatory schooling was wrong.
And he went to Nicaragua to meet with declared enemies of the US who were literally chanting Death to the US at the rally he went to.
Plus hes not just a Jew but one who doesn't believe in organized religion.
He would have been the Unamerican Communist Atheist Jew who supports our enemies and has never worked a day in his life.
The truth, though, is that we are ignoring rural America.
And when I say this, I don't mean we need to pander to the policies they think they want. We need to educate them. We need to show that we even care what they think at all! Treating them like the enemy will never work.
Clinton wasn't. She was speaking passionately about transitioning them into new jobs in industries like clean energy and putting forward tax changes that would have lifted over a million kids out of poverty.
It's a shame nobody seems to have been listening.
Again, it's not a problem of who was listening, it was a problem of who was talking.
Anyone who comes away from this election thinking anything but "the media needs to burn" needs to dwell very seriously on how any of this even happened.
The problem wasn't who was talking, the problem was that one candidate was constantly rewarding for barely reaching competence while the other was crucified for never being perfect.
And that was a theme that resonated constantly on all levels of this election, from Republicans to undecideds to single issue voters to the media to, it seems, Democrats.
You miss my meaning; the people who were talking were the news media.
It's definitely not clear that Bernie would have won.
What is clear is that we needed a real field to choose from in the primary, and all we got was Clinton and one cranky senator with the audacity to run an unexpectedly successful yet still hopeless symbolic challenge. We had one choice this election, and that choice was a bad one.
It still bewilders me that anybody could possibly see Clinton as a bad choice. It only works if people paid only the slightest attention to her.
She literally has thirty years of scandals attached to her. Are they bullshit? Yes. Does that make a difference to low information voters? No.
Did that mean she can win an election? No.
I think that's stretching just a bit. Were the election held 3 weeks earlier, she almost certainly wins. He surged at the end, and I think it's very important for us to understand why polling was so fundamentally wrong, and what generated that surge.
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
winky
how do you dismantle an ideological news media and only that subset of the news media?
The media sucks. Wikileaks sucks. Comey sucks. Third party candidates suck. Racism and sexism were huge factors. You will get no disagreement from me, and they all contributed quite a lot to what happen. Any one of them might have tipped the election.
But they are not all of it. And they are not fixable. Finding a better candidate, making better targeting decisions, improving messaging, and yes, countering voter suppression are things that are workable and they are the things we need to be worrying about. Right now.
Look, I'm just telling you guys, the problem is right there. It is, without question, the thing that is wrong and the thing we need to fix if we want this country to work again.
btw Sanders vs Trump is an impossible counterfactual; I would have liked to see Sanders nominated but there's not necessarily any reason to assume he'd have done better. He came in with less 'baggage' or whatever but he also didn't have six months of media focus and Republican attacks; even during the primaries such as Trump tended to be pretty hands-off or even complimentary with Sanders because they assumed they'd be running against Clinton, in the same way Dems tended to be with Kasich.
There's a lot of interesting potential attack lanes against Sanders if you think about it; I think the Rs definitely would have tried to make a joke of his age/appearance and tied him to 'effete' northern liberals in the manner of John Kerry. The rhetoric and conspiracy coming from the 'deplorable' Trump supporters would've been just as bad if directed at an actual Jew. The 'socialist' label would've come back at full volume as an epithet, which might've stuck since he actually was/is a socialist. Even the photos of Sanders getting arrested at civil rights protests that we all love could easily have become a way to tie him to BLM/hating police/etc.
Also how effective a campaign would he have run? His campaign didn't exactly cover itself in technical glory in the primary, and he's only really ever run local stuff in a small, homogenous state.
There was a story of him literally getting kicked off a hippe commune for being lazy. And his writings in his 30s were as conspiracy ridden and included claims that all men fantasized about rape, that the government was putting drugs in the water to control behavior and that mandatory schooling was wrong.
And he went to Nicaragua to meet with declared enemies of the US who were literally chanting Death to the US at the rally he went to.
Plus hes not just a Jew but one who doesn't believe in organized religion.
He would have been the Unamerican Communist Atheist Jew who supports our enemies and has never worked a day in his life.
I don't think Sanders would have won, pretty much for that reason. Though I think his map would have brought in the rust belt states, even as it lost votes elsewhere.
I think that Sanders in the campaign (and again, not his fault) became a disruptive element, in particular when the DNC e-mails leaked.
The Sanders that the Republicans would have been throwing everything against is that Sanders because he's the Presidential candidate. The Sanders who could be pointed to as 'see how terribly the Democrats treat this man you all love!' only needs to exist as a symbol.
WATCH THIS SPACE.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
And it's easy to blame the Jewsthe global elites the media for Clinton's catastrophic failure in the midwest blue states in Pennsylvania
Very trumpy, actually
OK, Then if it wasn't a combination of unfair media coverage, comey's october suprise, wikileaks, racism, and voter suppression what was it?
The combination of that and the Clinton's campaign cavalier disregard for Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin? If you can't make people vote for you in Wisconsin after six years of Scott Walker then you have to admit Clinton is also to blame for not reaching out to more people.
Late, but: Wisconsin's voter ID laws have hit minorities hard, just as intended.
Just to give you an idea of what we're dealing with:
You need a photo ID to vote, and you need a birth certificate to get a photo ID. No birth certificate? Go get a copy from the state you were born in (requires additional paperwork, natch). Don't have the money for that? Fuck you.
It costs a fee to get a voter ID. Since technically this would constitute a poll tax, which is illegal, the fee can be waived. However, you have to know that and specifically ask for the fee to be waived. At one point, government clerks were forbidden to tell people about the free ID unless they specifically asked.
The Justice Department actually took issue with the above, so Wisconsin allocated $250,000 for a "public information campaign" to inform people. The results of that were roughly fuck all.
Most of the state's Dem voters are in Madison and Milwaukee. As many of you know, Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the union. Guess which areas had voting locations and hours cut?
edit: Oh, yeah, and people being denied IDs even when they had all the appropriate paperwork. Though I'm willing to chalk that one up to incompetence.
So, yeah. We hate Walker too. Our hands are functionally tied.
This alone probably cost the election. Even if only an extra percent of minorities were able to vote in Wisconsin, that would have swung the state to Clinton.
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
I'm glad so many people know exactly what the stupid, failing DNC that got Obama elected twice did wrong this time around. I hope everyone calling for the DNC to be gutted is ready to sign up to replace them and lead the charge into 2020.
I'm a little concerned that the first mention I've heard of Clinton wilfully neglecting the Midwest is in this thread though, but I may have missed it back in the other threads in the good old days when we were all broadly on the same side.
They did not get Obama elected. Obama got Obama elected.
He would strongly disagree.
I don't mean to underplay the efforts of Obama's team, which by all accounts was amazing.
Rather, I mean to say that charisma is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for winning. If you have the best staff in the world but not enough charisma where it counts you won't win.
How charismatic was George "Dubaya" Bush? Or his father, for that matter?
I don't know about HW, but Bush was plenty charismatic! He's got the whole simple Texan charm thing going.
If that's your bar for charismatic enough then Clinton was plenty charismatic enough.
No seriously, from all accounts, W was a super likable guy.
Your plan to replace all horses with unicorns will bankrupt rural USA overnight since unicorns are impossible to break, are frequently invisible and can only be ridden by virgins.
I'm glad so many people know exactly what the stupid, failing DNC that got Obama elected twice did wrong this time around. I hope everyone calling for the DNC to be gutted is ready to sign up to replace them and lead the charge into 2020.
I'm a little concerned that the first mention I've heard of Clinton wilfully neglecting the Midwest is in this thread though, but I may have missed it back in the other threads in the good old days when we were all broadly on the same side.
They did not get Obama elected. Obama got Obama elected.
He would strongly disagree.
I don't mean to underplay the efforts of Obama's team, which by all accounts was amazing.
Rather, I mean to say that charisma is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for winning. If you have the best staff in the world but not enough charisma where it counts you won't win.
How charismatic was George "Dubaya" Bush? Or his father, for that matter?
I don't know about HW, but Bush was plenty charismatic! He's got the whole simple Texan charm thing going.
If that's your bar for charismatic enough then Clinton was plenty charismatic enough.
No seriously, from all accounts, W was a super likable guy.
guys the whole "I can't believe they'd vote for someone because they'd like to have a beer with him" came from George W Bush's first campaign
The media sucks. Wikileaks sucks. Comey sucks. Third party candidates suck. Racism and sexism were huge factors. You will get no disagreement from me, and they all contributed quite a lot to what happen. Any one of them might have tipped the election.
But they are not all of it. And they are not fixable. Finding a better candidate, making better targeting decisions, improving messaging, and yes, countering voter suppression are things that are workable and they are the things we need to be worrying about. Right now.
You had a better candidate though. Your candidate was amazing.
*edit* and let me remind you again that a large chunk of the team making the targeting decisions and delivering the messaging for Clinton's campaign were on Obama's team in 2008 and 2012.
Desktop Hippie on
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
Anti-media sentiment is at an all-time high right now among everyone. Surely we could come up with a piece of legislation that would get pushed through even a GOP-dominated legislature if it was backed by all the pressure of anti-establishment sentiment.
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
The media sucks. Wikileaks sucks. Comey sucks. Third party candidates suck. Racism and sexism were huge factors. You will get no disagreement from me, and they all contributed quite a lot to what happen. Any one of them might have tipped the election.
But they are not all of it. And they are not fixable. Finding a better candidate, making better targeting decisions, improving messaging, and yes, countering voter suppression are things that are workable and they are the things we need to be worrying about. Right now.
You had a better candidate though. Your candidate was amazing.
to be fair, i am a huge hillary supporter, but most of the liberal friends i have who didn't vote or voted stupidly did it specifically because she was the candidate
this circle of ours is far more informed than the average person
The media sucks. Wikileaks sucks. Comey sucks. Third party candidates suck. Racism and sexism were huge factors. You will get no disagreement from me, and they all contributed quite a lot to what happen. Any one of them might have tipped the election.
But they are not all of it. And they are not fixable. Finding a better candidate, making better targeting decisions, improving messaging, and yes, countering voter suppression are things that are workable and they are the things we need to be worrying about. Right now.
You had a better candidate though. Your candidate was amazing.
The truth, though, is that we are ignoring rural America.
And when I say this, I don't mean we need to pander to the policies they think they want. We need to educate them. We need to show that we even care what they think at all! Treating them like the enemy will never work.
What they claim they want is:
- Banning abortions
- Keeping minorities out of their communities
- No restrictions on guns, ever
If we bend on these, are we still liberals/progressives?
If we bend on these, why would they vote for is over the party that's always promised these?
Oh, and they hate when "liberal elites" try to educate them. They already know everything they want to know.
It's definitely not clear that Bernie would have won.
What is clear is that we needed a real field to choose from in the primary, and all we got was Clinton and one cranky senator with the audacity to run an unexpectedly successful yet still hopeless symbolic challenge. We had one choice this election, and that choice was a bad one.
It still bewilders me that anybody could possibly see Clinton as a bad choice. It only works if people paid only the slightest attention to her.
She literally has thirty years of scandals attached to her. Are they bullshit? Yes. Does that make a difference to low information voters? No.
Did that mean she can win an election? No.
I think that's stretching just a bit. Were the election held 3 weeks earlier, she almost certainly wins. He surged at the end, and I think it's very important for us to understand why polling was so fundamentally wrong, and what generated that surge.
The answer to that is fairly simple: you weight your results, as a pollster, to match what you think the electorate is going to look like. If your demographic predictions are wrong, your output can easily be shit. People expected that the electorate was going to be less white than 2012, because that's what happened in 2012 and 2008. The assumption was that the trend would continue, and it was a reasonable assumption to make. You have to make an assumption somewhere, even if it's that the electorate will look just like your sample. I'm not sure the surge in the white vote could reasonably have been predicted.
Anti-media sentiment is at an all-time high right now among everyone. Surely we could come up with a piece of legislation that would get pushed through even a GOP-dominated legislature if it was backed by all the pressure of anti-establishment sentiment.
i am 100% not interested in anti-media legislation
it would go against the very foundation of our society's ideals
The truth, though, is that we are ignoring rural America.
And when I say this, I don't mean we need to pander to the policies they think they want. We need to educate them. We need to show that we even care what they think at all! Treating them like the enemy will never work.
What they claim they want is:
- Banning abortions
- Keeping minorities out of their communities
- No restrictions on guns, ever
If we bend on these, are we still liberals/progressives?
If we bend on these, why would they vote for is over the party that's always promised these?
Oh, and they hate when "liberal elites" try to educate them. They already know everything they want to know.
How, exactly, do you expect this situation to change?
Anti-media sentiment is at an all-time high right now among everyone. Surely we could come up with a piece of legislation that would get pushed through even a GOP-dominated legislature if it was backed by all the pressure of anti-establishment sentiment.
Even if this were plausible, which it isn't, the courts would laugh in your face and have trouble choking out the words "first amendment" in between guffaws.
And a huge chunk of liberals would fight you, myself and the ACLU included.
I'm glad so many people know exactly what the stupid, failing DNC that got Obama elected twice did wrong this time around. I hope everyone calling for the DNC to be gutted is ready to sign up to replace them and lead the charge into 2020.
I'm a little concerned that the first mention I've heard of Clinton wilfully neglecting the Midwest is in this thread though, but I may have missed it back in the other threads in the good old days when we were all broadly on the same side.
They did not get Obama elected. Obama got Obama elected.
He would strongly disagree.
I don't mean to underplay the efforts of Obama's team, which by all accounts was amazing.
Rather, I mean to say that charisma is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for winning. If you have the best staff in the world but not enough charisma where it counts you won't win.
How charismatic was George "Dubaya" Bush? Or his father, for that matter?
I don't know about HW, but Bush was plenty charismatic! He's got the whole simple Texan charm thing going.
If that's your bar for charismatic enough then Clinton was plenty charismatic enough.
No seriously, from all accounts, W was a super likable guy.
guys the whole "I can't believe they'd vote for someone because they'd like to have a beer with him" came from George W Bush's first campaign
he was charismatic
unquestionably
Oh I know he was likeable, but can you think of a single speech he gave that got anybody excited about him? Most of the time he couldn't stop stumbling over his own words.
I mean for pity's sake when you mention him the very first phrase that comes to mind is "a hopefuller country."
Anti-media sentiment is at an all-time high right now among everyone. Surely we could come up with a piece of legislation that would get pushed through even a GOP-dominated legislature if it was backed by all the pressure of anti-establishment sentiment.
You can't regulate the media. Media is essentially speech. Speech is protected. Unless you can show it to be directly harmful, like the fire in a crowded theater thing.
Also; do we really want Republicans writing the laws that would limit the rights of the media?
And it's easy to blame the Jewsthe global elites the media for Clinton's catastrophic failure in the midwest blue states in Pennsylvania
Very trumpy, actually
OK, Then if it wasn't a combination of unfair media coverage, comey's october suprise, wikileaks, racism, and voter suppression what was it?
The combination of that and the Clinton's campaign cavalier disregard for Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin? If you can't make people vote for you in Wisconsin after six years of Scott Walker then you have to admit Clinton is also to blame for not reaching out to more people.
Late, but: Wisconsin's voter ID laws have hit minorities hard, just as intended.
Just to give you an idea of what we're dealing with:
You need a photo ID to vote, and you need a birth certificate to get a photo ID. No birth certificate? Go get a copy from the state you were born in (requires additional paperwork, natch). Don't have the money for that? Fuck you.
It costs a fee to get a voter ID. Since technically this would constitute a poll tax, which is illegal, the fee can be waived. However, you have to know that and specifically ask for the fee to be waived. At one point, government clerks were forbidden to tell people about the free ID unless they specifically asked.
The Justice Department actually took issue with the above, so Wisconsin allocated $250,000 for a "public information campaign" to inform people. The results of that were roughly fuck all.
Most of the state's Dem voters are in Madison and Milwaukee. As many of you know, Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the union. Guess which areas had voting locations and hours cut?
edit: Oh, yeah, and people being denied IDs even when they had all the appropriate paperwork. Though I'm willing to chalk that one up to incompetence.
So, yeah. We hate Walker too. Our hands are functionally tied.
This alone probably cost the election. Even if only an extra percent of minorities were able to vote in Wisconsin, that would have swung the state to Clinton.
the numbers i've seen shared around over the last couple of days have Trump winning Wisconsin by 27,000 votes and 300,000 registered voters being disenfranchised as a result of the new laws.
but hey, maybe if Clinton had just made a speech there it would all be different.
The truth, though, is that we are ignoring rural America.
And when I say this, I don't mean we need to pander to the policies they think they want. We need to educate them. We need to show that we even care what they think at all! Treating them like the enemy will never work.
You cannot educate them. They do not want to educated.
We cannot afford to throw our allies - who suffer from discrimination and violence - under the bus just to appease racists and sexists. We can make outreach to people who voted for Obama, yet we somehow lost this time. We can focus on finding out who stayed home and why. We can try to energize our party and harness the populist anger.
But under no circumstances should we sacrifice the people who we desperately need to protect, to pick up votes in rural areas.
Anti-media sentiment is at an all-time high right now among everyone. Surely we could come up with a piece of legislation that would get pushed through even a GOP-dominated legislature if it was backed by all the pressure of anti-establishment sentiment.
i am 100% not interested in anti-media legislation
it would go against the very foundation of our society's ideals
you fight ideas, you don't silence them
Legislation that is against profit-motive-driven twisting of information is pro-media, in the sense of actually making sure truth is delivered to the people.
I seriously wonder what a world would be like if all media was non-profit.
I don't think the Clinton campaign did a good enough job of presenting a positive policy agenda, other than to kinda vaguely continue the Obama platform. I mean I'm sorry, but if you think 'read my website for deets about XYZ' does that you are living in fantasytown.
Some of this of course is down to the media coverage, which was happy to give Trump free airtime to talk about building a wall. But if it wasn't deliberate strategy by the Clinton side I wonder why they did such a bad job with it, considering how successful Obama was in running 'around' traditional media.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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Well, Wisconsin is salvageable I think. That election was very close. Ohio though is gone. We got blown out there, and polled badly all election. Michigan - I have no idea. @enlightenedbum can hopefully shed some light on why turnout was down so much there.
Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia are all encouraging results. Though Pennsylvania now being a true battleground is immensely disappointing.
She spoke passionately about them to other people, but I don't think they felt they were spoken to directly.
For what it's worth all those vehicle manufacturering jobs are still around. They're just in Smyrna, TN and Huntsville, AL and Birmingham, AL. I think there are a few plants in KY too.
They went to where labor costs were lower. They took yer jerbs. Should be directed to the same people they allied with electing Trump.
I struggle with this. I never want to dismiss the reality that a large part of Trump's vote was bigotry, plain and simple. While, yes, it wasn't the most politically savvy thing to say, the 'basket of deplorables' comment was in no way wrong. And the uptick in violence against minorities is pretty much proof positive of this.
But there are, anecdotally, people who genuinely just wanted change. People who voted for a black president, twice. People in the rust belt who, whether realistically or not, wanted to see factories full of their friends and jobs coming back to an area that had largely lost them. And Hillary's policies did address this, but I guess the question is - was that enough? Or did we need to have people from that area, who knew that area, specifically campaigning there and saying 'hey, those jobs aren't coming back, and that sucks and we know it, but here's how we're going to create new jobs that won't disappear overseas.'
There's bad populism, where you blame the other and make promises that you can never keep. That's the kind of thing Donald Trump just rode to victory. But there's good populism, too. Populism that involves letting people know that they do matter to you, and that your message can reach them, and that you won't ignore them. That's what Obama was so good at, and that's what needs to happen again.
There's a way to take down the media complex. We just need to expand our thinking.
There was a big long post from a new anonymous poster in the OTHER post-election thread that touched on this. I'll add that, it's become increasingly obvious that the Republican base is not the same as the Democratic base in how it's structured and ordered, and that Democrats should not be looking at Republican strategies and trying to replicate them. The Republican base is primarily composed of single-issue voters, which makes them rather easy to shepherd with a platform. The Democratic base wants all sorts of unholy shit, and trying to cobble together a platform out of that isn't very effective, and it's made all the more difficult when the Democrats try to shift rightwards to claim the centre.
It may be that the short-term strategy for Democrats is to run HOPE AND CHANGE every 4 years, but that's also not a viable long-term strategy. People were already becoming disillusioned with Obama's lack of delivery on the HOPE AND CHANGE front, partially due to Republican congressional intransigence. I don't know how to overcome all of that.
The problem wasn't who was talking, the problem was that one candidate was constantly rewarding for barely reaching competence while the other was crucified for never being perfect.
And that was a theme that resonated constantly on all levels of this election, from Republicans to undecideds to single issue voters to the media to, it seems, Democrats.
There was a story of him literally getting kicked off a hippe commune for being lazy. And his writings in his 30s were as conspiracy ridden and included claims that all men fantasized about rape, that the government was putting drugs in the water to control behavior and that mandatory schooling was wrong.
And he went to Nicaragua to meet with declared enemies of the US who were literally chanting Death to the US at the rally he went to.
Plus hes not just a Jew but one who doesn't believe in organized religion.
He would have been the Unamerican Communist Atheist Jew who supports our enemies and has never worked a day in his life.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
You miss my meaning; the people who were talking were the news media.
I think that's stretching just a bit. Were the election held 3 weeks earlier, she almost certainly wins. He surged at the end, and I think it's very important for us to understand why polling was so fundamentally wrong, and what generated that surge.
how do you dismantle an ideological news media and only that subset of the news media?
All horses should be unicorns
But they are not all of it. And they are not fixable. Finding a better candidate, making better targeting decisions, improving messaging, and yes, countering voter suppression are things that are workable and they are the things we need to be worrying about. Right now.
I mean, we can dismantle more of it if necessary.
I don't think Sanders would have won, pretty much for that reason. Though I think his map would have brought in the rust belt states, even as it lost votes elsewhere.
I think that Sanders in the campaign (and again, not his fault) became a disruptive element, in particular when the DNC e-mails leaked.
The Sanders that the Republicans would have been throwing everything against is that Sanders because he's the Presidential candidate. The Sanders who could be pointed to as 'see how terribly the Democrats treat this man you all love!' only needs to exist as a symbol.
This alone probably cost the election. Even if only an extra percent of minorities were able to vote in Wisconsin, that would have swung the state to Clinton.
ok i'll take a step back
how do you dismantle news media?
No seriously, from all accounts, W was a super likable guy.
Your plan to replace all horses with unicorns will bankrupt rural USA overnight since unicorns are impossible to break, are frequently invisible and can only be ridden by virgins.
This is what we need to be discussing! I refuse to believe there is not a way.
guys the whole "I can't believe they'd vote for someone because they'd like to have a beer with him" came from George W Bush's first campaign
he was charismatic
unquestionably
You had a better candidate though. Your candidate was amazing.
*edit* and let me remind you again that a large chunk of the team making the targeting decisions and delivering the messaging for Clinton's campaign were on Obama's team in 2008 and 2012.
i can't think of one that isn't a pretty direct violation of the first amendment
I refuse to believe unicorns are fictional
to be fair, i am a huge hillary supporter, but most of the liberal friends i have who didn't vote or voted stupidly did it specifically because she was the candidate
this circle of ours is far more informed than the average person
What they claim they want is:
- Banning abortions
- Keeping minorities out of their communities
- No restrictions on guns, ever
If we bend on these, are we still liberals/progressives?
If we bend on these, why would they vote for is over the party that's always promised these?
Oh, and they hate when "liberal elites" try to educate them. They already know everything they want to know.
The answer to that is fairly simple: you weight your results, as a pollster, to match what you think the electorate is going to look like. If your demographic predictions are wrong, your output can easily be shit. People expected that the electorate was going to be less white than 2012, because that's what happened in 2012 and 2008. The assumption was that the trend would continue, and it was a reasonable assumption to make. You have to make an assumption somewhere, even if it's that the electorate will look just like your sample. I'm not sure the surge in the white vote could reasonably have been predicted.
i am 100% not interested in anti-media legislation
it would go against the very foundation of our society's ideals
you fight ideas, you don't silence them
How, exactly, do you expect this situation to change?
Even if this were plausible, which it isn't, the courts would laugh in your face and have trouble choking out the words "first amendment" in between guffaws.
And a huge chunk of liberals would fight you, myself and the ACLU included.
Oh I know he was likeable, but can you think of a single speech he gave that got anybody excited about him? Most of the time he couldn't stop stumbling over his own words.
I mean for pity's sake when you mention him the very first phrase that comes to mind is "a hopefuller country."
You can't regulate the media. Media is essentially speech. Speech is protected. Unless you can show it to be directly harmful, like the fire in a crowded theater thing.
Also; do we really want Republicans writing the laws that would limit the rights of the media?
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
the numbers i've seen shared around over the last couple of days have Trump winning Wisconsin by 27,000 votes and 300,000 registered voters being disenfranchised as a result of the new laws.
but hey, maybe if Clinton had just made a speech there it would all be different.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
You cannot educate them. They do not want to educated.
We cannot afford to throw our allies - who suffer from discrimination and violence - under the bus just to appease racists and sexists. We can make outreach to people who voted for Obama, yet we somehow lost this time. We can focus on finding out who stayed home and why. We can try to energize our party and harness the populist anger.
But under no circumstances should we sacrifice the people who we desperately need to protect, to pick up votes in rural areas.
Legislation that is against profit-motive-driven twisting of information is pro-media, in the sense of actually making sure truth is delivered to the people.
I seriously wonder what a world would be like if all media was non-profit.
Some of this of course is down to the media coverage, which was happy to give Trump free airtime to talk about building a wall. But if it wasn't deliberate strategy by the Clinton side I wonder why they did such a bad job with it, considering how successful Obama was in running 'around' traditional media.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget