Here’s my latest thinking on Democratic strategy going forward – it got long but I have more to come.
First, I know she’s not a Democrat, but fuck Jill Stein. As Scott Lemieux points out, the recounts will focus the issue of Trump’s legitimacy on the one issue where we’re almost certain to lose. I can lay no blame on the Clinton campaign joining in the recount because once Stein got that ball rolling they had little choice but to hitch on to her clown car. The Green “Party” is simply a terrible, rickety, grift-ridden institution.
Second, I’m not ready to continue tolerating our weak Democratic establishment or any of the top leadership of the Clinton campaign who try to remain as part of it. To pick just two of many examples, where is our fucking Congressional effort? Look at this:
Precinct maps of #TX32 (northeast Dallas). After a 17% swing, @PeteSessions now sits in a Clinton district. pic.twitter.com/UcjHXKkwTV
— J. Miles Coleman (@JMilesColeman) November 26, 2016
Pete Sessions ran unopposed.
And read how the Clinton campaign did not once contact the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin and made no campaign appearances there.
Democrats gave millions of dollars to the Democratic establishment and the Clintons in hopes that they would advance our interests and run a competent campaign. Where were those millions spent? How did we fuck this up so badly? Those questions need answers so we are sure that we aren’t pouring money down the toilet in 2018 or 2020.
I’ll also mention that, along with a few of the rest of you, I am skeptical about Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy. I have relatives active in Democratic politics in the Dakotas who saw little or nothing of that strategy, but they did see a major push by the Obama campaign in 2008 when South Dakota looked in reach. So, 50-state or 40-state or whatever it is called, I won’t be donating to an effort pours a little money into every race — I will donate to one that has realistic targets like TX-32, coupled with a quality candidate screening program that picks early-starting, hard-working candidates that raise funds and energize Democrats in tougher districts.
My third item is “identity politics”. It is a terrible term, and Democrats who use it to criticize other Dems are using the opposition’s words to define them. We are the party that defends civil rights of all Americans, period. We do not compromise on that, but it is not the whole of our platform. We need to be economic populists as well as defenders of civil rights. It is not an either/or, and it is the acme of stupidity to have an argument about which one of these we’re going to talk about. We will talk about both in the right contexts. That said, anyone who missed how Sanders’ economic message caught fire missed one of the major political truths of this election. We need to hone, craft and simplify this message so it resonates in contrast to greedy-ass Paul Ryan’s compulsive need to fuck the poor and the middle class out of their entitlements.
Speaking of that asshole Ryan, one of the first two big tests of the current Democratic establishment will be their messaging on Medicare. The second will be whether they just roll over in Louisiana or if they put a few million into that race. Privatizing or voucherizing Medicare is, from the point of view of almost everyone who pays into the system, taking money from our pockets. If the messaging on this isn’t something easily grasped, harsh and personal (“You paid into Medicare for years, now Paul Ryan and Donald Trump want to take your money away”), then we have learned nothing from this election.
Duke's Archives
That Castro piece from Loomis is worth reading.
mai naem mobile
I saw the blurb about the Madison mayor. I know the Clinton campaign screwed up but why didn’t the Madison mayor call the Clinton campaign ? If he felt something was going on the ground why didn’t he contact them?
middlelee
I paid into Medicare and Social Security for years. What I receive are not entitlements. We have to stop using that word. Yes, I am entitled but that’s one of the many words the Republicans have turned into dirty talk. I prefer to think of them as earned benefits.
Big R
So here’s why I like Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy. This was a relatively minor investment in unwinnable states like (where I was at the time) Mississippi. Basically, the DNC paid the salaries of two organizers who probably cost less than $60K total. Those two organizers recruited a candidate that flipped an open seat, and Mississippi had three Democratic Congressmen for the first time since 1994. And they scared Chip Pickering into retiring.
Their efforts from 2004 to 2008 helped keep the Lege under Democratic control for nearly ten years (the GOP didn’t take control of the House until 2013). So, for a quarter million dollars over four years, we basically moved Mississippi into the Democratic column in all but Presidential races. Is it perfect? No. But it doesn’t take much of an investment to build resources, and that is how we’re going to win back control. Through spreading ourselves thin and pushing the GOP to defend seats they don’t think they should have to defend.
Duke's Archives
@middlelee: See, that’s the thing. “Most of us won’t ever see it so let’s hurt them; my parents are the good ones but fuck the rest of them.”
Mnemosyne
Then you are prepared to hop onto my new hobbyhorse: we all need to call our local Democratic Party office (NOT the social club) and find out how to become precinct captains. The only way to change the party is from the bottom up. Here’s a 2015 article from Meteor Blades at DailyKos to explain why.
Sitting on the sidelines and carping is useless. Time to suit up and join the fight.
Mnemosyne
@middlelee:
When I really want to be bitter, I reflect on the fact that today’s Medicare and Social Security beneficiaries are actually living on my contributions. I would have no problem with that if many of those same beneficiaries were not voting to make sure that they can live off my wages while taking away my eventual benefits. Selfish fucktards.
eemom
So is anti-recount the official party line of the BJ Kremlin, or are there any FPers left with any sense?
Idiots.
scottinnj
We watched the show “The Circus” on showtime – yes it starred that hack Mark Halperin. Anyway most weeks he would spend a few minutes with some of the top staff of Clinton’s campaign. I forget their names, but you will find their pictures in the dictionary next to ‘smug’ and ‘clueless’. Every week I would think there is no way the Clinton campaign can screw up, then I’d watch this show and be convinced she would foul it up because HRC is not a good judge of talent.
DCF
Here are a couple of lucid (and useful) ‘post-mortems’ of the 2016 election debacle:
12 Notes From a Political Autopsy
November 13, 2016
Richard Eskow
https://ourfuture.org/20161113/12-notes-from-a-political-autopsy
The Years Of Living Dangerously
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/the-years-of-living-dange_b_12963482.html
debbie
@Big R:
With a 50-state strategy, Wisconsin wouldn’t have been ignored.
Mnemosyne
@debbie:
Read my link at #7. We can’t wait around and hope that someone at the top will come up with a 50-state strategy. We need to head down to our local Democratic Party offices and become our own 50-state strategy.
max
I’ll also mention that, along with a few of the rest of you, I am skeptical about Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy. I have relatives active in Democratic politics in the Dakotas who saw little or nothing of that strategy, but they did see a major push by the Obama campaign in 2008 when South Dakota looked in reach. So, 50-state or 40-state or whatever it is called, I won’t be donating to an effort pours a little money into every race — I will donate to one that has realistic targets like TX-32, coupled with a quality candidate screening program that picks early-starting, hard-working candidates that raise funds and energize Democrats in tougher districts.
Then you’re doing it wrong if you’re skeptical of Dean. The DCCC would claim to be running an overall congressional campaign that had realistic targets and a quality candidate screening program. And it put no one in TX-32 because if you look at the 2012 numbers, TX-32 (my old stomping grounds – I am well-acquainted with Sign-Stealing Pete) wasn’t a realistic target. That’s why the DCCC didn’t try.
The 50-state strategy is equivalent to investin in a simple broad stock market index. Some districts will flip from time to time, but most won’t. So run everywhere and take the victories as they come, because there will always be a few. Some years will be good years and you’ll get lots of candidates through and some will be bad, and most will lose. We got to a majority with Dean doing it that way. We have lost a majority and never gotten it back doing it the other way. So why are you desiring to keep running the same scheme we have been running and failing with.
max
[‘That’s all.’]
Juice Box
The old olds paid into Medicare for less years than I did since I started paying into it in 1974, two years after Medicare payroll deduction started. It doesn’t make sense that those of us in our 50s should lose Medicare while the Fox News crowd keeps what they didn’t pay for.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
One thing to keep in mind in criticizing Clinton’s strategy is that most, though not all, of the complaining benefits from 20/20 hindsight. Yes, not putting effort into Wisconsin was a bad mistake that should have been recognized then, but there were a hell of a lot of people, including some that seem to have forgotten they argued it, that said that trying to expand the map was a good play. The talk was of Clinton trying to flip the House, rather than making sure that she won. Everyone who assumed that she had it in the bag, which was almost all of us, need to step back in criticize in a constructive way rather than just bashing the Clinton campaign.
RepubAnon
@Big R: Agreed – the point of a 50-state strategy isn’t to divide up the money equally between all 50 states – the idea is not to write off entire states, and to have a candidate for every race, even the lopsided ones. It prepares people for future races, and makes Republicans play defense rather than simply giving them a “safe space.”
SFAW
mistermix –
So in one paragraph, you note that “Pete Sessions ran unopposed.” Two or so paragraphs later, we get
I guess it’s better than those two sentences appearing next to each other, but I’m impressed at the incongruity.
Bailey
@DCF:
Those are great, thanks for posting.
Mike in NC
Still waiting for shitbird Pat McCrory to concede the governorship here.
PhoenixRising
@debbie:
Whoa there.
Wisconsin was not ignored. Why the mayor of Madison, an early Sanders supporter who was openly hostile to the existing Dem Party of Dane Co volunteers who know how to stack the chairs and where the cookies are stored, keeps promoting that myth is a real mystery.
Unless you look at Dane Co results and realize that the mayor got snookered by Bernie supporters who were never gonna vote for a Dem & has no future in politics without a logical explanation for why Dane Co Dems didn’t deliver the state as anyone would have expected.
Anyone who repeats that myth is going on my list of Not Serious About Winning the Next War, Still Fighting the Last One.
Hildebrand
Re: Wisconsin – This can’t all be on Clinton’s head – how in the hell did Feingold lose a second bloody time to Johnson?
azlib
Let’s keep in mind Clinton won the popular vote pretty decisivly. The margins in WIsconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were razor thin. Of course as usual if you lose the campaign is always the scapegoat.
We did have some unusual things going on what with the Russian interference and the whole email coverage debacle. In the aggregate I think those things made just enough of a difference to turn the election and for the most part they were outside the campaign’s control.
I am looking forward to the Medicare fight. I suspect the Dems polled the issue whcih is why the Congressional leadership came out (finally) with fighting word. Most politicians are basically chicken and they do not pick a fight unless they feel they can win.
debbie
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t disagree at all. In fact, both would be good. I don’t see me as a precinct captain, but I’m hoping to speak to someone up pretty high in the party in my state (friend of a friend) to see what can be done.
debbie
@PhoenixRising:
But how often was Clinton there?
Hildebrand
Did we not realize we were going to lose the Midwest because of our own version of epistemic closure?
PhoenixRising
@Hildebrand: Dane County is the Dem wheelhouse of WI. Sandersnistas ran wild during the primary–friend of mine witnessed assaults & vandalism against Clinton supporters and signs–and of course their candidate had no plan to even try to land the plane.
Young people got involved in electoral politics so that’s supposed to count for so much that their failure to go on and vote for the Democrats on their ballots, if they voted, is somehow neutralized. Except if you care what happens.
Major Major Major Major
@mai naem mobile:
Quiet, you. Everybody knows mistakes can only be made by the Clintons. Your focusing on local politicians is only going to hurt our ability to focus on local politicians.
Mnemosyne
@Hildebrand:
I’ve been wondering that myself. I know that they usually say that the top of the ticket drives the down-ticket, but people swore that Democrats would turn out in droves to vote for Feingold. So what happened? I think he got fewer votes than Clinton did.
PhoenixRising
@debbie: what? Feingold also lost. He was there the whole time. I get that this seems impossible because getting young people engaged in politics is supposed to make outcomes improve, by magic. That’s not what happened.
Bailey
Great post, Mistermix. Just when I was beginning to despair at the absurdity of front pagers here. Agree entirely that it’s discouraging that Clinton has been publicly aligned with the recount effort even if Stein’s recall effort was probably always a stalking horse for Clinton anyway. How amazing it will be to lose twice in giant bold headlines. If we are hinging our hopes on uncovering Russian malfeasance to flip this election we’re in bad shape and nowhere near the “reality based community” claimed to be. Meanwhile, Stein sucks in millions she could never hope to raise as a candidate and with a website disclaimer can put that money towards “electoral reform,” whatever that might mean on this given day.
But I think you’re a bit off the mark here. 50-state is necessary, win or lose, pouring money into the effort or not. There is no way to effectively spread the democratic message if there are nothing but empty chairs in hundreds of districts around the country. Obviously, more money and effort should be put into the more promising campaigns, but without dry runs and political farm teams, waiting for that magical candidate to appear in a previously unlikely district is a fool’s game. Whether it’s Howard Dean (who I think is probably a bit too old at this point) or Keith Ellison, let’s not let so many parts of the country completely atrophy.
Mnemosyne
@Hildebrand:
Only if when you say “epistemic closure,” you mean “did not have an effective strategy to fight massive suppression of Democratic voters.”
It’s not some great mystery why fewer Democrats voted in voter suppression states than they did in 2012.
artem1s
The west coast secessionist movement is pretty ridiculous, but the idea of blocks of blue/purple states forming trade partnerships and environmental pacts to oppose the worst parts of derailing federal regulations might actually be a pretty good idea. A kind of resistance legislatively, if you will, if not a physical secession. For instance the Great Lakes states put together a 7 state pact to protect water integrity and deal with all kinds of legislation that impact environment, agriculture, mining, drilling, fracking, invasive species, etc… Even Kasich backed down from fracking lobbyists who wanted to ease regs on their waste water disposal and reporting because it would have endangered water quality in Erie. and they are actively dealing with Canada too. I think finding other ways to bring together multiple states, cities or communities to deal with local issues is more the kind of ’50 state’ strategy Dems need to look for. The Moral Monday movement in NC is another good example of activism mixed with education that got local people fighting for causes that are directly affecting them in real time.
fighting battles over Russian interference and hacking are important to election integrity but I’m not sure that is going to do much to energize voters. It’s too much Monday morning quarterbacking and way too distant to resonate with many individuals who are worrying about whether they can feed their kids.
PhoenixRising
@Bailey: Exactly. We need local Democrats doing local Democratic organizing work, in every damn precinct.
Even Clay County had 14% for Hillz. What is the DNC for, if not to transfer funds from those of us who GTFO of Appalachia & don’t want the ladder pulled up to the county party?
Mistaking a personality based movement for Democratic organizing got us into this mess; knowing what county parties do and making it happen everywhere is what gets us out.
Mnemosyne
@Bailey:
So when are you becoming a precinct captain? I have a big writers conference in March, so I have to wait until April. What’s holding you back?
Bailey
@PhoenixRising:
Hmmm? Do you have some reporting that shows some effort in Wisconsin on behalf of the Clinton campaign? Because regardless of the source, up an down, it seems virtually no one in Wisconsin heard from Team Clinton. Do you have information that says otherwise?
Hildebrand
@Mnemosyne: Yep, I am just wondering if we downplayed just how much the voter suppression tactic was going to work. Did we just assume ‘it wouldn’t be that bad’? Did we whistle a bit too loudly through that graveyard?
ASV
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Also too, winning Wisconsin and Michigan (two states Clinton led in basically every poll all year) wouldn’t have won the election. Even Wisconsin and Pennsylvania wouldn’t have been enough. She needed PA and MI, or FL and one of the lost Rust Belt states. And as a former Madisonian, I will note that Paul Soglin has many positive qualities, but he is also something of a crank.
Generally speaking, this “Clinton was too arrogant to campaign in Wisconsin!” line makes little sense. All the polls showed her winning it by doing what she was doing. Meanwhile, in 2012, Obama never visited MI, PA, NM, NC, or IN, and went once to NV. Biden went twice to NC, once to NV. Three of those were states he took from the Bush ’04 column, and two went right back to Romney in 2012. But he didn’t need them, as all polling indicated — just like it did for Wisconsin this year!
Bailey
@Mnemosyne:
Your shitty responses that indicate that you think I know what I do with my spare time are unbecoming and frankly, pointless. My precinct is well organized, thank you. Unless you think I’m a big fail unless I pick up and move to Madison, WI.
Have fun at your writing conference. Perhaps you’ll learn to stop writing the same thing over and over again.
Calouste
@Mnemosyne: Bailey was a Bernie troll during the primaries, and still is an anti-Democratic troll now. That fact that he agrees with mistermix tells you how bad mistermix’s post is.
AkaDad
What would Republicans say if Trump won the popular vote and lost the election?
Perversion of democracy. Unamerican. Broken system. A slap in the face of the majority. The will of the people were denied. Abolish the Electoral College.
Democrats play politics. Republicans wage war.
PsiFighter37
Not to be an asshole or Captain Hindsight, but that turdball Corner Stone railed me when I said that Clinton sitting out the entire month of August to fundraise was a mistake. I’m still waiting for him/her to apologize instead of asking me to apologize for being successful.
I’ve been giving the post-mortem a lot of thought – and I am very concerned that the Democratic Party is treading down the wrong road by making the same mistakes it has made in the past. Naming elected officials has been an unmitigated disaster for our party – Ed Rendell, Tim Kaine, and DWS sucked – and naming personal buddies (McAuliffe from 2000-2004) was awful too. Dean is ABSOLUTELY the right person to lead the effort. But it also means having people running DCCC and DSCC who care about building the party as opposed to building personal stature. I don’t think Jon Tester or Michael Bennet gave two shits about building Democratic strength the past couple of cycles. Steve Israel was a miserable failure, and Ben Lujan from NM – seriously? You can shit all over Rahm and Chuck that you want, but the unmitigated successes we had in 2006 and 2008 were purely a result of them being team players. Maybe you don’t like them for one reason or another, but those fuckers knew to bring a gun to a gun fight and use it – and do it for the team. Rahm has fucked up for a number of reasons as mayor in Chicago, but he should be Speaker-in-Waiting right now.
As for Clinton’s campaign strategy – clearly they thought things were in the bag. You ALWAYS have to tend to the base. She should have been doing as many rallies in WI and MI as she was doing in NC and FL. And – I hate to agree with Trump – but maybe it was a stamina issue. I know she got pneumonia, and that sucks, but outside of that – you have to be burning the airstrip rubber and traveling. Also – Kaine was a disaster of a pick. It’s a good thing Obama didn’t pick him in 2008, but he was absolutely invisible. What I would take to go back in time and pick Tom Perez or Xavier Bacerra instead.
As for the identity politics points – this is going to be a major pressure point on the progressive side going forward. I am already seeing loads of white male progressives attributing Clinton’s loss to failure to reach out (or outright lie) to the white working class and tell them their jobs are coming back – and focusing on not throwing the browns, the LGBTQ community, and everyone else under the bus as a result. It’s extremely disheartening, and it suggests, to me, the reason why white people of any education or income stripe voted for Trump over Clinton – race plays a much bigger part in this whole shebang than anyone is willing to admit. It screams of an insecurity that your ‘kind’ won’t be better off than the previous generation. And it’s ironic, because catering to the WWC is basically welfare in its basest kind – don’t change your routine, keep eating your Cheetos, drinking your Budweiser, and we’ll bring back your unskilled labor 9-5 jobs and you won’t have to DO A DAMN THING FOR THAT TO HAPPEN. It’s the antithesis of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Automation is real, and jobs are not coming back to Bumblefuck, Ohio, because nobody in their right mind wants to move out there and set roots down.
The whole identity politics comes down to the fact that human rights are fucking human rights, and I am not going to sacrifice that shit on the altar of giving some aggrieved white guy living in the middle of nowhere the illusion of feeling better that he’s not sinking to the bottom as fast as he really is.
RANT OVER.
GrandJury
We all know you are a Sandernista MarkyMux but how about you go pound sand instead of this Monday morning quarterbacking bullshit.
Sanders will NEVER be president…mmkay! No, he will not win the primary in 2020 either, if he manages to live that long, no matter who else is running.
And despite your horseshit agenda, the only thing the Clinton people did wrong was be Clinton people. Which are people who have been around for a long time. In a fact based world that would be a good thing.
ruemara
2 things: If Sanders’ economic message caught fire, why didn’t he win those poor WWC voters feeling so insecure. He’s Trump with a more benign brand of prejudice (yeah, I said it). And, for fucking once, how about a little discussion of helping communities of color with the voter suppression that has been affecting us since 2010 and STILL WE TURN OUT TO VOTE FOR DEMS IN OVERWHELMING NUMBERS. How about a little work on organizing funding for IDs? Legal orgs that will stand with us to hold on to early voting rules?
The reason why you can’t get white folks who voted Trump to vote for your economic populism is they don’t care to be populists if they have to share it with people they hate. It really is that simple. They would blow up this country with a nuclear warhead if they were told this was special radiation that only harmed unworthy browns and left good, honest white folks like themselves who are totally not racist, alone. That’s how it is.
Mnemosyne
@Hildebrand:
Sadly, I think non-racist white people like myself underestimated just how appealing the racist assholes in those states would find Trump to be. Add in the massive suppression of minority voters and white supremacists coming out of the woodwork (remember, there was a small but significant group of white voters in rural areas who did not vote in 2012 who voted this year) and you get the results we just saw.
As far as “economic insecurity” goes, the states that went for Trump have Republican governors and legislators who are fucking the state up and blaming everyone but themselves. The stares that went for Hillary have recovered nicely since 2008, because they’re run by Democrats who didnt spend the last 8 years fighting any improvements tooth and nail.
Wisconsin would be a lot more “economically secure” if Scott Walker had not disdained the chance to have a high-speed rail company build their factory there. The people in those states aren’t feeling “economically insecure” because of the Democrats. They’re feeling that way because the Republicans have fucked them over and then claimed the Democrats are to blame.
PhoenixRising
@Bailey: I guess you need this spelled out: during the general election ‘Team Clinton’ was supposed to be the Dem Party. Leaders who supported Sanders past the point of his failure to take over a party he still hasn’t joined failed in their only duty: To turn out votes for Democrats.
Clinton did better than Feingold so you’re the one with a burden of proof here: why should the failure of WI Democrats who didn’t support the Dem in the primary be held against the campaign they failed to deliver for?
Party politics is not a game in which candidates only deserve votes from states they visit personally. NM & CO came through as expected. Because voting is a form of harm reduction, which is well understood by voters who aren’t white.
Let it go. WI Dems fucked up, and the state party should be taken back by Democrats post haste.
gogol's wife
@scottinnj:
Unlike Trump.
Bailey
Maybe. A VP pick doesn’t tend to win elections in any scenario. Yeah, Kaine is kind of bland, but he’s a solid guy and I think that was meant to be a counter-punch to Trump who is a completely asshole. And honestly, the rate at which states were being lost, it’s not inconceivable that Kaine helped keep Virginia in the win column.
Mnemosyne
@Bailey:
So you will continue to sit in the stands and whine about how the team would be doing so much better if they would just listen to you.
Great, glad to know I can continue to ignore you while the rest of us do the actual work of changing things.
PsiFighter37
@PhoenixRising: Clinton fucked up, too, by not showing up, by not advertising, and not treating it as a state they should be investing in.
Yes, she outran Feingold, but he has always been a historically weak campaigner. And the fact that the Koch Brothers and others were pouring their money down-ballot was not a secret. The rich GOP was playing chess, the Clinton campaign was playing chess half-blind and shit-faced drunk, and the Trump campaign was playing checkers and got lucky. That is the story of the 2016 election.
debbie
@ruemara:
I think this is key. If they can come up with a medical van to take health care to the rural poor, I don’t see why there can’t be a bus traveling around the country issuing photo IDs that meet state requirements. And if not that, then a NPO that would pay the cost of transportation so people could get to where they have to go to get ID.
PsiFighter37
@Bailey: I doubt it. Clinton winning VA by only 5% is a function of her decision to not advertise or campaign there.
There was an NYT article post-election about Kaine that said he was much more comfortable not being in the spotlight. Goddammit, we need people who want that. I think the whole Clinton-Gore experience shied the Democratic Party away from putting someone on the ticket with ambition (and it’s weird – because Kaine’s resume doesn’t lack for it), but honestly – that was a missed opportunity on our part. I’m not sure it would have added votes, but Kaine almost certainly did not add many (if any) votes to our tally.
Bailey
@PhoenixRising:
I don’t need anything spelled out for me. I’ve read the article linked in the OP. In fact, I’ve read dozens of articles about Wisconsin that say pretty much the same thing. In all cases, seasoned local leaders never heard from the Presidential campaign and were activated. You want to blame local Dems for this—many of whom were shooting out warnings–when procedure and precedent shows that it’s the national campaign that needs to reach out and establish protocol and messaging, not the other way around.
It’s also pretty easy to do a compare/contrast to the number of field offices that Clinton opened versus Obama in ’12. You can’t get Obama’s results if you don’t put in Obama’s effort. Again, this isn’t a problem with local Dems. It’s lack of direction and resources from the top.
DCF
@Bailey:
Thanks, Bailey…here’s another one….
Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump–but Pundits Told You to Ignore Them
By Adam Johnson
http://fair.org/home/polls-showed-sanders-had-a-better-shot-of-beating-trump-but-pundits-told-you-to-ignore-them/
Hildebrand
@Mnemosyne: Added to all of that – the unrelenting negative press for Clinton. Was there ever a run of good news coverage for her? Likewise, the press could never contain themselves when Trump acted almost civil for a minute or two. When it came to the media this year, Sisyphus would have looked at Hillary and said, ‘you’re fucked.’
PsiFighter37
@ruemara: This, to me, should be the biggest focus in the next 4 years. The GOP, and the Sessions-led DOJ, will throw up insane hurdles to registering to vote. We need an organization out there (like ACORN, GASP!) that will do the dirty work of making sure everyone can vote.
That work should be going on right now, and not a moment later.
cbear
@DCF:
@Bailey:
C’mon guys, stop trying to disrupt the narrative. You’re upsetting the good folks here and, besides, people just don’t want to ruin their beautiful minds with your kind of crazy, ugly talk.
Hell, you’re probably not even REAL Democrats and may have even secretly voted for Bernie by write-in or something equally horrible.
Van Buren
@Mnemosyne:Just maybe if it is pointed out a couple thousand more times, the Rust Belt might start to make a connection between who they have been electing and their misery. Lots of pointing to counter examples will also help.
(In Steve Martin voice) Nahhhh!
Amanda in the South Bay
@PsiFighter37: Which is why I think Sanders is so totally unfit going forward-even bringing up this dichotomy between “populism” and voting for Hillary because she’s a chick is the absolutely wrong way to go forward. Even bringing it up like that does nothing but ratfuck and destroy the Democratic Party.
Really, the only thing we really, absolutely need is for a candidate who is like Bernie, but 20 years younger and doesn’t have giant gender and ethnic blind spots (and implying that such a candidate isn’t from low population whitey mc whiteysville).
Bailey
@Mnemosyne:
It is your assumption that I’m in the stands. And you can shove your assumptions up your ass, where they belong.
Hey, when you finally get around to ignoring me, that would be great. Because all I get from you repeated threats about how you’re going to ignore me and then, low and behold, more comments from you. I can’t miss you until you go away.
Again, that writer’s conference should do wonders for you. Hopefully you’ll learn that banging out the same dreary thing, time after time again, is repetitive and dull for the reader.
Hildebrand
@cbear: Ok, here’s a question for the Bernie folks. It is manifestly clear that Bernie is not going to be the leader of the new progressive movement in America, and will not be running for President again – so, who is the person who can take the movement to the next level?
PhoenixRising
@Bailey: nope. Other states which polled the same as WI all along but are not majority white had no difficulty delivering the majority of registered Dems to the polls. WI Dems had one job and they didn’t do it. The state party is mature and funded–it’s not like they should need direction or support like NV did.
Contrast NV& WI to better understand what went wrong.
Duke's Archives
Totally OT — If you say “Free America” into your stupid Xfi remote-thingy it winds up as “Free Amerika.”
You’d think their worthless tech division would have caught that.
Hildebrand
@Amanda in the South Bay: Bingo.
Thornton Hall
Texas 32 is R +10.
Who the fuck is J. Miles Coleman?
Bailey
@PhoenixRising:
Hmmm….you mean NV which has 1.) Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and his machine and 2.) still existing unions did better than a state with Republican leadership across the board and dismantled unions? You’re kidding. So understanding those dynamics in place, you’d think the national campaign would make an increased effort, no? Not just sit back and leave the state to its own devices?
Again, you can really just compare Obama ’08 and ’12 to Clinton ’16 and see how things in that state deteriorated.
Schlemazel
Mixy, part of the problem was that the polling showed Clinton didn’t need to spend time in WI. We can worry about how they did spend their time and money but if the polling sucks there is no way to hold that against the candidate. Meanwhile what are the state and local offices doing to help themselves? There is no reason they should just be sitting around waiting for the DNC or Presidential campaign to drop in and save them. Wisconsin’s Dems don’t exactly have a stellar record for taking care of business recently.
EDIT: remove Feingold comment as it has been covered above – Where the hell was he & his people?
Adam L Silverman
What is needed is an audit of the voting equipment. Recounting what’s been counted, unless you’re going to bring in undercounts (ballots marked, but deemed not marked), not counted (provisional and absentee ballots that are ignored, which does happen), what you’re looking for is the integrity of the machines themselves and the processes surrounding them. There is an issue here though. As Professor Halderman stated in his explanation at Medium on why he thinks a forensic audit and a recount need to be undertaken, if he or his students were to set up a way to repurpose the voting machines (hacking), they would actually do it by inserting malware on the preprogramming that would lie dormant until needed and then delete itself and all evidence of its existence. This is not my area of expertise, but if he and his students are good enough to do this and not leave fingerprints, then others would be to. So a forensic audit of all systems, including software, might not show anything.
https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.qd8nhq8sl
That said, Wisconsin does an automatic audit after each November general election and then publicly report the findings.
http://elections.wi.gov/elections-voting/voting-equipment/audit
Here’s the link to the audit notice to all election officials in Wisconsin, as well as the instructions for doing it, reporting it, etc.
http://elections.wi.gov/node/4412
This is happening, and would have happened, regardless of anything done by any campaign or anyone else with the money and standing to request a recount. Michigan also requires an automatic audit. Its reporting form can be found here, though it is nowhere near as extensive as Wisconsin’s:
https://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Post_Election_Audit_Checklist_418481_7.pdf
For more information on the 29 states that require post election audits, you’ll find the information here:
http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/post-election-audits635926066.aspx
And more information here as well:
https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/post-election-audits/
Cacti
@Bailey:
Self-awareness isn’t your strong suit, is it?
Taylor
@PsiFighter37:
This is the stand-up guy who, when DC Democrats went into full panic mode after Coakley’s loss in MA, started briefing against ACA to his friends in the press, until Obama told him to STFU.
No thanks.
Mikefromarlington
Just thinking out loud… If Trump had any dodgy connections, wouldn’t there have been a leak by now of it?
…edit…
And I’m aware he has loads of conflicts of interested which should have been exploited more in the campaign IMHO.
DCF
@cbear:
No, I voted for HRC – even in a ‘deep blue state’ the popular vote (should) count for (more than) something….
You can take your tongue out of your cheek now ;>) ….
Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-house-hillary-clinton-liberals
Cacti
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Bernie’s progressive ass will never stop “feeling the Bern” of getting beaten by a girl.
And by one who took the high road against him while he wallowed in the gutter.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Bailey: Wisconsin is also a state that re-elected a rabid TeaPartier multiple times since 2008. The upper midwestern/rust belt white population has changed, and not for the better.
DCF
@Cacti:
In a period of radical change, it’s comforting (in a masochistic sort of way) to read your consistently puerile, petulant expressions of ignorance….
Schlemazel
@DCF:
I only hit you because you make me so mad! If you would just be perfect I wouldn’t have to hit you!
Cacti
@DCF:
Truth Berns, don’t it?
Bailey
@Amanda in the South Bay:
So all the better to consider it “in the bag” and not campaign there?
Thornton Hall
This kind of analysis is like cops pulling black people over.
There is a near infinite number of traffic violations and everybody on the road is breaking at least one of them at any given time. So a racist cop can always pull a black person over.
It is no response to say, “Well, he should have used his turn signal.”
Campaigns similarly have a near infinite number of choices. If you are the type that is inclined to find fault with the candidate, you just start looking around until you find the missing turn signal that you need.
Adam L Silverman
@Mikefromarlington: It was reported on extensively by Wayne Barrett and David Cay Johnson. I’ve provided links and excerpts here on multiple occasions. This reporting goes back decades as they’ve been writing both articles and books – full biographies or chapters/sections in other books (Johnson) – about Trump since the late 80s. More recently, as in the past several months, Kurt Eichenwald has been churning this stuff out at Newsweek.
tobie
@Adam L Silverman: I’m having a hard time understanding your comment.
On the one hand,
On the other hand,
Is a forensic audit useless or not?
(This is not snark. I’m just trying to follow your argument.)
DCF
@Cacti:
Doesn’t it, Shillaryite?…and I’d bet it’s still berning (?)….
#RIPMyShillaries
An end to the era of professionally explained candidates
http://thebaffler.com/blog/rip-my-shillaries-johnson
Hildebrand
@Bailey: This is not snark – were you raising the alarm on Wisconsin prior to election day? I honestly cannot remember. If you were, did you regularly communicate your concerns to the campaign?
Cacti
@DCF:
I’m firmly on board with the idea that the future of the Democratic Party is a 70-something white flighter from a state of 700,000 people…
Who doesn’t even belong to the party.
Or not.
James Powell
I insist it was not us who fucked this up. It was all those who take pains to assure that they are our betters.
The Serious People did this.
Darkrose
@ruemara: My question is, if it’s really all about class and not race, why didn’t the non-white working class vote for Sanders in the primaries? Of course, whenever anyone brings up that people of color overwhelmingly voted Clinton, the response from the Sanders fans is either “DNC rigged!” or “They just don’t know what’s best for them.”
DCF
@Cacti:
Imagination – and courage (guile?) – is a potent combination….
Open your mind – and your heart.
dww44
@PsiFighter37: I enjoyed your rant. Specifically want to strongly endorse your point that the Democratic party does not need an elected official to chair the party. We need a full-timer who can devote his or her energies to rebuilding.. I like Keith Ellison but he does have a full time job in the House of Representatives. I can’t remember when the GOP had a chair who was also a serving member of Congress. The last two definitely didn’t.
Bailey
@Hildebrand:
Yes, I was regularly raising alarms on many aspects of Clinton’s campaign. For that effort, I was consistently labeled a “concern troll.” I don’t live in Wisconsin, so no particular idea other than the fact that Clinton clearly wasn’t keeping the same kind of campaign / communication schedule that previous candidates have.
I admit, I let my reflexes down with some of the poll numbers because I thought that a.) despite some pretty obvious campaign errors b.) the complete travesty that was Trump might have actually been enough to get Clinton snuck through for one term.
some guy
@ruemara:
not in Florida.
Felanius Kootea
@Thornton Hall: This.
Jill Stein has done what she has done and frankly, she is well within her rights as a candidate to do it and doesn’t have to listen to Dems who are not in her party bitch about it.
Even if all it does is confirm the existing results, I’m hoping it will highlight to Democrats how close we were in the swing states. There should be a focus on increased turnout of diverse Dem voters by: (1) a national effort to help voters obtain voter ID that meets their state’s restrictions (where are our “Koch brother equivalents” on this issue?), (2) efforts to challenge and overturn the shuttering of polling stations in minority neighborhoods, and (3) efforts to enhance early voting turnout and increase vote by mail balloting across the country (even more than during this election). The election was won by a couple of thousand votes in swing states. The sympathies of most American voters are with the winner of the popular vote because two million more people overall voted for her. Donald Trump is a once in a lifetime type of candidate, and we underestimated the power of his normalizing bigotry in Red states. The Republicans aren’t going to be able to find a shameless, narcissistic sociopath who is a celebrity because of his reality shows, and who is aided by an email hacking and disinformation campaign from Russia for every presidential election. It shouldn’t be that hard to overcome the deficits of this election next time if Dems do the right things.
Cacti
@Darkrose:
One thing that Bernie’s campaign squeezed out like a pustule was the amount of paternalistic racism festering under the surface of the political left.
Adam L Silverman
@tobie: I don’t know. This is outside of my expertise, but when the subject matter expert who spent time trying to convince the Clinton campaign folks 1) calls for a forensic audit and 2) when he finally publishes something about why he did so part of his explanation is an argument of why it might not turn up anything even if there was malfeasance, then I am confused. When I read his explanation at Medium he seemed to be contradicting himself: a) we need a forensic audit to determine if there was tampering and b) if I and my students were to do it, we could and would do it in a way that couldn’t/wouldn’t be detected.
And as I posted last night before I went to bed, this is why I’m not highly supportive of the recount effort. Professor Halderman had just posted his explanation, which while it allows me to see his reasoning both contradicts itself (on the point I delineated above) and does not actually provide any evidence to support his argument. And that’s what this comes down to: he’s making an argument. He’s not pushing a theory, he’s not publishing evidence, he’s arguing that he things an audit and recount need to be done. I still want to know why? What’s the evidence? Or what does he think the evidence is? Again: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He’s provided neither and his argument is internally contradictory.
All of the above said, what the focus should be on is counting the undervote – ballots that are marked, but were deemed (either by the optical scanners or by election officials) to not have been marked, as well as provisional and absentee ballots. Every vote cast should be counted. Additionally, I do think a forensic audit should be conducted in case anyone who might have tampered were not as talented as Professor Halderman and his students. Moreover, it should be done in every state to the same standard as should a reconciliation of the undervote. I also believe that all districting/redistricting should be taken out of the hands of partisan elected and/or appointed officials, but that is a longer term related fight. Finally, establishing, staffing, and equipment polling places should also be taken out of the hands of partisan elected and/or appointed officials and, in this case, should be located, staffed, and equipped appropriately for the actual voting population assigned to that polling location – no more two machines per two polling sites in a precinct with high density and 20 machines per 1/2 a dozen polling sites in a precinct with low density. And finally, finally Kris Kobach’s crosscheck system for removing voters from the rolls should be litigated as far as necessary as its simply a high speed, computer program driven form of voter caging, which is illegal.
Bailey
@Darkrose:
Because prior to the primaries, Sanders had virtually zero name recognition? No, Sanders did not win the non-white vote, at least over the age of millennials, but he was coming from zero to sixty in the span of 5 months. Question is, had Sanders won the nomination, would non-white voters have eventually come around on him? Who knows? It’s unanswerable, but your either / or question is incorrect. It is neither a case of the DNC being rigged or non-white voters not knowing what’s best for them. (How insulting.) But more simply, a guy who know one had ever heard of nearly swept out the candidate everyone has known for 30 years. Should’ve been a YUGE red flag, but wasn’t treated as such.
Felanius Kootea
@Cacti: Yup. And it hasn’t escaped my attention that most of the people running around screaming about identity politics are white males who want us to focus solely on working class white people in rust belt states. Makes me go hmm.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Bailey: Nearly, for certain values of nearly. Staying in the race long after it was obvious he was going to lose doesn’t count.
Baud
We should split into two parties and divide up the states and legislative districts based on demographics.
We’ll choose which party gets to run for president based on the winner of the All Star game.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Bailey: You’re also coming close to outright begging that the DNC coronated Bernie (how undemocratic!) instead of going through the process of fighting it out with Hillary.
Bailey
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Or look at this way, Sander staying in the race longer meant he had influence on the party platform. He injected issues there that the party had ignored or watered down. Ultimately, he likely dragged far more millennials to Clinton in November than she ever would have herself.
liberal
Great fucking post!
Bailey
@Amanda in the South Bay:
What? I’m doing nothing of the sort and I’m not sure how you read that into my comment.
SenyorDave
@PsiFighter37: This, to me, should be the biggest focus in the next 4 years. The GOP, and the Sessions-led DOJ, will throw up insane hurdles to registering to vote. We need an organization out there (like ACORN, GASP!) that will do the dirty work of making sure everyone can vote.
Yes!!! Some type of project to register, educate and engage voters. Sessions should be a huge story, but apparently the DOJ being led by a guy who was TOO FUCKING RACIST just doesn’t matter as much as Melania Trump’s dress choice. The Democrats need to find the right people to run the party. Having a DNC chair who is a sitting congressman is a poor start. I want a full time person.
Lurking Canadian
@Mnemosyne:
One of the reasons I was so sure Clinton had it in the bag is that I simply could not believe there were any racists who could have been too lazy to get off their couch to vote against the black man but would yet be motivated to vote for fucking Trump.
This election has taught me something. People don’t vote AGAINST things they DON’T want. They vote FOR things they DO want. I still kind of can’t wrap my head around it, since I would have crawled over broken glass to vote for anybody who was running against Trump, but that’s apparently how people operate.
BTW, thanks for all the hype around Moana. Took boy today. It is indeed awesome. I haven’t seen any reaction by Pacific Islanders to how their culture was portrayed, but I happen to think the Polynesian explorers who got almost all the way across the Pacific in damned canoes were among the most stupendous badasses the human race has ever produced. Anything that draws people’s attention to that history is a good idea.
liberal
@Bailey: Agreed.
You don’t have to think Bernie was a perfect candidate to think this should have been a giant red flag re HRC.
PhoenixRising
@Bailey:
, he likely dragged far more millennials to Clinton in November than she ever would have herself.
Let it go. Again, as shown in Dane County (WIs Dem wheelhouse), someone didn’t show up & carry WI. Was it longtime Dem voters, or the Sandersnistas who were screaming at their neighbors to stop supporting a neoliberal fascist during the primary?
Guess that mystery is unsolvable. Much like your standards for what the Democratic Party, a membership organization which I haven’t seen you claim to belong to, should do next are unreachable.
Raven Onthill
@Darkrose: It’s about both, of course. This is only hard to understand if one is desperately working to believe there can be social equity without economic equity. One cannot credibly argue one is for the downtrodden when one has spent that last 25 years compromising with the people treading on them. People eventually see through you, and then there is nothing left to be said.
Amanda in the South Bay
@liberal: If it was all so easy in hindsight, then 3 million people should’ve voted for Bernie instead of Hillary.
tobie
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for this. Sorry if I misunderstood that you were pointing to an internal contradiction in Halderman’s argument. I agree that at this point we should use the recount to showcase the extraordinary difficulties POC face in exercising the franchise (too few voting precincts in minority neighborhoods, cross-check schemes, onerous ID requirements, and the failure to take account of provisional ballots).
liberal
@PsiFighter37: great comment. Particularly about him not being a great campaigner, which is an obvious confound to the claim that he did worse than Clinton only cuz he’s to her left.
Applejinx
@PsiFighter37:
But then there will be no jobs and no bootstraps. As I said, there are not enough skilled jobs to go around, and education is expensive and time-consuming. When it’s a racket like Trump U, it’s actively predatory. Immoral to try and push people into being prey for liars in order to give them a lottery chance at a future.
I won’t argue your facts: I agree, there will be no jobs in Bumblefuck Ohio, or for that matter San Francisco, which is why people there poo on the street and live in Hoovervilles and under bridges. There are not going to be jobs, full stop.
So then what? What is our plan for redesigning society when ‘not constantly learning new jobs’ is a death sentence and constantly learning new jobs is no sure thing either? I speak as one who’s better positioned than most even though I’m exposed to the brunt of this like few of you are.
The saving grace here is, neither Trump nor the Republicans have an answer. In fact, the Republican stuff is worse than what we have and would accelerate the problem. Their only answer is to do that and then try to redirect the anxiety into racism and xenophobia, ???, profit.
But they can’t profit either, nobody is profiting except through financial instruments, the world’s loaded with capital and there’s no good investment and there’s no consuming. (I know, tell millenials to sell their diamonds and start their own small businesses with the proceeds…)
It’s a pretty blank slate. Nobody knows what to do. So what SHALL we do?
Davis X. Machina
@Hildebrand:
Bernie. There is no movement, there is only Bernie.
Mike E
@Mike in NC: Pat is going the
Al Goreselective recount route, hehliberal
@Amanda in the South Bay: Look, sorry to break your bubble, but HRC was a crap candidate. She had the entire party behind her running up to 2008, and still lost to Obama.
Doesn’t mean she’s evil, doesn’t mean she’d be a poor executive…there’s not much reason to think that’s highly correlated with campaign “ability”. But anyone coming into 2016 thinking she was a great candidate has a hole in their head.
DCF
@PhoenixRising:
It was a combination of variables that resulted in her loss – period. Her weaknesses played to Trump’s strengths….
Second… the Democratic Party needs to re-assess (and reformulate) its core message(s). Are we ‘Republican-Lite’, or progressive/liberal Democrats?
Applejinx
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, exactly.
Doesn’t change the fact that they’re fucked and right to consider themselves fucked. Trump won’t help them (for all that they kneecapped ALL their Republican politicians and ran with him: it’s like if Sanders, or Stein, won the Dem nomination)
The Republicans will continue to do this. How do we turn that into an opportunity?
liberal
@Applejinx: solution is easy: just learn JavaScript!
Adam L Silverman
@tobie: de nada
liberal
@PsiFighter37: care about personal stature…exactly.
Google “the iron law of institutions”.
NR
@Cacti: If only you’d said stuff like this more during the campaign, Cacti, Hillary surely would have beaten Trump.
How could you let her down like that?
Mnemosyne
@Applejinx:
There will always be jobs. No one has successfully automated nursing, or teaching, or cooking and serving food, or cutting people’s hair, or cleaning other people’s messes, or caring for small children. And I could go on. There are plenty of jobs that cannot be automated.
The problem is that those are still considered lowly “service” jobs that are barely worth minimum wage and not respectable jobs in and of themselves that should be fairly compensated. There are a lot of jobs that cannot be automated by definition, but no one wants to talk about them because they’re, frankly, considered girly, not a manly-men job like coding.
Applejinx
@liberal: Do you have any idea how many people have learned, or half-ass-learned, Javascript?
Javascript and even Java are kind of old news now (and yeah, I know you were just snarking)
Scamp Dog
@Mnemosyne: I just figured out that I’m in Adams County, Colorado’s precinct 112. They like to have two per precinct committee persons for each one; I have no idea if mine has both, one or none. Time to start calling around to figure that out!
Callisto
@Bailey:
Well, then why don’t you tell us all what you’ve been doing that isn’t “bitching on the internet”.
Ella in New Mexico
@eemom: Ignore them. There are plenty of other folks here who feel the same way we do. If it pans out, who cares? We’ve already got President Trump, Hilary’s got no political future to worry about and we’re all just gonna hunker down and fight the same fight we knew we’d have to fight a week ago.
Applejinx
@Mnemosyne:
Are you joking? Teaching is already moderately automated. Diagnosis is more accurate and effective from expert systems than from skilled human doctors if you look at it from an actuarial standpoint. Cooking and serving food? CLEANING? Ever heard of a roomba? And that’s dinosaur age stuff.
There are not NEARLY enough jobs in all the areas you mentioned to support the population of the United States. Nor can they pay enough to support a nation of hangers-on and assorted dependents. This is a problem NOW.
Hell, male nurses have been a trend for at least a decade if not longer, and survival WAY takes precedence over people feeling it’s ‘girly’. You must be hanging out with very old people to have that seem like a thing? I’m kind of old but I’m hard pressed to think of anyone I know at any age who would get bent out of shape over nursing while male, as if that doesn’t count. We’re already way beyond that being an objection. There aren’t enough jobs and those that do exist are being consolidated, speeded up, and made impossibly difficult for the good of profit and to NOT hire any extra people.
This is a good time to ask what we do when there are no jobs anywhere for all practical purposes. Because if we have an answer that works for humans, we win. And pride won’t enter into it at that stage.
jacy
Yes, there will always be jobs. Problem is, everybody wants the job they want. Lots of jobs that people don’t “want,” or that aren’t properly compensated for, or that carry some stigma in some way. It’s great when you can find a job that you want to do that pays you enough to live relatively comfortably. Not everybody gets all of those things all the time, and there are many reasons why. People living on the street is not a problem caused by lack of jobs — that’s an oversimplification that has no real meaning.
Bailey
@PhoenixRising:
Oh jesus. Yes, the infiltration of screaming Sandernista neighbors. My neighborhood was rife with them, I tell you. Whatever you need to tell yourself to make this electoral loss easier to swallow I guess is alright by me. But given that 90% of Sanders voters backed Clinton without question is about all you can expect. (That beats the percentage of Clinton voters who backed Obama in ’08, by the way.) From there on, it is up to the candidate to get voters to support them. Obviously not enough did.
Now what in the actual fuck are you talking about? Do you mean, “have I voted and donated and volunteered for every Dem candidate since 1992 and even attended an inauguration or two?” By those standards, I think I’m pretty much a Democrat.
Here’s a problem that is going to have to be solved real fast if anyone wants to win elections in the future. The smugness and certainty that anyone who was not excited about HRC must not be a true Democrat and dismissal of all those concerns has got to stop.
I’m glad more people are chiming in now to make this blog less of an obnoxious echo chamber, but the constant purity checks will lose voters every time.
Mnemosyne
@some guy:
Yeah, about Florida …
But, sure, despite the massive coverage of the issue both before and after the election, let’s keep acting like it’s a mystery why people of color just happened to not show up this year. Yep. Total mystery. Never to be solved.
cbear
@DCF: Yeah, I donated money to her campaign and voted for HRC here in Florida.
But, I’m ashamed to admit that I was Bernie-curious at one time and even had some mildly critical thoughts about Hillary, her campaign, and my betters in the Democratic Party and here on BJ.
However, unlike you, Bailey, mistermix and a few others I have come to realize that I must be punished for my transgressions, and even though I’ve been a “member” of the BJ community since 2005, I’m trying to accept my fate and my diminished stature within the tribe with grace and goodwill while purging my self of my impure thoughts.
Peace.
Aunt Kathy
Vitriolic jackals, indeed. Jeeesus, stop fighting and DO SOMETHING. Me? I kicked in a couple bucks to Foster Campbell in LA, remember him?? And trust me, I don’t have the money, but it had to be done so I did it.
Instead of complaining about voter suppression, can a fund be started to not only pay whatever costs arise to get people their proper ID, but also provide them rides to whatever agencies they need to get to, DMV, courthouses, whatever?
Didn’t a NC university nix an early voting center on campus, so students would have to take a 10 minute bus ride across town to vote early? Well, how about using some of these millions being raised to hire shuttle buses specifically for early voting students, and give ’em some damned pizza while yer at.
Yeah, the other side tries to cheat and suppress and whatever. Thats why we have to circumvent in any way we can. I always say, I can play any game you want, baby, just tell me what the rules are. Doesn’t matter that the rules are unfair, we can get around them if we pay attention.
And give $5 to gotdamned Foster Campbell, will ya?
https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/fostercampellforsenatedonate
Mnemosyne
@Lurking Canadian:
You’re welcome! ;-)
Bailey
@efgoldman:
HRC was supposed to walk away with this with no struggle. It was hers to lose and she very well could have.
And yet he campaigned on far more issues in the primary than Clinton did in the general. Funny that. And I think you might want to be careful labeling who is a “core” constituency and who is not. The Dems have several core constituencies. The dramatic shift in formerly “Blue Wall” states demonstrates that it is our candidate who did not effectively reach out to core constituencies.
Bill_D
@middlelee:
The term entitlement as we are using it here began as a budget wonk term, to refer to spending that’s based on legal entitlement to a benefit as opposed to government spending via specific appropriation. Congress doesn’t set aside a given amount of money each year for Social Security, SNAP, or TANF to cover the benefits to be paid out. Instead, anybody who applies and qualifies get the benefits in the amount prescribed by law, no matter how much might get spent nationwide as a result. This applies both to entitlements such as SNP that are funded out of general revenues, and entitlements such as Social Security that are funded out of earmarked taxes on earned income.
That’s in contrast to normal discretionary government spending where a certain amount is appropriated each year for each program (defense, FBI, national parks, etc.) and when it runs out it runs out. Entitlements don’t run out, except in the potential case of a trust fund running dry which has nothing to do with annual appropriations per se. This also has the important budgetary effect that if demographics or the economy increase payouts under an entitlement program, then spending increases unless eligibility or benefits are actually cut back by act of Congress. So from a budgetary standpoint this distinction between entitlements and appropriated spending makes sense as a way of understanding how the different kinds of federal spending operate.
Of course the term entitlement rubs some people the wrong way because entitled and its variants have picked up a bad connotation over the decades. But, if we get rid of this term the budget wonks will still justifiably need and find another term to cover the same meaning because it’s a useful distinction in their realm.
The other thing is that Medicare parts B and D are paid for out of general government revenues, not your FICA taxes. They’re not earned benefits in the sense you’re using, of being paid out of special earmarked taxes you and others paid from earned income only. So the term earned benefits is only partly accurate overall. Only 38% of the total Medicare program is funded by FICA taxes:
Mnemosyne
@DCF:
What part of “Stronger Together” said “Republican-Lite” to you?
jacy
@efgoldman:
YES. He had a core support group that didn’t really cross much with women or minorities or people over 40. He appealed to people who wanted platitudes not programs. It drives me up a wall. (And the three people closest to me were Bernie supporters through the primaries, so it’s not like I was living in an echo chamber.)
Bill_D
http://kff.org/medicare/fact-sheet/medicare-spending-and-financing-fact-sheet/
Sorry for posting klutziness.
SFAW
@Bailey:
And Al Gore lost Tennessee in 2000!
Bailey
@cbear:
With that admission, I’m not even sure you’re a Democrat. Can you prove it? ;-)
FlipYrWhig
Did I die overnight and get stuck being punished for my sins symbolically forever? Because the people who turned out for this thread make it pretty much like one of Dante’s deeper circles of Hell.
PsiFighter37
@jacy: Bernie is a fucking asshole. Making him chair of outreach in the Senate for Dems is a joke. Let’s appeal to all aggrieved white people, whether they be hippies in vermont or hicks in backwater OH or WI, and we can make America great again!
Emma
@Mnemosyne: The Hillary haters don’t want to hear this. They will scream themselves hoarse and split the Democratic party AGAIN AND AGAIN unless we tell them they’re absolutely right and beg them pretty please to lead us to the promised land.
No longer worth the argument.
PsiFighter37
@FlipYrWhig: In what sense, pray tell?
FlipYrWhig
@jacy: You underestimate his appeal to 40- through 70-something lefties who’d been nursing ideological grudges against The Clintons since 1991.
bemused senior
@Adam L Silverman: This is one explanation of what was seen as indicating a problem and this expert’s dismissal of it based on data he trusts.
NR
@Emma: Actually you guys are the ones who have split the party with your nonstop shitting on liberals for the last eight years.
Tell me, how has that worked out for you?
raven
@FlipYrWhig: I’m watching football with Betty.
Mnemosyne
@Applejinx:
Only if you think “teaching to the test” is an effective way of helping children learn. Most studies show that our kids should be learning in classrooms of 10 or fewer, but we won’t do it because we don’t want to pay enough teachers to do it.
Please point to places where these expert systems have replaced doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants, pharmacists, and orderlies. Robots may be assisting complicated surgeries, but they’re not taking out anyone’s appendix all on their own. More to the point, robots are not admitting patients to the hospital, filling out their paperwork, prepping them for surgery, and releasing them from the hospital when they’re ready to go.
Let’s say you’re checking in to a hotel and they proudly tell you that there’s a Roomba in every room, so they fired all of their housekeeping staff. Still willing to stay there?
There is no Roomba that can change sheets, or scrub the toilet, or clean the bathtub. All of those things are still done every day by poorly paid human beings who go from room to room to do them. Same with the food you eat: either you cook it yourself, or a human being cooks it for you. Even frozen dinners have more human intervention than you seem to realize — watch a few episodes of “How It’s Made” and you will be astounded by how many otherwise fully-automated factories still require humans to start or complete processes.
I know techies love to look down on service jobs, but look around you sometime and realize how many people are doing things for you every single day. Garbagemen may not have to dump each can into the truck by hand anymore, but they still have to drive the truck and pick up all of the cans.
raven
Oh god, please don’t start with this motherfucker again.
PsiFighter37
@NR: You’re an asshole. Go away and hide under a rock and never come out.
Emma
@NR: Liberals my arse, You’re as much of a tight-assed demagogue as any freaking Republican. And you’re off my radar as of now.
FlipYrWhig
@PsiFighter37: NR, Bailey, DCF, and Applejinx high-fiving each other for boldness and insight and saying TOLDJASO BERNIE RULES for hosannas from one another is functionally equivalent to a boot stomping on a human face forever.
NR
@Emma: Oh, that’s cute. The same people who have blamed liberals for everything that went wrong in the last eight years (when we were not in charge for any stretch of it) are now calling me a demagogue.
Project, much?
SFAW
@NR:
Do tell.
Did I mistakenly end up at RedStoat, thinking it was Balloon Juice?
raven
@efgoldman: She’s at hers and I’m at mine.
PhoenixRising
@Bailey: In closing: The Dem Party in WI failed in its only mission. There were 2 Dems in statewide races. One lost narrowly–we think. The other got creamed. Dane County didn’t show up and shift those totals in the way everyone expected.
The burden of proof is on those who are sure that their preferred candidate or set of policy preferences or message or all 3 would have easily overcome the structural factors that led to that outcome. Insisting on shifting all blame away from people who voted for Stein, because Clinton was a neoliberal fascist, is not a good technique to set the direction of the party going forward. The pipe fitters prefer unrealistic bullshit from a racist populist to the truth from a woman; most of them didn’t vote for Obama either.
If you’ve been involved in Democratic work for any amount of time, you must realize that the name-calling and shrieking at everyone who points out that we cannot policy our way to those voters being reliable Democrats isn’t effective.
Why are you so damn mad at anyone who points out that your preferred narrative (insufficiently appealing candidate didn’t campaign right) could be correct, but that wouldn’t amount to a strategy going forward?
FlipYrWhig
@SFAW: NR’s theory of politics is that Democrats should get to doing what NR likes, posthaste, and that the reason why they don’t is some mix of ineptitude, spite, and corruption. The fact that elected Democrats include a lot of people who genuinely have different ideas from NR’s and have good reason to think their constituents do too… that doesn’t seem to affect this view, curiously enough. But at least it’s internally consistent. Daft, but internally consistent.
cbear
@Bailey:
Sadly, no. I had the temerity to post a question about the Clinton speeches to banks during the primary and Mnemosyne and Cacti and a whole mob of BJ’ers stripped me of my credentials in a secret ceremony.
Oh God, it was horrible! They just kept chanting and screaming the same thing at me over and over and over “Heretic, Heretic, Heretic” until my will and spirit were broken.
I’m praying you don’t suffer the same fate.
janeform
@Mnemosyne: 100% correct.
eta: Our county Dem party has had about 150 new people sign up since the election. Encouraging.
Aardvark Annie
@Mnemosyne:
I guess I am living off your contributions at this point in my life. I’m seventy-three. But I will fight until I die for your benefits. Please don’t tar all codgers with the same brush.
I campaigned for Bernie. When he got skewered by the DNC, I sucked it up and campaigned for Clinton…..although I have never liked either of them much.
It does us no good at all to attack each other. Direct your bitterness in a direction that counts
Mnemosyne
@cbear:
And Clinton’s speeches to banks were worse in your book than Jill Stein’s speeches to Vladimir Putin?
Every single candidate for president except Clinton — including, yes, St. Bernard the Incorruptible — had direct ties to Vladimir Putin and you’re still worried about a speech to Goldman fucking Sachs?
FlipYrWhig
@PhoenixRising: Has the Democratic Party of Wisconsin had any success since Tammy Baldwin in 2012?
Mnemosyne
@Aardvark Annie:
I’m only bitter towards the people who are taking my money while voting to end the system before I can benefit from it myself. If you didn’t vote that way, I have no problem with you personally, but the demographic group you belong to is mostly made up of assholes. I’m a married, college-educated white woman, so I, too, am stuck in a demographic group dominated by assholes.
NR
@FlipYrWhig: It’s not about doing things I like, it’s about doing things that will a) benefit working Americans instead of big corporate donors, which also happen to be things that will b) earn the support of enough voters to win elections.
Which is a decidedly better approach than yours, which is to double and triple and quadruple down on a strategy that has turned the Democrats from the dominant political party in America into a regional party confined to the Northeast and the West Coast.
You guys like Bill Clinton, right? Why didn’t you listen to him when he said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?
FlipYrWhig
@NR: As it happens, no, I don’t especially like Bill Clinton. Incidentally, when the Democrats were the dominant party it was on the strength of centrists from the Sun Belt and the suburbs, not because of liberal anything. That’s what “Blue Dogs” are. Would that it weren’t so, but so it be. Your whole theory is wishful thinking smeared in dogshit, as usual.
Poopyman
@Adam L Silverman: Here are the way things are as I see them, and I see them as someone who has insight into how some of these things are accomplished.
*- A recount will not reveal anything about any hacking.
*- A system does not need to be connected to the internet to be hacked.
*- Once a system is hacked, the malware installed can delete itself and cover traces of itself.
*- A forensic analysis this long after the fact will not be able to detect such malware, as Prof. Halderman alludes to. But it could provide some insight into the probability of its having been hacked, and most likely find some ways to tighten the system for the future.
bemused senior
Anybody know if there is a pie filter that works in Opera on Android?
PhoenixRising
@FlipYrWhig: No, that’s the funny part. By which I mean ‘odd’, not ‘haha’. Tammy Baldwin was able to win a statewide race, and Obama did as well…but off year the party’s weaknesses have been on display. Which is why (I’m guessing) DaneCo and Milwaukee Dems were unrealistic about the general: The recent data indicated that they could expect Dem turnout in a year divisible by 4, AND there was good turnout in the Dem primary.
If all of those voters had turned around and voted a straight Dem ticket in the general, we’d be having a very different conversation about who failed and needs to be purged from the party. So why didn’t they? (Or…didn’t they? is I guess the argument for an audit and recount.) Apparently it’s not allowed to suggest that some of them rode the Sanders plane all the way down into the jungle and caught a ride home on Stein Air. It’s also somehow irrelevant what % of the late deciders broke for Trump when the FBI attacked Hillary. It’s not clear to me why those explanations are unspeakable while Bad Candidate Failed Centrism is the only proper one.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
You forgot the Plains states (Dorgan, Conrad, Johnson, Nelson, sort of Baucus and Salazar (since the subject is ’08), and a whole bunch of ConservaDems who staggered into office on a fluke or a wave or family tradition– Lincoln, Pryor, Landrieu, Bayh, the Alaska fluke whose name escapes me. But NR has never had a fucking clue who or what those people are
Bailey
@PhoenixRising:
Yeah, not really in closing, but whatever. You’ve ignored the fact that it is the normal way of things for national campaigns to coordinate with local ones, to make sure their marketing materials and yard signs are in place, to set up an appropriate amount of field offices and to, you know, show up.
I have no idea whether Sanders would have won or not. I know that he won in the primaries in the critical states we needed. I have no idea whether, had he secured the nomination instead of Clinton, non-white voters would have fallen in line with him. I just don’t know. I did know, however, that Clinton was going to lose. I knew that from the beginning. I had a pretty good idea why and how she’d lose. Watching her campaign was torturous because it was just wrong in almost every possible way. The polling gave me a glimmer of hope and made me gut check my own assumptions, and I really, really wanted her to win. But in the end, she lost in every way I thought she’d lose and a few more I hadn’t considered. End of story.
And you’d probably realize that a party trying to demographic it’s way to victory ends up in nothing but a rout, too. There has to be broad appeal AND policy. Mistermix’s OP was spot on. Quit trying to pretend that a minority voting constituency is somehow a zero sum game with sane economic policy.
Who am I mad at? I’m not mad at anyone. On the contrary, the normal group of super-fans can be counted on to show up to tell me to either fuck myself or blow a goat or die in a fire, or whatever other charming invitation might pop into one’s head.
But to the point, Dems need both an appealing candidate and a strong policy message. They had neither this year.
Felanius Kootea
@PhoenixRising: Because tackling the FBI’s meddling or taking concrete steps to reduce voter suppression or acknowledging that the Russians ran a successful misinformation campaign against Dems and figuring out how to prevent more of the same in the future is way harder than shitting on Hillary.
SFAW
@NR:
So the areas that are probably the most liberal in the US are the ones to which the Dems are confined, and the Dems have lost the more-conservative areas, but they’re losing because they’re not liberal enough? Interesting.
raven
who cares
Mnemosyne
@PhoenixRising:
Given the various hair-on-fire articles prior to the election about how Wisconsin’s voter ID law was making it almost impossible for people to get one, I’m wondering why the WI Dem Party didn’t do more on that. But, it’s easy for me to say from 1,800 miles away.
ETA: Fixed linky. I hope.
FlipYrWhig
@PhoenixRising: It certainly seems to me that Democratic and/or liberal Wisconsin has been punching below its apparent weight since the recall campaign if not before.
Bailey
@raven:
Since you asked, I guess I can’t include you in that category.
ruemara
@Bailey: You seriously are talking about things you don’t know. POC know the Clintons because there’s a good and bad track record. We also know Sanders, because there’s a track record of not giving a damn about us. And his “Fuck YOUR Identity; Worship MY Identity” politics is going to kill the Dems entirely off, because we’re fucking sick of you guys taking our money, volunteerism and votes, then patting us on the head when we say what about our issues. See also, the progressive groundswell to help POC vote over the past 6 years.
James Powell
@Bailey:
You missed the whole point. If you are a Democrat – and by that I mean not just someone who tends to vote for Democrats more than other parties but someone who really wants Democrats and their policies to prevail – then you had to be excited about three presidential terms in a row, you had to be absolutely fucking ecstatic about a Democrat appointing the replacement for Antonin Scalia, you had to be giddy at the thought of a woman taking the oath of office, you had to be filled with gleeful anticipation that the modest achievements of the Obama administration would be protected and, with a little luck, improved and extended.
If you weren’t excited by all those things and more, if you let your petty personal feelings about Hillary Clinton interfere with everything that Democrats are trying to do, with all the people that Democrats are trying to help, then you are not only not a True Democrat, you are a Republican-enabling doofus. Democrats find you annoying and Republicans smile in your face and laugh when you leave. You are not helping anyone or anything good. Please go from this place and don’t come back.
Felanius Kootea
Derek Black (Stormfront founder’s son) on why he left white nationalism.
Larkspur
@Mnemosyne: This is a very fine response, and I thank you. Sometimes I imagine what would happen if all of those service workers (and I don’t mean the Roombas, but I’d include the people who work on the assembly line, the drivers who deliver stock to the stores, and the clerks or fulfillment department workers who sell the damn Roombas) just went on strike for a week. It’s not going to happen, because we service work persons are not organized (we’re so different) and we can’t afford to lose a week’s pay (although you could count me in), but IF WE DID, everyone would fucking notice.
SFAW
@James Powell:
But Benghazi!!! And e-mails! And her private server (hacked 300 times by WikiLeaks, FSB, OGPU, the 7 Santini Brothers, and a bunch more)! And Wall Street!
You just don’t understaaaaand.
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It has long seemed to me that the number of ideological liberals in the Senate, whether it’s a majority-Democratic Senate or a majority-Republican Senate, has been somewhere around 25 at best. It ain’t like there are 40 awesome battling liberals and then a handful of problem children. The best of times, it’s half problem children. Ones who get elected by running on things like bipartisan, technocratic reasonableness and reining in runaway spending. Then they vote the same way they ran. This is not surprising and requires no detailed explanation, and wanting REAL BAD for things to work differently isn’t going to cut it, not for NR, not for Bernie Sanders, not for anybody.
glory b
@efgoldman: Don’t forget, Bernie cosigned Jeff Weaver’s statement that black voters in the south didn’t matter. The african american incarceration rate in his state is the highest in the nation, he didn’t ever take note of it.
His ethnic blind spot is enormous.
And an almost 4 million vote win isn’t close.
Larkspur
@bemused senior:
I am not one who knows, but I just have to say: that’s a mighty fine sentence. It’s lyrical; it makes me want to paint it or play it on a sitar or make a quilt that symbolizes it. Thank you.
Shared Humanity
@ruemara: Trump ran the most blatantly racist, misogynistic, hate filled campaign in recent history and nearly 54% of American voters rejected his vision of America. Were Trump supporters racist? Absolutely, but racists are in the minority and this election had far more going on then pure racism and misogyny.
cbear
@Mnemosyne: Lolz. You’re beyond parody at this point.
Btw, you forgot “CAMPING WORLD!!”
SFAW
@Larkspur:
You need to get out more.
glory b
@James Powell: Amen!
Why do so many of these folks have to be excited? Can’t you just be a grown up and vote for your own best interests? The candidate isn’t Santa Claus. Why does Clinton have to come to your state or city?
Mnemosyne
@cbear:
Hey, if you want to ignore the fact that the Russians put their hands all over our election from every angle, you can go ahead and do that. You’ll be in company with the MSM, which is still unwilling to point those connections out to its viewers even when there is photographic evidence of them.
Congratulations, you have now moved yourself into the category of “Willful Idiot.” Your badge should be arriving in the mail in 5-7 working days. Wear it with pride!
ETA: And if your only answer when told that millions of your fellow Americans were not permitted to vote because of voter suppression is “LOLZ!!” then you should probably get a troll badge, too.
Mnemosyne
@glory b:
I have to say, I vastly overestimated the emotional maturity of the majority of my fellow white Americans. I am ashamed of that.
Larkspur
@SFAW: Bless your heart, you are certainly right about that.
SFAW
@Larkspur:
Them’s fightin’ words ’round hyar.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@raven: Does Kirby still have a job? If so, what’s the over/under for how long? I’ll take the under.
raven
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): It’s his first year, freshman QB and a terrible O line. People are freaking but it what they should have expected.
Baud
I feel like we’ve had this debate before.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@raven: I think it’s a bit of an overreaction as well, but it’s an amusing question.
cbear
@Mnemosyne: What in the living fuck are you even talking about?
Your answer to my satirizing your incessant ravings is to scream “The Russians! The Russians!” as if that was in any way germane to anything I have ever posted only proves my point.
Jesus, lady, those bugs crawling on you must be the size of cats. Get a grip.
Like I said, you’re beyond parody.
Lizzy L
@Baud: Ya think? (Passes popcorn.) Truthfully, I am awed by the level of energy displayed by all comers. I think all parties should retire to their respective corners and just breathe for a while.
Sab
@Schlemazel: Clinton came to Ohio a lot, and she got clobbered here. Lost every county that wasn’t urban.
James Powell
@Mnemosyne:
I am right there with you. I am grievously disappointed in the educated, well-off, white people who voted for Trump. But I have been ranting and raving against the Good & Wise American Voters for quite a few years. We blame Trump and the Republicans and we should. We blame the press/media and we should. But we never go right at the real problem which is the morons and bigots who vote Republican and watch FOX and listen to Limbaugh. They are not poor misguided souls. They are assholes. Hateful, racist, small-minded, mean spirited assholes. I mean, I don’t want to cast any aspersions . . .
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Somewhere, Faye Dunaway may be reading this comment and wondering if the problem was that she underplayed Mommie Dearest, and Jesus is looking at the scars in his palms and thinking, at least I wasn’t this poor, tortured creature”
Emma
It is amazing how many men in this discussion think the problem is that Mnemosyne will not abandon facts.
PsiFighter37
@James Powell: Most Americans are assholes once they consider things past their front door. That is why it takes extraordinary politicians on our side to win the day (and the election).
Glidwrith
@Shared Humanity: And yet that racism enabled massive voter suppression in multiple states and because the butt hurt Rust belt whites were concentrated in some of those states we have president Shitgibbon.
cbear
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Somewhere, a lot of poor assholes has been reading your many comments over the last year, almost all of which have proven to be disastrously wrong, and thinking, “You know, that Jim guy is one smart asshole.”
Fuck off.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Jeffro
While we are busy feeding the trolls and what not, we could be beating on the Electors that they shouldn’t elect someone in thrall to Russia and Putin.
That’s just for starters.
Poopyman
@Baud:
You want a debate? That’s two doors down, on the left. This here is Abuse.
Glidwrith
@cbear: I am always interested when a new commenter/lurker shows up – they provide new insights or information and expertise. You have provided none of these things and have shit on multiple commentors that do contribute.
Troll.
TS
@Jeffro: Given the non stop (until Trump) right wing hate towards the USSR and then Russia, it is off the planet weird that the US will now join forces with Russia against the European Community – but this is what looks to be happening in the near future of world politics.
cbear
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Oooh, you got me there, Jim.
I made a boo-boo. Congratulations.
Now, fuck off.
Mnemosyne
@cbear:
Yes, it’s just my weird paranoia that makes me point out that the two circled people in this photo are Jill Stein and Michael Flynn, and the guy walking in front of the camera is Vladimir Putin.
Face it — you got played. The Russians pumped out reams of propaganda, and you fell for it. And now you’re pissed off that people are pointing it out to you.
Mnemosyne
@Jeffro:
Apparently, the new meme is that the Russians didn’t really do anything and we’re all just paranoid for pointing out the dozens of people who had Russian connections in this election and within the Trump administration.
Gvg
@Glidwrith: I have seen cbear before tho not recently. I don’t recall a particular viewpoint, I think they were sort of middle of the road. I don’t think he/she was a troll. Time will tell how they are now.
We don’t seem to be handling getting clobbered gracefully. Well Trump is so bad he makes me hyperventilate, but I am not sure this helps. One thing about these internet conversations is its easy to pile on and hard to take many people one after endothermic tell you, you are wrong. I think at least half of the comments are wrong…but I am not sure what is right. Still thinking it over.
glory b
@efgoldman: Well, shortly after the primaries, I heard a couple of his African American organizers being interviewed on Mark Thompson’s show on Sirius Radio. They said that it was hard to get any traction from Weaver and Devine, they had lots of ideas for turning out the black vote, but got rebuffed. This included Danny Glover, a big name for Bernie.
They agreed with a caller who pointed out that the video of white college guys yelling and clowning at African Americans who came in church vans to see Clinton wasn’t a goo dlook for his organization (lots of young black voters don’t like to see white guys disrespecting their elders, who knew?), and noted that Glover tried unsuccessfully to get some tickets for black students at a black college,resulting in the crowd for Bernie AT A BLACK COLLEGE to be about 80% white
cbear
@Glidwrith: New commenter/lurker?
I’ve been a commenter/lurker here since 2005. Who the fuck are you?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@cbear: i like you. I think we’re going to be bloggy pals
Jeffro
@Mnemosyne:
They have to deny it with every fiber of their being, because if it’s true (which it obviously is) then the cracks start to appear…how do they get to vent their white (and usually male) privilege against History’s Greatest Monster, Enabler of De Minoriteez, if it means going along with Russia and being a willing dupe of Vladimir Putin??!? Wingnuts heads are splodin’ all over the place. Well not yet, but let’s help them get there….
Actually, let’s just beat on the Electors, the media, and ask them: if positions were reversed, what would you expect Democratic Electors to do?
I thought so.
Jeffro
@Mnemosyne: Seconded, amen and amen.
Now let’s ramp up and make that people know this election isn’t over yet. It’s just a matter of which country Americans support: America, or Russia?
Heck, let’s help ’em out:
1) You know, that there Russian propaganda was really cleverly designed, I can see how some folks might think it was the real deal.
2) It’s amazing how the Russians thought they might get folks so ramped up against Hillary that they forgot to fact-check a few basic things…
3) I had no idea Putin was a former KGB officer and stuff like this is second nature to him…it’s almost a form of warfare, if you think about it…
4) it’s weird to think that this Flynn guy AND Jill Stein were both guests at a Putin dinner last year…last year!…Flynn sure has some strong pro-Putin views, which is kind of weird also for a former US officer…
hamandeggs
Yeah, don’t trust Stein. Her long-term goal is to probably help fracture the center-left.
Also…Richard Spencer was married to Russian writer, Nina Kouprianova (aka Nina Byzantina). They separated in October 2016. Weird how so much as some kinda Russian angle, huh?
Botsplainer
The next century will be Chinese. The PRC will have to demonstrate to the Putinized world of Europe, North America, Oceania and Russia how responsible government looks after the citizenry and aims to improve the lot for a multiethnic populace.
In the new bipolar world, there are white kleptocrats, then there are the Asians.
Glidwrith
@cbear: And you repeat yourself and are rude to boot. My ‘nym is easily searchable. When you have something worth saying, I will pay attention. ‘Bye.
schrodinger's cat
@Botsplainer: Ask the Tibetans how tolerant the Chinese are of ethnic and religious diversity.
Botsplainer
@schrodinger’s cat:
China is constantly evolving internally over the course of the past 50 years. They’ll do better than we did.
Mnemosyne
Christmas in Connecticut is not the best Christmas movie ever, but it does have an unparalleled cavalcade of character actors. When you have Una O’Connor and S.Z. Sakall in the same movie, plus Sydney Greenstreet in a rare affable role, it’s hard to go completely wrong.
Miss Bianca
@Emma: Emma! Why can’t you be more understanding of how many men need to tell women they’re hysterical for sticking to the facts? When they’re facts they don’t like? It’s all part and parcel of our refusal to admit that the white guy *they* preferred should have been the candidate, even tho’ he didn’t win the primaries. Get with the program, woman!
Kathleen
@ruemara: I totally second what you said. On all counts.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: I actually really like that movie. That and Holiday are two of my favorite Christmas/New Year’s movie treats.
Kathleen
@debbie: I agree with that as well. I took the survey sent out by Ohio Dems and wrote that they/we need to become proactive in battling voter suppression and helping people get ID’s.
PsiFighter37
@Botsplainer: They won’t. I have been there, and the empty apartment buildings in Shanghai, and the constant smog everywhere I have been, suggests they will flame out in a bigger way than the U.S. is about to.
We are about to decline, as a species, on a global scale. Just enjoy it while your city remains above water.
PF 37 +5
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
We haven’t watched Holiday in a while. We should probably add it to the rotation.
I think the whole “getting ready to marry another guy at the exact same time” thing kind of creeps me out. But I love the dueling accents thing that O’Connor and “Cuddles” Sakall (yes, that’s how he was sometimes billed) have.
ETA: Also, too, did you know that the Hepburn/Grant Holiday is actually a remake? I can’t remember if I have the Pre-Code version in my library, but it still exists.
PsiFighter37
@Kathleen: There’s an actual human being organizing Ohio Democrats? Quick, someone tell Ted Strickland!
I know I’m being an asshole, but seriously – it’s time to let OH float free and embrace its destiny as a hick backwater. If white unionized households want it, let them have it hard.
cbear
@Glidwrith: Yeah, I’ll get right on that—finding something to say that you deem worthwhile. Maybe next time you might consider taking your own advice and searching someone else’s ‘nym before labeling them as a troll. It’s one of those things that tends to elicit a rude response.
G’night
MomSense
@Jeffro:
Sounds more productive to me.
Zinsky
I agree with mistermix on these points – Democrats need to simplify their message and economize the words they use to communicate their platform and their stances on issues. Republicans never have a message longer than what fits on a bumper sticker. Their constituents wouldn’t be able to process it mentally. We need slogans like: Democrats value human rights over property rights. Democracy believe in denuclearization. Democrats believe in combatting income inequality by establishing living wages. Democrats believe in eradicating hunger because we can. And so on…
Until we can articulate a package of effective middle-class messages simply and powerfully, we are going to struggle to regain majorities in Congress.
Botsplainer
@Mnemosyne:
Best Christmas movie any and everywhere is every adaptation of “A Christmas Carol”, not that white Christian Americans people will ever really take Dickens’ full message to heart.
Far as I’m concerned, there were only two writers in the Anglo-American literary world that had their shit together and totally got it – Dickens and Clemens/Twain.
Kathleen
@PsiFighter37: You know, when I think of how Obama saved the auto industry, which saved a good part of the Ohio economy, I can totally agree with what you’re saying. But my county supported Hillary (she out performed Obama actually) and managed to get 2 more Dems in key county offices, which in Hamilton County is close to a miracle. So there are pockets of good buckeyes in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. And I don’t feel I should complain about Ohio Dem Party because I haven’t gotten off my glutes to get involved or support them. I need to change that. But again, I understand your viewpoint and if I didn’t live here I would probably say the same thing.
Mnemosyne
@Zinsky:
We had this one this past election that I still think we should keep: “Stronger Together.”
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: I signed up to be a precinct committee-person last week. I do most of my volunteering through my local district, but I will turn up the effort from here on out.
CaseyL
It’s not a mystery why the Right, which was anti-commie, is now pro-Russia.
Russia ain’t communist anymore.
Russia is an extremely corrupt kleptocracy, with a strongman running things who kills opponents, journalists, and other people who look at him funny. Russia is also not known for its tolerance of diversity: the Orthodox Catholic Church is very powerful there, and they jail people for heresy (thus earning Russia the loyalty of people like Dreher, who yearns for a theocracy).
Those are all hunky-dory with the Right, and with Trump & Co.
Mnemosyne
@efgoldman:
The “Christmas in Connecticut” version is particularly weird because part of the farce is that the judge keeps showing up at the house to perform the wedding ceremony and it keeps having to be put off again, so it’s not just that she’s engaged to someone else.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
Yes, you are my poster girl for getting other people here to do the same thing! ?
Botsplainer
@Kathleen:
No reward was given Obama and the Dems for saving the car industry in the Rust Belt.
WWC resented it.
Suzanne
Best Christmas movie is and probably always will be “Die Hard”.
I love shit blowing up. I’m a simple creature.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
Tee Fury has the holiday t-shirt of your dreams.
Corner Stone
@Suzanne: I’ll bet he wishes he had some socks and sandals when shit went down.
John
Despite Clinton not contacting Soglin, turnout was up in Madison and she won more votes here than Obama in 2012. She was always going to win Madison; her mistake was not visiting or focusing on Milwaukee and the rest of the state.
Suzanne
@Botsplainer: The Rust Belt is dying and instead of facing reality, I predict that they will continue to vote erratically. They want something that no president or policy can provide, and the sensible move would be to move to a thriving city, but apparently that’s a bridge too far.
Most urban planners, architects, and futurists will say that most people should not live in rural areas or small, loosely populated, spread out towns anyway. It’s not sustainable. We need people living in rural areas to grow food and resources, and we need enough people to provide them with essential services, but other than that, we all need to pack in closer together to reduce demand on infrastructure and to share resources. We need public mass transport instead of loose, car-centric development. That doesn’t need to be crazy, like Manhattan or Tokyo, but more like Paris level of density. It is a challenge to increase density for poor people without devolving into slum or favela conditions, so we will need to have good policy in the arsenal in order to make it happen.
Corner Stone
This thread is like a whole lot of condensed Crazytown. Thank God I turned my Sonos playlist up to Blow My Balls Off levels.
Although the return of JSF’s alterkaker ego was glorious, all by itself.
Suzanne
@Corner Stone: You’re lucky I’m not the drunk rageaholic. Let’s hug.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: I just showed that shirt to Mr. Suzanne and asked him to buy it for me. That is amazing.
BillinGlendaleCA
@cbear: Apparently you’ve not been around Balloon Juice much since election day. You seemed to have missed Mnemosyne’s new hobbyhorse. I’m not sure how you could have missed it, it’s shinny and sparkly with streamers. She’s been talking, not about Russians, but voter disenfranchisement and getting involved in your local Democratic Party*. Now, do try to follow along.
*Hell, she’s talked about these issues more than the H-word, I somewhat concerned.
Corner Stone
@Suzanne: I make a pretty damn good salary and I can not afford to live inside 610 loop for Houston and also send my son to a school that will actually spend resources educating him.
It’s not even about being poor or transportation or a lot of that. I spent two years looking around the outskirts of Houston for somewhere I could afford. I then spent 8 months or so looking for tear downs within 20 minutes of downtown Austin. All at $350K or more for just the lot, before demolition costs.
J R in WV
@Bailey:
So, what’s your favorite kind of pie? I made a pecan pie, with a dash of Chinese Five Spice in it, which has anise primarily, and I used maple syrup instead of corn syrup. There were 8 of us for dinner, and it went away totally. With vanilla ice cream from a local dairy, which is really great.
I also like sour cherry pie, with vanilla ice cream. Once I made a lemon meringue pie, served after a fancy stir fry that came out great. We each took a bite of pie, together, nearly in unison, and each went “Yuuucccck…” because I left the fresh squeezed lemon juice on the counter. So it came out beautiful but flavorless sugar sweet pie.
But I have won pie-baking contests at summer parties, whole-wheat crust, home raised eggs, fresh fruit, real ingredients.
What kind of pie do you like?
Suzanne
@Corner Stone: I know. I am in the same boat. It’s a tough problem for those of us that live out here in the western cities, most of which were heavily developed in the age of automobiles.
It is a significant challenge for design professionals, planners, etc.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
If I’m not dead, and I am actually not sure of that, then someone fucking end this for me please.
Corner Stone
@Suzanne: I still want my hug.
Suzanne
@Corner Stone: Dawwwwww.
Hey, I might be a snobby brat, but at least I’m fun.
Gretchen
@Bailey: @Bailey: The expression is “Lo and behold”, not “Low and behold”
Botsplainer
@Suzanne:
It took extreme dislocation and intentional famine for Stalin to collectivize agriculture inthe Russian and Ukrainian breadbaskets. Peasant farmers, tenant farmers and their hangers on love pretending that their decentralized homes and hamlets provide some slight measure of freedom.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Suzanne: I’ve been riding public transportation here in LA quite a bit lately, I’ve noticed that there’s quite a bit of new development in the immediate proximity to subway/light rail stations. It takes about a decade or so, but it happens.
Corner Stone
@efgoldman: Fuck you, you elitist pig fucker. It’s “chainsaw”.
Corner Stone
Now, where’s muh ballot?
James Powell
@ruemara:
This is a basic fact of American politics. One that the Republicans have exploited and nurtured since Reagan. And one that the U.S. press/media will never never never acknowledge. And one that Democrats have to tiptoe around, pretend it is a tiny minority of Americans who nobody really knows or understands.
Suzanne
@Botsplainer: Yeah, it will not be easy. In fact, it may end up as one of the most challenging migrations in human history. But climate change and globalization will make it happen. It’s just a matter of if we want to do it painfully and inequitably, or do we want to plan ahead and attempt to do it with respect for human dignity.
I think I know the answer.
Suzanne
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yes. Phoenix is experiencing the same thing. We put in our first light rail line about seven years ago, and it has stimulated some denser, more affluent development. The problem now is social. In Scottsdale (Phoenix’s Beverly Hills or La Jolla), the voters rejected the light rail even though downtown Scottsdale has a lot of bars and clubs, because the residents don’t want Those People coming in. A line extension in south Phoenix that goes through a poor and working-class area that is heavily Latino has been very controversial, because it provides access for Those People. Another new line that is being planned has two routes that are being considered. One goes by the university and a large high-tech employer, then finishes at a large shopping area. The other route is through another poor, Latino neighborhood, and the City Council is trying to gentrify and drive Those People that live and work there out of their neighborhood so they can redevelop it and make it “cooler”.
So densification will be unpleasant
BillinGlendaleCA
@efgoldman: Our mass transit is in the city, not much wide open, to be developed places here.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Suzanne: The next phase(planned but not under construction) of our subway will be though Beverly Hills an out to UCLA. One of the first two lines to open(the Blue Line) when though the neighborhoods where “those people” live(Watts, Compton, and South LA). It took it a few months ago(I’d taken it a few times when it first opened) and it’s, well, different.
Gretchen
@James Powell: well said
Suzanne
@efgoldman: It’s going to suck. What’s happening in the Bay Area is what we have to look forward to, unless municipalities manage to overcome the NIMBYs and figure out regionally appropriate ways to densify.
But many small rural towns are dying, and the sooner we plan for that, the better.
Elizabeth
@artem1s: Re your compact idea…
It has been done, it can be done and here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact
BillinGlendaleCA
@Suzanne: Speaking of densifiication, Downtown LA has alot of new construction. A lot is conversion of old office space into residential, and building on parking lots that were cleared in the 50’s and 60’s. Some of this new construction of residential building is the boxy, fugly style. I hate this style, and it’s worse when it sits next to a century old structure. I saw one really large new construction where they actually tried(quite successfully) to design it in a style that didn’t clash with the other buildings in the neighborhood. But gawd, I really hate the current trend in apartment/condo architecture. it’s fugly.
Morzer
@glory b:
Why do people keep demanding tasty food in restaurants? They should just eat gruel and be grateful!
And for the Jill Stein fans out there:
.
.
.
I wonder which party and which candidate she’s really going after with this recount.
Morzer
@Corner Stone:
I have it on good authority that efgoldman does not, in fact, demand that those pigs be elitists. He’s quite happy to make do with populist pigs.
Morzer
@efgoldman:
Fat, sugar, caffeine and salt. All a body needs.
Suzanne
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Ummmmm, brutalist?
In general, architects tend to think that buildings should fit into their temporal context, and that buildings designed and constructed in the 2010s should not try to look like buildings from other periods. But buildings should relate to their spatial context in some other way—massing, materials, rhythm, etc. The mix of styles is part of the fun.
However, please remember that residential architecture is where good taste goes to die, as a rule. This is just part of why I don’t do residential.
Elizabeth
@Mnemosyne:
The next big labor movement needs to really focus a lot more on service jobs. Which seemed to be the case under SEIU but it petered out apparently?
Suzanne
@efgoldman: The more stakeholders you involve, the worse it gets. Every time. Design by committee never turns out well. That’s not to say that designers shouldn’t listen to everyone’s needs and wants and visions, because they should. But at some point, on the best projects, the stakeholders involved remember why they hired whomever they hired and they stop trying to make a project all things to all people, and instead let the designers…..design.
The last time I was in Boston was about 7-8 years ago for a conference. The Convention Center was new or very close to new at the time. I liked the view, but convention centers are typically snoreful. I think we stayed in Back Bay.
Morzer
@Elizabeth:
A lot of recent progress in labor rights and unionization has come from people in the fast food sector getting together and finding ways to fight back.
Suzanne
@efgoldman: I used to get to Boston with some regularity, but it has been a while. I get to New York more.
What you’re describing is why densification is going to be really bad for a lot of people. Highest and best use of prominent urban land is not for mid-rise residential development for condos and townhouses for families. Yet that is what we need—not high-density lofts for DINKs, not tenements, not studios. Or we need to get better at building that stuff around transit nodes. But developers like to build $750K one-bedroom condos in towers with rooftop swimming pools and bars that serve $20 martinis. So we have an approaching crisis.
Bailey
@James Powell:
I think you’re missing the point because now you’re saying in order to be a Democrat I had to be fucking ecstatic about a candidate that changes her position on things more frequently than I change my shoes. I had to be giddy about a candidate who thought right after the worst financial crisis in 70 years was the best time to chow down on Wall Street. And apparently I had to be over the moon about a candidate under FBI investigation for the majority of the campaign.
Any Democrat would have given us a preferable replacement for Scalia. Having a female president would be amazing, and it is time, but it cannot be the primary reason to be excited about a candidate. After all, there’s no way I’d vote for Sarah Palin, but, wait for it, she’ll probably be the first female president.
The fact that you can’t tell that many people have issues with Hillary Clinton that aren’t petty at all and, in fact, are fundamental to the identity of the party itself tells me that you have a lot to learn—and probably a lot of elections to lose–before you figure out the disconnect.
James Powell
@Bailey:
See? It’s just like I said. You’re a Republican enabling doofus. I never said anything about the candidate you willfully obtuse bonehead. I’m talking about the country, the political culture, the people who live here, and how different their lives might have been. But you don’t care about those things. So you go on waiting for one of those pure and perfect candidates that run in all those fairly conducted elections you have in your imagination.
low-tech cyclist
mistermix, I agree with others here that the opportunity the Dems missed in TX-32 would more likely have been picked up by a 50-state strategy than by any sort of intelligent targeting.
It’s got a Cook PVI of R+10, and Romney won it by 15.5%. Who’s going to target this one? If I’m basing my targeting on how we did in the *extremely* good year of 2008, I’m still only going to target districts with R+7 or less.
OK, you might say, at some point it became known that Clinton was running stronger in the Sun Belt, and weaker in the Rust Belt, relative to past Dem candidates. But then WHEN did this become known? Probably well after the point when a good candidate could have been recruited to run against Sessions.
The Dems need to be ready to compete everywhere. Not just in order to capitalize on opportunities like this, but in order to have people on the ground arguing for what we Dems believe in, so that we can win hearts and minds, and make things like this happen from the ground up.
The DNC needs to be in the business of building strong state and local parties that can do a lot of this work themselves, to recruit candidates and run campaigns for state legislature and for the House in ways that work well locally, and can tell when the ground is shifting locally before the DNC sees it. And the DNC/DCCC/DLCC can then help out when the state and local parties say, “hey, we’ve got a real chance in [insert House or state legislative district], and we think we can win it if we can get a little more money.”
But the fact is that the 50-state strategy worked, and not just at the Presidential level, but all the way up and down the ladder, from state legislatures on up. And then the Dems abandoned it, and now we’re in the crapper, from President all the way down to state legislatures. And that latter bit of erosion has been constant over the Obama Administration. Clinton got 2 million more votes than Trump did, and we’ve got nothing at ANY level to show for it.
Morzer
@low-tech cyclist:
You can’t win a seat if you don’t field a candidate. Sure, you’ll spend money on candidates who go nowhere – but that’s the price you pay for maximizing your chances in the electoral cas.ino.
Applejinx
@Bailey:
That last is a dumb objection since the FBI is run out of Russia now. And I WANTED her to change her position, and Hillary obligingly did, and I even managed to convince a number of people this was a good thing: showed she was smart enough to see that the 90s neoliberal thing was played out. It might not have been true, but it helped.
I also wanted her to win. Seems like she should have been able to win against Donald Fucking Trump. That’s not the highest bar in the whole wide world. I thought one of the narratives was that he was a Manchurian Candidate and the one guy the Clintons wanted to run against, because he was such a trainwreck and basic oppo research would be Christmas Morning every day all day?
Maybe wanting to run against only the biggest most epic trainwreck was a sign of weakness. I would rather run against Paul Ryan and go to the mat on his granny-starving, privatizing ways as a polar opposite. But if Clinton simply is not that opposite to guys like Ryan, I can see how all this happened.
Kathleen
@James Powell: Know I’m probably too late to thread, but I think it started with Nixon in 1968 with Southern Strategy.
SFAW
@James Powell:
Bailey still takes his/her Mumia sweatshirt out for a spin, every so often.
Thornton Hall
@Morzer: “that’s the price you pay” Why do people think the DNC and the DCCC have infinite money?
Bailey
@James Powell:
I’m sorry, I did this by how? By voting for the milquetoast presidential candidate you so enthusiastically endorsed? Which of us is really the Republican enabling doofus? The one who consistently votes for Democrats or the one who morbidly insists on putting forth candidates that guarantees Republican victories?
It’s very cute that you have some childish notion that the Tinkerbell clap-louder approach somehow works on the electoral level.
Tom65
Oh Nowyou want to know? Anyone who was paying attention knew, the minute the DNC started washing the money through the state parties, who had money that was supposedly for down-ticket candidates for about a week.
What wonderfully short and selective memories on display here. At some point you’re going to have to admit that the so-called “Bernie Bros” were right about a few things.
SFAW
@James Powell:
As Upton Sinclair (purportedly) noted: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
You can keep talking about Dem (anticipated) policies until you’re Smurf in the face, Bailey will keep talking about Hitlary and how she was the worst candidate since Kevin Phillips-Bong, and Al Gore lost Tennessee so it’s not Nader’s fault, and so forth. And Mumia.
DougJ
I couldn’t agree more.
Shared Humanity
Arguments are pretty nasty here. At some point, we will have to acknowledge that the 2016 election confirmed for anyone who is paying attention that we are a center/right nation. Sure, Bernie ran an effective campaign, articulating a lot of Socialist ideas, but he lost in the primaries and our more centrist candidate lost in the general.
The ideology of the left is bankrupt, its adherents a motley mix of bitter old white men wearing berets and the youngs who don’t know any better. We were also once captivated in our youth but gained wisdom as our pensions and 401k’s grew.
Shared Humanity
@Glidwrith: Yep.
SFAW
@Shared Humanity:
Yeah, whatever, thanks for sharing those deep thoughts with all of us morons.
But, please, do keep in touch, and write us if you get a clue.
Shared Humanity
@SFAW:
Should have put my Snark emoji on it. I do believe we are a center right country and I think there are a lot of us baby boomers who have walked away from our leftist leanings of our youth. I still count myself a wild eyed leftist pacifist. What I do not believe is that the ideology of the Left is bankrupt.
SFAW
@Shared Humanity:
My apologies. My snark-o-meter is apparently gersput.
However, I think you’re incorrect about the center-right thing — mainly because survey after survey has showed that liberal policies are what are favored by majorities in this country, sometimes by a lot. The problem comes when the word “liberal” gets attached to a survey question. It’s not unlike the support for Obamacare — as long as Obama’s name was not mentioned or hinted at. There was a concerted effort, starting at least as far back as Bush 41, to turn “liberal” into an epithet as vile as “child molester.” As with the working-the-refs the Wingnuts did vis-a-vis the MSM, it eventually succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Those unAmerican fucks, may they burn in Hell.
Shared Humanity
@SFAW: Not to worry. I don’t come here often. I spend most of my time at Eschaton.
justawriter
At comment #315, it is unlikely that anyone will ever read this, but I do have to give a rebuttal to mistermix’s “Dakota” comments. I’ve lived in North Dakota almost all of my life and have been a liberal/union activist or journalist for most of that time. In my state, the Democratic party went into a steep decline after 1992. Representation went from a split legislature to basically a 25-75 supermajority for Republicans. After Dean took over the DNC, that slide was starting to be reversed because there was money available for a permanent Democratic staff presence in the state to recruit candidates and provide an alternative message to an overwhelmingly conservative local press. After 2008, all the press releases no longer came from Bismarck but from Minneapolis and just parroted the latest national message of the day. By 2008, the D’s had stopped hemorrhaging seats in the legislature and had gone from a quarter to a third of the house and senates, roughly. In the last election, it dropped to about 15 percent with both the house and senate minority leaders and the state democratic party chairman losing their seats. Going from Dean to the OFA led DNC has been an utter and horrible disaster.
nominus
TX-32 has https://www.facebook.com/DaniForCongress/ running in 2018, don’t know when it was announced or if there will be any others in the primary