There are two narratives emerging to explain the shit-gibbon’s triumph. In one telling, the Democrats are to blame for driving white folks into the arms of the shit-gibbon. They’ve failed to address economic dislocation and spent too much time kowtowing to elites. They nominated an “insider.” To move forward, they must adopt economic populism to appeal to the shit-gibbon’s voters.
In the other telling, the shit-gibbon harnessed a wave of white nationalism and status angst that was heightened by eight years of a black president and the prospect of a woman president. A joint Russia-WikiLeaks project helped the shit-gibbon divide and demoralize the Democrats, and with an assist from the Beltway press, voter suppression and the FBI, the shit-gibbon won.
The first narrative seems to be gaining traction. But I think the second version is more accurate. The majority of white folks have been voting Republican since Nixon, and it’s not because the Republicans address their economic concerns. It’s because Republicans indulge rural America’s racism, sexism, xenophobia, religious intolerance and gun fetish in exchange for cart blanche to loot the Treasury.
The data just doesn’t support the “economic anxiety” or “outsider” explanations, since Republicans haven’t done jack-shit to address rural America’s plight and establishment Republican pols were returned to congress in even greater numbers. Also, the shit-gibbon didn’t garner as many votes as Romney or McCain, which wouldn’t have been the case if voters of all stripes were flocking to his “reformist” agenda. The scant voting data I’ve seen so far suggests turnout was down across the board, but rural voters went all-in for the shit-gibbon.
I think the voters who went gaga for the shit-gibbon voted for him because they share his worst qualities, and this Democrat ain’t getting on board with any movement to attract them. Yes, money in politics and wealth inequality are huge problems. Only one party recognizes that and has done anything to address it, and it’s the Democrats. The shit-gibbon vowed to undo the work Obama has done to address it during the campaign, and Hillary Clinton promised to do more. The shit-gibbon voters endorsed MOAR inequality.
I don’t know what the answer is, but the “economic anxiety” theory is bullshit on stilts, and I hope it doesn’t become the guiding principle of the party reboot. Maybe it’s simply a matter of choosing a candidate with charisma. The shit-gibbon apparently has it. Obama has it. Bill Clinton has it. GWB has it. Hillary Clinton doesn’t. It’s a dumb reason to disqualify someone, but we’re apparently a dumb country.
Trentrunner
1. Hillary won the popular vote.
2. This election was very, very close.
I’m not sure we need to do anything significantly different, except nominate a candidate who will get slightly more votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Corner Stone
Destined to become infinitely more stupid in the short and longer terms. With federal cover R states will press the gas pedal to cut education funding, grade school curriculum revampment, and how higher education is administered.
The new Dark Ages, if you will.
Corner Stone
Oh God. Obama’s speaking. In the Oval Office. With that disgusting attempt of a human being. GOD HELP ME! STRENGTH!
Trentrunner
Andrea Mitchell is literally having an orgasm at the Obama-Trump rapprochement. The true Villager.
Betty Cracker
@Corner Stone: I wouldn’t watch that for all the tea in China. Netflix only for me, at least until this crushing depression lifts.
Major Major Major Major
@Trentrunner: #2 is missing in basically every gloss of the election. It was close enough to steal. Between voter ID and other more blatant forms of suppression, maybe they did. It certainly didn’t help.
I’d also add that ‘third terms’, as it were, are very difficult to win.
Doesn’t mean there aren’t things to learn, of course.
Karen S.
Yeah, I’m still not in a place where I can believe that “economic anxiety” had anything to do with oodles of white people (not just working class whites either; middle and upper class whites went for him, too) going ga-ga over Hair Fuhrer. They love that he’s an authoritarian bully and love that he’s given them license to openly indulge their bigotry. I’ve heard since Tuesday night of a few instances racist graffiti, anti-Semitic graffiti and anti-transgender harassment where the perpetrators thoughtfully signed Trump’s name to the deeds. I’ve yet to hear of any bankers or, say, coal mine owners being harassed or their property vandalized. Maybe I just haven’t heard of it yet. Yeah, that’s it.
Mary G
Bullshit on stilts is my new band name. I’m with Betty.
eldorado
i live and work in trumpland central. i can tell you for a fact it is almost entirely part two.
Mart
From the country folks I work with the economic anxiety is they are working there asses off in multiple low paying jobs, they believe they are heavily taxed, and all that tax money is going to the blahs (blacks and illegals) to pay for there Obamacare and welfare. When I mention 50% of the poor blahs are white, or what we spend on defense compared to the rest of the world, they nod and carry on without acknowledgement. This also applies to middle and upper middle class whites. The socialist dems are giving all my money to the blahs.
Richard Mayhew
@Karen S.: agreed… 100,000 strategically placed voters is the difference.
schrodinger's cat
My take is simple: The people who voted for the Republican nominee are afraid of the new kid and aligned with the school yard bully to keep them safe.
Jonny Scrum-half
Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho also had charisma.
I agree that the “economic anxiety” explanation is a beard to cover-up some very unflattering conclusions about the people who voted for Trump. It’s not that the economic problems aren’t real, but as noted the Republicans really have never even suggested doing anything about them and Trump is very unlikely to be any different.
I disagree with anyone who says that we shouldn’t even bother to try to explain things to the Trump voters. They may be deplorable, but I don’t see them as irredeemable. But I don’t have the slightest idea how to get through to them. I gave up discussing politics with people this election season because, after several frustrating conversations, I decided that if simply looking at Donald Trump’s statements and actions wasn’t enough to persuade someone that he was unfit for the office, there was nothing I could say to change that viewpoint.
cervantes
Let us not forget to mention the catastrophic failure of the corporate media. We also need to work the refs the way the right has been doing for decades now.
clay
Betty, please. This man is about to take the Presidential oath. To refer to him as “the shit-gibbon” over and over again is unworthy of his stature.
Please, in the future, make it “The Shit-Gibbon”. He deserves that much. (And no more.)
3Jane Tessier-Ashpool (a/k/a Lorinda Pike)
“But I think the second version is more accurate. The majority of white folks have been voting Republican since Nixon, and it’s not because the Republicans address their economic concerns. It’s because Republicans indulge rural America’s racism, sexism, xenophobia, religious intolerance and gun fetish in exchange for cart blanche to loot the Treasury. ”
This is true, I live among people who are all for all of those reasons. And his second-in-line is a deep-dipped theocrat, and possibly more dangerous than The Yam himself. These people WANT to blow up the world to usher in the Second Coming of their “deity”.
Yep, a little more than half of us are a damn dumb country. I wonder how painful it has to get before some of the stupidity goes away?
boatboy_srq
“Charisma” also explains the early 2000 primary activity. Edwards had it. Trouble is he had other baggage as well.
The distinction between Dems with charisma and Teahadis with it is that the Dems have to travel light (minimal or no baggage) or face summary dismissal, where the Teahadis can pack multiple PODS with their baggage and still get elected.
Gus diZerega
These explanations are not mutually exclusive. The issue is not one or the other explanation, but how they fit together. Either could fit one person and the other another. The greater the fear the greater hold nasty reasons will have on how they vote. Clinton did not emphasize the economic and Trump did all the time. The states that were crucial were ones where the economic explanation carries more weight than in rural areas and even if it applied only to a small number, addressing it would give us a Clinton victory. Elections are usually won on the margins and people’s pocketbooks matter to them.
cmorenc
@Betty Cracker:
One bit of delicious irony in our contemptuous reference to Trump as the “shit-gibbon” is that we can say that of him without the slightest overtone of racist language, unlike many right-wing Trump supporters who referred to Obama with ape references, e.g. the alleged resemblance of Michelle Obama to a chimpanzee (true – I have a “crazy Uncle” friend who forwarded me a RW chain email with that exact reference). Nevertheless, expect Trump-fanboys to indignantly reply along the lines: how come you can say N-clang and we can’t?
amk
Racism. Sexism. White privilege. Everything else is utter bs.
Billions of people around the world, let alone amurkkka, are more ‘hard working’ than these pos.
boatboy_srq
@clay: Dunno about the caps. “president trump” has merit as well.
schrodinger's cat
@cervantes: Agreed, especially the so-called liberal media.
sigaba
Would it be too much to point out the turnout was quite low this year and Trump effectively won by default. Essentially the space meteor won.
PS. On a personal note, I may not visit or comment for a while. People are upset and I am too, I just don’t want to talk about it. People say things like “Trump has killed America” or “America is dead,” I personally feel like America was found dead in the closet of a Bangkok hotel, with a rubber hose around its neck swinging from a hanger rod. It’s so awful it’s scandalous and I don’t wanna talk about it.
retiredeng
What’s clear to me about “he who shall not be named” is that he’s not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor a politician, nor even a “businessman”. He’s an opportunistic parasite that latches onto something like Atlantic City, saps it from all its value and discards the empty shell. The current host is the Republican party and the next will be this great nation. “Make America great again” my ass.
3Jane Tessier-Ashpool (a/k/a Lorinda Pike)
@Trentrunner: Hubby had the TV on while I was cleaning one of the litter boxes. What I was scooping was way less repulsive that Mrs. Greenspan’s bloviating.
To his credit, he changed the channel without me even having to make a snarky statement…
boatboy_srq
@Trentrunner: In other words, the Dems need a man to win those states.
Not exactly helpful, if you think about it.
mistermix
Can I have door #3: Be more loud and proud about the minimum wage, don’t shy away from “Medicare for all” even if the math doesn’t work right this minute, more discussion about the affect of free trade and what Democrats will do to promote trade that won’t kill jobs, etc. In other words, good old-fashioned Democratic populism, served up enthusiastically.
The analysis I’ve seen show that some of the shift in the rust belt states was a group of white voters who did vote for Obama but didn’t vote for Clinton. These are presumably not racist. Maybe they’re all misogynists – doubt it. What I would guess is that they were looking for some kind of change, concerned about EMAILZ, etc. We need to swing a few of these voters and get some more of our base to turn out in the rust belt.
And, no, Clinton did not have charisma. I wish it didn’t matter either, but the only two Presidents who Democrats have elected in the past 3 decades had it in spades. Elizabeth Warren has it – and has the ability to serve up a populist agenda convincingly. This isn’t a solely male trait.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@eldorado:
I believe you, but where is that? There seems to be a lot of those places.
dmsilev
For whatever it’s worth, I agree with you, Betty. But, I’m a lot less sure I understand this country than I was 48 hours ago, so who the Hell really knows any more?
Another Holocene Human
There are six million missing Dem voters. Our ground game was crap. I volunteered in FL in 12 and 16. No comparison. Sorry, spending money on ground game doesn’t mean your ground game is worth anything.
Now–how do we boycott Trump’s corporate supporters?
GrandJury
Maybe we need an occupy Trump properties movement. Let it be known that there will be loud, disruptive, unwashed (in their minds) protesters nearby when ever anyone considers going to a Trump hotel or golf course anywhere.
Bobby Thomson
It can be and is both. We gotta do something different or we’ll never compete in lots of districts. It doesn’t have to be burn-the-bankers Bernie rhetoric, but we have to do something to let people who live outside the city know we’re at least trying to do things for them that the majority party in congress is blocking.
Clinton did talk about some of those things, but they weren’t a big focus. Something got people who sat out 2012 to vote. Bathrooms? Russian hacking of the results? Hell if I know.
Walker
I actually think both could be true. There are democrat-leaners out in the hinterlands. They have seen the least benefit from reforms. And they were the easiest to split off by the division tactics. If we want to prevent division tactics from pulling them off, we need to find them and reach out to them.
Joyce H
Let’s not ignore the impact of one factor. For fourteen years, Trump played the part of a decisive, successful businessman on television and there are plenty of people who mistook that for reality, not considering that he had producers, writers, editors, and a whole host of people to create that ‘reality’. (Personally, I think anyone who believes that an actor is as smart and savvy and cool as the character he plays should be forced to sit in a room for a very long time watching episode after episode of Celebrity Jeopardy – too often these guys turn out to be rocks with legs.)
Steve Crickmore
@Trentrunner:Amazingly how close it was, but what consequences.. once again! I calculate that if just sixty-five thousand voters in those three states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in total, had switched their votes from Trump to Hillary, she would have won the election.
BretH
Democrats need to nominate better liars. Nobody believed Trump would – or even could – do all the things he promised but his lies were appealing. Given that the Democrats will never be able to get support from the TV and radio news that middle Americans listen to all they can do is promise things that will at least get them neutral coverage.
Sanders knew the necessity of lying big-time – did anyone honestly think he would be able to do 90% of what he promised? But – and here’s where I laugh at the trolls here who say “if only Sanders had been nominated” – the magic unicorns Sanders was promising to give away were not the magic unicorns middle America wanted. Now if he promised unicorns to everybody, but if he had promised hornless unicorns to the folks on public assistance of any kind or with middle-eastern backgrounds, or latinos, well then he might have had something.
mai naem mobile
I love Obama and he is a truly awesome politician but a good part of him winning in 08 was that Bush had fucked it up so bad. He won in 12 because he did a good job. If Hillary had become POTUS in 08 and Obama ran against Putin Jr I am not sure Obama would have won because people would have been fat and happy with Hillary and forgotten about Dumbya.
Shalimar
Democrats: What can we give you to get you to vote for us again?
Trump voters: A holocaust aimed at all minorities.
Democrats: Other than that. Anything that isn’t evil.
Trump voters:
schrodinger's cat
Reposting from the last thread:
This is a great country and worth fighting for, ask the millions who have voted with their feet to come here. We cannot give up without even a fight. I am meeting some writing buddies for coffee, doubt whether we will get any writing done, will probably just commiserate. The three of us represent three religious and national heritages, where else but in America is this likely to happen. The idea of America is worth fighting for.
Bobby Thomson
@GrandJury: Christ. It’s almost impossible to make him a sympathetic figure but that would do it.
gogol's wife
@Trentrunner:
Yes, I agree with Betty and with this corrective. My anecdata from here in blue Connecticut is that it was people who loved having license to be racist out loud.
planetpundit
Third narrative; get new leaders and go with what works. Barack Obama 2012 beats Donald T rump 2016. National Review kust posted an anaalysis of that (which I have done merely a quick once over of). the problem with 2016 is what was wron ith 2014 and 2010…..the people of like minds as ourselves WHO DID NOT VOTE!
Now they may well have a reason for abstainign from the sole constituional obligation for sustaining ourDemocracy. So we need some talkign to and fro and find soem common ground. We need a renewal and broadening of leadership. We need to offer solutions that draw in a solid majority of out fellow citizens. Problem solving in a democracy, especially in a representive republic, is by definition a majority effort enddorsed and led by a representive leadership.
clay
@Jonny Scrum-half:
You say that disparaging, but he also had an honest appraisal of the problems his country was facing, and a sincere (if dumb) plan to fix things. I’d much rather have President Camacho than what we have now.
You must remember that Hillary didn’t call ALL of Trump’s supporters deplorable (even though the morans started self-identifying as such). Hillary defined her terms: the deplorables are the racists, the homophobes, the Islamaphobes, the misogynists… We, as Democrats and progressives, cannot and will not find common ground with them and still be true to our principles.
The REST of Trump’s supporters, if you recall, Hillary spoke about in kind and empathetic terms. They are the ones we need to find common ground with and try to persuade with logical and emotional appeals. It’ll be easier to do once they see what a couple of years of unopposed alt-right and neo-con rule brings.
Another Holocene Human
@Jonny Scrum-half: It’s not that the GOP is going to do anything for rust-belters. It’s that the GOP gave Dem voters an excuse to stay home by telling them loudly and repeatedly that the Dems were conspiring with global elites to keep screwing the working class in the US.
Once Dem voters were convinced Hillz sucked, they couldn’t be moved to vote. Oh, and the media helped the GOP do this. Big league. (Sanders helped too, though. Thanks a lot, Bernz.)
The Moar You Know
Utter shit. Anyone who voted for Trump never has and never will vote for a Dem.
Also utter shit. Nobody voted any differently than they always have. What IS different is that this time, 6.1 million folks who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 stayed home.
Why that is I have no idea.
TaMara (HFG)
Racism and stupidity. And no, I don’t want them anywhere near my party. Fuck off and enjoy your economic disaster you fucktards. I’m just hoping for no nuclear war before this is over.
hey, but other than that, i’m fine.
bluehill
@mistermix: I heard something along these lines too. In some counties in MI and WI that went for Obama in 2012 went for Trump. Obviously had a big impact.
Another Holocene Human
@Karen S.: The numbers show Trump won with people making more than 45$K/year. It’s not the poor, but those who are doing better, and wish to kick the ladder down behind them…
mai naem mobile
@BretH: this is what I’ve been saying. Just fucking lie. That’s what the GOP does and gers away with it. I said this in 2012 during the first debate when Romney was gishgalloping.
martian
Feeling shaky today. I’m starting the process of figuring out how to obtain health insurance for my little girl who is high medical needs. I expect we’ll probably have to lose all the various specialists she’s been with and find new ones, fingers crossed. I am resigned to being uninsured for my preexisting conditions and possibly completely uninsurable because of the form of cancer I survived.
I grew up working class. Some of my own family voted to do this to my child and are presently gloating threats on FacelessGhoulsBook to Rosie O’Donnell and various other scapegoats. This was not about economic anxiety. Clinton wanted to raise the minimum wage and give people free college and childcare. Seriously, miss me with the elitist Dem smears.
Hillary spoke to people’s real economic needs, but it turns out Trump’s rage and spite is what they feel they really need. It’s not the hole in their pocketbooks they wanted filled, it’s the hole in their souls. Cleek’s Law all the way down, folks.
Poopyman
@sigaba: I don’t blame you. That analogy/reference is disgusting and wrong and I’m totally stealing it.
gogol's wife
@schrodinger’s cat:
I keep telling myself that. My husband keeps repeating, “more people voted for her than for him.”
Mnemosyne
@mistermix:
Gosh, a guy who doesn’t see the massive misogyny of the people* who just hate Hillary Clinton but can’t quite put their finger on the reason why? Color me surprised.
(*Edited — there are plenty of women out there who have the same unexplainable, visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton, and it’s due to the same underlying cause: misogyny.)
And, frankly, those whites had been swinging back to Republican for some time. They liked Obama only when he didn’t talk about Black Stuff, and they really, really hated that he didn’t immediately set the dogs on Black Lives Matter protesters. Hillary was tarred with the same brush — too inclusive, too likely to coddle non-whites.
Ironically, your hero Michael Moore called it in the very article you linked to yesterday: White Guy Dominance is breaking down, and this was a backlash against that. They call it “economic insecurity” when they talk to reporters, but they voted away their healthcare benefits so they could be ruled by the guy who promised them they could be at the top of our racial caste system again.
My Truth Hurts
Keep deluding yourself. The democrats haven’t addressed those concerns anymore than the Republicans have. If they had they would have won. If they had run Bernie they would have won. Just like I told you all so back in June you arrogant out of touch assholes. Keep on losing, losers.
JMG
Here’s something people respond to: being asked what they want. Outreach should proceed on that basis. If the answer is “my sense of racial/sexual/religious superiority,” drop it and move on. But if the person has some concrete desire from government, perhaps it can be addressed by Democrats.
Another Holocene Human
@The Moar You Know: Obama ran a data driven campaign that spent months chasing down infrequent voters. It was cutting edge and effective.
Hilary’s campaign was hilariously in disarray, from chasing down the same people in public every week to register to vote, to never sending out promised bumper stickers to donors, to begging for volunteers when it was too late a few days out from the election. A JOKE.
Humboldtblue
@Betty Cracker: Sweet mother of the Queen mother, the only fucking thing that has saved me from running down the street with my baseball bat and whacking my known Trump supporters in the head is The Crown.
Major Major Major Major
@mistermix: I personally don’t find Sen. Warren to be particularly charismatic.
Another Holocene Human
@My Truth Hurts: My wife (Jewish) is thankful this day that Bernie didn’t run because at least she doesn’t have to deal with EVEN MORE anti-Semitism than is already spewing out of Trumpland.
Mr. “frigidy causes cancer” and “oh yeah, my wife totally trashed that college” would not have won the general, buh-lieve me.
GrandJury
Todays newspaper in Scotland.
gene108
What more can Democrats do to address economic anxiety than: (1) save the motherfucking U.S. auto industry (looking at you, Ohio and Michigan), (2) expand healthcare access to millions of working poor, (3) get us out of the worst recession, since the Great Depression (yes it was painful, but we’re better off than we were 8 years ago)…
I’m sure there’s more.
If people were so worried about their pocketbooks, they would be all-in with the Party that gave them a 40 hour work week, family leave, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
miserybob
What in the hell would a “new” Democratic populism even look like? “Rural” voters have been cutting their own throats for decades on workers’ rights and economic populism. They’ve told us over and over again that they just. don’t. want. it., at least not from a Democrat. From a Democrat, populism = socialism, which is why I had my doubts about a Sanders campaign. Who knows, Trump may actually pass a budget-busting infrastructure bill (no one will care about the debt or deficit in this case) – if he does, they’ll act like it’s something they’ve never seen before, finally SOMEBODY is offering help to the little guy. They’ve been lied to for so long, I don’t see how a Democrat CAN “reach out” to them.
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
Yep. And a whole lot of Dems — some at this very website — bought into it. Thanks, assholes.
Also, are we allowed to mention that Sanders also had ties to Russia through his campaign manager? And he chose to campaign in the way that would do the most long-term damage to Clinton’s general election campaign. Funny, that. I think Adam Silverman has been telling us how that works …
debit
@My Truth Hurts: Keep on jerking off, fuckface. Just try to keep your jizz to yourself. And don’t complain when your dick gets sore.
jheartney
Betty, loved the essay, particularly “shit-gibbon” with or without caps.
I think all the analysis of exit polling etc. misses another major point, which is that in the U.S. there’s a long tradition of alternating the party in power in the presidency every eight years. Eisenhower, Kennedy-Johnson, Nixon-Ford, WJClinton, Dubya, and now Obama. The only exceptions are Carter (sabotaged his own reelection by allowing Volker to raise interest rates high enough to kill hyperinflation) and Bush I (who only managed a single term). After eight years with the same party in the White House, large, irrational forces seem to come into play pushing for a switch. I think that (plus racism and sexism) was a big part of the headwinds HRC faced.
Another Holocene Human
@martian: To be fair, only Dem political junkies ever knew about Hilary’s plans. The media made sure that the public at large never, ever heard about it. (And she had no idea how to play them.)
The media caused this, now they must humiliate themselves before the orange one for their survival. The only ones in this farce who deserve their fate.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
Warren is great in an interview situation, but her speech at the DNC left me cold.
Teddy' Person
Thanks for this Ms. Cracker!! I got into it with a neighbor last evening that I’m so over the top sick of people hiding behind the “sick of the establishment” BS. Racist, nationalists voted for the racist, nationalist candidate and won with an assist from voter id laws. The guy who’s made a career of screwing over the little guy won on a wave of faux populism. The logical mind reels.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: Me too. In general though, she seems to excite Dems.
Someone mentioned Sherrod Brown. Yeah. Kind of wish he had run. I wonder how Tim Kaine might have done in the Dem primary too. My dreamboat was Deval Patrick but his wife forbade him to run.
boatboy_srq
@clay: Exactly how do you propose identifying that “rest of Trump supporters”? They’re far less visible, they adopted the Deplorable mantle willingly, and they’re complaining bitterly about how badly the Left is taking this election because reasons. They’re hardly easy to sift out of the Deplorable masses. And it ust may be that the same things that made the Deplorables so identifiable are present in the “rest”, just not so obviously, publicly, crassly stated.
Soprano2
@clay: I almost spit all over my monitor when I read your comment. Thanks for the best laugh I’ve had since Tuesday.
sigaba
@Poopyman: Is it too soon for David Carradine jokes?
Betty Cracker
@mistermix: It’s tough to pull off a populist appeal when you’re running to succeed a popular incumbent. Clinton tried to thread that needle by hitting the minimum wage issue and advocating for a public option. She rather awkwardly repudiated the TPP. But she couldn’t have held the Obama coalition together as well as she did if she’d showed a lot of daylight between herself and PBO. Bernie tried that and couldn’t even win the primary. But that won’t be an issue next time, dog help us.
WereBear
I completely agree. It’s like trying to be sweet and reasonable with an abusive partner. Ain’t gonna work: being liked is not their motivator.
inventor
@Another Holocene Human: This is the unfortunate truth. I was deluded in thinking that Clinton had learned well from her ’08 campaign and was running a well oiled GOTV machine. I often remarked about how well her campaign was run.
I was wrong. The GOTV effort was not well run, the campaign put no effort into Wisc. at all and barely spent any time in Pa. or Mi.
This election was not lost because of a bad campaign per se, it was lost because of Hillary hate, and the depressing effect that had on Dem. enthusiasm along with the media’s feeding frenzy on the hate. Sanders campaign devolved into Hillary hate towards the end. Both Comey’s press conferences were given because of Hillary hate.
Republican turnout was down as well. They didn’t like their candidate either, but enough of them hated Hillary more.
Even with all of this along with the “third term” problem any candidate would have faced: a little more charisma, or a little better campaign especially in the “firewall” would have made the difference. I know there are Dems that voted in ’12 but sat out this year that must feel terrible….at least I hope so.
Mnemosyne
@My Truth Hurts:
Please explain how the Jewish Socialist beats the guy running as an anti-Semitic white supremacist.
ruckus
Very anacdodal but the racist asshole at work is the one who is the happiest about the results. Everyone else is just going about their day.
I mostly agree with Betty’s #2 reason but do also think that there is a real level of monetary concern. We aren’t that far out of the largest recession in history. Money is a big concern of mine, I just understand the fix a little bit better than some.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: Not surprising if true–his campaign was a shitshow and at the point he was losing was when he knifed Hilary–easy for “I’m not a Dem” Sanders to do, I guess. Also the way he failed to concede really hurt and had Hilary’s ground team getting off to a really late start … again, Obama spent ALL SUMMER hunting down infrequent voters. That’s why he outperformed his polls.
PJ
@Another Holocene Human: Sure, it’s an obscure Socialist politician from Vermont’s fault that Hillary didn’t win. Give me a break. Sanders got traction – much to his own surprise – because his message resonated with people, but not anywhere near enough to win the nomination. Hillary’s problem was that she and her message didn’t resonate with enough people in the general – she lost Obama voters, both in percentages and in absolute numbers. You can blame it on the voters for being idiots/racists/sexists, etc., but as a candidate in this democracy, you have to win enough votes from the existing electorate, not from some ideal enlightened populace, to win the Electoral College. Voter suppression probably accounts for some of the missing votes, but given Obama’s approval ratings, she should have been way out in front.
JMG
Setting aside the obvious big reasons (racism, sexism, all-around xenophobia and plain old greed), I think there were a significant minority of Trump voters who knew he was terrible but did so anyway because they have reached the point of nihilistic alienation from their government and their country. Burn, baby, burn.
Eural Joiner
@Trentrunner:
I keep repeating this as everyone chases twenty other much more complex (and less helpful) explanations. Simple fix – get rid of the EC. Snap, we’re done.
Tripod
A majority of voters went for the neo-liberal shill. Suggesting that’s just a elites game, and not representative of the economic and political interests of millions of urban voters in this country – that way leads to madness, and a Mondale level beatdown.
Chasing EVs and House seats in states and regions that are losing them DUE TO POPULATION LOSS, because hard workin’ white folks – this is a sound plan?
Shalimar
I think the lesson I take from this election is Fuck Politicians. All that money Clinton raised and wasted and all of that volunteer time meant nothing compared to the sheer hatred Republicans use to motivate their voters. The time and money is better spent on charities that help people at the very bottom: homeless shelters, food banks, free clinics.
ETA: my $200, your $500, etc, what good did it do among the billions spent? What good could they have done for a starving family without shelter?
SenyorDave
@Corner Stone: Oh God. Obama’s speaking. In the Oval Office. With that disgusting attempt of a human being. GOD HELP ME! STRENGTH!
In an alternate reality Obama would stop in the middle of sentence and say, “Donald, I wanted to thank you for being one of the leaders of the Birther movement. It really helped me understand why people said that I increased racial divisions in this country.” And then continue as if nothing happened.
JPL
@Another Holocene Human: What do you have to lose was a strong selling point for Trump.
I just don’t know how you come back from this. Democratic administrations are always in clean-up mode, because the previous administration fucked up things. Without putting back the fairness doctrine, we are screwed. There is money to be made by being a racist asshole on the air.
Busybody
@cervantes:
I’ve decided to call him The Pig. Please note the capital letters denoting respect for his office. I think all of HRC voters should organize a boycott of the corporate media. They failed to do their jobs and we shouldn’t support them or their sponsors.
KG
The answer is somewhere in between. Part of it was a sense of white nationalism among white conservative voters. Part of it was the belief that Democrats, as they have become more urban, have become less sympathetic to rural and exurban populations – and Trump played on real economic fears there. Part of it is that Hillary Clinton was not the right candidate for the times (and probably over all just not a good politician – which is to say, bad at campaigning). It probably doesn’t help that she was something of a retread (Evan Bayh and Russ Fiengold, two other retreads also lost races they probably should have won).
I am still shocked that Trump won. But it was a low turnout election, Clinton won the popular vote while getting nearly a million less votes than Mitt Romney and (as of the current county) five thousand less votes than John McCain. The low turn out is likely due to both nominees having high unfavorable ratings that were baked in by three (Clinton) or four (Trump) decades in the public eye.
I am not a Democrat, so I can’t say what the way forward is for Democrats, but hopefully there is some honest reflection on what happened this time – as opposed to the Republicans approach in 2012.
Tripod
@Trentrunner:
I’d say get slightly more votes in Charlotte NC, and Atlanta GA and Phoenix AZ, etc.
Mart
@The Moar You Know: Because I will never vote for that lying bitch.
Tom Q
Can everybody stop making pronouncements about turnout until we actually get the final numbers in? Yes, RIGHT NOW it appears turnout was below 2012 level — but there remain somewhere from 5-10 million votes still to be added to the count. This has been true of all recent elections: some states are very slow about putting their final numbers in. (And many of the later votes tilt Dem, since they come from thee West Coast or from provisional/challenged ballots, all of which lean blue — Obama’s margin of victory rose by 1-2% from this point on in both ’08 and ’12.)
It may turn out some of the analysis will also be true when actual totals are seen, but right now it’s jumping the gun to compare raw numbers.
Mike G
failed to address economic dislocation and spent too much time kowtowing to elites
The rubes who expect a Trump administration dominated by Repuke hacks are going to be disappointed if they think Trump is going to address either of these with anything more than lip service. I expect a turbocharged version of Bush’s corporate cronyism and corruption.
It’ll be the same Republican shit sandwich they’ve been eating up for decades, corporatist corruption and grinding down of living standards behind a veneer of culture war shiny-object distractions.
les
@Mnemosyne:
Absolutely true–I heard one of them on the radio today, and she said (among other deplorable things) “at least he’s a man.” Phyllis Schlafly was not unique.
Another Holocene Human
@inventor: If the people who were polled had voted alone, Hilary still would have won. Trump had that secret sauce of alt righties who had spend decades in the political wilderness but now had a reason to vote. It was just enough to win it for him.
Had Hilary copied what Obama did in 2012 I think she would have won. An ugly win is still a win. I have no earthly idea why she didn’t just copy-paste Obama’s ground game.
True story: election day I was knocking on doors using the sheet from the day before. They never entered the data into the computer. Also, the AFL CIO is now using a smartphone app for door knocking but Hilary was all paper. They didn’t know who had voted yet, hadn’t removed deceased voters from rolls … lots of wasted time. And they were relying on last minute door knocks to get working class people out to vote and of course they’re never home.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve seen this a couple of times, their targeting was messed up and registered, reliable Dems were complaining about the frequency of contacts.
@Major Major Major Major: Warren has a certain appeal, a certain kind of charisma, a word I personally couldn’t define. I remember at the Dem convention, thinking her speech really suffered by immediately following Michelle Obama’s poetic speech. more or less off the top of my head, I’d say she has a kind of earnest wonky-nerd charisma. I don’t know if that carries a national race.
rawhide rawlins
Last time the rethugs held all three branches was 1928. We all know what happened in 1929 and what followed.
schrodinger's cat
I am so tired of the smug explanations of the Bernistas. Give it a rest, guys.
Omnes Omnibus
I go with option 2.
hovercraft
@Betty Cracker:
THIS!
I’m all HGTV all the time for now. My DVR is also pretty full so I’ll be clearing out my backlog for the next few weeks.
I also agree with your post, white resentment and the GOP long term strategy to depress democratic turnout through voter suppression, constant gridlock, and the media flacking for them. Throw in Comey, Putin and wikileaks and you have the perfect recipe for what just happened.
debit
Anecdotes are not data, so take this for what you will: My boss is dyed in the wool progressive. She and her daughter were saved by the social safety net several times over the course of their lives. Her daughter, also my coworker, admitted that she would have voted for Trump but was skeeved by his sexual assaults. So she voted for Johnson. Hillary never had a chance. Any democrat never had a chance with her. Why? Because she’s a racist. She claims she’s not, but she routinely expresses her disgust that her tax dollars go to support welfare fraud. (Here’s a hint: they don’t. She doesn’t make enough to have more than Social Security and Medicare taken from her check.) You can’t tell her that though, despite this being a tax office and her mom being an accountant.
People want to hate other people. Telling people there’s love and hope doesn’t motivate them. Give them a target to fight against and they’ll kick their own parents in the teeth to get the chance.
Sorry to be so bleak, but I don’t see a way forward. Trump told everyone how loathsome he is and his voters didn’t care. We only get those voters if we become as despicable as he is. Maybe in four years after everything has gone to shit we can get another democrat in office to clean it up. Again. But then the cycle will repeat itself.
Gah. Sorry. I should shut up until I can figure out a way to be positive again.
schrodinger's cat
@gogol’s wife: I had a long conversation with a classmate from upstate NY. His family has been here since before the Revolutionary War, he was as heartsick over this result as I was. Like our blog host he used to be a Republican in the Bush era. Iraq War changed him. I have been reaching out and talking to like minded friends and family and of course this community of jackals. That’s what’s keeping me sane.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: @Another Holocene Human: Me three. But I’ve never found her to be a particularly engaging speaker. ‘Exciting Dems’ isn’t enough.
Sherrod Brown has always intrigued me.
RareSanity
@Mnemosyne:
I completely retract everything I said last night about trying to court the “less extreme” Bernie supporters. You guys were right, they’re toxic.
Captain C
I agree that it’s not economic anxiety, at least not per se. I think it’s more status anxiety, and the economic component is people who are infuriated that their life is now as precarious as those Others who are supposed to be less successful and have less opportunities (and at whose expense their own opportunities are supposed to come). I suspect there are a nontrivial number of people who are miffed that they can no longer have their readily available (union-supported) remunerative job (from which Others are de facto barred) at the factory or mill, with enough time and cash to get a nice gas guzzler, vacation down at the Gulf, take the kids to Disneyland once in awhile, and buy a home (for which they, but not a similarly-financed Other can get a mortgage). Their parents and maybe grandparents grew to expect this, and they’ve forgotten or never knew or cared that the circumstances which led to this were both rare and in fact made possible by those hated unions. Kind of the same thing as “take their Social Security, Medicare, and welfare, but leave mine alone!”
Felonius Monk
@My Truth Hurts:
Oh, yes. The wonderful One-Dimensional Man. The Mythical X-Man of the Left. My advice to you,pal, is to lay off the reefer. The truth might hurt you.
Mnemosyne
Also, if I may repeat myself from yesterday:
Remember in 2012 when Karl Rove had a public melt-down on teevee when Romney lost PA, WI, MI and OH, and we all laughed?
He had that meltdown because Republicans had already started their voter suppression tactics in those states in 2012 but they had not quite come to fruition.
Now they have. This entire thing was planned by the Republicans long before Trump was the nominee. He’s just the one who happened to benefit from that pre-planned scheme.
They did a gerrymander for the whole country — lost the popular vote but won just enough states to win the electoral college, just like Republican House members keep winning their seats because their districts are carefully carved with smaller populations.
Our only option is to win back the legislatures of those 4 states and repeal those voter ID laws. Otherwise, we’re fucked for the foreseeable future no matter who we run for president.
SatanicPanic
Well, if it’s any consolation, we used to be more racist.
Another Holocene Human
@Tom Q: Well, I am in Florida. I can really only speak to that. I wish we had missing Dem votes out there, I really do.
GrandJury
@Busybody: WaPo mostly did their job. I would exclude them….and only them.
negative 1
Since crippling poverty and a decline (crash) in employment in those areas are actual verifiable facts of life for everyone in those areas of the country, why does it have to be an either/or proposition? Obviously people don’t like our platform on that point, so why not improve it? And also run someone voters seem to like more?
People’s stances on these two “competing” narratives seem to mirror their “I am right because I said so” stances before the election. I hate to continue to be a nihilist, but I’ll say now what I said to Sanders supporters after the primary: elections are zero sum games. The only lessons anyone really learns is ‘you lost’ and no one will ever trust what you have to say again.
An actual point I’d like to bring up about messaging before I get attacked: ask a trump supporter what they think he’ll do as soon as he gets into office. I guarantee they’ll say : repeal Obamacare, build a wall, deport the Muslims. We know it’s bullshit, but they know what he ran on. Ask a Clinton supporter what she’d do as soon as she gets into office. I’ve tried this 5 times, got one policy proposal (child care) and four vague sentiments (start healing the nation, ‘deal with the cops and the BLM protests’ and two others somewhere in there). To me that looks like a messaging failure.
Another Holocene Human
@SatanicPanic: I know, right?
I was just thinking if Trump really wanted to pull some shit he could do a Wilson redux and bring back redlining. I’m just thinking he won’t even mentally go there.
D58826
I agree with one qualification. There probably are enough folks in some states that an appeal, as a subtext, to narrative one will strengthen blue states, turn some purple states blue and maybe even a few pink states purple. Turning deep red Mississippi is a waste of time. Turning Ga. with it’s growing diverse Atlanta metro population purple might be worth the investment of a few bucks and a couple of political operatives. They did elect Jimmy Carter governor after all
hovercraft
@Mart:
The culmination of the Reagan Revolution, a huge swath of ill educated and uneducated morons who vote year after year for the people causing all of their problems, because they hate the same people you do. They’ve convinced these morons that their problem is the blacks and browns, while they rob them blind. This is only possible because they are “poorly educated” and therefore willing to buy this claptrap line hook and sinker.
Another Holocene Human
@negative 1:
Completely agreed. The campaign never got over the media wall and into people’s ears.
You know, something a better GROUND GAME could have helped with.
Eljai
Just after Jerry Brown handily defeated Meg Whitman in 2010, I attended a panel on California politics. There was a woman on the panel who belonged to a food workers union. She said the union volunteers went door-to-door months before the election. They would talk to people about what was important to them. Once they got a conversation going, they’d casually mention, “did you know that Jerry Brown supports those things too?” and then they’d hand them the campaign literature. It’s methodical, painstaking work, but I feel like we need to set up that kind of permanent grass roots operation in all 50 states.
jheartney
@Another Holocene Human:
The multiple times I’ve done election day GOTV, I never got more than one or two hits (out of hundreds) of people who where A. home and B. not yet voted. It’s always struck me as a colossal waste of time. It’s not even a question of the targeting, etc. I think it generally doesn’t do much.
waysel
@Steve Crickmore: Do you have state by state numbers? And Stien/ Johnson numbers for same? I’m very curious about those numbers.
martian
@Another Holocene Human: I don’t think most of the media will feel humiliated or threatened. They might be personally liberal, in their own minds, for whatever worthless good that is, but very few of them will feel to blame. I’ve concluded that most of the media are smug bastards secure in their own little bubble of disinformation. They don’t just push the propaganda, most of them believe it. And Trump will be very good for ratings right up until he comes for their heads.
Clinton couldn’t get past the media. Even Obama’s ability to do so wore off once he wasn’t shiny and new. Who do we have that can and that’s credible on policy? That’ll be what I’m looking for in a candidate. Must be media catnip and not an utter douche. Somewhat of a douche acceptable.
Bobby D
The economic anxiety driver is NOT the b.s. you all keep wanting to paint it. Yes, it is not the only driver and racism/xenophobia was also a major driver. But a deep, deep feeling of betrayal by the “establishment” as reflected in economics is as much a part as anything. These are not “competing” narratives, they are complimentary narratives that both apply, and the degree of each will vary widely from place to place.
Why the democrats can’t put up two fkin charts at every campaign event and speak to them, every time, I have no idea. They should show:
1. GDP vs income gains for the top 1% and income gains for the bottom 99% since about 1972. All the gains go to the top.
2. Ratio of CEO pay to avg worker pay since about 1950. It’s gone from ~ 25:1 to ~ 250:1.
Both are saying the same thing. It’s not the immigrants and blahs that are screwing your wallet, its the conmen at the top raking off all the gains while adding no value and routinely risking blowing up the company or entire economy.
Then again, partisan people don’t use facts to change their mind or even make decisions. So maybe you can’t even reach them with the most compelling and accurate argument…they just want to get their hate on.
Matt McIrvin
They’re talking about Ken Blackwell and Kris Kobach being in Trump’s Cabinet. Loomis and a bunch of commenters on LGM are saying it’s just over, there won’t be free elections any more and we’re going to be a one-party state. Nothing to be done.
We shall see. I think any hope comes from the bottom up at this point.
JMG
Trying to reach out to Trump voters is a waste of time and effort. They’ll either stick with their choice come what may or succumb to buyer’s remorse of their own creation. Finding out why Obama voters stayed home rather than vote for Clinton and then making sure that never happens again are the top priorities for the party. For ourselves, we need to offer encouragement and support to elected Democrats who’re willing to fight and lose in Congress and stern messages of unhappiness to the collaboration-curious. Not now, the statements from Sanders and Warren are the things that get said after every election. Plenty of Republicans said it in the first couple days after Obama was elected, even as they’d already planned to oppose him to the max.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: WI is a lost cause. FIght for MI and come down and make a go for NC, FL, and GA.
States with viable economies have a chance of being blue. Walker’s austerity has lost WI for a generation or more.
waysel
@schrodinger’s cat: To come where?
matryoshka
I’m so angry and scared right now, I don’t care about the Democratic party, and I was and am a Hillary supporter and lifelong Dem. This feels like a survival to me. I just saw a headline about “Trumpcare” and I think what is happening is that the shitstains are going take credit for President Obama’s work while gutting its essential benefits. I’ve been reading this blog for years and at times the smug pedantry pisses me off, but I keep coming back here because it’s the only place I can find that approximates a conversation of peers. I don’t care who’s offended or who will pat me on the hand and say “there, there, dear.” I’m used to being invisible and unheard but I am going to have to learn how to operate at this level of rage and anxiety. Maybe the Democrats deserve my time and energy and maybe they don’t. Right now, I’m with my LGBT friends, people of color, women and the men who don’t hate them, and my immigrant neighbors and international friends, and I want to know more about resistance movements and insurrection, not politics.
oldgold
There is not one answer. Like most things, this happened as a consequence of a lot of things. One of those things that needs to be admitted is that Hillary is not much of a campaigner. I think that accounts for a considerable part of the dismal democratic turnout. 6 to 7 million democrats, who voted in ’12, stayed home. It cost us PA, FLA and WI.
The political hole we find ourselves in is not all that deep. Hell, we have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential races.
hovercraft
@cmorenc:
Maybe no racist undertone, but surely we are denigrating this poor species of animal. What has the Gibbon done to earn this much enmity from us? Unfortunately it must be referred to as something, and I agree that Shitgibbon is a suitable moniker, so carry on.
Sorry to all the Gibbons out there, we are though making a distinction.
gene108
@Bobby D:
You do realize the people, you hope to reach with this argument, are voting for a Party which openly talks about enabling the 1% to take a larger chunk of the gains than what has happened in the past.
There maybe some few people you can reach, but they aren’t voting against Democrats for a more socialist-jail-the-bankers Party.
They are voting for a Party that wants the bankers to run wild.
negative 1
@D58826: As I said above, it’s actually a problem, so why not try and solve it.
Betty seems to know better than the polls as to why someone voted trump, but if you think that exit polls actually exist people in those areas of the country want someone to help them and I think the Democratic message fell flat. I did a slew of reading on Hillary’s page. I know she backed Sherrod Brown’s plan, and though I don’t think it goes far enough I also don’t agree that the democrats “had no answer on trade”. I do think they messaged it really, really poorly though. CNN had a result where basically in the unholy trinity of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania people who thought that trade hurt the economy voted trump somewhere near 2-1. So their message won.
Matt McIrvin
@oldgold: Except that vote suppression and harassment of opposition political campaigns becomes much, much, much easier now. The VRA is probably a completely dead letter.
D58826
Only slightly OT but an indication of how quickly this is all going down hill. One of the names on Trumps short list for Homeland security is Sheriff Clarke from Milwaukee county. Goes around in full dress uniform. Kinda of a black Sheriff Joe Appario. He sent out a tweet that the ‘anarchist’ protesting Trump’s win have to be shut down. That there is no legitimate reason to protest the will of the people.
I think Mr Khan has to send him a copy of the constitution with the first amendment in bright yellow.
SatanicPanic
@Another Holocene Human: I hope not. But I wouldn’t put it past him to repeal most of the Civil Rights Act. At least now we’re in a country where at least half of us would be appalled. Not that it would matter in the end, because too many people will look the other way.
Felonius Monk
@negative 1:
And, this cycle that would have been?????
negative 1
@Bobby D: Probably, but there are a fair number of us who said that talking about trade was a waste or something only the ‘bros’ wanted so there are going to be a lot of us who are defensive when that’s thrown back in our faces as to why we lost districts that Obama won 12 years ago.
waysel
Option one will be the MSMs dream pick. Ad nauseam. From the rooftops. Option two has two things that are deal killers for the MSM. 1. It is true. 2. It rightfully blames the MSM. I feel like the MSM did more to throw this election than the voter suppression. I don’t see how we could ever change that, in future. I’m not optimistic.
Mnemosyne
@Bobby D:
And yet all of your “economically insecure” white voters elected one of those very conmen. He has a long record of cheating his employees and declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying his debts. Why do you think they did it?
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: Yeah, but Trump’s ads actually emphasized the jail-the-bankers angle (in its anti-Semitic International Federal Reserve Conspiracy form). The actual reality is irrelevant to the message. Breakdown of accountability is a large part of the problem.
schrodinger's cat
@waysel: To leave their countries of birth and come to the United States of America. Sorry, I was not clear enough.
negative 1
@Felonius Monk: No one. Sorry, hate to say it, but some years it just seems to be bad luck. It’s not structural. Hardcore rethugs swear it’s what sank Romney against Obama — great candidate to them, people just didn’t seem to like him. I’d argue the same as Hillary. It’s not structural, we had a primary, she won, that’s how you’re supposed to guard against it. Just didn’t seem to work. That’s what those of us in the Northeast were screaming about Martha Coakley when she lost to Scott Brown. Sometimes people don’t seem to like your best candidate.
Linnaeus
@Tripod:
I agree that more voters there are important, but as a caveat, here’s Clinton’s margins of loss (per Google):
Arizona: -84,500
Georgia: -231,000
North Carolina: – 178,000
Michigan: -12,000 (is it still listed as too close to call?)
Pennsylvania: -68,200
Wisconsin: – 27,300
Both the North Carolina and Georgia margins of loss, on their own, are greater than the combined margin of loss in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (approx. 107,000 votes). Clinton gets those votes, and she’s president.
gvg
@Trentrunner:
A couple of people made the point that this has happened twice in 5 elections. This is too often. It didn’t happen before, now it is. My hypothisis is it’s because we are so evenly polarized. If we get way past that by demographics patterns, it will stop until the next such point, which is likely to be in some future time when both parties have reinvented them selves to deal with the issues of that future day. However our politics work as 2 party and if one party loses and can’t win as formed, their is pressure to reform or add something and so it can keep happening. When we can, I think we just need to get rid of the electoral college by Constitutional amendment. all the other more politically possible suggestions seem just as silly as what we have. The EC invention, like the Senate is meant to over weight the representation by lower population states. That isn’t democratic, we haven’t been a rural country for a long time and it needs to go.
I remember reading stories excitedly saying this could happen before 2000 but Gore was projected to get the EC and Bush the popular! I dismissed it because I thought it unlikely due to a 300 million population IMO then, being unlikely to come that close so that it was possible. I was wrong then and now again? This is bad for democracy. Adam has been posting about the Russins trying to undermine our trust in our system. this adds to it. I might add that I know democrats who still insist Gore really won Florida etc. There are going to be more over this.
Of course it won’t be easy and I don’t know how.
D58826
@Matt McIrvin: and with that additional buit of bad news, I think it’s time to do something useful like play on I-85 at rush hour:-)
Omnes Omnibus
@Linnaeus: But AHH wants to write off WI…
Captain C
@gene108: I’m going to use these arguments with the people on my FB wall who are pushing the “if only we’d paid more attention to the (white by implication) working class, they’d have voted for us” line.
Though I do think a combination of Obama Administration inattention to PR and a negligent-at-best MSM made sure that the good word didn’t get out like it should have.
Captain C
@debit: If it does get sore, it’s obviously the fault of the Democrats.
Gindy51
@The Moar You Know: The Obama voters I have talked to here in SE IN, they did not likeHIllary. Now whether this is due to her not being a wow candidate or whether they were brain washed by the media onslaught of vileness she’s had slung at her for decades, who knows. Maybe both but it didn’t matter what I said or how much I talked her up, they were NOT going to vote for either one. Period.
SenyorDave
I’m one of those people who thinks that the Comey letter had a major impact, because early voting was in full force for the nine days between its initial release and then the Never mind follow-up. IMO, hurt a lot in NC and FL. Not sure whether WI and MI have early voting. Don’t know about her GOTV efforts, but I thought Clinton’s campaign was pretty good, maybe overconfident at end, but she did clean his clock in the debates and the sex tape release. I thought she would win because I guessed that more people were motivated to vote against him than her.
Matt McIrvin
@D58826: Mind you, overreaction is kind of Loomis’s trademark. But it ain’t good.
Mnemosyne
@matryoshka:
I’m going to try and not be too much of a jerk about this, but resistance movements and insurrection don’t change laws unless you have legislators willing to change them. That’s the hard truth.
The Civil Rights Movement succeeded because they had politicians who were willing to have their backs and pass the laws needed. In Northern Ireland, Catholics tried to emulate the American civil rights activists, but there were no members of Parliament willing to help them get laws passed, so it turned into a decades-long civil war that killed thousands of people before a peace settlement was finally reached.
What state do you live in? What town? What can you do to get someone elected to your town council or school board? This is what the Republicans have been doing for 40 years, and it’s why they’re in the position they are today. They got their people elected.
Civil war is not the answer. The only way the civil war in Northern Ireland was resolved was when the resistance movement was allowed to form a political party (Sinn Fein) and participate in their parliament.
Let’s skip the whole “armed civil war” step and go straight to “getting our people elected at all levels, starting with dog catcher,” shall we? Civil war will only delay the end point of getting our representatives elected.
Another Holocene Human
@Bobby D:
And there’s the rub. Dems failed to get their people out in key states. How much of it was lousy messaging by candidate/lousy candidate and how much was lousy ground game is up for debate of course, but the number of people who switched party preferences is low (and may have even canceled each other out). Trump’s secret sauce was white nationalists who did not vote previously because they felt iced out by both parties. Dems stayed home.
We can’t convince the Reagan Republicans to come back. But we can do a better job motivating our own voters.
Betty Cracker
@negative 1: As you said yourself, the three things Trump supporters remember from his stump speech are repeal Obamacare, build a wall and deport Muslims. Yet we’re supposed to believe they’re motivated by economic anxiety.
Partisan Cheese
Trump was out in those rust-belt states, Clinton ignored them. You can say Democrats are for workers rights but Clinton certainly wasn’t a symbol for helping workers. Her husband enacted NAFTA. Can you guys please take off your blinders?
Matt Taibbi has a great article back in March during the primaries, where he talks about how Trump would go out to the rust belt, and most of his rallies he would talk about trade, and workers getting screwed over. The media would only cover the gaffes, and paper over the anti-free trade stuff, but he was conning those guys into believing that he would help them. He was an outsider, he would shake things up. Yes it will be a con, but these people are desperate.
Meanwhile, websites like these had complete contempt for struiggling blue collar workers, calling them retarded deplorables. And then Clinton hardly campaigned in those rust belt states, she took them for granted. They felt ignored. She wasted time campaigning in Georgia and Arizona like she was confident that it was going to be some watershed sweep. How wrong that was.
But yeah, just assume that these people are terrible. Bernie knew how to speak to them, you guys fucking hated Bernie. Maybe your attitude and approach is the problem. Rather than writing them off and telling them to go fuck themselves, maybe realize that you cannot win elections without giving them a little attention, and respect.
This was a low turnout race, this was the fault of the Dems for putting someone up who had low enthusiasm. This was the Democratic establishment trying to shine a deeply unpopular stone and pretend it was a diamond. The fault is on Democrats, and once they can quit blaming everyone else, and change and develop a strategy that will engage the average person, will be the day they will be out of the wilderness. I doubt this website will be contributing much to that change though, with the way people continue to name call and the continued contempt.
You can’t just think you can build a multicultural identity issued coalition and paper over the economic wall street loving part of the democratic elite and think that identity issues will sugar coat the big money influence. Both sides are playing a con, people are just more fed up with the Democratic con these days cause it’s blatantly hypocritical and transparent. Obama failed to criminally prosecute anyone in the financial crisis. Obama bailed out the banks while leaving homeowners fucked. Obama continues to try and ram through a wide sweeping trade deal. And you cannot blame republican obstructionism for any of that. That shit is on Democrats, and that shit is deeply unpopular in the formerly blue states Hillary lost in.
RareSanity
@Linnaeus:
I can only speak for the two areas I know, but the reason you target GA and NC is because their urban centers of Atlanta and Charlotte are experiencing massive growth, and will just about make up those margins by 2020 without doing much of anything…especially Atlanta.
As someone that grew up in, and currently lives in the Atlanta area, that GA was even that close points to it’s likely flip in 2020. By then, the Atlanta metro area, combined with the Athens area (UGA) will vastly out populate the rest of the state.
Another Holocene Human
@SenyorDave: I’m interested to see how much of an impact it had. My gut feeling is that in an election this close it may have cost us just the margin that Trump needed. Mostly in convincing people to stay home.
Talked to some people yesterday who depend on benefits and are about to get SKROOED by Trump who didn’t vote because they were meh about Hilary. They sounded like nobody had even tried to persuade them prior to the election. IDK about the rest of Florida but ground game in this county was weak.
Mittens
I grew up on a farm in rural Michigan.
I remember the day when I knew in my heart that I would get out of there.
I got onto the bus one morning when I was in middle school.
An unfriendly high school kid in the back asked with a sneer “Ask that kid if he’s a Jew”.
I am not a member of that gifted people, nor have I ever seriously entertained conversion.
And to my lasting regret, I said nothing rather than “no, but what I were?”
But I knew then I was leaving.
And i know that economic anxiety just a small piece of that toxic mix.
You gotta fight at the margins and you can’t write off a region, but there are some people way beyond the hope of a political campaign to “reach” and trying to meet them half way is just dangerous.
Mnemosyne
@Linnaeus:
MI, WI, and PA all have something in common — strict Voter ID laws deliberately designed to prevent minorities from voting. PA’s was not supposed to be in effect this year, but WaPo and other outlets reported that poll workers were enforcing it anyway.
We got played, folks. They deliberately suppressed our voters using their long-term plan.
Another Holocene Human
@RareSanity: Completely agreed and boy are there some ex urban whites who are going to be boiled in their little white shells over all this. Change is a-come, Georgia.
negative 1
@Betty Cracker: So they only became racists in the last 12 years? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/trump-won-a-lot-of-white-working-class-obama-voters.html
Another Holocene Human
@Partisan Cheese: Saint Bernie lost the primary by millions of votes. Weak troll, no cookie.
Linnaeus
@Omnes Omnibus:
IMHO (which, with 2 bucks, will get you a cup of coffee), any talk of “writing off” anywhere is the wrong approach. It’s more about resource allocation. What resources in what areas will maximize chances of a Democratic win for any given election?
And depending on the election, that’s going to vary. You could have a lot of activity going on at the state level even in a place where, at the federal level, you’re putting less into.
Another Holocene Human
@Captain C: The working class (making $30K and less) voted for Hilary.
Trump’s base was petty bourgeois.
The poorest of the poor seemed to have stayed home. Hilary didn’t sell them any Hope and Change. To be fair the media iced her out, to be fair to the media she pitched to experts and elites and didn’t have any simple slogans for simpler folks. She could have learned from Obama but didn’t.
Why didn’t her campaign manager realize they were coming up short? WTF!
Mnemosyne
@Partisan Cheese:
Please explain how the Jewish Socialist beats the openly anti-Semitic white supremacist. I still haven’t gotten an answer from any of you guys.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Holocene Human: wasn’t he a rightwing troll a few weeks ago?
@Linnaeus: Sanders has called for Keith Ellison as DNC chair, which is provoking a lot of “Ooh, yeah, that’ll show Trump” on twitter. To which I say
1) no it won’t
2) what are his plans for party building at the state and local level?
Another Holocene Human
Obama knew where all his voters were in 2012. There were no surprises on Election Day. Why did Hilary’s team not know they were missing households and voters? That’s the real scandal.
Also, still want to know how I can boycott Trumpistes. An app would be really helpful. I want all Trumpsters to experience their own personal recession.
KithKanan
@Another Holocene Human: I finally got those bumper stickers in the mail — Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week. Sure as fuck not putting them on my car at this point.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I don’t want a politician who is currently in office and DNC chair. I want someone who can dedicate her/himself to the job all day every day.
Another Holocene Human
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I googled “PC” and he has been Bernie stanning for a while, at least since July. Which doesn’t mean he’s not a Russian/GOP troll. Bernie Bro is one of their favorite masks.
Emma
I am sick and tired of all the MEN who think that IT WAS ALL HILLARY’S FAULT. She wasn’t charismatic, her campaign was a disaster, blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you,folks, if that’s the meme for the new Democratic party, you’re on your own. If we’re going to simply accept the MSM bullshit and ignore the racism, anti-semitism, and misogyny that created this mess, bye-bye. I may have to take that crap from the enemy but I sure as hell won’t take it from allies.
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: I want Obama. And his computer programmer friends.
gene108
@Captain C:
Where Obama really screwed up on the economy was not stopping the foreclosure crisis, when he got elected.
People were losing their homes, because they lost their jobs, and there was no direct intervention to keep them afloat.
A lot of the people in Treasury and the Fed viewed the Great Recession as a crisis in confidence between lending instutions and if that got fixed the rest of the economy would follow.
But while that was getting fixed, millions of people lost everything.
matryoshka
@Mnemosyne: I understand all that, Mnem. I am much more in a feeling state than a rational, roll-up-your-sleeves and make nice frame of mind right now. And I probably don’t have 40 years left on earth to see any recovery from what’s coming. This is what I was worried about 20 years ago when I was teaching high school and working to get sane people on the school board because of the blatant and casual bigotry and cruelty going on in the community. And here we are.
Another Holocene Human
@Emma: I’m not ignoring anything. The racist misogynist transphobic fucks are coming for me and my family. This isn’t marbles. We have to WIN elections. That means running our elections right. I don’t have insider knowledge, I’m just a low level pickup volunteer. BUT I DON’T LIKE WHAT I SAW. Some people don’t face consequences from this election–I DO. FUCK the people who screwed me!
clay
@boatboy_srq:
I don’t know. Like I noted, the vocal Trump supporters gleefully adopted the “deplorable” name. Which meant they were self-identifying as racist, misogynist, etc.
Fuck those people. They’re, to borrow from Mrs. Clinton, irredeemable.
But there must be a non-zero subset of Trump-voters who were honestly attracted to him because of economic issues. And, though we know his promises to bring back factories and trash NAFTA, etc., are all empty at best, or disastrous at worst, but THEY don’t know that. They just know that they’re left behind by the current economy, and that Washington can’t or won’t help them.
Not that this is a recent development. Shit, Springsteen called it 20+ years ago: “They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks/Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back”.
Anyway, these people don’t (necessarily) hate Mexicans or gays or [insert group attacked by Trump here]. They just want a better life for their family, and Democrats used to be able to speak to them. Obviously, Trump was able to grab their attention this year.
Remember how small the margins are. We just need to connect with a small percent of these voters, and the election swings the other way. Hillary, as much as I thought she was a good candidate, was not the person to do this, stories about her father notwithstanding.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Everyone wants Obama for everything.
matryoshka
@Emma:Yep. Uh huh. Absolutely right.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Holocene Human: that’s interesting– Axelrod? Stewart? Plouffe?
Another Holocene Human
@gene108: Not true, Obama did make attempts at direct intervention. However, the programs just didn’t save many people’s houses right after the crash. It didn’t help that the banks continued to illegally foreclose on people. Obama and the lege were able to pass some laws to help protect people. I know someone who got his house back from the bank when he got sick because of that.
Totally untrue that Obama did nothing.
Linnaeus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That’s a perfectly fair question. Anyone who can’t answer that shouldn’t be DNC chair.
p.a.
Pew’s prelim. demographic breakdown
Another Holocene Human
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m thinking of the people who wrote his software for the 2012 election. Don’t remember what it was called. I do remember Romney had competing software that was a big fail. Axelrod and Plouffe were great assets, to be sure.
gene108
@RareSanity:
Don’t forget RTP, in NC and the college towns all across NC, like Boone, Asheville, etc.
If you looked at the gay marriage amendment vote, from May of 2012, all the places with colleges pretty much supported gay marriage. All the places without colleges were overwhelmingly against it.
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: Obama knows how to win elections. Last few DNC chairs had no experience prevailing in a tough fight.
Davis X. Machina
@Another Holocene Human:
Don’t screw with the narrative, buster.
gene108
@Matt McIrvin:
What I expect, at some point, is a complete repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Literacy tests are illegal because of the VRA.
Look for those to make a comeback, but framed in such a way that it will only impact new voters, so you scare off 18 year olds from voting and immigrants, who have recently been naturalized and are more likely to vote for Democrats.
FlipYrWhig
@gene108:
So, thing about that: that was what the original Santelli “tea party” rant was about.
geg6
I’m with you on your take on things, Betty.
I know these mother fuckers and it ain’t economics that animates them.
Emma
@Another Holocene Human: Hillary ran the campaign as the second coming of Barack Obama. She hired his people, they attacked the situation from all angles. IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT. Did you miss the MSM playing Trump enabler, attacking Hillary for every stupid little thing they could find? Did you miss the Russian-Wilileaks intervention? Did you miss the open appeals to racism and misogyny?
It’s this simple. It seems to me the Democrats, especially the Democratic men, are looking for a good way to compromise on their coalition. As someone in a thread yesterday, we might have to compromise to defeat Trump and then we double-pinky swear we’ll get back to you. F_U_C_K that to hell and back. I am not letting anyone throw women, people or color, or LGBT people under the bus just so that Democratic white men can get the headrush of winning.
Jilli Brown
@Corner Stone: I couldn’t bring myself to watch that spectacle. Goofus and Gallant. Total revulsion and absolute grace. Not today.
Davis X. Machina
@Another Holocene Human:
Bingo!
Poujadiste, all the way.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t have Netflix, but I agree. I have lots and lots of things in my DVR queue and HGTV and the Food Network can always draw me into a fantasy world. I won’t sully my TV screen with that man. I am ashamed that President Obama has to be gracious to that man. I am deeply, deeply ashamed of that. My heart breaks for him that he feels he has to.
Starfish
@Another Holocene Human: Can you explain what you mean by this? What was going on?
Another Holocene Human
@negative 1: Ya know, I think plenty of rather racist people voted for Obama. That’s why he had to walk that fine line of respectability politics. A certain number of genteel racists will vote for a Black guy who pushes the right buttons. Obama NEVER could have gotten elected with Trump’s negatives as a Black man.
Hilary never tried to not be an unabashed feminist. I want to believe that other factors cost her the election but she may have ticked off some people that Obama managed to not tick off … it’s possible.
Betty Cracker
@negative 1: Are you aware of any data on the number of Obama voters who voted for Trump? The article you linked talked about approval numbers, which isn’t the same thing.
In the absence of that, I can think of a few reasons why people would vote for Obama and then Trump. Maybe they are attracted to the most fascinating character in the reality TV show. Maybe they won’t vote for a woman. Maybe they got outraged by the BLM movement and liked Trump’s opposition to it. Maybe they think two terms is enough for one party.
It’s all speculation in the absence of data, but I suspect we’ll find turnout was a bigger problem than crossover voters.
Davis X. Machina
@RareSanity: Worked in Atlanta in the early 80’s I remember DeKalb county then, and now. It was a hotbed of white petty bourgeois fear and trembling then. They were fighting MARTA because They would use it to come out to Toco Hills and steal their televisions.
It’s another world now. The diversity of ATL is amazing.
Linnaeus
@RareSanity:
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying don’t target those areas. It’s just a longer-term party building project. The margins in places like WI and PA suggest to me that that, at least in the short term, they’re still winnable.
Local Observer
@Mnemosyne: Mysogeny is too easy of an explanation. I’m male and like Kirsten Gillibrand and Barbara Boxer and love Elizabeth Warren but Hillary Clinton grates on me intensely. I held my nose and voted for her but I doubt if I’m the only progressive man who finds Hillary Clinton completely unappealing as a politician.
geg6
@Shalimar:
This.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: I said this the other day, but one of Obama’s campaign honchos said that he considers MI to be a Republican state, and what saved it for Obama in 2012* was the auto rescue, combined with “Let Detroit go bankrupt”. I assume that had some play in Ohio, too. I would guess a lot of people forgot and/or didn’t want to give credit to That Woman, or any woman.
*although the closeness of this race and Gary Peters’ 2014 election suggests that this guy was wrong about the inherent redness of MI
Captain C
@gene108: I agree. Even a 90-day moratorium while they sorted out what to do long-term would have helped. It could have been conditional for/on banks who received government aid so as not to go under/into receivership.
Another Holocene Human
@Starfish: I’ve explained elsewhere in the thread. Basically, don’t like the way Florida Hilary team deployed resources. Didn’t make much sense. Definitely did not follow Obama’s ’12 game plan that won Florida. I don’t understand why we didn’t do a repeat of Obama’s 12 game.
cokane
neither of those narratives are true. it’s simply turnout. if dems had voted the same as R’s, it’s another ’08 blowout. Trump hasn’t even surpassed McCain’s vote for chrissakes. 2016 was basically the same Republican party as 2008’s, which will be the same as 2020’s imo. Why focus on that?
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
There was a whole brigade of guys right here on Balloon-Juice who just couldn’t get on board with Hillary for … reasons. They didn’t like her manner, or her voice was too shrill, or there was something untrustworthy about her that they just couldn’t put their finger on.
That, my friends, was deep-seated and unconscious misogyny at work, but they all violently rejected the very idea (after all, they like Elizabeth Warren, but Trump likes Ben Carson) and wouldn’t even consider it an issue.
If we had that problem here at BJ where we’re all relatively enlightened, imagine how bad it was out in the real world.
RareSanity
@Davis X. Machina:
I live in one of the northern suburbs now, but I grew up in the city…I have to tell a lot of the transplants out here that they only have their predecessor caucasians to blame for why they can’t catch a MARTA train from Alpharetta to the airport.
My Dad was born and raised in the city as well, and he witnessed the initial “white flight” in and around the civil rights era. I witnessed the next great white flight in the 80s. The Atlanta metro area is a significantly different place than it was just 20 years ago.
It is truly an urban oasis in the deep south.
SatanicPanic
@Emma: Preach. Also, they’ll never get enough white people to offset the losses they’d suffer by throwing minorities under the bus.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: From talking to some professional-class African Americans in the past few days, I strongly suspect that the one-two punch of
(1) electing Barack Obama (which plenty of white people felt good about, or felt good about themselves about), only to be followed by
(2) police shootings and the consequent rise of Black Lives Matter (which plenty of those same white people felt very angry about)
managed to make a fair number of onetime Obama-supporting white people (“yay! he’s cool and we overcame racism!”) into Trump-supporting white people (“I’m fed up with The Blacks and their grievances, you don’t see me marching in the streets because of some thug”).
Another Holocene Human
This is fascinating: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/
Dem’s margin with Blacks and Latinos is DOWN. I think this is because if what I saw as a volunteer for Hilary in Florida is any indication, they did a piss poor job of getting the working poor and the subsistence poor to the ballot box.
GOPers of color are doing better economically and will go to vote on their own.
Mnemosyne
@Local Observer:
I hate to tell you, but that “grating” feeling? That’s misogyny. I’m not saying it was conscious on your part — in fact, I’m saying the opposite — but that was misogyny raising its ugly head.
Starfish
@Another Holocene Human: I felt similarly. When I phone banked for Obama from Maryland. We were calling people in Virginia. In Colorado? We were just calling people in the next town over at times when they were not likely at home? And then hitting up the same houses over and over again even if the voters had moved, houses were clearly abandoned.
Linnaeus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Debbie Stabenow is up for reelection in 2018. That will be a race to watch.
FlipYrWhig
@Local Observer: I’m old enough to remember when Kirsten Gillibrand was the crypto-conservative enemy of right-thinking progressives everywhere. The Daily Kos rec list exploded with rage when Patterson appointed her. She supports the NRA! Her family includes wealthy Republicans! What a betrayal of all the “netroots” stand for!
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
Don’t discount Voter ID in those states. If you have to travel 20 miles to get a voter ID in Wisconsin because Scott Walked closed all of the DMVs in black neighborhoods, you don’t vote at all.
Percysowner
I don’t think the Democrats have ignored economic issues. The only time they had a majority in the Senate and House they did what they could to fix health insurance and bailed out the auto industry. I think we have to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton will never be able to win the Presidency, partly because of misogyny and partly because the Republicans spent too many years demonizing her. I think that 1) President Obama has to issue her a blanket pardon for any actions taken before the end of his term. This will mean she will never again be able to run for President because it will always be a cloud over her, but it also means, I’m not going to have to watch her be executed for treason on trumped up charges. 2) We need to find (I HATE saying this) a male candidate who can pull the votes that were lost because Hillary was a woman and a Clinton. 3) We have to work on finding people to run in 2018, not wait for 2020. (Ted Strickland the recession wasn’t your fault, don’t run again anyway, not for any position) We can’t lose more seats in the Senate and gaining a few back would be nice.
cokane
@Mnemosyne: i dont think this is accurate, but you seem keen on blaming certain demographics, data be damned. Based on exit polls, turnout among demographics was basically the same, with the only exception being lower turnout (vs 2012) among low-income and low-education voters. Basically Democrats across the board didn’t turn out for Clinton — women, men, youth, blacks. Actually Latinos were up slightly, but that could be due to being a larger share of the voting age population.
Laying this at the feet of white boy bernie bros no doubt feels good, but it’s not supported by the data.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: If it was misogyny writ large I think Trump’s whites margin would have beat Romney’s. Pew is saying that ain’t so. Hilary failed to turn out African Americans in firewall states. And that has to be a ground game issue because we’re not talking about a demographic that trusts what they see on cable TV. They turned out … just not quite enough.
You can’t rely on door knocks of working people just a few days before the election. You should have been calling them months ago. They should have early voted. Worry about teh Olds on election day.
geg6
@My Truth Hurts:
Since I know very few people who would have voted for Bernie from either side of the aisle, I have a hard time believing he would have won either. In fact, I think he would have lost by a much larger margin.
I know that I wouldn’t have been out canvassing, calling or donating to him.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Percysowner: Looking at the map, I think it’s gonna take some major Trump fuck-ups for Dems to make progress in the Senate in 2018. The good news is, I can’t imagine Trump won’t majorly fuck up in a lot of ways.
It’s gonna be ugly no matter what
NR
Well it sure is a good thing that the Democratic party is perfect the way it is and doesn’t need to change anything. We only lost because of racism and sexism after all, not because of anything the party did.
Davis X. Machina
@Percysowner:
They failed to seize the commanding heights of the economy in production, distribution and finance, now didn’t they?
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne: Why didn’t the Dem party spend money to get those folks registered? I mean, land sakes, this stuff isn’t rocket science.
This voter suppression crap DOES matter but I saw no organized effort by the party to combat it except for lawyers. Which are important but you need boots on the ground, too.
Obama chased down specific voters to make sure they updated their registration. Hilary sent kids out on weekends to bus stations to harass the same people every week. Diminishing returns, y’all…
FlipYrWhig
@Another Holocene Human: This seems to me to be a case of “I really like Barack Obama but I don’t give a shit about the Democrats,” which I think has been a major factor all along. IMHO it looks like Democrats had pretty much the same people turning out in 2004, 2010, 2014, and 2016, with 2008 and 2012 anomalous spikes because of the singular presence of Obama at the top of the ticket. (I haven’t looked into 2006.) People tend to think of it as “Democrats don’t vote in off-year elections,” but maybe the problem should be turned inside out, and it’s “millions of Obama fans ONLY vote in on-year elections.”
Jack the Second
Re: “reaching out to everyone”
The point of the Democratic Party isn’t to win elections (ha-ha, laugh it up), it is to advance the Democratic agenda. We advance the Democratic agenda by winning elections.
We must always try to help everyone, including those who hate us, we must always be fair and just, even to those who would treat us unfairly, unjustly, but we cannot reach out to everyone, because not everyone supports the Democratic agenda. We cannot weaken our resolve, discard our principles, to appeal to people who are actively opposed to the Democratic agenda, or there is no point to winning elections.
There are doubtlessly things we can do, to reach out to people who voted against the Democratic agenda in this election, who did not see the appeal of the Democratic agenda enough to turn out, but we cannot do so by betraying our Democratic principles, and we will not be able to reach everyone.
gvg
Aside from this election, i do think it should be a worry to everyone, minorities and majority, that in the last 20 or so years, all the income gains have gone to the top bracket and not the middle or lower. I don’t see that it would cause any higher costs if the same profits had gone around more evenly. I think it’s on our tax policy and the anti union propaganda. that apparently was able to happen because of the racism or past union workers. If the inequality gets too bad, history says we may see a revolution. Talking to these people has not been productive for me. I don’t know how to start except for, “your being scammed-divided you fall”. Studies say telling people they have been conned, makes it harder to get them to see it.
If the lower and middle classes stuck together instead of dividing on race, we’d have enough negotiating power to get better results, but no…..this is why democrats can’t get anywhere explaining our fact based policies and how they could help.
We have always reached out. its just in recent decades, racism has trumped economic interests. Pity, because I am sure it has impacted my white person income unfavorably, and I’d like to have made some more money and had more opportunities. Not only am I unwilling to allow screwing minorities, I thick the evidence is screwing them HAS NOT HELPED NON RICH WHITES and even that there are fewer rich every color total because of this game.
When I call them fools, I am actually measuring them from different values. they are economic fools who choose racial status over economics. Sometimes they don’t even have the self knowledge to see that. To them I am some kind of fool. They hate fear the other. I work with, talk to, interact with whoever happens to be around and just don’t even care…..they see threats I gather. We are talking a different planet, so the arguments I think are conclusive just don’t convey.
s
Davis X. Machina
@FlipYrWhig: “Four legs good, two legs bad” is the motto of every highly-recommended DKos commenter.
grandpa john
@waysel: Agree, I have been preaching for several years, that our media will be the death of us as a first world country, I just didn’t expect it to be so soon
cokane
@FlipYrWhig: this is a reasonable hypothesis
Emma
And another thing. Stop talking about “latinos.” We ain’t a monolith, people. We come from places that have hated each other for centuries. We look at the world in different ways. Catholicism still influences a lot of us. Miami Cubans are becoming more liberal as the older generation dies off but it’s not a certainty that we’ll turn democrat. And believe it or not, there are other nationalities — Venezuelans, Argentinians — that tend to be as conservative as a rich white American.
geg6
@Another Holocene Human:
This is simply not true. At least not in my neck of the woods. They had the same stellar organization that I experienced in both Obama runs.
waysel
@Another Holocene Human: Glad to hear another rational voice.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NR: Shut the fuck up.
Local Observer
@FlipYrWhig: I remember that as well. I view her as a pragmatist and she seems to
genuinely try to represent all parts of NY (including the red trump fever swamps of upstate), not just the downstate folks.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker: What episode are you on in The Crown?
I’m on episode 3.
Grandma Mary was a frigging trip!
Prometheus Shrugged
@Another Holocene Human: True. This is all in hindsight of course, but the DNC should have made sure galvanizing initiatives (like legalizing MJ) were on the ballot in all the potential swing states. I haven’t seen the final numbers, but my impression is that California turnout and margins were precisely as expected, partly because young voters turned out to vote on legal weed. Russ Feingold, Katy McGinty and Evan Bayh (!) aren’t exactly the most effective electrodes for young voters. To the extent that any part of the electorate was energized (and not actively suppressed), it seems like the racist cultural warfare deplorables were what remained. This is a subtle variant on Option #2 above.
I’m a climate scientist, so I’m looking forward to the next 4 years of total repudiation of my life’s work. If people think that the homeland security czar choices are horrifying, take a look at who Trump picked to head the EPA “transition” (i.e. demolition) team. Beyond comprehension…
qwerty42
But … but … Our own Mistermix approvingly quotes Jim Newell saying its Shrillery’s fault. She wasn’t nice to racists and misogynists and anti-semites (and yes, I know I can’t label all Trump supporters that way, but I’m not in a good mood and all the ones I encounter down here seem to fall into one or more of those categories). So she lost all those white votes.
Mnemosyne
@cokane:
Those “missing” low-income and low-education Democrats were the targets of Republican voter suppression in the form of strict voter ID laws. And it worked exactly as the Republicans designed it.
There are actually a lot of reasons why we lost the Electoral College and had lower turn-out, but I will continue to push back hard on the “economically insecure” claim because it’s bullshit. It’s the thin veneer that white people used to cover up their racism and misogyny. And if we don’t accept and understand that, we will continue to lose.
It hurts my heart to say this, but America is not ready for a woman president. There are too many misogynists on both sides of the political spectrum, and misogyny is one of the factors that depressed turnout.
And Elizabeth Warren would have had the exact same problem. Running against Trump, it would have been even worse, because she’s a wonky, intellectual woman who also has some Native American heritage. You think Trump’s white supremacist supporters would have been fine with that?
Cacti
@Partisan Cheese:
The point where you lost me.
geg6
@inventor:
I can’t speak to Michigan, but this is a mother fucking lie about PA. I’m here and I worked it. So did a lot of other people including Hillary, Bill, Chelsea, Tim Kaine, Obama, Michelle and Biden. Not to mention Jon BonJovi and a host of other people. Fuck you. She and her campaign put a LOT into PA. They got it spit back in their faces and now people like you lying about it. Fuck you.
cokane
@Mnemosyne: more people cast votes for Clinton than Trump. Bullshit we’re not ready. Again, *SOME* people aren’t ready, but they’re basically the same people we’ve been battling since at least 2000.
Sly
I’ll note for the record that the “economic anxiety” argument is coming largely from:
(a) Disgruntled Sanders supporters, in what is mostly an instance of the Pundit’s Fallacy
(b) White liberals who have a tendency to be weak on white supremacy and racial polarization (this also includes a fair bit of (a))
(c) Advocates of the outright gentrification of the American Left, like Connor Kilpatrick
Maybe if we sprinkle some kale chips or banana guacamole on racists, these three groups will finally notice them. Otherwise I got nothing.
Cacti
@Mnemosyne:
While it’s near blasphemy to say this in Democratic circles, I’ve never been impressed with Elizabeth Warren’s skills on the stump.
Local Observer
@Mnemosyne: I also find Sarah Palin and Rudy Guiliani grating. Is the first mysogyny and the second not? I think you’ve so broadly defined the word that it has lost any meaning.
cokane
@geg6: yeah well said, Clinton basically ended her campaign in Philly
NR
@gvg:
No no no. No one cares about stuff like that. We only lost because of racism and sexism. Get with the program.
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
It doesn’t matter if you’re registered if you don’t also have the proper ID, and the list of acceptable ones is very short. Omnes had a link to a good article about WI’s law, but I’m on my phone.
I agree with you that there should have been a MUCH bigger push by the Democratic Party to get everyone an ID. I have no idea why that happened, but it was definitely malpractice on their part.
way2blue
Thanks! Great, timely post. I have zero tolerance for the handwringing wing of the Democratic Party. And hope tougher heads prevail through the dismal months ahead.
Cacti
@NR:
Still here and still pretending to be a Democrat.
Why?
cokane
@Mnemosyne: Wisconsin as a whole is huge evidence of some Democratic campaign malpractice for sure. Don’t forget Clinton’s campaign had a huge spending advantage. Campaign resourcing definitely needs to be seriously re-examined.
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
I already responded in another comment, but I’ll repeat myself: African-Americans in firewall states were the specific targets of voter suppression. And the Democratic Party dropped the ball.
Amaranthine RBG
Here’s a reality check.
Republicans got about 59-60 million votes in 2008, 2012, and 2016.
The democrat got 69 million in 2008, 65 million in 2012 and, 59 million in 2016.
So there isn’t this large unseen wave of angry people (white or otherwise) who had just had enough of Obama and were finally motivated enough to vote. That is not reality.
What happened is 10 million people who voted for Obama did not vote for Clinton. They did not vote for Trump. They just didn’t vote.
Months ago I posted several comments in Balloon Juice noting that there were about 45 million people who would vote for Trump no matter what. I noted that Clinton did not excite or motivate voters and that is why she is was a weak candidate.
I was told to STFU by dozens of posters here.
Look, even knowing that Clinton was a crappy candidate, I drove from SF over to Reno and worked on GOTV for her for a week. I am not some Republican.
But Clinton was a terrible choice. Trump did not win the presidency, Clinton lost it.
It would be useful, perhaps, if people would look at reality and realize what the fuck they did wrong before they start ratcheting up the grand plans about all the things they are going to do in the future.
Bailey
@Another Holocene Human:
Oh stop. Having a primary opponent that points out obvious things about the pre-ordained frontrunner was not what killed HRC’s campaign or the perception of her being a global elite and not working in the interest of the lower and middle classes.
You know what did that? HRC’s horrific judgment and poor decision to constantly align herself with the global elite at the expense of the working and middle classes. HRC and Bill, along with every other ex-politico out there, have been gorging at the damned trough of Wall Street, extracting outrageous speaking fees. And you know what? I don’t even care about that. I’m a capitalist–if the market wants to pay you for that, go crazy. But if that’s the route you want to take, maybe you should realize that your alignment as a candidate for the Presidency has thus been forever altered. Neither Bill nor Hill could make a decision — were they going to be gorging capitalists or were they going to be public servants? You’d think that for at least a small window of time as she prepared to run for President—and after one of the biggest financial crashes of all time—she could have held off but the temptation to live in both worlds could not be tamed and it damaged her greatly.
I’ve seen posters here tie themselves in knots trying to justify her decision making but hopefully a few will come around and understand that “blaming Bernie” is not the answer. Addressing HRC’s questionable judgment is.
But hey, upside: Both Bill and Hill are free to go back and feed further at the trough without abandon. Maybe they’re even happier that way, who knows.
Cacti
@qwerty42:
Like any good BernieBro, MM is a believer in trickle down social justice.
FlipYrWhig
@Prometheus Shrugged:
But here’s the rub. If young voters require a lot of stroking and petting and then they mope and sigh and drag their heels anyway, it’s really not unreasonable for consultants and strategists to say, “ya know, love ’em, but it’s not worth this much effort, let’s throw ’em a few bones and get to work on professional white people in the suburbs who believe in social tolerance and steady-handed technocratic governance, because at least they show the fuck up.”
NR
@Cacti: Still here and still as tiresome as ever.
Hey, how did those months of shitting on BernieBros work out for you?
geg6
@Matt McIrvin:
I was ahead of them in declaring this country done. It is. We’re all just waiting around to see the exact mechanism for its demise.
I literally have no hope at all.
Brachiator
It’s really not an either/or.
Also, I like the one where we blame the media for not blaring “DANGER! DANGER! Demagogue Alert!!” 24/7
Not entirely, but keep repeating it. It won’t really matter, but it will make for a hell of a soothing lullbaby.
People insist on looking for simple explanations for complex causes.
But here’s a thing. About 46 percent of registered voters stayed home. I wonder why? Are they satisfied, or did they give up?
On Monday, a lot of folks were predicting the splintering of the Republican Party and wondering who might be around to pick up the pieces. Now, the GOP can ignore its schisms for a while and stick it to the country.
Meanwhile, the need for soul searching has shifted to the Democrats.
And even though a lot of people had dismissed the Bernie People (and they are not simply BernieBros who hated Hillary), look at the motherfucking energy of the primarily young people protesting the shit out of the Trump election. That energy obviously ain’t happy, and it ain’t just finger pointing.
Find a way to channel that energy ’cause that’s where the future is. The rest of this navel gazing don’t mean shit.
FlipYrWhig
@Bailey: “I’m so angry about the ‘global elite’ I’m voting for a billionaire celebrity playboy!” You do realize how little sense that makes, right?
cokane
@FlipYrWhig: there’s also no evidence of a disproportionate dropoff in turnout among young voters compared with 2012. People need to look at the data and accept that Dems across demographics did not turn out. Figure out the What before getting into the Why.
Jim Reed
First, while it’s definitely true all shit-gibbons were Trump supporters – it’s also true not all Trump supporters were shit-gibbons.
Second – I am originally from Detroit. I can tell you with a fair amount of certainty that the loss of well paying jobs, and the suppression of unions played a major roe in the mid-west.
Obama got their support because he promised hope and change – and he was viewed an outsider, with only one term in the senate.
We kept the hope – but never got the change.
These workers wanted to hear about what was going to be done to get their well paying jobs back, everything else was just so much noise.
As ludicrous as a vote for Trump (the shit gibbon) may seem to any rational person – you need to understand that they were voting for hope and change.
Because for all of the bullshit from the shit gibbon – he promised to get their jobs back and improve their life. And, that’s what they cared about.
if the democratic party wants to flourish they need to kick out the corporate wing that Bill introduced into the party – and get back to their FDR roots.
Davis X. Machina
@FlipYrWhig: Their votes count more when they do show up, because of the Authenticity Multiplier that’s applied when the votes are finally counted.
Just like the corn-fed elders of the prairies, whose votes also count more for the same reason.
Cacti
@NR:
Just slither back to Breitbart, will you.
Nobody’s buying your aggrieved BernieBro façade.
Davis X. Machina
@Brachiator:
Never mind the energy — look at their numbers. Enough to swing a swing state? Not yet, anyways.
FlipYrWhig
@cokane: Agreed, good point.
D. Mason
@Emma: by BJ logic doesn’t that make you a hildabro ?
Mnemosyne
@gvg:
Here’s where I climb onto another of my favorite hobby horses: in this country, we have an economic class system and a racial caste system. Poor whites are at the bottom of the class system but were at the top of the caste system.
Trump voters want the caste system back. They don’t care about their place in the class system nearly as much. In fact, they’re willing to take action against their own economic interests just to maintain the caste system.
This is a problem for Democrats trying to appeal to those voters. Unless we promise them that they will be first in line for all of the benefits (as they were promised with the New Deal), they won’t play ball.
jenn
@rawhide rawlins: The Republicans held all three branches during the Bush administration. Not that that lessens your point.
Davis X. Machina
@Cacti: Trailed Obama by 8, when they shared a ballot in the bluest state in the union.
Could be misogyny. Could be. Could be something else.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: It’s not registration. 300,000 registered voters with ID issues. Trump won WI by about 27,000 votes.
geg6
@matryoshka:
That might get me off the couch and back into the trenches. But all this drama over the Democratic Party and the MRAs/Bernistas and how can we appeal to the white guys in the white hoods without every making it seem like we approve of racism is just wanking. None of it will matter. The Democratic Party is dead. The MRAs/Bernistas were never on our side and never will be. They are no better than the white hoods. And the white hoods want us all dead.
Insurgency, now that might have an effect. I have no hope for any other of the suggestions I’ve seen.
NR
@Cacti: You just didn’t call the BernieBros racists enough times.
That must be why Clinton lost.
sunny raines
correct, racism, misogyny, and bigotry (aka option 2 above) won the election for trump and filled up congress with republican craven imbeciles.
So why wouldn’t Democrats try to address the actual problem rather then something off the mark? It is a hell of a lot easier to come up with things to try to address option 1 (even though it doesn’t address the problem) than it is to do anything about option 2. Option 2 is a character flaw. For the most part, the only thing you can do about changing people’s character flaws to wait for them to die. Adult’s do not lose their bad characters based on pressure form the outside. It is what makes the election result so terribly depressing.
cokane
@Mnemosyne: duh. I don’t understand any effort put into so much as thinking about appealing to Trump voters. Republicans have about ~60 million voters in the past 3 prez elections. There’s some movement in and out of that group in the margins, but it’s not significant. And it’s not as significant as a 6 million dropoff in Dem voters from 2012 to 2016. Far easier to convince a non-voting dem-friendly citizen than someone who actually cast a ballot for Trump, in my experience.
Davis X. Machina
@Mnemosyne:
What’s really clever is you can beat her up for claiming it when she isn’t, and beat her up for exploiting it if she is.
FlipYrWhig
@Cacti: And beyond that, do we even know anything yet about what Warren thinks about issues besides banking/finance? I have a just-barely-non-sexual crush on Elizabeth Warren but she strikes me as, like, a mile deep and an inch wide.
D58826
@geg6: He does it for two reasons
1. he is a CLASS guy
2. he is a patriot who will uphold our tradition of a peaceful and respectful transfer of power.
Cacti
@Mnemosyne:
Yep.
Full rights of citizenship for people of color was the rock that broke the new deal coalition.
There is a class of white people who have not one damned intention of sharing the country with “them” and it has always been that way.
Cacti
@NR:
Your candidate is POTUS now. You can drop the ruse.
FlipYrWhig
@cokane: This. But of course part of the dilemma is that part of what turns people off from politics is that politicians try too hard to please them. So you need to find politicians who please people who are currently not voting, but who don’t seem as though they’re trying! Oy.
geg6
@negative 1:
You do realize that the asshole Trumpsters who scream about “trade” around here are saying that because they are under the delusion that the Ohio River Valley steel industry is going to be back and up and running within the next six months to a year? They truly believe this. This hasn’t been a reality here since the early 80s. And there are no more steel mills along the river any more. It’s all brown fields, industrial parks and recreational facilities. They are gone forever and they aren’t ever coming back. But these assholes are convinced that NAFTA killed the steel industry and that man is going to make it come back just like it was when their daddy worked there. These are deeply stupid and delusional people. These are my neighbors.
sukabi
@Trentrunner: statewide it seems that folks should be working to ensure even access to the polls, and to remove the voter suppression barriers for a start. Can’t claim democracy if you’re actively blocking large swaths of eligible people from voting.
NR
@Cacti: You used to at least be funny, but you’re honestly just sad at this point.
FlipYrWhig
@geg6: Do you think they *actually* think it’s coming back? Or is it more that they’re pissed off that it isn’t and they’re pleased to find a candidate who’s pissed off about that too, with the coming-back part optional?
Cacti
@geg6:
Ditto the coal mines.
With cheap natural gas available from fracking, coal is declining because the market for it is disappearing. The mine, the mill, and the factory that Trump promised to bring back are gone forever.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: probably both, the unemployed mine worker who HRC got in the “put a lot of coal miners out of business” flack with told a reporter he appreciated her explanation (bring new jobs and new technology to coal country) but he believed God put the coal in those hills so that he could provide for his family. People have strange beliefs
geg6
@Linnaeus:
The pundits here in PA are blaming the margin on the people who, mostly, were the Bernistas around here–the Stein and Johnson voters. Had Hillary gotten almost all of the Stein votes and about half the Johnson votes, she’d have won PA. I blame the Bernistas more than I do Hillary. Fuck those assholes. And I see them polluting BJ today with their lying bullshit. They are no better than the Thugs. Worse, in fact. I want them crushed by the coming shitstorm just as badly as I want the Trumpsters to be. I’ll be suffering too, but I will still have the great pleasure and alleviation of my own pain by watching them suffer.
Davis X. Machina
It’s the same country it was on Monday, one that elected, and re-elected a black president, and would give him a third term if they could (Cf. Bloomberg).
One where a million and a half more actual poll-going voters will turn out to have voted for the woman, and the Democrat, than the alternative.
The White House and the House of Representatives are now both about to be controlled by a party that lost the popular vote for both.
It’s the same country it was Monday. Now it’s just better than the people running it.
So let’s change everything!
Emma
@D. Mason: It makes me someone tired of being considered expendable. It makes me someone tired of seeing their relatives, friends, and acquaintances being considered expendable. It makes me someone tired of seeing my so-called allies immediately begin to look for ways to set us aside.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.
When Obama was first making his moves, I recall a well known talk radio host on KFI, and someone who was politically moderate, wisely intone that he didn’t think that America was ready for a black president. I thought, “What you mean is that you are not ready for a black president.” But you could just see the nation engage with Obama and go from “Who. What. I don’t know.” to “hell yes!”
And in 2008, when Hillary looked to be the Inevitable One, I had a deeply self-important Democrat explain the natural order of things to me. “First, there will be a woman president, then a Jewish president. Then, somewhere down the road, a black president. But it is not Obama’s time, now.”
But right now, today, the question is almost more “is America ready for a Democratic president?”
There are some people who think that JFK was the first Catholic to run for the office of president. That ain’t true.
But I don’t care whether anyone thinks we are not ready for a woman president, or another black president. Or a Latino president. Or an openly gay president.
I am still astounded that an arrogant imbecile has been elected president. But if we survive this, the future will belong to the man or woman or the transgender person who steps forward and jumps into the ring and makes the fucking country embrace him or her. Because the best thing about the future is always based on the audacity of hope, and the person who sees what is possible while everyone else is still entertaining doubts.
negative 1
@geg6: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-18/after-doubting-economists-find-china-killing-u-s-factory-jobs
Why aren’t they coming back? Maybe when you say that to their face they’re not going to vote for you.
Here’s the thing: if you’re right, what are they supposed to do? One of the following two assertions is true. Either a.) the democrats have a great plan for it and no one knew about it because the messaging was awful or b.) the democrats don’t really have a plan for it.
No one doubts that racists voted for trump but they’ll be racists next cycle, too, and there’s nothing we can do about that. However saying *everyone* just voted for him because they’re racist seems to ignore some of the data. And we can do something about those folks. As well as just make good policy because people in those areas need it. I don’t understand why coming up with either a better policy or a better message around it for the basically abandoned rust-belt or similar areas is somehow mutually exclusive with any other ideas anyone has to win next time.
clay
@Prometheus Shrugged: Weed (medical use) was on the ballot in Florida. It passed overwhelmingly — 70%. Didn’t seem to help Hillary that much.
geg6
@Partisan Cheese:
Again, another Bernista pushing a motherfucking LIE. A complete and utter lie.
Bailey
@FlipYrWhig:
Well, there’s not much logic to be found in any square as to why republicans would vote for Trump. The problem are the millions of democrats that did not vote for Clinton or did not vote at all. It is reasonable to conclude that they found no inspiration in her allegiance with the global elite while also presenting herself as for the working class.
I’m not saying there are no contradictions at play here–clearly there are–but again, it was Clinton’s own lack of foresight on a fairly predictable issue with Democrats or Dem-leaning voters that helped seal her fate and accounted for the lack of enthusiam for her which dogged the entire campaign. (Amongst other issues.)
Felonius Monk
@NR:
Bernie is not a Democrat, so why don’t you fuck off and go join his Revolution wherever it hangs out and stop annoying everyone here with your horseshit. Your one-dimensional X-Man of Populism is already trying to suck Trump’s dick, maybe you should go help him.
Linnaeus
@geg6:
Yeah, it’s a combination of factors: voters who don’t realize how elections work and want to treat voting as a consumer choice instead of a strategic choice to advance your agenda as much as you can, turnout and GOTV problems in certain districts, etc. Maddening.
Joe Bauers
MORE THAN ONE THING CAN BE TRUE AT A TIME. We didn’t get here for one reason only. The fact is that she performed pretty much as expected outside of the Rust Belt. Yes, a lot of people there voted for Trump because racism but MORE THAN ONE THING CAN BE TRUE AT A TIME. Obama took Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Twice. Clinton lost all four, and that’s the election. Did they get super-racist all of a sudden in the last four years? Trump said “I’ll bring back your jobs and screw brown people at the same time. She’s crooked and took money from Goldman Sachs and NAFTA is her fault.” She said “I’m not *that* guy. She lost. Since the Democrats aren’t going to out-racist the Republicans, and thank God for that, how about trying to be a party that represents labor and the working class again IN ADDITION TO minorities of all kinds?
Or you can keep insisting that it’s all racism and sexism, because that’s working out just fine, right?
geg6
@Mnemosyne:
PA does not have a strict voter ID law. I don’t know how this got into the mainstream here at BJ, but it’s a lie. PA’s voter ID law only requires you to show your ID the first time you vote at a polling place. After that, never again. There were some reports of some poll workers trying to force people to show ID who did not need to, but that was minor stuff and happened mostly in areas where there aren’t a whole lot of non-white people. It was not a factor in the loss of the state, IMHO.
dww44
@debit: I made the mistake of visiting Facebook just a bit ago. I never post any political diatribes on my FB page. Mostly I don’t post anything at all and I’ve made it a point to remain aloof from social media during election season.
So, my recent visit finds 2 prominent posts from high school friends about how God Blessed America with Trump’s win. There was another about how his victory saved the country from that infinitely evil Hillary and the Clinton Foundation which was all set to ruin the county. All of them believe in the absolute sincerity and truth of their posts.
In post haste I exited, but not before posting my own response: “Values Voters”!! Thanks to valued BJ commenter, Jeffro, for that response. Henceforth it will be my default ultimate push back.
Felonius Monk
@geg6:
They seem to be circling around here like flies today.
Davis X. Machina
@Joe Bauers:
And the Democratic Party fails to represent labor and the working class precisely how?
NR
@Joe Bauers:
The beauty of the argument they’re making here is that it means that they don’t have to change anything.
Intellectual laziness at its finest.
mai naem mobile
@geg6: go after their God Bernie in his next primary. People forget Howard Dean and Bernie represented different factions of the Dems in Vermont when he was governor. BTW,did Bernie ever release his taxes?
SFAW
@retiredeng:
Interesting. Earlier today, I was thinking that he was pulling a Ferdy Marcos. If memory serves, before Marcos took over, the Philippines had one of the highest standards of living of the Pacific rim, and Marcos was not particularly wealthy. And when he was finally gone, he had empoorened his country, and made himself a billionaire.
Fast forward to today: rich country, not-particularly-wealthy, corrupt scumbag wins the election.
I expect the US is too large and rich to be empoorened too much as Shitgibbon finally becomes a billionaire for real (after years of falsely claiming that he is). But it won’t be for lack of trying on Shitgibbon’s part.
[Apologies if anyone has already covered this. I’m too lazy/depressed to ready to much about that fuck, and about how fucking stupid the electorate is.]
Bobby D
@Davis X. Machina: Grew up and went to college in ATL, family is all still there, and my first dentist was in the Toco Hills shopping center back in the eary/mid 1970s. Even in the 90s when I was in undergrad, Cobb co was fighting a MARTA extension for same reason. DeKalb got overtaken by mid 2000s, particularly in the I-85 corridor, Doraville/Chamblee. It was already trending heavily hispanic and Asian when lived on Buford Hwy near the Dennys and Pink Pony. I lived there late 90s, and Chamblee was already known as Chambodia, and a little further south on Buford Hwy was basically little Mexico. Small world, hadn’t heard Toco Hills in probably 20 years.
D. Mason
As a white man who didn’t vote I will go on record as saying I chose to stay home instead of casting my vote because I feel like both options spelled doom for America and there’s no reason I saw to go out and do a little song and dance to get my portion of grief. Neither candidate could convince me that they wouldn’t hand the whole thing over to Wall-Street and the warm fuzzies of electing the first female President weren’t enough to get me in a dancing mood. If that makes me a misogynist in the eyes of BJ I can certainly live with it, but I would have voted for anyone who could convince me the economy would be in good hands.
LanceThruster
Testing.
Felonius Monk
@geg6:
Did you read BooMan’s analysis of the PA results. Very interesting. Here’s the essence:
(Source)
dww44
@Davis X. Machina:Thanks. I always look for your comments, even though sometimes I have to figure out their import. No so with this one. It is just so correct. Now, how do we convince Ryan, McConnell, et al. that they DO NOT have the legislative mandate they claim they were given as a result of Tuesday’s election?
Davis X. Machina
@Bobby D: Our watering hole — all young teachers — was the Toco Tap.
FlipYrWhig
@Bailey: “Global elite” is a Breitbart-ish way to put it, and smacks of The International Jew. I’ll tell you the things I’ve heard as populist-ish anti-Hillary claims instead:
(1) Hillary is corrupt because she got rich after being in government. (This is what the Clinton Foundation stories are about. Bernie people would add the Wall Street speeches.)
(2) Hillary covers up the crimes she’s committed and gets away with everything. (This is what the Benghazi and email server stories are about.)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@D. Mason: Okay, you’re an idiot. Thanks for sharing.
Davis X. Machina
@dww44: You can’t. Or massive resistance. I’m not sure there’s a tertium quid.
Luckily we have some old souls like John Lewis to show us how it’s done, who’ve done it.
Cacti
@Felonius Monk:
Maybe he and Donald can help plot which Hispanic towns should be the dumping grounds for northeastern toxic sludge.
I know Bernie has some experience with that.
FlipYrWhig
@D. Mason: Oh, you mean you’re an idiot. Good to know.
liberal
There’s a third theory: Clinton was a poor “retail” candidate who couldn’t motivated Democrats to get to the polls in sufficient numbers to win.
Linnaeus
@D. Mason:
An example of voting, or in this case, not voting as a consumer choice. Christ.
Felonius Monk
@D. Mason:
No, it doesn’t make you a misogynist, it makes you an idiot. You didn’t vote, so your opinions are worthless.
ETA: Aw, Flip, you beat me to it.
Bailey
@Joe Bauers:
Yes. This. Agree to infinity with this.
FlipYrWhig
@Felonius Monk: Hmm, interesting. Those provincial results have to be defections from D to R, right, not formerly-non-voting Rs showing up and formerly-voting-Ds staying home?
FlipYrWhig
@Felonius Monk: Jim Foolish Literalist beat both of us!
liberal
@Davis X. Machina: It’s certainly more sympathetic to labor than the Republicans, but it’s doesn’t truly represent the interests of workers. Of course, anyone who works for a paycheck who either voted for Trump or (barring a family emergency) didn’t vote for HRC has a hole in their head.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: I saw him coming. He’s new (shocker) but he’s persistent the last few days
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: Or a third-and-a-half theory, that only Barack Obama has been an adequate “retail candidate” in recent memory, because he is sui generis. Which is also a pretty sad state of affairs for the Blue Team.
Felonius Monk
@FlipYrWhig: If you read the BooMan article,he’s got some ideas about that. I’m guessing it’s people who will vote for whoever they think will protect their interests. Probably misguided in this case, but you vote with the info you have, not with the info you wish you had.
liberal
@D. Mason: Look, unlike a lot of others here, I actually detest Clinton in many ways. But the choice was easy. Why? Because on the one hand you have a hawkish, detestable neoliberal, whose election would continue the long, slow decline of our nation, and perhaps get us involved in a war where we have no national interest.
On the other hand, you have Cthulhu, who is going to sign any bill the Republican thugs in Congress hand him, send us back to pre-Lockner days, stack the Court with racists who will ensure voter suppression efforts will continue and that my daughters, when they grow up, won’t be able to get abortions if they need them, probably crash the economy after he signs off on the Tea Party Caucus plan to gut the federal government (excepting the military of course), might get us in a war very soon with Iran after reneging on the deal agreed to by Obama, etc etc etc.
If you don’t think that’s a clear choice, you have your head shoved far up your ass, my friend.
Betty Cracker
@Joe Bauers: I don’t think anyone’s insisting that it’s 100% racism and sexism (or at least, I’m not). I’m saying the facts on the ground don’t seem to support the economic dislocation / wealth inequality theory. If people were motivated by that, they’d never vote for another Republican again, and they sure as hell wouldn’t support a fat-cat conman worker-stiffer like Trump. The Democrats are the only party that ever stands up for labor and the working class (however imperfectly — and I agree there’s lots of room for improvement on that score). Clinton was the only candidate who supported raising the minimum wage. Trump promised to slash taxes for the wealthy. It just doesn’t add up.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig: Yes, there’s that.
I’ve been very critical of Obama in an absolute sense, but realized even before the disaster upon us that I’m going to miss him greatly, given all plausible alternatives.
Brachiator
@geg6:
So, what are they supposed to do? Roll over into a ditch and die?
NR
@Cacti: You know, Cacti, we haven’t talked enough about the biggest failure in this election: you. You had such a great strategy for winning votes, but you just didn’t take it far enough. If only you’d called the BernieBros racists a few more times – maybe even just one more time – Clinton would surely have won.
Really, I blame you for President Trump.
liberal
@Betty Cracker:
That’s wrong. You’re assuming people aren’t fucking idiots. But they are fucking idiots.
I will not at all be surprised if the Republicans burn everything to the ground, and people will still blame the Democrats.
Joe Bauers
@Davis X. Machina:
NAFTA was one of Bill’s big achievements and she was also for it. After NAFTA, were there more manufacturing jobs here or fewer? Did working class real wages go up or down? It’s a more complicated story than that but that’s what he hung around her neck. And at the same time, racist dogwhistles. We can’t wish away the fact that racism sells to people whose votes we need, so we have to give them some reason to vote for us that’s more appealing than the minority-stomping that Trump was selling. Or, again, we can blame racism and sexism, do nothing, and keep losing. Being right that racism and sexism are still problems, like being right about climate change being real, is cold comfort when you have no power because you can’t win a goddamn election.
Fair Economist
There are at least four reasons Hillary lost the weird Electoral College in spite of actually winning the election by over a million votes. Here’s the four, with evidence for each:
The first two are the reasons Betty’s proposed, more or less
1) Racists came out for Trump.
Pretty incontrovertible.
2) Economically distressed people switched and/or had differential turnout.
Booman has a good analysis showing there were big shifts from Obama to Trump in industrial regions in Pennsylvania
But there’s two more:
3) The email faux scandal
Polls moved pretty distinctly every time this came up.
4) Sexism
Minority males moved to Trump where minority women didn’t.
These are all real, and all significant. I can’t yet say which is most important. If I had to guess, I’d say the relative importance is 3 – 2 – 1- 4, but that’s really guessing at this point. We don’t have to fix **all** these problems, but we are going to have to address some of them. #2, the economic issue, isn’t the most important BUT it’s the one we can most easily address. The problem is that although Hillary had a strong agenda to help the rural communities and the working poor, it didn’t get out there. Her campaign’s approach was to put out white papers on a regular basis for discussion, but the media was determined to suppress that. Next time we have to recognize the ONLY time we get to address the public about issues is during the national broadcasts – the acceptance speech and the debates. The next candidate needs to hit hard on how much better the Democrats’ agenda is for the working class, and say it directly – even when Hillary mentioned her agenda items in her acceptance speech she didn’t tie it into economic inequality and the hollowing of the “middle class” (which includes working class in American parlance).
Not really dinging Hillary here – she was giving the media too much credit, and I think she didn’t want to overpromise on items she couldn’t deliver without a friendly Congress. In retrospect, she should have run more against the Republican Congress and less against Trump, because Trump’s problems actually came up in the media anyway while the Republican Congress got a free pass.
Tripod
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Stranger considering even if God put it in, we’ve extracted most of the thermal coal from central Appalachia. The region’s coal production was in terminal decline before Obama’s election.
Maybe if we all clap together the mountain giants will restore that resource…..
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think you mean Coal Angels, Heathen
Bailey
@FlipYrWhig:
Fair enough and anti-semitism was not my intention at all.
Okay, let’s talk about these points.
1. As a voter and you see that your Democratic candidate—historically one who is supposed to represent the middle and working class–is, spending a fair amount of energy taking huge speaking fees at the very institutions that caused misery and financial crisis for millions at a time in which people are just starting to get back on their feet again and a time in which the base of the party found the messaging in Occupy persuasive. Is it fair or unfair for voters to have a negative opinion on those developments? Is it fair or unfair for voters to wish to know what she discussed at those too big to fail institutions? Does it look favorable or unfavorable that the candidate in question goes to great lengths to not disclose her comments?
Does the voting public really hold “rich” candidates in low regard? No, they don’t. We’ve had plenty of rich presidents and, frankly, some of the wealthiest have been some of the best in history. Are voters naturally suspicious of people that get very rich, very fast? Yes, they probably do. Should they? I guess that’s a value judgment. Again, I don’t care that Hill and Bill found a fast way to riches or traded in on their experience and high profiles. As private citizens that is their right. But the get-rich quick scheme was never going to play well, truly, with large portions of the base and while many, many democrats managed to talk themselves into thinking this contradiction was really okay and was going to work out, it really was not ever.
But more importantly, Hillary never, ever managed to even try to turn these perceptions on their head. The only thing voters heard was “Pay for Play” but never heard—from her or anyone–what the hell the Clinton Foundation actually does. I may be mistaken and she might have mentioned in passing during a debate, but never was there a full-throated explanation–or even defense– of the many, many good works the foundation does. And that was just pitiful.
More frustratingly, she didn’t manage to use some of the wikileaks revelations to her advantage, particularly the Goldman Sachs leak where she talked about open borders for energy. That, in fact, might have been the perfect opportunity to spin the narrative and actually go on offense about her plans for domestic energy production in the US and how those jobs may replace the manufacturing jobs that are never coming back. (Again, we don’t seem to have any politicians who will actually say the obvious: those jobs aren’t coming back. They need to be replaced.)
dww44
@Davis X. Machina: Interestingly, Lewis, genuinely a hero, visited our local campaign office last Friday as a push to GOTV. He really is pretty good on the stump. Because he’s so respected and revered. However, a fellow female AA of his generation, who also represents Dems on the local Board of Elections, didn’t think much of his planned visit when it was announced just the night before. Her comment, “Oh, we all went through that era and earned our stripes. He and Lynch need to be in DC doing something about the voter suppression in the Secty of State’s office and get us out from under “this confederacy of Republicans.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Fair Economist:
I agree with this. But we cannot back off on a commitment to fighting for the equality and safety of all of our citizens. People with vague racist, sexist, etc. issues are going to need to swallow them in order to get the economic benefits. Right now, they don’t seem willing to do so.
jonas
I think Hillary herself had it right: half of Trump’s supporters were motivated by anger at what they believed was a hopelessly corrupt political system that couldn’t get anything done (that it was Republicans mucking up the works for the past 6 years didn’t seem to register) and an economic recovery that seemed to benefit mostly bankers and hipster tech workers in Silicon Valley while they were left living with vacant factories and a meth epidemic; the other half were truly a basket of deplorables lashing out at greater rights and visibility for minorities, gays, women, etc. and who just wanted to see shit burn as long as it pissed off liberals. As Elizabeth Warren’s letter to supporters today put it, Democrats *can* reach that first group, while telling the deplorables to go fuck themselves. And win.
Felonius Monk
@Brachiator:
Seems to me that if they are waiting for some messiah to bring back those jobs, that is exactly what will happen to them. But they keep voting for R’s who have blocked every effort to provide them help. Go figure.
FlipYrWhig
@Bailey: I’m surprised that there was never an ad (at least that I saw) about Trump’s fondness for ripping off, defrauding, and otherwise screwing people. And to me one of the most damning and telling anecdotes of the campaign was the item about how Trump used money donated to his foundation to buy portraits of himself — twice! But I guess “foundation” became a dirty word and the rip-off stuff just got treated as “hey, that kind of thing happens in business, he’s ruthless and we like that about him.” I think they probably overcommitted to the proverbial wisdom about how if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
PJ
@Mnemosyne: That’s horseshit. I voted for Hillary and gods know, she’s a much better prospect than any Republican, but:
1) her policies and instincts are much more conservative than what I want from a President. She is much more likely to go to war than I am comfortable with.
2) She and Bill are also completely tone-deaf when it comes to how they present themselves. Using the Clinton Foundation to shake down corporations and foreign oligarchs, who are also putting money directly into Bill’s pockets? Giving speeches for hundreds of thousands of dollars to Goldman Sachs? If you’re retired and don’t care about your political reputation, that’s fine, but if you want to run for President as a Democrat, it’s insane. The email thing is nothing as far as I’m concerned, but anyone could tell Hillary that it looks like she’s being secretive and has something to hide. Public perception matters. This kind of shit is one of the reasons she lost the election.
3) She’s not a natural politician and she’s not a good politician. Her public speaking is just adequate, and she has a hard time relating to people. She also has poor instincts in this area – why wasn’t she more focused on getting people to vote in the Rust Belt instead of spending money in Georgia and Arizona?
I’m convinced that if Obama ran for a third term, he would have won. I’m convinced that if Biden had run, he would have won. Elizabeth Warren is not a great speaker, but her policies and her real belief in them would have resonated. But it was Hillary’s turn, and look where it got us. If you want to believe she lost just because of misogyny (surely this was a significant factor among Trump supporters, but among Democrats, I have serious doubts), go ahead, but if you want to win elections, you need to figure out why you lost and what you can do to prevent it from happening again. And part of that means looking at the actual candidate who ran.
Betty Cracker
@liberal: Point taken.
@Fair Economist: That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
geg6
@NR:
There is plenty of racism and misogyny in the Democratic Party, so I don’t know who is saying the party is perfect. Take yourself, for instance.
Captain C
@Mnemosyne: This is a very important point. Also known as the “At least I’m not a Ni-CLANG principle.”
FlipYrWhig
@PJ:
I’m just throwin’ this out there, but maybe because the polls were closer in Georgia and Arizona than they were in the Rust Belt? And that it was actually pretty effective, because their efforts got more votes out of Georgia and Arizona than Obama got?
Joe Bauers
@Betty Cracker: But who polls better on “the economy”, Republicans or Democrats? Would a majority of voters agree that “job creators” can create more jobs if we cut their taxes? Perception drives votes, not (necessarily) reality. And both the perception and the reality are that globalization and free trade have shifted wealth away from American workers and to lower-wage workers and (mainly) the owner class. Bill Clinton championed NAFTA and Obama was largely silent. Trump offered hollow promises and racist dogwhistles, and people bought it because they liked both of those things. If we had some answers would we have done enough better to have kept Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania? I think so. They weren’t blowout losses.
D. Mason
@Emma: So to be clear, the bernie bros should stuff their own interests when ignored by Hillary and vote for her anyway but you openly admit you wouldn’t do the same. Equality in action folks.
toocanAnj
@Shalimar: This. And yet, once again, the pundits refuse to listen to POC who have seen this reality from the beginning. And 66% of white women who voted buying into it are the worst. My son tells me I need to make connections with these women, and thus infilitrate their internalized misogny and racism. I think he’s right.
Bobby D
@Betty Cracker: And we are arguing with you, because the facts on the ground DO support the economic anxiety driver, as a significant and possibly even more important factor than the xenophobia and racism drivers. Both are true, they are not “competing” narratives in any way. They are force-multiplying.
I voted for her, gave money, and encouraged others to vote. But I never liked her, and still don’t. I respect her for her accomplishments and public service, I much preferred her to her primary opponents and to any republican. But I am not inspired by her, I find her unlikeable and too DNC corporate centrist type for my liking. I’ve given a pretty significant sum to Sen Warren (and shes not even my Sen, I live in Calif), Boxer, Feinstein, Kamala Harris, and countless other female candidates. Being called a misogynist (not by you, but another in this thread) because I simply don’t find Hillary inspiring or likeable is ridiculous and offensive.
Captain C
@geg6: In other words, they believed the guy that bought his steel from China instead of the US, when he had no shareholders to whom he had a fiduciary duty to buy cheap, will somehow force the rebuilding of American steel mills by means unknown.
Captain C
@sukabi: I think this is what Obama is planning on working on.
clay
@Bailey:
Well, her campaign — probably correctly — decided that they were not going to verify and legitimize any of the e-mails by discussing their contents. Once she confirms one of them, then she has to spend weeks answering questions about ALL of them.
Jeez, what a shit show. I still can’t believe that Russia and Wikileaks conspired to fuck up our election — and a huge chunk of the country IS OKAY WITH THAT!!
WarMunchkin
@Felonius Monk:
This is probably one of the most earth-shatteringly frightening things I’ve read about the election. In 2008, there was some diarist at Daily Kos who did a rural county analysis during the Clinton-Obama wars. I tried to find it just now to no avail, but I distinctly remember seeing Obama do pretty well compared to Clinton. I suppose Bernie does decently well as well. Mind you, I think Bernie is a terrible candidate who knows merely single digit times more policy than Trump.
As for the subject of this post, I don’t really know what to say about this anymore. People keep telling me that an economic message is inflexibly sexist and misogynist (yes, this is how it comes across, and I don’t know anyone who says we should give up BLM or feminism or the VRA for votes), and I can see a perspective where this is true. But we just ran this election expressly on common decency, and common decency lost.
So you can either wait for more people to have common decency, or appeal to voters who don’t have it in order to build an electoral majority that can secure the protections of government and a social welfare state for its citizens. And the consequence of us re-attempting a cosmopolitan purity-pony coalition is that the rest of us suffer. Yes, that’s harsh, but I am tired of being in the fetal position and waking up with panic attacks.
Obligatory statement that GOP voters bear the ultimate responsibility.
Omnes Omnibus
@D. Mason: Fuck you. You are simply an asshole.
eldorado
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: that would be the sooner state.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
Well one thing is for sure we will get to see if Jill Stein’s theory of politics if valid. Trump will fuck it up so bad there will be a glorious liberal revolution that will turn out the bad guys and install a liberal paradise in the U.S.
Felonius Monk
@Bobby D:
Why don’t you lay all these facts for us. Apparently you possess a lot of important information that we don’t have. How about sharing.
geg6
@Jim Reed:
LOL! Seriously? They may not have begun that way, but they definitely are now and will be forever more. Doesn’t matter if they whine that they, themselves, are not racists or misogynists or bigots. They are fine with enabling it, which make them just as much as a racist, misogynist and bigot as if they had a whole closetful of white sheets and pointy hats. Fuck them. I’ll never voluntarily speak to or socialize with a Trumpster ever again. I only have about another 15 to 20 years on this earth and I’m not wasting any of that precious time worrying about them. They are scum and deserve exactly the same attention I’d give to your average pond scum.
dance around in your bones
Has this been linked yet? Gotta laugh where you can!
D. Mason
@liberal: I simply saw Cthulhu x2 and because of the (D) beside her name some people were blind to it. BTW you can call me and idiot and say I’m stupid or whatever because I let her being in the opposite pocket from the one Trump was in keep me from voting but I doubt I’m alone and low turnout cost your lady of inevitability the election.
clay
@Felonius Monk: That’s exactly what the touch-screen guy on MSNBC was saying on Election Night. In every swing state, he would zoom in on the rural counties and show the 2012 totals, and the reported ’16 totals. Trump’s margin was vastly greater than Romney’s in all of these counties.
That’s when I started getting the sinking feeling in my gut.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
You don’t need a complicated theory to explain anything. People were pretty open about what they thought and felt. People (including people here) didn’t believe them or were too bent on proving how dumbass these people were. The Atlantic, The Guardian, other sources published excellent on-the-ground reports about the disillusionment. And everyone discounted it. I love this clip from a pundit show in which the guy from the Young Turks is practically laughed off the set for suggesting that Trump might actually win the election.
ALMOST Everyone Was Wrong About The Election
Trump is not a Republican. He has been a member of the Reform Party, a Democrat, whatever gave him the most publicity. And his supporters saw him break every Republican, the pro-business guys, the sexuality obsessed, the evangelicals, the New Jersey professional politician, another member of the Bush dynasty. He smoked them all, and then mocked former contenders McCain and Romney.
And Trump never pivoted, never bowed to the pressure from the GOP grandees. Oh, yes, he is a worthless piece of shit, but if you don’t look at him through the eyes of his supporters, you only end up trying to deny what is right and front of you when it comes to his appeal. He made the GOP political elite back down and kiss his con man ass. If that ain’t the American Dream, what is?
The unions can’t save jobs or prevent them from leaving. How many of Trump supporters were unemployed or under employed? How many used to have good union jobs?
And like all the Republican liars,Trump promises to slash the taxes for everyone. It’s only in the details that you see how well the rich will make out.
I don’t think for a second that Trump will be able to deliver on what he promises. But he was up front about what he was about, and he convinced the people who voted for him that he could do better than the Establishment. He lied his ass off, but his supporters wanted to be lied to. But it is pointless to try to downplay their dissatisfaction, or to say that it wasn’t real or hid their “true motivations.”
Betty Cracker
@Joe Bauers: Those are voter stupidity and messaging issues, and yes, we have to address them. If that’s what you’re talking about, we agree. But you seemed to be suggesting above that the Dems don’t represent the working class anymore. I don’t think that’s true. Hell, Clinton co-opted a big chunk of Sanders’ economic agenda and ran on the most progressive platform since LBJ. Didn’t seem to matter.
@Bobby D: See above.
geg6
@FlipYrWhig:
Oh, they have stated this to me numerous times. I read an article that ran in yesterday’s NYT about that man’s voters in one of the towns in my county, Ambridge. Used to be a Dem bastion. Reagan killed the economy there and it’s taken the area since then to recover. Some of these small steel towns will never be what they were. But if you had read the article, you’d see that the people who are the Trump voters are either old and retired, white non-college educated but with good paying jobs, or just really stupid college educated white people. And one of the themes they all touch on is that they expect the steel industry to come back. It’s delusional. They are idiots. One of the people interviewed works as a professional tutor at the local community college. She has a college degree, probably a master’s in that position (I used to work there right in that learning center and it’s a pretty good job for a community college if you aren’t faculty). But she’s all in for that man. The other underlying theme of their remarks is exactly what I’ve been saying all along: they hate the ni**ers and anyone who allies with them. It’s not economics…none of the people interviewed are under any economic stress. None of them. It’s race and misogyny. Nothing else.
D. Mason
@Omnes Omnibus:There really are some vile people around here.
geg6
@Brachiator:
If only. If I believed in a god, I’d be praying pretty damn hard for exactly this to happen.
You do realize, don’t you, that these people don’t need the steel mills? That most of them have jobs, good jobs? And most of those that don’t are retired, with pensions from those mills, pensions that none of the rest of us will ever have? The only people I see suffering economically around here are single mothers, black and brown people and heroin addicts.
Brachiator
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: Just wanted to say that, having recently seen Doctor Strange, I chuckle whenever I read your nym.
Bailey
@clay:
Well, except they did kind of answer them, they just did it in a half-assed way that gave her no advantage.
But hell, she should have been talking up the success of the foundation anyway, regardless of wikileaks.
This is disturbing on so many levels. But just another opportunity that got lost in the ether.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
Don’t you feel kinda dirty citing incorrect polls?
Did she win those states? Are electoral votes assigned based on “pretty close?”
Cacti
@NR:
N(attering) R(epublican).
That’s you, Trumpkin. Enjoy your 4-years.
NR
@Cacti: You’ve got a lot of nerve saying that when it’s your fault Trump got elected.
If only you’d called BernieBros racists more, we could have had President Clinton. But you just didn’t push your winning strategy hard enough. It’s a damn shame.
Omnes Omnibus
@D. Mason: You have no idea why I called you an asshole, do you? You are saying that you literally are willing to put other people’s lives and health at risk to get what you want. The rest of us want to deal with problems like economic inequality, but we also won’t abandon civil rights to attract white economic populists who have issues with women, POCs, and xenophobia.
gwangung
@geg6: I think this is a core driving force. And what Trump did was to tie that white nationalism to economic revival.
And the problem here is that there IS economic anxiety here—the ongoing globalization, the upcoming reliance on mechanization (which cuts into stability)///they may have something now, but it’s all on economic quicksand.
That sort of anxiety makes it quite easy to scapegoat, and that existing racism and homophobia gets an easy outlet….
The tricky thing is to defang and decouple these two causes…and to note that at this point trying to hit the racism head on may not be very fruitful.
No solutions here….just to toss out that it’s all connected and it’s all needs to be combatted.
Bailey
@Betty Cracker:
Perhaps because she had to co-opt it and it wasn’t innate to her campaign is an actual indication that the representative Dems aren’t really representing the working class and that Clinton, in particular, was long past being authentic on the issue?
Cacti
@NR:
You trying to be clever is physically painful, Trumpkin.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@Brachiator: Thanks.
Betty Cracker
@Bailey: Look, I wish the Democrats were more liberal on economics than they are. I disagree with President Obama on TPP. I wish PBO and HRC and every Democrat in congress had supported a $15 minimum wage since 2010. But like I said earlier, there’s only one party that stands up for the working class, however imperfectly, and it’s the Democrats. This doesn’t appear to have been an economic policy thing, IMO.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: But the ultimate incorrectness of the polls doesn’t uphold the idea, now commonly expressed, that it was TEH STOOPID not to try harder in WI and MI rather than going to GA and AZ. GA and AZ were toss-ups too.
Felonius Monk
@Omnes Omnibus: Omnes, it’s like talking to a wall. This asshole was too pure to vote yet wants us to take him seriously. As you said, Fuck him/her/it.
Davis X. Machina
@Betty Cracker:
In other words, his response was non-responsive.
Davis X. Machina
@WarMunchkin: They were willing to vote for the nigger when U3 was north of 10 per cent and a second Great Depression was staring them in the face. Now, it’s safe to vent.
Davis X. Machina
@Tripod: I know! They can all work on the unit trains carrying the coal from the Powder River Basin to the West Coast!
Davis X. Machina
@Joe Bauers: NAFTA was before the beginning of political life for the median voting-age American.
Applejinx
@Jonny Scrum-half:
TRUMP IS NOT A REPUBLICAN. He beat all the Republicans, in part because they have indeed never suggested doing a thing about the economic problem. All the Republicans lost to Trump first, he stomped them. Go to Red State and watch Republicans freaking out over Trump practically as bad as us.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
Quite honestly, I am not paying much attention to the snap judgments and all the various attempts to find easy answers to what happened.
However, one thing that is emerging is the idea that it wasn’t a matter of visiting this state or that state. There were voters who were more receptive to Trump’s message than Clinton’s. And in the swing states in particular, there appeared to be some defection of people who had voted for Obama in 2012, who now moved toward Trump. People liked Trump’s message more than Clinton’s.
Davis X. Machina
@Brachiator:
There were more voters receptive to Clinton’s message than Trump’s
NR
@Cacti: You wouldn’t know clever if it bit you on the ass, Skippy. As evidenced by the fact that you didn’t push your winning strategy of calling BernieBros racists hard enough, thereby causing Clinton’s loss and giving us President Trump.
Bailey
@Brachiator:
Probably because Trump had a message–belligerent, incoherent, and unworkable as it is–while Clinton did not develop one other than “vote for me, I’m not him.”
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: Except that’s not at all what happened in AZ and GA, where more people voted for Clinton than had voted for Obama. The polls showed that they were two new swing states, so they spent time on them. Spending time in AZ and GA is hardly political malpractice when those states were (a) close in an absolute sense, (b) closer, in polling terms, than WI and MI and PA in a relative sense.
Fair Economist
@Bailey:
See, this is the kind of nonsense that’s interfering with reaching the working class. Hillary, entirely on her own, had lots of things aimed at the working class:
Limitation on ownership inversions
A higher minimum wage
Improvements to the ACA
Incentives for unionization and union power.
A plan for a new rural wind industry in Appalachia.
This is real, toothy, stuff that could make a big difference for working people, and which could get passed in the current political climate if the Dems take Congress. Don’t lie to the working class by saying Hillary wasn’t trying to help them.
alfred pandolfi
Note that the vote in Detroit was down 129000 from that in 2012. She lost michigan by 61000 votes.
Milwaukee vote was down 95000 from 2012 and she lose Wisconsin by 73000 votes.
So the results are more complicated by the fact that democrats took for granted Michigan and Wisconsin and did not rev up the base. We did it to ourselves.
Big Picture Pathologist
@Jonny Scrum-half:
It’s worse than that. I pointed out Snopes links to Facebook debate opponents that stuff they believe was bullshit, and they wouldn’t even bother to check.
FlipYrWhig
@Bailey: Everyone always credits the winner with A Message and the loser with No Message. It’s a tautology. Winners have messages and you can tell because they won!
Brachiator
@Davis X. Machina:
And, so Clinton really won the election?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Jonny Scrum-half: They are completely brainwashed. I’ve tried to get through to them. I’m convinced that Bernie and Liz Warren’s overtones toward working with Trump to improve things for the working and middle classes is just a strategy to keep his voters eyes on the prize – i.e. when he does nothing about trade deals etc. the Dems want his supporters to know about it and know that he let them down. I’d be asking where those tariffs are every day if I were the Dems. I doubt they’ll ever materialize.
Brachiator
@Bailey:
I think that Clinton had more of a message than that. But I agree that Trump knew how to play to his supporters.
wobbly
I think job one is to ABOLISH the ELECTORAL COLLEGE.
That brake on democracy, written into the Constitution.
It gave us Bush over Gore, and it’s given us Trump over Clinton.
Applejinx
@Fair Economist:
I have never heard of half of these things and I have been desperate to hear about any such things, to justify the support I was trying to drag out of a suspicious crowd of Busters for Hillary. I’ve heard of the minimum wage though I don’t remember if she settled on the Fight For Fifteen or the half measures she originally wanted. I have not heard about her proposed improvements to the ACA, I’ve heard nothing about incentives for unionization, have no idea what the fuck ‘limitation on ownership inversions’ even means, and seriously? What sounds like ‘subsidize big electric companies to put windmills in Appalachia’? Or are hillbillies supposed to be paid to whittle them out of sticks?
What the actual fuck.
Not only is this a pile of shit, but I’ve literally not heard about half of these things and I have been all over Balloon Juice and the overall political zone for the last few years, quite a few years.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx:
*whistling nonchalantly and politely*
D. Mason
@Omnes Omnibus: I understand, you called me an asshole because I didn’t go out to vote for your chosen political candidate. Do you not understand that I don’t see her bathed in the same white light you apparently see? I do choose national, not personal, economics as my primary measure of a political candidate because I feel like when the economy goes bad everything else falls by the wayside whether we like it or not. If in my opinion, which is all a vote is, neither candidate will preserve economic integrity then I won’t vote. Maybe that makes me an asshole but I won’t vote for my own downfall. Also, there’s no need to pretend my voting for one flavor of economic ruin over another would prevent anyone’s suffering, we both know that’s nonsense. If Hillary had convinced me that she hadn’t already sold the country out to Wall-Street I would have happily done my “duty” and voted for the first female President but she failed. She failed because of her personal choices, not because of her gender but because of individual alignments she chose. I don’t care about the emails, or benghazi, or her stance on Iraq honestly, and when I say I don’t care I mean that I don’t care even if shes guilty as sin in all the ways the Republicans said she was. All I needed her to do was keep things afloat for 4 years and I don’t believe she was capable of doing so. Obviously neither did trump, so I didn’t vote. Not Sorry.
karensky
@Mnemosyne:
And, black working class men in WI, MI did not vote for Trump. I am devoting my old lady time (outside of volunteering at a public library branch here in Philly) to voting rights efforts. I want Kris Kobach and his ilk to go down in flames and for all US citizens to vote without an ID!
Dan
Betty, I typically love your posts, but disagree with you on this. How do you explain Hillary losing or underperforming so many counties that voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012? A lot of white Dems in the rust belt didn’t show up because they didn’t believe in Hillary as a converted populist. The Comey letter probably hurt too. The info below is from Politico, so I won’t link it, but I originally read the same things in the NYT the day after the election.
In a county (Mahoning County, OH) that Obama won by a 63-35 percent landslide against Romney, Clinton barely hung on for a 50-47 percent win. In similarly situated nearby counties, she flat out lost. Among them was neighboring Stark County, a bellwether in this heavily blue-collar region that went Democratic in the last three presidential elections. There, Trump defeated Clinton by a wide margin — she ran 11 points behind Obama’s 2012 performance.
Bailey
@FlipYrWhig:
You can’t honestly say that Trump wasn’t loud and upfront with his message from day one. Win or lose, it was going to be on what his frankly obvious messaging was. (And that’s what makes this loss so tough for liberals because the message was abhorrent.)
Bailey
@Fair Economist:
So wouldn’t it have been a great idea to run on these ideas? And create a much larger, more robust narrative around them? She spent virtually 90% of her time talking about how terrible Trump was and virtually zero time articulating her grand ideas for America in the 21st century.
Good grief, they had that former Miss Universe story in the wings and ready to go when Hillary name-dropped her in the debates, but honestly, what was that all about? Did it even net her additional votes from women? Not much, it would seem.
LongHairedWeirdo
This is probably too late to be noticed, but: WTF? DATA?
They *claim* to be supporting economic growth and jobs. Constantly. And it’s the fault of those gol’ durned democRATS that there aren’t any!
And the Democrats say “we can do that too, only we won’t fart around with restrictions on abortion and stuff.” Who wins? The guys who say “we can fix the problem they caused.”
We don’t need data. We need to hang “wall street love slave” and “lover of layoffs and off-shoring” around the GOP’s neck at every opportunity, and point out that we’re the proponents of higher wages and better working conditions – real JOBS, not just gigs.
Monala
@PJ: Check out this article by Gallup. Key passage:
boatboy_srq
@clay: I think you’re confusing the comparative silence of the slightly embarrassed and the silence of those for whom the dog whistle worked well enough and don’t need to be explicitly Deplorable. The silent ones were already voting for HEB?, or Cruz, or Kasich, or any of the others who would agree with the Deplorable agenda (just not phrased as tRump did). You may have hope of reaching these people; to me they’re just as unpleasant, though they know how to make the insults and threats sound nice.
Monala
@Joe Bauers: NAFTA WAS A GEORGE HW BUSH POLICY. NAFTA WAS NEGOTIATED BY GEORGE HW BUSH.
Monala
@FlipYrWhig: There were several ads featuring contractors who Trump had stiffed.
lofgren
There is no rational explanation for what White America did on Tuesday. None. We’ve addressed every single fig leaf complaint they’ve ever made. It comes down to one thing: Hillary Clinton has a vagina. The end.
PIGL
@Mart: Then you’re a fool and a vicious prick and a worm-infested dropping from a thrice-buggered dog.
PIGL
@RareSanity: One I know quite well is suddenly all deranged. I don’t undertsand it.
NR
@PIGL: They were right and you were wrong. Pretty simple.