Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

please define "honest self-examination" because most of the iterations I've seen so far have all pivoted around "how can we make this white supremacy train work in our favor"

lmfao xp

pls trump destroy twitter somehow im begging you

holy shit at that twitter story

the thing that's wrong about the Drum analysis (it was so close that there are a million different reasons it could have gone clinton's way, therefore nothing fundamental needs to be re-examined) is that it shouldn't have been close in the first place. in 2012, romney talking about binders full of women and the 47 percent thing were the major scandals. trump said much worse things on a daily basis and had/has dozens of scandals swirling around him at any given moment. clinton was right when she openly wondered why she wasn't beating trump by 50 points. a sack of bloodstained shit should have been able to beat trump by a landslide. so it's not that the two candidates were evenly matched and that a couple things happened to go the wrong way and aw shucks we ended up with this living nightmare. it's more like there were a range of possible outcomes, and the one where trump even came close to winning was waaaaaaaaay off on the side of the bell curve. the fact that it happened suggests that it wasn't mere chance or bad luck, it was something more fundamental. whether those fundamentals (racism, economic inequality, the fact that democratic voters have pretty much zero direct participation in the party other than being asked to vote for them every 2/4 years) are something that can be effectively addressed by this particular crew of democrats is a different question.

Tell me instead why Democrats have such dismal prospects at the state level.

gerrymandering?

goddamn the 2010 midterms for real

honest self-examination.

ok: most white people behave with depraved indifference towards black lives. this includes not only all the trump voters who are not overt white nationalists, but most clinton voters, who supported her primarily out of tribal loyalty and only secondarily, if at all, out of concern for black lives.

how do we react to this understanding?

not by changing our policy proposals to the detriment of minority groups. this election was not lost on policy.

not by abandoning a political commitment to black lives. why abandon our values and principles when so much of the opposition to the democratic party centers on the perception that we are valueless and opportunistic?

maybe we should examine our tactics. maybe, just maybe, self-rightously huffing that we "don't imprison our political opponents" is not the best approach to take when your chief political opponent is a genuine criminal. maybe, while affirming that basically everything the republicans, trump supporting or no, believe is wrong, we should consider that effective tactics can be used in the service of sound principles as easily as they can be used in the service of unsound principles.

Karl Malone tom

otm

the fact that it happened suggests that it wasn't mere chance or bad luck, it was something more fundamental.

it was the power of celebrity

there is no potential mutual interest, no comity, between the democratic party and the american right. the right's goal is absolute unquestioned rule, and they will not deviate from that goal. all dealings with the american right and its representatives must be undertaken with that truth foremost in the mind.

please define "honest self-examination"

how about self-examination that goes beyond looking at internal polls

KM and rushomancy OTM. I have no idea what impact it'll have in the short-term (particularly in 2020) but the left needs to focus on GOTV efforts (including going in hard on helping people maneuver state voting laws), and the white people who aren't already joyously slavering over the fact need to fully recognize the extent to which they've been complicit beneficiaries of white supremacy and figure out what they can do to help chip away at that behemoth.

the left needs to focus on GOTV efforts

Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.

Yeah, kinda thinking there's gonna have to be a lot of independent effort on that front. Clearly, expecting the party or the candidates to get their shit together is often a losing proposition.

What was General Yellowcake saying about HRC and hubris?

So Clinton loses to Obama in '08 thanks to her complacency and her organization's arrogance, and she loses the gen election in 2016 thanks to her complacency and her organization's arrogance.

the silver lining is that at this rate in 2020 she'll lose the new world order global election due to her complacency and her organization's arrogance

Pretty much. Kevin Drum is an idiot for arguing that it was somehow acceptable for Clinton to totally ignore the people she most needed to vote for her. Xp

it's as if the Dems could see this coming

so I thought we'd read articles last fall and early spring about the Clinton campaign taking the Obama mode and improving it

Except for James Comey. Feel free to blame him all you want. Unfortunately, there aren't really any lessons to be drawn from that.

there's one pretty obvious lesson about appointments...

well, Henry Stimson's dead.

A lot of her campaign, at the end, was about emphasizing how dumb and uncouth Trump was. This was a good way to motivate people who might be on the fence about trump but HATE being talked down to to vote for Trump.

Frankly, a lot of the opposition to her -- the sense that she was a "scold" -- was due to sexism. But with the fate of civilization hanging in the balance you think she could have tried to counteract this, maybe by making her message about the voters instead of about her and Trump. Idk. Easy to say in hindsight I guess. I also think she could have been more aggressive in defending herself on the idiotic scandals instead of rolling her eyes, secure in the knowledge that All Good People knew they were idiotic.

She was true to who she was and that actually made her earn my affection in the end -- I liked that she maintained her dignity and didn't get in the muck of a real head to head with the Beast. But I was not the one she needed on her side.

i've said it before, but she had the entire rest of the world to rely on to deliver the "here's why trump is a fucking psychopath" message. only she could deliver a concise "vote for me because ____" message, and she never did

it wasn't about message (messages don't matter to people who don't read messages) god why are we still arguing about this

This was a good way to motivate people who might be on the fence about trump but HATE being talked down to to vote for Trump.

there's ne evidence that it worked other than make people already voting for her go "Hmm you know right"

I'm sure what they say about Michigan is true but I can tell you from firsthand experience there was tons of door-drop literature in Wisconsin and repeated knocking on doors and encouraging people to vote face to face. There was no visible difference between campaigning for HRC and campaigning for Obama.

vote for me because in 78% of simulations, my presidency leads to better results overall for the average voter, given the usual assumptions (see footnotes below) about economic and technological conditions

it wasn't about message (messages don't matter to people who don't read messages) god why are we still arguing about this

effective messages manage to break through to people who don't care about messages

still arguing about this because what the candidate says matters. i suppose democrats could run a picture of a hot dog in 2020 and win if they step up their GOTV game, but it'll help if the hot dog offers a compelling vision of why people should vote for it

I think she needed to fight back against the de-humanizing personal attacks more than 'deliver a concise message'. she could have done more to show some character e.g. talk off script, deliver her own zings on twitter instead of letting a team of 200 run the account, idk.

only problem is that politicians who aren't donald trump and stumble even a little bit when they do the above get punished pretty hard.

still arguing about this because what the candidate says matters.

lol it obviously doesn't

what matters is who the candidate is and how well they reflect/reinforce voters' preconceived notions

There wasn't enough effort going toward addressing what Trump was actually saying and why it was wrong -- rather than just "illegitimate." She didn't make the case that the solutions he was proposing was unworkable. She instead emphasized that he was a monster who only monsters could vote for.

The only thing not worthless that's come out of Joe Scarborough's mouth in the last few months was when he wondered why Hillary couldn't have responded to the first public "How do you feel?" question after her pneumonia with, "Like crap!" and laughed.

one minute she was parroting Sanders' populism, the next she was calling him a Communist, and shrugging that 675G was what Goldman Sachs was paying for speeches.

as Twitter Dick Nixon said, she'd take a poll before saying what her favorite color was. She often sounded like the phoniest phony that ever phonied, except for her opponent.

There wasn't enough effort going toward addressing what Trump was actually saying and why it was wrong -- rather than just "illegitimate."

Treeship, she did this over and over again, especially in October.

candidates' party affiliation + race/ethnicity + gender = majority of voters' preferences predicted

xp

and the nonmajority is where the election's decided

still arguing about this because what the candidate says matters.

lol it obviously doesn't

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, December 14, 2016 1:34 PM (fifty-seven seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes we can vs i'm with her

which one of these is a far, far better political slogan?

one is an inspirational call to all americans, the other is a facebook status

it's practically a selfie in slogan form

Eduardo Porter of the NYT drills down into the metro/nonmetro economics of the vote:

There are almost nine million more jobs than there were at the previous peak in November 2007, just before the economy tumbled into recession. But the gains have not been evenly distributed.

Despite accounting for less than 15 percent of the labor force, Hispanics got more than half of the net additional jobs. Blacks and Asians also gained millions more jobs than they lost. But whites, who account for 78 percent of the labor force, lost more than 700,000 net jobs over the nine years.

The racial and ethnic divide is starker among workers in their prime. Whites ages 25 to 54 lost some 6.5 million jobs more than they gained over the period. Hispanics in their prime, by contrast, gained some three million jobs net, Asians 1.5 million and blacks one million....

Only 472 counties voted for Hillary Clinton on Election Day. But according to Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution, they account for 64 percent of the nation’s economic activity. The 2,584 counties where Mr. Trump won, by contrast, generated only 36 percent of America’s prosperity.

The political divide between high-output and low-output parts of the country also meshes with the cleavage between urban America — largely won by Mrs. Clinton — and the vast, less-populous rural stretches where Mr. Trump racked up large numbers of votes.

“It has been a good decade for metropolitan America,” said Mr. Muro, who heads the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. By contrast, “you can’t underestimate the economic and social pain across the rural tier.”

Given such clear divisions — less-educated whites living in depressed rural areas, on one side, and minorities living in more vigorous big-city economies on the other — the social and racial animosity manifest during the election campaign is hardly a surprise.

So there is a clear economic argument for Mr. Trump’s angry voters to have bucked the establishment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/business/economy/jobs-economy-voters.html?_r=0

the interpretation that what the candidate says is meaningless and that instead elections are decided by predetermined measurable factors is, somewhat ironically, something the clinton campaign would probably agree with. no reason to motivate voters with a compelling vision for their country, instead increase allocation of resource X to sector Y by 15%, assuming that it is correct that sector Y's historical trend of voting on issue Z continues to increase by 5% per annum, an assumption based upon a number of factors tha

Aye

there's a reason that the only left-leaning people i knew that were PUMPED TO VOTE this year were bernie sanders voters during the primary, because he was actually saying cool stuff and, even though everyone knew the GOP would stonewall any ideas he had, when you listened to him you could easily visualize the country that he wanted to build and understand how it would be different and better than the status quo

the winning candidate spewed a never-ending stream of false, contradictory, inflammatory garbage and won handily. it's clear the content of what he said didn't matter as much as *how* he said it (belligerently and provocatively) and *who* said it (a celebrity whose main identifying factors are "rich", "obnoxious" and "white male")