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

xp

i.e, you're just describing Clinton's campaign. as she lost, it's not hopelessly cynical to think that wouldn't work

Democratic Party: Dear white midwestern people, did you know you get free stuff under our plan? You do!

GOP: they won't tell you this but the blacks and browns and gays get that free stuff TOO

Milwaukee suburbs: well fuck that noise! MAGA

Guh, hi from WIsconsin, where this could not be more wrong.

Wisconsin voters went for Tammy Baldwin, a lesbian and an outspoken liberal from Madison, in large numbers. They voted for Obama twice, again in large numbers.

The Milwaukee suburbs? Yeah, those places aren't going to vote Republican ever, any more than Madison and Dane County generally are gonna vote Republican. But those are movement Republicans, wealthy suburbs defined by white flight from "scary" Milwaukee. They are not swing districts and they are not that big. When Democrats win Wisconsin, which they often do, they win without those places.

If you want to know who voted for Obama and Trump, it's rural voters and to some extent voters in the smaller metro areas like Green Bay. They've voted for Democrats before and they'll vote for Democrats again -- possibly as soon as they realize the Medicare they love is about to turn into a clone of the Obamacare they hate. I doubt many of them go to Trump rallies. I think they're voting on some general vague sense of "throw the bums out" and I think the steady hammer of "Clinton is a crook Clinton is a crook Clinton is a crook" gained some purchase there.

the electoral college isn't going to last another decade

http://www.salon.com/2008/11/03/racists_for_obama/

kaine & co are correct

and yet they lost, almost as if winning elections is not about being correct.

look, i don't know what kind of midwesterns you guys have met. on the whole they seem like nice people with a reputation for being overly polite.

so suzy, milo z and eephus all seem to be making a similar point which is that there are Obama/Trump voters and then there are movement conservatives and the Obama/Trump voters can be probably won back by not having EMAILS win the headlines almost daily - which is to say, there's not much from a policy perspective that Dems need to change

rushomancy puts it best but got there too soon, should have sat on that post imho

That forks into two conversations, though. A better candidate can squeak out what we expected of Hillary without much changing, but if Democrats want to use future demographic changes to win big (in Congress and the states) the same old same old isn't going to do that.

the steady hammer of "Clinton is a crook Clinton is a crook Clinton is a crook" gained some purchase there

fwiw there is a compilation of Norm MacDonald trashing the Clintons on Weekend Update on youtube. half the jokes are about how much she lies, and this was in 1996.

Democrats relying on "demographics" need to start telling me what their plan is for winning gerrymandered congressional districts and state legislatures.

And how they're going to improve turnout among poor black and hispanic voters in an environment where it's only going to get harder for them to vote.

the gerrymandering isn't going to last another decade

Do the democrats have a good plan for 2020, and how do we know the Republicans don't have some even more devious shit up their sleeves?

1.No, and 2. a lot of people are assuming there won't be elections

By what mechanism are the 20 states with the populations of small metro areas going to consent to ending the only thing making them politically relevant?

u mean the electoral college or the senate?

Why would democrats not try to fight gerrymandering/the electoral college *and* sharpen their message to combat right wing propaganda?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

fwiw there is a compilation of Norm MacDonald trashing the Clintons on Weekend Update on youtube. half the jokes are about how much she lies, and this was in 1996.

I'm not sure this proves what you think this proves, unless you meant to highlight that she was fighting a 20-year wall of bullshit.

Where are you going to get the 85 additional electoral votes you still need for the national popular vote thing to mean anything at all, and how are you going to get any states with red state legislatures to pass it?

it proves she was a risky candidate. its not like Trump just came up with this strategy and EMAILS are what did them in. she has 20 years of bad press and instead of countering it they relied on the media hyping up Trump's worst qualities.

I don't know, man alive. Still waiting on k3vin and Adam to turn in their proposals on how to bring the Real American voters back into the fold, then none of the electoral college reform ideas or counter-gerrymandering stuff is even necessary

Have you guys figured out why Trump won yet

we didn't listen to Iago Galdston

i don't have any "ideas", and neither does anyone itt. i'm pretty pessimistic about the future and i just find the straw-grasping ("trump will be impeached, just watch", "the electoral college will be gone in 10 years", etc) laughable. finding humor in our shared doom is merely an ego defense

all the same people who were supremely confident in everything that went wrong a month and a half ago are now also optimistic about the future because of these far-fetched escape hatches, one weird tricks, etc. we're fucked.

you and larry appleton should go on a date

You're kind of being a dick in this thread el tomboto

America will be radically transformed & possibly decimated under Pres. Trump but the electoral college and gerrymandering will endure for centuries

i don't have any "ideas", and neither does anyone itt. i'm pretty pessimistic about the future and i just find the straw-grasping ("trump will be impeached, just watch", "the electoral college will be gone in 10 years", etc) laughable.

otm

u mean the electoral college or the senate?

Both or either. "Abolishing the EC" would have to be tied pretty heavily into Senate reform.

Neither of which will happen until global thermonuclear war breaks into a dozen rump states ruled by warlords.

i don't have any "ideas", and neither does anyone itt. i'm pretty pessimistic about the future and i just find the straw-grasping ("trump will be impeached, just watch", "the electoral college will be gone in 10 years", etc) laughable. finding humor in our shared doom is merely an ego defense

― k3vin k., Sunday, December 18, 2016 4:21 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup

yeah I need to gtfo this thread

all the same people who were supremely confident in everything that went wrong a month and a half ago are now also optimistic about the future because of these far-fetched escape hatches, one weird tricks, etc.

straws would be one thing as we are early in the coping process; what i could do without, and certainly not just itt, is the accompanying contemptuous sneering at any suggestion that america's antifascist party failed to win the support of america's now very perilously enfranchised antifascist majority for any reasons that were at all within their control

or that could have been brought within their control by any technique besides racism

+ my own far-fetched straw is that people who think like that can be dislodged from their power soon and the party can be reorganized from the bottom. that's all

failed to win the support of

stick "sufficient" in here before someone explains the electoral college to me; would that someone had explained it to the dems.

I think it's good to have passionate disagreements about this stuff, not sure it can be separated from the process of "uniting" to defeat our common enemy

i def think what people call "relitigating the past" is important to the future!

(not that you can't do it too much or in circles)

I think we can keep having these arguments even as we are "building the party from the ground up" so to speak. It's more important that we rebuild than that it gets rebuilt on a single model.

Like I'm not worried about people thinking "Let's just tweak the Clinton coalition" vs "Let's use the Sanders model." I'm worried about people thinking we can just keep doing top-down messaging with no local parties, and I'm worried about people who say "we need to purge all of the x from the party."

Hey just a super-quick suggestion if you're worried about getting back some marginal votes, stop referring to large swaths of the country as "the rust belt." It's bullshit condescension, and since the scale of manufacturing whose departure heralded the nickname is not coming back any time ever, defining a large-ish region of the country by what it lacks is maybe not helpful?

is anyone in the rust belt actually offended by "rust belt"? Serious question.

yes

pretty sure the dems already got the votes of everyone in america offended by stuff like that

Impeachment is good because Trump should be impeached, by even the most charitable reading of the law. They shouldn't do it to be successful, they should do it to be on the right side of history.. What is there to lose?

Reporting from St. Louis, seriously fkn stop using basically any term that lumps half the country together, our probs are wildly different from Wisconsin whose probs are very different from Ohio's. Deindustrialization is a thing but so are a hundred little issues that basically make it stupid as fuck to talk about these places as the same and that thinking is exactly the top down nonsense that has weakened the local parties. No one is offended by you using them, per se, but they make you think about these places in an incredibly dumb way.

Have you guys figured out why Trump won yet

― Οὖτις, Sunday, December 18, 2016 4:19 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they believed their own hype so they didn't work as hard. people are making fun of Trump for doing thank you rallies in states Clinton didn't even go to.

the only reason we're even talking about the midwest right now is because trump swung a lot of midwest voters and thus the election by talking about manufacturing jobs / using these same lazy stereotypes, so it seems like a particularly weird time to be suggesting that we don't do that.

iatee, the electoral college is going to be gone in a decade. forget about the midwest