Democratic (Party) Direction

anyway, just realized i dragged this thread off-topic, sorry

if they can't get ACA repealed/replaced I haven't thought through how that impacts the GOP - hardcore right feels betrayed, Trump angry about looking like a loser, presumably. And obviously the usual quarters (including Trump) will blame Democrats but it seems like it's more likely to spur intra-party in-fighting...? idk

I totally agree about the terrorist attack scenario, which is what worries me the most.

Christ those polling results are depressing.

yup

never getting my hopes up about politics again lol

Thanks for the balanced discussion in general about Perez, minus a few excessively partisan/snarky voices. I do apologize if it seems like I can't be bothered to do basic research but I'm in China and even with a VPN, common sites like Google and Twitter can take forever to load here.

I'm interested in how people here would explain those polling numbers, particularly about the Dem Party. I tend to attribute much of Trump's success to the media, particularly Fox News. But I don't think Fox News viewership is close to 45% of the total population. According to this they max out somewhere south of 20 million (I don't totally understand how those numbers work though, and thank you Bing for these wonderful results):

http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/ratings-fox-news-tops-all-of-cable-total-viewers-q1-cnn-up-triple-digits-1201741012/

Personally I have my own ideas about the unpopularity of Democrats but maybe in the interests of diplomacy I should hold off on expressing them for now.

OTM :http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/02/the-assassination-of-keith-ellison-by-the-neoliberal-coward-tom-perez

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 8, 2017 1:58 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ok, well it looks like the straw man version of my perspective has already been covered. I'll admit I could be a lot more informed but the absence of any real nuance in most political discussion now leaves me cold. It seems like most people who actually care about these things now are so emotionally invested in the process that's it really challenging to take any kind of long view.

It's really just that they cheated the guy everyone wanted and who would've won, and installed the only person in the world who could lose to Donald Trump, viborg xp

I seem to remember a bunch of people who lost to Donald Trump during the republican primary

yeah, but republicans aren't people.

it's really horrible how totally rigged the democratic primaries were. the person who gets the most votes is supposed to lose, just like in the general.

Anyone who truly likes Ellison should be happy he won't be the (haha) chair of the DNC.

hey rushomancy, Money buys Myth

you watchin' Liberty Vallance at work?

"Bernie was cheated out of getting the most votes in the primary" isn't that removed from "millions of illegals voted for Hillary in the general". Or at least people who casually say rigging should probably say how they think that happened if they think the former is true and the latter isn't.

'rigging' isn't necessarily synonymous with cheating

i was unsurprised by the primaries; when you have a casino, the house wins

you forgot to cite Nixontwitter.

"Rigging" is such a nebulous term, no wonder it lead a lot of people toward thinking that the votes themselves were somehow not real. Though results largely lined up with the polling throughout.

The Dem party nomination system is def designed to favor the more establishment-approved candidate, so in that way it's rigged. This was done on purpose for (perfectly defensible, at least in terms of historical American Poli Sci discourse) small-r republican reasons. This is a pretty undisputed historical fact.

I mean, there's really no way for it *not* to be rigged toward one kind of candidate or another. This isn't controversial imo.

Right but that's not what's being referred to whenever anyone complains about how it was rigged against Bernie. Anytime you hear someone say that in reference to the 2016 primary it very rarely means "just like how it was rigged against Howard Dean in favor of Kerry". The implication is that some atypical major transgression occurred.

It still amazes me that after the debacle of 1968 the Democratic Party subjected itself to a thorough overhaul of its system for choosing delegates in an attempt to redress the anger the '68 convention aroused, by making the delegate selection more open and inclusive. Then, in 1972, the man who chaired the committee which drafted the new delegate selection rules, George McGovern, who knew every nuance of how the new system had been "rigged", just happened to become the next presidential nominee. History, it teaches you stuff.

unless you're H.R.C., making the same mistakes in 2008 and 2016

primaries are rigged in the same way ships are

bullship

Then, in 1972, the man who chaired the committee which drafted the new delegate selection rules, George McGovern, who knew every nuance of how the new system had been "rigged", just happened to become the next presidential nominee. History, it teaches you stuff.

then the system changed again, allowing an outsider like President Carter to get the nomination, then changed yet again so that President Mondale could get it. It worked so splendidly.

Anytime you hear someone say that in reference to the 2016 primary it very rarely means "just like how it was rigged against Howard Dean in favor of Kerry". The implication is that some atypical major transgression occurred.

I really don't think that's what people are saying when they say that. I always interpret it to mean exactly "the system favors establishment candidates the way it favored Kerry over Dean." People aren't nuts, they don't think there's a secret faucet of illegal Hillary votes Donna Brazile can turn on whenever she needs to suppress leftism!

Well...

Our social media feeds were very different then. Was it only mine? Genuinely curious and fascinated by how the impact of this stuff can be gauged. The campaign had their own perspective on it...

"Mark Longabaugh, a senior Sanders adviser, described supporters who’d turn a “nugget of fact” — the disqualified Sanders-supporting delegates at the Nevada state convention, for instance — into “fanciful ideas that we had in fact won elections that we hadn't.”"

https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/democrats-confront-lefty-fake-news?utm_term=.gj5DmgKOZX#.jxmNoPzmAn

This was shared a lot dor example. I know it seems anecdotal but it gives you a sense of how people actually did get it in their heads that the DNC controls/counts votes and that voter suppression played a role. Shaun White's reporting and US Uncut pushed the idea as well. This is all well before the Wikileaks stuff.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cLPd2HhURq0

Not only was it before the Wikileaks stuff, some of the damaging DNC mails were about them trying to combat this, which only hurt them further.

one should be careful to put so much stock in just one poll. Economist/YouGov, for example, paints a diff pic: http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/9deo3n58va/econTabReport.pdf

Democrat favorability: 41% favorable, 48% unfavorable
Republican favorability: 38% favorable, 50% unfavorable
Trump favorability: 41% favorable, 50% unfavorable (40% of the 50 = "very unfavorable")
Pence favorability: 42% favorable, 40% unfavorable (he has a very high undecided number)

these things tend to vary wildly

Pence seems to be the most populari n all these polls but mostly cos there are so many "unsure" votes. voters don't know much about him yet since he isn't as publicly visible like Trump is

"Bernie was cheated out of getting the most votes in the primary" isn't that removed from "millions of illegals voted for Hillary in the general".

fuck this imo? the very real leaked DNC emails showed those in power actively working against him and many had concerns with that. you seems to be suggesting that the very real concerns based on very real emails are equatable with the nonsensical racist rantings of Donald Trump that is based on nothing.

That's almost 2nd order troll bait: Nerdstrom tosses off a remark, Adam finds it, and now if Fred B decides to read Adam's post...

hey imo we should ban political threads completely, it'd be a lot more interesting around here

Naw they're just in reruns now

I'm as predictable as any of you I'll have you know

Oh, fuck, I missed my window, didn't I?

haha stop the presses xp

not...making... defenestration joke

Nerdstrom tosses off a remark

I always miss the special 'tossoff' html

fuck this imo? the very real leaked DNC emails showed those in power actively working against him and many had concerns with that. you seems to be suggesting that the very real concerns based on very real emails are equatable with the nonsensical racist rantings of Donald Trump that is based on nothing.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Sunday, March 12, 2017 7:34 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

True, the racial element in Trump's claims probably makes this an unfair comparison. But too many people downplay how big the perception of "rigged against Bernie" is tied to truther-like election fraud conspiracies that were constant throughout primary and that absolutely carried over to form the baseline of Trump's claims. No one can ever point to an example in the emails shows scale tipping or "actively undermining", bias perhaps but that's an institutional constant. What makes the Wikileaks emails work so effectively as propaganda is the dissemination of "leaks" put a sinister framing around the benign. It sucks to see people who should know better perpetuate what is essentially right wing propaganda and a pretty vile violations of privacy. I'm not saying it's the sole factor for Trump's win( HRC shouldn't have run in the first place imo) but it was obviously a major factor.

HRC shouldn't have run in the first place imo

There was no way in hell HRC was not going to run and there was no argument in 2015 against her running apart from "you might lose", which has never deterred an ambitious politician from running, because the answer is always "I think I have a chance to win". Turns out she had a damn good chance to win. She won more primaries than Bernie did and she got 3,000,000 more popular votes than Trump.

The primary story IMO should be less about "Bernie got hosed" and more about the way the path was cleared ahead of time for Clinton's anointment, things like Biden and Warren being told to not even think about running, no effort at developing the next round of possibilities during Obama's administration, etc., and the story of the general should be the incompetence of the Clinton campaign overall (which should have been somewhat obvious after 2008).

Presidential elections are never about the good of the nation, or even the good of the party, but only about getting the most votes. Maneuvering to eliminate or weaken possible rivals within the party is always a part of that process.

For a campaign selling a candidate with high negatives and the minimum amount of charisma, I think they did OK. It would be difficult to maintain that the Trump campaign was a model of competence, they looked like fucking clowns most of the time, but they won so no one talks about their prior incompetence at campaigning. We're too busy agonizing about their present incompetence at governing.

I guess there were no ways in which HRC's campaign was different -- oh, looky loo

@irl
Astounding study: Clinton’s message was devoid of policy discussions in a way not seen in the previous 4 contests.

http://mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/blog/2016-election-study-published/

Hillary ran the dumbest campaign in American history, probably

That's a high bar

She was a perfectly qualified candidate endorsed by a popular incumbent president and she lost to a man of clownishly obvious malevolence. There are myriad ways to explain this away but come on, she would have won if she spoke to people's concerns even a little bit. Her campaign was at once stodgy and vacuous.

I was even on board during the campaign, a "steady hand" was enough for me and I was into the prospect of a woman finally becoming president. But in hindsight I see so many issues with what she did, how many voters she just wrote off, not even trying to pierce the right wong bubble to expose their lies about her, lies even centrists came to believe because of their ubiquity

As I recall, Trump was so good at sucking all the attention of the media toward himself that unless HRC had proposed something extreme or radical there was no way her policy proposals could break through to anyone's consciousness. And other than the fact of her gender, HRC was the antithesis of extreme or radical. Trump, otoh, was provocative in ways HRC could never compete with. This was a function of the two candidates and their personalities, not some deep malfunction in the Clinton campaign.