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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Gotta say, a fine of five thousand dollars and not being able to be an elector again just don't seem like substantive punishments for the deed. Like, it's already been done. And the fact that it happens so little means that most people probably aren't all that concerned about such things.
Edit: I do like how Suprun got snarky right back at him about it, though.
edited 20th Dec '16 10:42:03 AM by AceofSpades
Nomiki Konst, a progressive activist who served on the Democratic National Committee’s platform committee this year, said that Clinton’s team also ignored advice to throw additional resources into Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the three states that ultimately cost Clinton the election by fewer than 80,000 votes combined.
“They fucking ignored us on all these [three] battleground states [while] we were sounding the alarm for months,” Konst told the Daily Beast. “We kept saying to each other like, ‘What the fuck, why are they just blowing us off? They need these voters more than anybody.’”
According to Konst, Sanders' people met with Clinton's team during the Democratic National Convention and offered up “strategy memos, lists of hardened state organizers, timelines, data,” and more for the purpose of preventing Donald Trump from seizing the White House. Sanders delegates also pitched rallies with both Sanders and Clinton in attendance in states “such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.” Senior Clinton staffers allegedly agreed to follow up, but they never did.
“A ham sandwich could beat Donald Trump,” a Michigan delegate for Sanders told the Daily Beast. “And Hillary cannot beat Donald Trump.”
Fucking brutal.
http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-surrogates/
Well, that's not a new take once you ditch the Bernie name dropping. Is The Daily Dot trying to sour Dems on Bernie supporters even more? I think Busters can do that on their own already...
That ignores the extent to which historical and economic factors say this was always going to favour the GOP; a republican ham sandwich would've beaten a democrat ham sandwich. The fact that it was close at all- and, let's be clear, it was really close; Trump has the smallest portion of the votes any winning presidential candidate has ever gotten, and in terms of absolute number of votes Hillary's second only to Obama- was entirely down to who the candidates were.
And Hillary was ahead in the polls for the entire time. At no point in the primaries was there even the slightest reason to believe she couldn't beat Trump.
But mostly, it's exactly the kind of infighting the left needs to cut out right this fucking second.
edited 20th Dec '16 11:57:39 AM by Gilphon
The circular firing squad on the left is pointless. These are the reasons why Trump won, in order of how big an effect I think they had.
1: The media wanted a close horserace, because that draws eyeballs. They skewed their coverage until they had one. Horse races have uncertain victors.
2: Voter suppression.
3: Innovations in online propaganda - the paid trolling of social media, in particular. This moved the overton window a lot.
4: Russia.
Bernie bros are not even noise.
edited 20th Dec '16 11:59:44 AM by Izeinsummer
"a republican ham sandwich would've beaten a democrat ham sandwich" is going to forever live in this forum in one way or another from this day on.
Oh god, it's a page topper too ![]()
edited 20th Dec '16 12:00:29 PM by blkwhtrbbt
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for youHillary Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate going in, as her approval rating attested. Yes she was the victim of a long winded smear campaign, but the democrats critical lack of young prospects made it pretty obvious who was on the shortlist for the presidency if the party had its way, and the democrats have far more control over their primary process than the GOP. The democrats desperately needed someone relatively fresh, with new ideas about how to run things, and enough distance between themselves and the beltway clique to avoid the anti-establishment backlash that characterized this cycle.
In short, the candidate the democrats needed for 2016 simply didn't exist, which is something that falls squarely on the party's shoulders for allowing the bench to get so lean.
edited 20th Dec '16 12:34:25 PM by CaptainCapsase
See, FF Shinra did also argue that the Democrats need to put more weight on downticket to get better candidate rosters.
Not so sure about "anti-establishment", tho'. My impression is that these tend to last only one electoral cycle, as "anti-establishment" attitudes tend to bring out more things than their supporters bargained for.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I strongly suspect the anti-establishment climate will continue to last until the current economic paradigm shifts; the failure of laize faire capitalism in the 1920s and the failure of classic Keynesian welfare capitalism in the 1980s were accompanied by similar backlash, and it appears increasingly likely that neoliberal capitalism is reaching the end of its lifespan.
edited 20th Dec '16 12:12:00 PM by CaptainCapsase
It's not that she couldn't have won. It's just that she still could've blown Trump away even with all those disadvantages.
She campaigned in New York and California but not in Wisconsin and Michigan.
One thing that struck me as a weakness throughout the campaign and probably contributed to some of the issues, including decisions on where to campaign, was that Clinton put a lot of emphasis on trying to woo Republicans turned off by Trump being Trump, and seemed to have an assumption (apparently backed up by polling) that in addition to winning Democratic voters, she'd cut into a decent chunk of expected Republican voters- and this latter chunk is of middle/upper-middle/upper class people. And with this assumption, Clinton's strategy was the campaign in Democratic States as well as Republican states in which there was expected to be some unexpected swing. Which is why she ignored most of the swing states.
What always struck me as a problem with this approach, was that besides putting a lot of trust in Republicans doing the right thing, it seemed to blunt her message. Because at various points she was talking about both how "good Republicans" didn't like Trump and presenting them as trustworthy authorities and selling a Progressive message. Both of these are valid, even good approaches to campaigning, and it's true both that Trump is a uniquely awful person and that Clinton had a Progressive platform. However, combining the two makes both messages seem insincere. This probably also explains the under emphasis on the awfulness of Pence's views- because of that emphasis in painting Trump as uniquely bad.
edited 20th Dec '16 12:39:53 PM by Hodor2
All of Hillary Clinton's policies, broad stroke-wise - protections against discrimination, public college, etc etc
Plus most of Obama's charm.
PLUS regularly uses Social Media to connect with electors.
...
...
The more I think about this, the more perfect a candidate he seems...
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you
Is he willing to take a stand against the failing economic status quo though? If he's not, then he'll simply condemn America to authoritarianism if the Trump administration doesn't; a vibrant middle class is essential to a stable democracy, and the current decline of the middle class in the west shows no signs of stopping.
edited 20th Dec '16 12:45:16 PM by CaptainCapsase
Y'know, there is actually a reason candidates tend to visit their biggest strongholds at some point. Making sure NY and Cali actually mobilize was important.
And considering how things turned out, I'm confident she could not have blown Trump away. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see ways she hypothetically could've won. But her tactical mistake, as it turned out, was trying to make it a landslide victory instead of a regular win. Trying to flip red states instead of shoring up her firewall- which, once again, didn't look vulnerable at all until the very last stages of the election.
And once again I have seriously question the usefulness of having this argument.
This argument is happening because if the democrats simply run another one of their "battle-tested", and increasingly aging mainstays, they're very likely to lose if Trump fails to run the country into the ground by 2020 simply because of his incumbent status.
By 2024, the electorate will be increasingly dominated by millennials assuming they start voting as they get older like most generations do, and it's extremely unlikely that Trump will do anything to make generation Y become more moderate, quite the opposite in fact. Attempting to triangulate Trump by shifting right as is the party's preferred strategy is unlikely to work.
edited 20th Dec '16 1:03:55 PM by CaptainCapsase
In a nutshell - the GOP lost NC. So they poured resources into it until they won it. Then the moment they had power, they changed the rules until it was nearly impossible for them to lose it again, and used it as a weapon for gaining further influence nationwide. Then, once they lost again despite their rigging the game, they enacted an appalling legislative coup stripping the new administration of any meaningful power.
I've said this a dozen times now, but if the Dems don't start fighting back in a major way against voter disenfranchisement tactics like this, then we can forget about taking our country back. The GOP don't play by the rules. It was true then, and it's truer than ever now.
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."

Texas governor Greg Abbott channelled Trump by saying "YOU'RE FIRED!" over Twitter to the faithless elector who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times and also mentioned there is a bill going through the Legislature which would fine electors $5000 and prevent them from being an elector again if they didn't go with the state.
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."