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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@Septimus; probably a symptom of the way the parties run themselves.
Anyway I send in volunteer applications to a couple of places but haven't gotten anything back but one email saying "wait for us to send you more emails."
The Electoral College and the way votes are distributed with it. Mostly Winner Takes All.
edited 21st Nov '16 12:48:21 PM by AceofSpades
She lost to Trump because her campaign focused on the wrong states. She should have spent her time shoring up the Midwest and the Eastern swing states, red states that Trump was polling badly in for a while should have been ignored. The Dems also should have held events in a more diverse set of locales.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Also catering to the working class.... that's still fucking identity politics.
And here I thought that Sanders would be a decent DNC leader. He's just as blind as rest of them.
So what happens after catering to the "working class" (which almost never includes the working class of color), the minorities don't come out to vote because then they felt like they were being neglected or that Sanders failed to take notice of voter suppression?
edited 21st Nov '16 12:59:53 PM by NoName999
"You guys are thinking of 2018 solely in terms of Senate elections, not in terms of anything like state-level elections, House or anything, aren't you?"
Yeah, because we're never winning those (in places other than the coasts).
edited 21st Nov '16 12:56:58 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."Bernie has always been about white people, probably. Part of the reason why folks here and elsewhere have been complaining about him not offering much in terms of race relations, he hasn't any experience in that stuff. Vermont is a paper-white state in terms of demographics, after all. Perhaps these comments on identity politics are also an example.
It is true though that on minorities alone you won't win a presidential election (or state level elections for that matter, except Hawaii and maybe New Mexico and California), at least a little support among white people is necessary. I think there is some room to occupy between "artisanal racism" and relying solely on minorities that one has to exploit for 2020.
@Crimson Zephyr: In a midterm election under a Republican president? Yeah, if folks don't get their act together or if Trump and co. turns out - against all evidence - not to be an incompetent moron. Call me an idealist but none of these - especially not both - are likely.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanIt seems to tie into something I've been hearing a lot lately, the idea that the only reason people vote for 'minority' candidates is because they are minorities. Which is utter nonsense. If he's referring to Clinton, there were a hundred decent reasons to vote for her that weren't about her gender? IIRC Susan Sarandon, one of his supporters, said something like "I'm not voting for Clinton because I don't vote with my vagina." The hell?
It's almost like there are people who actually do research into the candidates they can vote for. What a concept!
Hell, I didn't vote for her because of her gender. Partly it was because I didn't want Trump to win. But mostly it was because, after doing some research, I genuinely thought she would be a good president.
Also, identity politics are kind of a big deal when the opponent and his running mate are unrepentant bigots whose very rhetoric has encouraged and normalized bigotry across the country.
edited 21st Nov '16 1:06:21 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised![]()
The issue with identity politics is that a lot of it is preaching to the choir. The people who would've been susceptible to this kind of talk would've already been turned off by Trump's bigoted statements to begin with, and the people who haven't won't be changed by bringing it up, either because they're the kinds of white rural voters who don't know any minorities to give a crap about or they're conservative minorities who find any talk about identity politics to be tokenizing.
@Crimson Zephyr
And we never will if we keep up with that kind of fatalism. The whole point is that if the Democrats change their approach, maybe they can actually do something about it now.
Yeah that actually seems to be the big problem.
Clinton has a history of scandals, which fabricated or otherwise have resulted in mostly people being apathetic towards her if not outright disliking her. If Trump was against someone else (not necessarily Sanders, perhaps Biden) this race would have been very different and there wouldn't have been the same climate of voter apathy.
This was not really an election about policies as far as the Democrats are concerned, a lot of people disliked Hillary enough that they opted not to vote altogether even though the alternative was Trump.
edited 21st Nov '16 1:19:26 PM by Draghinazzo
You know, people keep talking about how Clinton winning the nomination proves her to be a better candidate than Sanders, but they never bring up the differences in circumstances between the two candidates. Sanders relied on grassroots donations, contrasting with the establishment and corporate funding Clinton had access to, and was a perceived outsider struggling against an establishment that had shown every possible sign of wanting to lock him out in favor of Clinton. He didn't have the benefit of having been previously married to the POTUS or all the associated years of national-level networking, he was just one more politician out of many doing his job. Clinton had every possible advantage in her favor for the nomination, and the fact that she didn't straight out blow him out of the water really should have been taken as a warning sign that she was pushing against the zeitgeist of the election. Sanders himself is mostly only important insofar as he serve as a convenient representative of that zeitgeist, and if for some reason he stops being suitable, people will shift their focus to someone else, like Warren. Or get disillusioned and ignore politics for the next few years, as per the norm for the Democrats' voter base.
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.Biden is probably out of the 3 big possibilities (Bernie, Hillary and him) the one with the higher possibility of winning if we're theorizing. What could the Republicans have used against him, I wonder.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Conspiracy theories about his dead son and first wife I imagine.
Quite a few minorities and women were big Sanders supporters of him and would claim that Hillary supporters were all old white women trying to guilt trip young voters by appealing to her gender, oddly enough.
edited 21st Nov '16 1:24:20 PM by AlleyOop
My hardcore Trump supporting family admitted they think Biden would have won if he ran the exact same platform as Clinton. Clinton's baggage kept people going "They're as bad as each other." and discouraged people from voting Clinton while Trump energized his base with all his deplorableness and fake promises to revive the Rust Belt.
edited 21st Nov '16 1:27:46 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."Well, I mean, 33 out of a 100 is still "quite a few," just not a majority.
Honestly, the liberals who gave me shit about supporting Hillary were universally white, and mostly male.
edited 21st Nov '16 1:30:22 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

...and why she lost to Trump?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman