No hero worship here, guys. Move along
Hillary Clinton is a woman of no accomplishments
let's see your list of accomplishments that includes something better than secretary of state or US senator on it, since neither of those count, apparently.
Ahhh and there it is. She's only successful because of her husband.Cool. So President Trump is a man of even greater accomplishments than Hillary Clinton since title means everything.
And maybe I could have been a Senator or Secretary of State if my spouse were a former President thus allowing the sheeple in the party to act like I'm some sort of God?
Because if that last name didn't say Clinton it sure as hell wouldn't have got anywhere.
No hero worship here, guys. Move along
Disagree entirely. Just learn how to use them responsibly. Plenty were accurate between the primaries and the election.
To suggest "current polls" are any different than older polls is wrong. The polls made this a possibility. The way they were perceived and reported... that's where people were wrong.
Ahhh and there it is. She's only successful because of her husband.
There's no way you can tell me polling has stayed the same. You're trying to tell me that polling in the days of landlines and pre caller id is the same as today? There are entire demographics now that are likely not to even take a poll. Pollsters don't even have access to me.
Where was the accurate polling in these swing states? And why weren't you predicting a Trump win if they were accurate?
Yeah because the fact that she's a Clinton and former first lady had nothing to do with her Senate primary (and general) victory and her ascendancy within the party. Seriously, use your critical thinking skills and quit trying to just declare people as racists and sexists because it makes you feel good. That's how you lost the election.
What political track record did she have aside from being the First Lady before she ran for the Senate? Virtually none. She'd be an unknown and have had absolutely no prayer of winning a Senate primary.
No hero worship here, guys. Move along
My problem with black America is that they merely wanted an extension of the Obama Presidency. They saw Clinton as his third term and we all know he wanted her to be the nominee, so that's the result we end up with. I'm really not bitter about it, just demonstrating that it really wasn't about the issues for that group just as I suspect they will slide over to Cory Booker's column immediately when the next election rolls around (just as many of you will because the establishment tells you too). It's called identity politics and those of us on the far left are having a frank discussion about it at the moment.
Well it's what they've been working on for the past 8 years, and they worked it to perfection.And the more I read, the more I become convinced that the difference came down to GOP success in suppressing the black vote.
It's never just one thing. But that seems to be a huge difference between 2012 and 2016 in key states.
It's cool. They're talking. They'll figure all this shit out by 2020.The youngs dropped off in 2012 for BHO because you know he didn't like close Gitmo on day one, and you know like didn't not like stand up to Wall Street.
The real world sucks for youngsters. Once they get out of their college bubble they realize it's not black and white anymore. Sometimes you have to compromise and hold your nose as you do something you don't want to do.
Or you don't turn out because like your integrity is more important than millions of lives
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It's cool. They're talking. They'll figure all this shit out by 2020.
Disagree entirely. Just learn how to use them responsibly. Plenty were accurate between the primaries and the election.
To suggest "current polls" are any different than older polls is wrong. The polls made this a possibility. The way they were perceived and reported... that's where people were wrong.
It's called identity politics and those of us on the far left are having a frank discussion about it at the moment.
And the more I read, the more I become convinced that the difference came down to GOP success in suppressing the black vote.
It's never just one thing. But that seems to be a huge difference between 2012 and 2016 in key states.
The enraged focus on Clinton ignores the broader historical forces at work. This was clearly a change election, a wave that was bound to dispel pretty much any Democratic candidate in its path. For the first time in decades, stalwart Democratic states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania went to the Republicans. It is all the more remarkable given that, unlike the last change election in 2008, we live in a time of relative peace and prosperity. The inequalities embedded in our economic system are undeniable. The U.S. continues to have a military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and has abetted wars in Yemen and elsewhere. But in the past eight years under President Barack Obama, the U.S. has made steady progress toward full employment and has vastly reduced its military commitments abroad, which in the Bush era resulted in thousands of American deaths, hundreds of thousands of injuries, and untold psychological damage to military veterans. In the simplest sense, one candidate in 2016 promised to uphold that progress; the victor promised to reverse it.
This election was about a much greater phenomenon than Hillary Clinton. We know this is true because a nearly identical political undertow has gripped other Western democracies. In Britain, a nativist campaign preying on the fears of immigration and economic dislocation resulted in the Brexit, throwing the country into total chaos. In France, the right-wing National Front is the preeminent political force in the country, after spending decades on the fringes. Britain’s Nigel Farage and France’s Marine Le Pen and America’s Trump have all succeeded by sowing fear and hatred of the other. They lead movements that, at their core, are propelled by white revanchism, a raging against an increasingly globalized world that has threatened white power and diluted white identity.
But it is also becoming clear that the racist face of the resurgent right wing is, in important respects, superficial. To be clear, I find it almost impossible to forgive any person who voted for a blatant racist and misogynist like Trump. I agree with Slate’s Jamelle Bouie that, in attempting to sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden white who voted for Trump, we are in danger of perpetuating a false narrative of white innocence. And I think his election will set back racial progress by decades. However, the rise of the new right also has its roots in the financial crisis, a political earthquake whose deep, radiating repercussions didn’t quite register until Trump’s election. This is a response to what is seen as a corrupt order, one that perpetuates the power of a global elite at the expense of common people. It encompasses Republicans and Democrats, New Labourites and Tories, a Socialist like Francois Hollande and a conservative like Nicolas Sarkozy. It is a protest against liberal democracy as we know it, and it is no surprise that these grievances have found outlet in vulgar authoritarians whose core supporters want to blow up the system.
https://newrepublic.com/article/138635/dont-blame-hillary-clinton
It is impossible to say what would have happened under a fictional scenario, but Sanders supporters often dangle polls from early summer showing he would have performed better than Clinton against Trump. They ignored the fact that Sanders had not yet faced a real campaign against him. Clinton was in the delicate position of dealing with a large portion of voters who treated Sanders more like the Messiah than just another candidate. She was playing the long game—attacking Sanders strongly enough to win, but gently enough to avoid alienating his supporters. Given her overwhelming support from communities of color—for example, about 70 percent of African-American voters cast their ballot for her—Clinton had a firewall that would be difficult for Sanders to breach.
When Sanders promoted free college tuition—a primary part of his platform that attracted young people—that didn’t mean much for almost half of all Democrats, who don’t attend—or even plan to attend—plan to attend a secondary school. In fact, Sanders was basically telling the working poor and middle class who never planned to go beyond high school that college students—the people with even greater opportunities in life—were at the top of his priority list.
So what would have happened when Sanders hit a real opponent, someone who did not care about alienating the young college voters in his base? I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.
Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.
Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.
Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”
The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.Could Sanders still have won? Well, Trump won, so anything is possible. But Sanders supporters puffing up their chests as they arrogantly declare Trump would have definitely lost against their candidate deserve to be ignored.
Which leads back to the main point: Awash in false conspiracy theories and petulant immaturity, liberals put Trump in the White House. Trump won slightly fewer votes than Romney did in 2012—60.5 million compared with 60.9 million. On the other hand, almost 5 million Obama voters either stayed home or cast their votes for someone else. More than twice as many millennials—a group heavily invested in the “Sanders was cheated out of the nomination” fantasy—voted third-party. The laughably unqualified Jill Stein of the Green Party got 1.3 million votes; those voters almost certainly opposed Trump; if just the Stein voters in Michigan had cast their ballot for Clinton, she probably would have won the state. And there is no telling how many disaffected Sanders voters cast their ballot for Trump.
The Myths Democrats Swallowed That Cost Them the Presidential Election