WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

Ish, and funny story: the more likely you were to try to water down the ACA to try to save your seat, the more likely you were to lose your seat to the right

deep web creep posted:

"Globalists"/"World Bank(ers)" have been a far-right dogwhistle for Jews for basically loving forever and you've got your head in the sand if the rise of the alt-right hasn't popularized that take.

Congratulations on not having heard about it until now, I guess, but it is absolutely a thing in far-right circles, and now more and more in even moderate conservative groups

Clip-On Fedora posted:

Before Trump, I would agree with you, but now that up is down and black is white, his star is on the rise.

Vladimir Putin posted:

Didn't a bunch of democrats lost their seats because they voted for ACA? If that's he case, I don't think it was possible to push it any further than Obama did.

quote:

President Barack Obama didn’t quite blame his ally Hillary Clinton for causing her stunning loss to Donald Trump last week — but he chided her for not focusing on reaching out to white, non-urban voters like he did in 2008 and 2012.

Obama — about to hand off the presidency to a man whom he declared temperamentally unfit to serve — pointedly declined to endorse Clinton’s own explanation for her defeat, instead suggesting that the former secretary of state’s failure to “show up everywhere,” not just the big diverse cities she targeted in her final campaign push, proved to be her downfall.

“How we organize politically I think is something that we should spend some time thinking about. I believe that we have better ideas, but I also believe that good ideas don’t matter if people don’t hear them,” Obama told reporters Monday ahead of a foreign trip to Greece, Germany and Peru. “And one of the issues the Democrats have to be clear on is, given population distribution across the country, we have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere. We have to work at a grass-roots level, something that’s been a running thread in my career.”

Obama outperformed Clinton substantially in most suburbs and in critical swing areas in the Midwest, like Michigan’s Oakland and Macomb counties.

Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House, a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump, who also won 194 of the 207 counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012.

During a candid and bittersweet post-election news conference in the White House, Obama signaled to Democrats a need to emphasize a 50-state strategy, citing his success in Iowa as an outline of an effective campaign.

“You know, I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points,” Obama said. “There are some counties maybe I won that people didn’t expect because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.”

The Democratic Party, which is looking to name a new chairman early next year ahead of the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election, must try to replicate that, added Obama, who described the party’s introspection as a “healthy thing” and advocated for “new voices and new ideas.”

“The challenge for a national party is how do you dig in there and create those kinds of structures so that people have a sense of what it is that you stand for,” Obama said, stressing the difficulty of doing so with just a national press strategy. “It’s increasingly difficult to do because of the splintering of the press. And so I think the discussions that have been taking place about how do you build more grass-roots organizing, how do you build up state parties and local parties and school board elections you’re paying attention to and state rep races and city council races, that all, I think, will contribute to stronger outcomes in the future. And I’m optimistic that will happen.”

The president conveyed that optimism by recalling how Democrats rebounded from a dismal showing in 2004, when John Kerry lost his White House bid and Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle lost reelection.

“Things change pretty rapidly, but they don’t change inevitably,” Obama said. “They change because you work for it. Nobody said democracy’s supposed to be easy. It’s hard. And in a big country like this, it probably should be hard.”

In 2004, Obama and Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar “were the only two Democrats that won nationally,” he continued. “Republicans controlled the Senate and the House. And two years later, Democrats were winning back Congress. And four years later, I was president of the United States.”

gradenko_2000 posted:

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obama-clinton-campaign-work-231370

Obama suggests Clinton didn't work as hard as he did

Obama posted:

given population distribution across the country, we have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere. We have to work at a grass-roots level, something that’s been a running thread in my career.”

Kilroy posted:

Say you've got a room full of Trump voters, like having dinner or watching a football game or something. They're all white save for like one Hispanic or something who passes the paper bag test. One of them tells a racist joke, like a really bad one too. A couple people really laugh their asses off - they liked the joke and genuinely found it funny. A few more laugh politely, and a few others shift uncomfortably in their seats.

Everyone in this room is racist. The person telling the joke of course, and the people who truly laugh obviously, but also the people who normalize this behavior and refrain from calling it out for the bullshit it is.

But, while the latter two groups are racist, they are not irredeemable. They know what's happening is wrong, but they lack the courage to say anything. You can call that a moral failing, and it is, but it is one they can work on, and they're certainly not going to be the type to vote against racial justice purely for the spite of it. We can appeal to this people on economic terms and explain both why racial justice is right and good and also how it's not about pushing them down, but lifting others up.

As for the first two groups: gently caress them and everything they stand for. There is no use talking to such people.

Conservative America is full of the first two groups. Those who defend rural America all the loving time I think often delude themselves about how big the problem is. We are not going to win these people over if we're talking about affirmative action and gay marriage, even if the economic platform might otherwise appeal to them. They're way too far up Rush Limbaugh's rear end in a top hat for us to ever reach them. But, we don't need to.

Vladimir Putin posted:

Clinton is like 70 and Obama was 45 in 2008. No way she could have went to every home Iowa. She put in as much work as she could--she collapsed on national TV.

tsa posted:

Almost as if she lacked the stamina to be president...

Vladimir Putin posted:

Clinton is like 70

enraged_camel posted:

So is Trump.

punk rebel ecks posted:

L O L

theflyingorc posted:

Clever attempt, but you're not tricking me into watching The Young Turks. I'm too smart for that.

quote:

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.

sean10mm posted:

Obama's "majority in Congress" included a large number of blue dogs barely less conservative than the GOP itself, including at least one straight-up turncoat. He didn't have the free hand to reinvent everything that people seem to assume.

Not that I think he was a secret radical, but even if he didn't try to play ball for longer than he should have his ability to make huge changes to everything in America forever was really limited, to put it mildly.

kaynorr posted:

I'd like to poke at this further. So Obama comes into office knowing that we're in for a massive shitstorm of a recession and he has a non-filibuster proof majority in Congress. Are you saying that the recovery package we got was as good as could have ever happened and that the economic malaise that followed was inevitable?

Radish posted:

The oppo file on Trump worked super well.

Maybe all that stuff would have shafted Bernie, we'll never know. However Clinton had literally two decades of effort going into making her an unappealing candidate. Throwing that poo poo at Bernie last minute may or may not have stuck and it's clear from Trump that people are willing to overlook egregious stuff if they agree with the message.

Vladimir Putin posted:

Didn't a bunch of democrats lost their seats because they voted for ACA?

punk rebel ecks posted:

The DNC lost a lot of seats because they didn't campaign.

tsa posted:

Kilroy posted:

Partly. Obama campaigned on progressive causes to a great degree and was elected with a pretty clear mandate to do a lot of that stuff. He capitulated on most of it embarrassingly quickly. But yeah, for whatever reason after the success of the fifty-state strategy in 2006 and 2008, the Democratic elite stabbed Howard Dean in the back, elected Tim Kaine as chair, and proceeded to go whole hog with "let's schmooze with Wall St and focus on keeping our jobs". And now Donald Trump is President.

punk rebel ecks posted:

Why did they stab Howard Dean in the back?

Also where did this "keep our jobs" rhetoric come from? I haven't seen this, obvious, argument brought up before. Was it in a lot of leaked emails?

Kilroy posted:

They turned the DNC into an organization dedicated to keeping Democratic incumbents in office and let grassroots organizing wither on the vine. And they did it just at a time when the GOP was absorbing the Democratic successes in 2006 and 2008, and trying to replicate them. The Tea Party movement is the result of that.

punk rebel ecks posted:

I see. That does make sense. Any confirmation of this besides common sense? I'm hungry to read more on this, which is why I'm so curious.

Kilroy posted:

I don't know about Tim Kaine's tenure especially, but under Schultz it shouldn't be hard for you to find confirmation of this. It's something even top Democrats were saying for years before the email thing finally got her thrown out on her rear end. It's hard to understate just how bad that woman was for the party.

As for the Republicans trying to replicate that success, no I don't know that they actually went out and specifically tried to do what Howard Dean did except with people who listen to Rush Limbaugh, but whether on purpose or through dumb luck that's what happened.

punk rebel ecks posted:

TYT is still superior to MSNBC, CNN, and pretty much anything else. They've been right on the money during the entire election season and how it would play out and why.

CheeseSpawn posted:

TYT can be just another echo chamber. I remember Cenk was fawning over Lessig at one point. As I mentioned in the other election thread, read left economic blogs like Reich and Nakedcap. They're more apt to using examine issues more from an objective point of view with a slight left slant. Learning and examining why polices have failed the working class going to help you make the case to other liberal skeptics who are still in denial about Obama and Hillary.

Typical Pubbie posted:

Bernie wrote some peak sexual revolution fan fiction 45 years ago about sexual agency or whatever. Donald Trump was recorded saying he could grab a woman by the pussy if he wanted and that was practically yesterday. Voters don't give a poo poo, they just want someone they think will work for them.

Mans posted:

So, a week has finally passed and we probably get a better idea now about a few questions that were still a bit unclear to me:

What was the minority and demographic breakdown like? Got a lot of kneejerk reports that women and minorities voted evenly between trump and Hillary.

Additionally, there's also a tale of Trump winning with less votes than Romney got 4 years ago. Is it true?

Typical Pubbie posted:

FYI Kurt Eichenwald is a massive idiot and that "GOP oppo book" is just a summary of information widely reported on the internet throughout the primary season.

https://twitter.com/leyawn/status/795662034520199169

incoherent posted:

kurt IT guy must have never worked an actual day of IT in his life, 650k is well within (and quite low in my experence) the realm of possibility to be stored on a laptop.

Especially if the users of e-mail were curmudgeon old people who CONSTANTLY REPLAY ALL to ALL e-mails AND they store the copies locally.

TheOneAndOnlyT posted:

I disagree with this assessment. I don't think that people overlooked all the poo poo on Trump because they agreed with him, I think it was for two other reasons:

1) There was just so much of it that it was impossible to ever really focus on any one thing, while with Clinton everyone knew about "the emails" because it was the only goddamn thing anyone would ever say about her. I have no doubt that if the Republicans had found an attack on Bernie that stuck, they'd have harped on it nonstop and made sure it stayed in the news for as long as possible.
2) Trump himself didn't really engage with most of it, which ties in with 1 because it meant that his scandals didn't stay in the public eye for long. When he did actually engage with a scandal (the Khans, Alicia Machado), it hit his poll numbers hard. Trump had the personality to just blow past most oppo like that, while Clinton and Sanders did not.

MikeCrotch posted:

I suspect part of it is that Trump was seen as the non-establishment candidate, so him being bashed by the establishment media constantly may well have helped play into that rhetoric.

Mans posted:

Additionally, there's also a tale of Trump winning with less votes than Romney got 4 years ago. Is it true?