Senate The US Politics discussion

How stupid of her to think that the American people would be repulsed by Trump's obvious bigotry, stupidity, ignorance, multiple attacks on the media and freedom of speech, calls for violence, his childish bullying of detractors, praise for dictators, bizarre policy ideas (stealing Iraqi oil, expressed eagerness to use nukes, desire to build a wall to keep out Mexican rapists), his advocacy of Birtherism, belief in conspiracy theories, his continual lying, not so subtle sexual attraction to his daughter, multiple accusations of sexual assault along with the Access Hollywood tape rather than correctly assume that the American people would actually be attracted to these repugnant qualities in Trump.

Everyone thought that Hillary would win. The pundits, the pollsters, the media, the Obama administration, late night TV hosts, even the majority of voters themselves (which contributed to some of them choosing not to wait in 5 hour lines in swing states like Wisconsin which purposefully did not have enough polling stations in cities where Democrats are strong). Go back and look at our election night thread. Everyone was shocked that Trump won.

It's pretty hard to blame Hillary for believing what everyone else believed, especially when the polling experts in her own campaign were telling her how likely her win would be.

 

The fact that Trump was even an option in America, much less the winner, tells me that the biggest thing that should be held in contempt is this garbage society.

 

Well, it's not as if Hillary didn't campaign hard. Her schedule was booked, and she had tons of surrogates campaigning for her too. Not campaigning in the right places and not campaigning hard are 2 different things.

I do agree that it was dumb for her to ignore Wisc and virtually ignore Mich, but honestly that didn't make much of a difference. She campaigned hard in Penn and FL, and still lost those. Winning Wisc and Mich wouldn't have made up for those losing FL and Penn. She still would've lost.

I campaigned for Obama in 2012 and Hillary in 2016. We had the same game plan here in FL. In fact, we had more autonomy under Hillary than under Obama, though that could've been a local decision rather than a decision at the top. (And both campaigns still overly micro-managed and made really obvious mistakes. Contemporary campaigns are hardly the the state of art enterprise that the media makes them out to be.)

 

I don't disagree that it was both very surprising and very disappointing. I'm arguing that it's dishonest of Clinton supporters to argue that the media was somehow always to help Trump. Precisely because everyone thought all the negative things you mentioned would hurt his image, it was seen as likely helping Clinton and at worst having a neutral effect. It turns out everyone way wrong. That doesn't mean the world conspired against her.

 

Oh, I see. I agree with you there. Actually, I believe there was an analysis of media coverage during the campaign, and I believe it showed that Clinton's coverage was more negative before the general began and that Trump's coverage became more negative the further into the general it went, but again, I'm not sure how they can really make that determination when, as you point out, coverage that would typically be considered negative Trump voters responded to positively. I think Clinton has a fair point that the media didn't cover the issues, but she was foolish to believe that they would, as they typically cover the horse race, not issues, and I don't think "boring" coverage of policy positions that actually affect people's lives sways many voters. I'll look around for that analysis of the 2016 campaign.

 

But lots of white people voted Democratic too , so how do you know who this extra 10% of whites would vote for ?

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If only whites had voted in the election, Trump would've won the electoral college 369 to 169. If only white males had voted in the election, Trump would've won it 493 to 45. On the other hand, had only minorities voted, Hillary would have won every state.

In this situation, I'm assuming that these extra white voters would've voted in the same pattern that whites did in the actual election where whites voted Trump over Hillary 57% to 37%. If this were the case, that extra 10% would have pushed swing states like FL, NC, Wisc, Mich, Penn, and probably many more, out of reach for any Democratic candidate.

Above, I wasn't really making a prediction about how voters who didn't turn out would have voted, though all but certain that this trend would hold if only white non-voters had voted in enough numbers to boost the white vote by 10%.

Instead, I was making a point about how much Hillary is to blame for her own loss. My conclusion is that it's mostly beyond her control. She lost mainly because of white grievance about racial, gender, gender-orientation, immigration issues, etc. That allowed much of the white population to accept and sometimes even embrace Trump as a candidate even though he has the tons of traits that should disqualify him in the minds of any rational voter.


(btw, Gez, why do your posts always have a period 2 lines below your last line of text?)

 

True, she thought she was going to win, but in no way did she take it for granted. She SPECIFICALLY trotted out Al Gore as the poster child for not assuming things are a sure thing and tried to get people to vote. She had Michelle out there in New Hampshire telling people the difference a vote can make based on Barack's own counts in various counties. The Democrats did NOT want to blow this one and saw the trend of depressed voting and tried to motivate them. Then Comey's memo came out.

If you are looking for the true culprit- I go to the media every time. This era of sensationalized news never favored Hillary because that's not who she is. Meanwhile, Trump insults people and they give him hours of free airtime. When you give all the air to one person, you suffocate the rest. That's how he won the Republican primary. That's how he turned enough voters. The media wanted a horse race and THEY propped Trump up by giving him that free air time. Not only that, THEY beat up on Hillary, reporting the leaked emails and the Podesta's hack and endlessly showing her nearly fainting as they brought up the "stamina question". Believe me, I don't exactly shed a tear for the reception the media has been getting from Trump- they are right up there with the GOP and Putin as far as how Trump managed to win. If they had simply treated Trump as a true political candidate and not a circus, they would have focused on his lack of policy or how horrible the policy he proposed was. Instead, they sensationalized all the awful things he said while pummeling Hillary's missteps because they didn't want it to look like a blowout. They convinced people it was already over and people stayed home. Hillary and the Dems were out there saying vote. President Obama was out there whipping up votes. It simply didn't matter and half the time, it simply wasn't covered because Trump had stolen the narrative that day.

 

Well, Wisconsin was lost 100% due to voter suppression. 4 of the other 7 swing states she lost also had voter suppression laws. If they run Harris or Booker and lose the same states in the same way, it will really show how effective voter suppression is. You can thank Anthony Kennedy for that crap.

 

She didn't do a single public campaign event for the entire month of August. How isn't that "taking it for granted?"

 

Remind me, wasn't the Olympics during that time? Wasn't the idea not to campaign during that time- which of course Trump still managed to make about himself? Also when do we think that walking pnemonia started? Pretty sure it was the end of August given her near fainting occurred at the 9/11 memorial.

I'm not saying she didn't make mistakes and is free of fault- far from it. And part of that goes to hiring people who chose not to campaign in those places and have her down there. That's on her as the overall boss. But again, the Trump campaign was run by Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway- and Paul Manafort before that. It wasn't exactly a well oiled machine. It was Putin's aid that helped that sinking ship stay above water. And it was more of a freak accident that all these factors came together to give Trump the win than it was that he ran a great campaign- it was terrible. At the same time, it's not exactly fair to say that Hillary should have done even more when other candidates in her position who have won did less and when others who have lost did less. She did try. She did try to explain her policies. She did try to motivate voters. She simply couldn't overcome the fact that she didn't have a penis. If it were Bernie in the exact same role, same scandals, and same campaign ideas too, I think he would have won. I don't think it was the platform. I don't think it was the emails. I think it was ultimately gender that did her in. There were several blows, but the one she simply could never overcome was that. And again, the media was no help in this regard and validated Trump's criticisms against her gender with how they treated her campaign vs how they treated Trump's campaign.

 

I have a question since some are talking about the media in here.Does any one think that when ever(or how ever) trump leave office that the media will stop covering his tweets?I think the media is hooked on it like a drug and will find it hard to stop.

 

Even if he had lost in '16, the media would still be covering it. I remember there was even talk, if Trump lost, of a "shadow cabinet" with Trump still picking people to be his Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, etc. and writing fake executive orders and fake-signing real bills passed by Congress, to show the country what he'd do as President, whenever President Hillary Clinton made any decision, and try to overshadow her as much as possible.



EDIT:


Trump is making ALL-CAPS threats to other countries on facebook now

 

An 11-year old rules the country.

 

I apologize to 11-year olds for making fun of them.

 

his tweet reminds me that i need to buy lead underwear

 

I’m sorry but I am so tired of hearing the unending litany of excuses for Hillary. She lost because she is a terrible retail politician and a poor campaign manager. She was a uniquely bad candidate. She had massive advantages over Trump, and squandered them all.

She out-fundraised Trump and outspent him. She had the endorsements of every major newspaper in the country. She had Beyonce, Springsteen and Katy Perry. She had Obama in the White House. She had Bill. She had a comparatively docile primary fight. She had more access to institutional support from the professional political class. She had more experience in politics. Her opponent was the most unpopular presidential candidate in modern history. She had an intelligent and disciplined mind, something Trump does not have.

And in the end it wasn’t enough. Sanders would have won the general election. Martin O’Malley probably would have as well.

If any of you want to get a better idea of why she lost I’d highly recommend reading Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Johnathan Allen and Amie Parnes. It lays bare the infighting, indecision, incompetence and hubris of her campaign which started at the top and trickled down from there. I’d also recommend this article by David Auerbach which looks at the campaign’s data analytics system and concludes it was little better than soothsaying.

 

It used to be normal to take August off. Kerry did it. Hillary was sick, she needed to go to Hollywood to get campaign contributions because giving was low, the Olympics was going on, and it was thought at the time that Trump would sink his campaign all by himself with all the ridiculous stuff he was tweeting. In fact, his campaign staff stealing his phone during the last 2 weeks of the campaign was their best move. That along with the Comey stuff really helped tilt the negative coverage against Clinton right before election time.


Here's the study of media coverage that I was talking about. Some highlights from an examination of the coverage from the top newspapers and television newscasts:

--The study found that, on topics relating to the candidates’ fitness for office, Clinton and Trump’s coverage was virtually identical in terms of its negative tone. “Were the allegations surrounding Clinton of the same order of magnitude as those surrounding Trump?” asks Patterson. “It’s a question that political reporters made no serious effort to answer during the 2016 campaign.”

--Trump's media coverage moved from somewhat negative in the primaries to strongly negative in the general. Hillary's coverage did not change from the primaries to the general. It remained somewhere between somewhat negative and strongly negative. However, during the last 2 weeks of the campaign it went strongly negative against her, coinciding with the Comey reopening of the email investigation.

--Only 10 percent of media coverage dealt with the candidates' positions on issues, with Trump's positions getting more coverage (12%) than Clinton's (9%). Coverage of both of the candidate's policy positions were more negative than positive.

--The tone of the coverage for the fitness of each candidate for office was overwhelming negative and exactly the same for Trump and Clinton, with both receiving 89% negative coverage on the question that they were fit to hold office.

--Trump received more coverage than Clinton in every week of the general election, though it on average was more negative (77% negative to 23% vs. 64% to 36%).

--It's no wonder that people distrust politicians as negative coverage has exceeded positive coverage since the 1980's. This campaign had the 2nd highest negative to positive coverage to the 2000 Bush vs. Gore campaign.

--Negative coverage is not limited to elections. In recent years, when immigration has been the subject of news stories, the ratio of negative stories to positive ones has been 5-to-1. In that same period, news reports featuring Muslims have been 6-to-1 negative. News stories about health care policy, most of which centered on the 2010 Affordable Care Act, have been 2-to-1 negative. Although the nation’s economy has steadily improved since the financial crisis of 2008, one would not know that from the tone of news coverage. Since 2010, news stories about the nation’s economy have been 2-to-1 negative over positive.



And here is a good article from 538 that examines the biases in the media's coverage in terms of its assumptions about the 2016 campaign and the false conclusions that they reached to explain why Trump's win defied conventional wisdom -- such as a consistent belief that the electoral college favored Clinton, that Clinton had an overwhelming lead in the polls, that racial resentment played a small role, or that Comey's letter only had a small effect on the election's outcome.

 

The only person alive who would have any chance of beating Trump in an election is Barack Obama, and he is term-limited. Yes. Hillary is a terrible campaigner, but Trump's ability to create a cult for himself and to denigrate others is amazing. Whoever the Democrats run in 2020 will be given a nickname, insulted, ridiculed and worst of all defined by Trump.

He will be President for the foreseeable future. He will easily be reelected and then suspend elections in 2024 due to some huge crisis that he himself will start. Once he is too old, he will install Ivanka was the first female President.

A Trump will be US President for the rest of our lives.

 

I'd be fine with Ivanka becoming the new main villain in a couple of seasons.

Seriously, was that tongue in cheek?

 

Lol I can't tell if you're being serious or trolling.

 

And what I have been saying is that she wasn't uniquely bad. She was uniquely female though. Take away Russia, and she's no worse than John Kerry or Al Gore. Hell, take away the social media aspect and she might have even won. Take away that and Bernie might never have taken off. The fact is there are numerous factors that led to this outcome. But three of them are not in doubt: Comey's memo, Hillary's gender, and now confirmed Russian interference. Take those three factors and apply them to any of the candidates in the past twenty years. Look at the campaign run and apply that to the previously run campaigns.

Hillary was not uniquely bad. Hillary struggled with being a boring politician. She said it herself at the DNC: She's never been good at the public part of public servant. She's better at the details and getting things done. That's why her plans were so detailed. That's why she was so strong in debates. And bringing up the fact she always said "but" to Sanders' policies, it's because like Trump, they sounded nice but were not practical or fully fleshed out. Education and healthcare were two of Hillary's biggest focuses going all the way back to being first lady of Arkansas. So when she points out why things wouldn't work and then proposes how the overall goal could be achieved with some compromises, it's because she's been there done that. More than any other candidate in history, she was the most qualified by far. That's not even really debatable. She knew the office, she knew diplomacy, she knew congress, she knew state and local government, and she knew the law. Personality was never her strong suit but people associate her likability with her looks- it won't take me long to find memes making fun of her facial expressions for instance. Her actions were often made out to be more shady then they were and yet when she tried to explain things- it was too detail oriented compared to whatever quick half truth/half lie that Fox could tar and feather her with. The Benghzai panel and "What difference, at this point, does it make?" are perfect examples of that.

As to the idea she had massive advantages- I disagree with that as well. She had massive disadvantages that she tried to overcome and failed- mostly due to the Comey memo and her gender. Yes she had fundraising and strong campaign staff. But she lost precious time trying to win Bernie's support and his dragging his feet despite "knowing math" did not help matters. Do I think it was a huge cost? No. But he could have been quicker. Considering in comparison to how quickly she rallied around Barack Obama when she lost, she wasn't given the same treatment- which was particularly damaging when a small contingent of his supporters hated her for her gender and made trouble partly because of that. I've already been over the perception of stamina, looking presidential, and general comments on HER health despite Trump writing his own doctor's note. She campaigns with walking pnemonia and the focus is on what she didn't do and that she nearly faints and then all the headlines come out that she's dying etc. etc.

Again, this is not to absolve Hillary from blame. She made plenty of mistakes besides not campaigning in states. For instance, I still think her biggest was not picking Elizabeth Warren over Tim Kaine. Tim Kaine did her no favors. Warren would have bolstered her approval, crushed Pence in a VP debate because she has Bill Clinton's ability to break things down and explain, and she would have been in the press tackling Wells Fargo right as Hillary was facing questions about her health. A Clinton/Warren ticket would have been Trump's worse nightmare and it might well have been enough to sway voters who hated Hillary but like Warren over to their side. By comparison, Tim Kaine was too safe and too dull.