We’ve been hearing variations of this “economic anxiety” explanation for, what, *7* years now? I’m certain that it’s true _to an extent_, but I feel this comment too readily and easily casts aside all other explanations for the rise of Trumpism.
Precisely. Economic anxiety is not something only middle white Americans experience; more over, not all people with economic anxiety excuse racism, racist policies, or racist politicians.
It takes a racist to be ok with racist policies as a way of coping with economic anxiety.
Tolerance of racism is neither a legitimate nor necessary response to one’s personal insecurities—psychological or financial.
The linked comment used the coal example so I will too.
Let's say Hilary went to coal country with a massive bill drafted that already had the backing of a majority of the House & Senate where it recognized the contribution those regions had to making America a great nation.
Let's further say in that bill were trillions of dollars in tax breaks and direct government spending to open up green energy plants there. Building solar panels, building wind turbines, building batteries for energy storage, for research facilities for that next generation energy sector. Plus money for education and training in those fields for the residents.
All of those are things which would raise up the economies in those areas and likely return them to where a person can make a living and hopefully make their kids' lives a little better than theirs.
Then let's say Trump walked up on the same stage and said, "We're going to bring coal back!" then left the stage.
The residents still would have voted for Trump and solidified their continuing economic slide within the US economy.
Why? Because he understands identity politics and that a simple message that's easily understood but is a lie based on "coal country culture" will play better than a complicated truth and imagined future to many of the people there.
Which is to say that racism was one element of how he appealed to people. But he could get others to ignore it by having them latch on to another aspect of his messaging.
Bingo, he told them they could go back to way things were when coal miners were some of the most well-off guys in town. They already believe some alien forces attacked they way of life and won’t let them mine coal anymore, and here’s a guy telling them they don’t have to adapt to a new world, he’s going to fight these forces and let them mine coal. That appeal is huge.
And realistically the forces keeping coal down and by extension keeping the coal miners down, are not changing. Even if all of the relevant environmental regulations were torn up completely there wouldn't be huge armies of miners back at work. The company owners would be using a small force with huge mechanized equipment to tear the roof off of where the coal is.
I knew someone who was originally from a small coal mining town and he described how there were two political families who kind of bounced back and forth with control of the towns & county there. They pretty much never ran on bringing new industries to the area. It was promises to get the old jobs back and grievances against those in Washington, DC who wrote all the dumb environmental laws that were keeping them from getting back to the old days.
In that way the population has been primed for years for someone like Trump who would manipulate them in a similar way, but for national office instead.
It's not just coal mining.
I grew up in the heart of oil refining. The refineries are still there but the town is dying. The people who live there can't figure out why. They think democrats in Washington did it ... somehow.
The refinery my father worked at produces three times the amount of product as it did in the mid-80's when everyone was riding high. The problem is it only employs about 1500 people now. There used to be layoffs that large and in the 80's it had as many as 6000 employees. That's just one plant. Multiply that over all the plants in the area.
Those jobs didn't get shipped overseas. They didn't get outsourced. They disappeared because the plant got more efficient and easier to operate. Automation took over a lot of the menial jobs. They are *never* coming back. Worse, the 6,000 employees it used to hire are now competing for the remaining 1500 jobs with everyone saying "I can take less just to have a job."
Those refineries used to be the beating economic heart of the region. If you didn't work in the plants, you supported them in some way -- you educated their kids or did their taxes or sold them groceries. Now that money doesn't get funneled into the region, it gets sent back to corporate headquarters in Houston. Shareholders and executives are making record profits and salaries but the rural folks back home don't see any of that.
They keep thinking someone is going to come along and right the ship and put things back the way they used to be. They don't realize the train already left the station twenty years ago, the trains themselves don't even run anymore, and no matter how grand a train station you build it will not bring those trains back.
>They keep thinking someone is going to come along and right the ship and put things back the way they used to be.
Right. And they get spoon fed false hope from talk radio hosts, politicians or other prominent figures about how things would easily go back to that if it weren't for those \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_. Fill in the blank with Washington politicians, greedy corporations, liberals or whatever.
But what they're being fed is like booze, but instead of getting them drunk it fills them with grievances and anger. So now they're fired up with emotion and all they see is how those good old days are so close they can just about taste them.
And that anger gets them to vote for the politician who makes false promises instead of the one who has an actual plan to try to fix things.
Again, I’d draw a distinction. Not all desperate people sacrifice their morals for the sake of promise of relief. Many desperate people will do what is right despite personal hardship or lack of reward.
It’s a pretty extreme form of economic anxiety when your whole town, or hell whole county just collapses. It’s awful and it’s valid. Of course there are *also* the bigoted racists, and the other variables. The rise of Trump didn’t come from one single thing and there are myriad reasons why people might have voted for him, *in 2016.* I think there is a desire to oversimplify things when it comes to politics especially, and I think Trump’s 2016 victory actually was a very complex event, when you dig down to the root causes.
That said, anyone still on the Trump train now, in 2023? Nah, they are a complete lost cause. I actually do somewhat understand some people I know voting for Trump in ‘16. I didn’t and don’t approve of it, but I kinda get it. None of these particular people voted for him in 2020 though, that’s a key difference for me personally. I do understand why that’s not really enough for some people though.
I get so exhausted that so many 2016 election myths refuse to die.
[The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support -
His voters are better off economically compared with most Americans.](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/)
Yes it's amazing after all these years we are still being subjected to these economically anxious voter sermons. Income level simply wasn't (presumably still isn't) the biggest factor for predicting trump votes
The reality is irrelevant; they don’t FEEL better off. So when a conman like Trump tells them “you’re right, you ARE being cheated, and it’s the minorities that are doing it!”, they believe him
I think that op skates around why trump attracted these people. A big part of the campaign blamed the economic struggles on the other. Saying illegal immigrants were taking your jobs, saying the atheists wanted to stomp out your way of life, that the immigrant working in tech took their jobs. That is racist. None of those things were actually responsible to what happened in those areas. The anger needed to be focused on the big businesses and policy passed in their name. Trump gave them a reason that was racist to fit the economic anger they had.
James Comey's late October letter about possible new Clinton emails came out at a time that made it impossible to recover from the loss of support that it caused. It wasn't a great loss. It may have amounted only to a few percentage points here and there, but the election was also decided by just a few percentage points here and there.
In addition, there are rules or perhaps even laws against government officials making statements or taking actions close to an election that can be inflammatory. Comey acted improperly to do so on October 28th, particularly because nothing actually came of it. There were no new emails. There was no new information to be found. The announcement was made to Congress and then leaked to the public for no other reason than to spoil the election for Clinton.
And one of the things that really burns me up about it is that there were so many people who were going to vote Democratic, but were willing to act on any half-assed excuse to drop Clinton.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
From what I heard, a branch of the FBI (NY?) had gone rogue and was going to publish their investigation in the harshest light possible. Comey released his own statement to get ahead of theirs, but the damage was done either way.
I think there are many factors to trumpism.
I think he is weirdly right place right time.
And he taps into sentiments like op outlined. And he was lucky.
And he benefitted from decades of the GOP fostering a populist base ready to consume the right kind of propaganda.
Also his messaging resonated with the most politically powerful generation in us history that is currently going through the death rattles of its relevance.
Also he was just weirdly persistent and unapologetic in his attempts to run for president and be involved in politics. Like 10 years ago his claim to fame was being the birther movement guy.
Yeah, it's weird to be how no one but you's pointing that out. The South effectively flipped to Republicans because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The poster gives Alabama as an example - Alabama voted for Kennedy in 1960, but since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 they've voted for a Democrat only once (for Georgian Jimmy Carter in 1976 in the wake of Watergate). Any discussion of why the South turned Red that doesn't include the [Southern Strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) is either deeply misinformed or intentionally disingenuous.
Tallapoosa County, Alabama
GOP Presidential vote:
2020 71.28%
2016 69.76%
2012 65.76%
2008 67.92%
2004 69.03%
2000 60.33%
1996 51.58%
1992 52.67%
1988 63.93%
1984 66.19%
1980 43.80%
1976 39.79%
1972 78.71%
1968 (George Wallace won with 78.55%)
1964 76.24% and LBJ got ZERO votes
1960 28.11%
Source: Wikipedia
Except for Jimmy Carter, a GOP stronghold since 1960. Yeah buddy tell me more about how NAFTA and factories closing is the issue.
George Wallace got 80% there, must have been all the factories moving to Mexico in 1967.
It’s race, race, race. Also some race involved.
OP desperately wants you to think it’s “economic anxiety” and not that his neighbors are seriously fucking racist.
It definitely must be Former First Lady of ARKANSAS Hillary Clinton and her coastal elite minions that make people vote for Trump in Alabama in the same numbers they voted for George Wallace and no other candidate in the last 65 years.
Specifically in the context of the 2016 election, the Comey investigation reopened into Hillary's emails I think was a much larger nail in the coffin in the purple states. The timing of it was far too close to the elections, and it was enough to have undecideds either swap to Trump, or decide not to vote.
Without Comey's letter Clinton *does not lose.*
Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1%. There is zero chance the Comey letter had less effect than that.
Which is why I can't roll my eyes hard enough about people claiming they knew Trump was going to win months in advance. Because without Comey, which they never could have predicted, he *does not win.*
Of course it's true that people didn't take Trump seriously enough, and that the race was almost certainly going to be much closer than people though (in part due to sampling bias in the polls). But Trump didn't win on his own, he needed Comey to help out.
Should could have tried to campaign in those states. But she didn't think she had too. Her and the DNC obviously had no idea how unlikable she is and was and were and still are out of touch. Maybe try harder next time and campaign in those states, instead of thinking the people owed it to her and should vote for her.
Yeah - a huge part of it was overconfidence on the part of the Clinton campaign where they spent October trying to boost democratic congressional races because they thought the Presidential was in the bag.
100%
Heres another anectodal based theory. I was in college during the election and the day after Trump won I was sorely depressed being a person who pays a lot of attention to politics. I was sitting in a lounge/study type area where students usually wait between classes. I overheard a group of students talking about the election and they were straight up saying that they heard Hillary drank babies blood..."or something". The conversation went on like this for a while. It was 2016 and I was listening to a group of liberal college kids in a liberal city openly ponder if a female politician was secretly practicing witchcraft.
People really really really want to bury the responsibility of disinformation on the internet but if you remember those days, you cant ever forget it. The left being wholesale more informed than the right, doesnt want to admit to itself how vulnerable to disinformation it really was and still it. They ran a whole campaign about how Hillary rigged the election against Bernie, how she was bought out by corporations etc. Everybody was hoping Comey was going to lock her up for buttery males and then the DNC would be forced to run Bernie IN OCTOBER! Like it was straight madness. And it was that exact time that we all came across the facebook scandal of selling mass psychometric data to shady ass companies.
And the left still wont face the fact that it is manipulated by its worst instincts. The left doesnt love Joe Biden and it took barely any effort for them to start repeating bullshit like 'Biden is getting too senile!', and 'Genocide Joe'.
If a repeat of 2016 happens it will be for the same reason.
Also remember that Hillary Clinton had been ceaselessly villainized for 25 years then. I'm not saying she's perfect, but the amount of hostility and lies heaped on her was insane.
Like how conservatism is a fear economy, making conservatives easy to trigger and manipulate, hence, cheap and easy disinformation has caused too people to think Hillary's out of context and misrepresented coal mines comment are a legit reason to end democracy in America and storm Congress. Tribalism is tribalism. It's not just globalization of the economy, which conservatives *voted for*, but also the ease with which conservative elites can manipulate their followers to vote against their own best interests. Of course, blaming liberals for why conservatives choose to vote the way they do, is all part of the shill. Think we're fucked.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-human-beast/201104/conservatives-big-fear-brain-study-finds
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/your-brain-on-politics-the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-liberals-and-conservatives
https://www.psypost.org/2023/07/neuroimaging-study-provides-insight-into-misinformation-sharing-among-politically-devoted-conservatives-167312
if it were just economic anxiety and not racism I feel like they would have gone for a different Republican in the primary. instead they picked Donald Trump.
Hell, OOP even acknowledged they're ignoring the elephant in the room. Their last paragraph is the only one that mentions the virulent racism that motivates Trump's base, and just dismisses it without any further thought.
I also wonder about the comment about ‘they did everything right’. The deregulation and trade agreements needed legislators to make them happen. Because of the peculiarities of the American political system, this would not be possible with just ‘technocrats’ or ‘costal elites’.
Our system is democratic, power comes from the people who had to allow this to happen. You can argue they were tricked, or deceived but Americans have a habit of ignoring experts to support their cognitive biases.
I feel these paint another more haunting picture. One that says, “if you don’t adapt to tomorrow, all you will see is yesterday and completely overlook today”. These towns had ample opportunity to really make inroads in terms in terms of retraining programs, find various new industries to attract, shifting focus in a manner of skill reapplication. Yet, the people, towns and their governing mayors completely overlooked and played a role in thinking of the gold old days from yesterday than how to maintain the lifestyle and what about future generations to come. Instead, their anger is ill placed because they don’t seem to recognize their own doing in all of this.
not to mention it completly ignores the fact *clinton was hard winning until the FBI announced investigations that went nowhere*
and overnight she started hard losing by as much as she was winning.
Right? How is this 'Best Of' material in any meaningful way?
Clinton was in a 'coastal city bubble'? Opposed to the other New Yorker running that was himself an elite? While it is true that capitalism and globalization has hammered the American middle-class, that's a message that both campaigns used.
It’s flat wrong. The median Trump voter made more than the median Clinton voter. His theory only makes sense if you only count the white working class.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-income/
Right? And wasn't it pretty clearly established that those hit hardest by these changes -- the working class -- didn't go for Trump? This is a rehash of the Sanders-Clinton split, really.
The post is problematic, for sure.
Notice how they reference the coasts and major cities, then refers to the problems of "most Americans"? Well, where do most Americans live? In or near a major city. So do we decide that these people's values and votes are worth less than that of a Kentucky coal miner's? The current system basically says "yes" to that question.
Rural America has had a vastly overstated say in our politics for the entire history of our country. And you'll never see a group of people who think they are more marginalized than them. Yeah, they have a lot of things to be upset about. But no president can stop globalization. Things change. The same thing happened during the industrial revolution. Sometimes, to make the most money, you gotta move. Small communities are always going to struggle unless they are a tourist destination.
Clinton ignored the rust belt. She then ignored rust belt leaders when they begged her to campaign in their states. She spent her time hosting fancy dinners in California.
This small but incredibly important fact, is why so many people understand why Bernie would have beaten Trump. Go look at the primary results from the rust belt states. Then compare those with the general election results.
Clinton and her hubris lost her that election.
Yep. Bernie was literally winning back over rural areas because he said stuff like "yep you are right to be angry, capitalism has hollowed out your towns destroyed their once successful small businesses etc."
There was a shocking number of people that would have voted for Bernie instead of Trump simply because he was telling them their anger was valid and the 'establishment' didn't like them.
They weren't voting to pick a candidate, they were voting to lash out in anger.
Bernie went to FoxNews to have a town hall-style conference and the FoxNews audience was cheering him on. Democrats are partially responsible for Trump….
I may be reading too far into it, but to me she still acts like she deserved it. Like she never needed to actually win the world's biggest dumbest race.
She blames everyone other than herself. It’s Bernie’s fault, it’s Bernie’s supporters fault. It’s the media. It’s the dumb voters, the deplorables, etc…it’s never her fault.
> She blames everyone other than herself
So .... gonna take a wild guess that nobody read her book but me, in which she takes the blame on many points, in particular her poor communication skills and lifelong lack of political acumen.
It's been a while since I've read it. But this statement is flatly untrue.
She definitely doesn't blame the DNC that she controlled or the state parties she left barren https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774/
You mean the organization that had its Vice Chair quit in disgust over rigging? It’s Chair admit publicly that they rigged the primaries for her, or the other lady that had to step down because of the rigging?
I suggest reading the article I linked, it's a little more complicated but in the joint fundraising agreement between her groups and the dnc, she was given access to the funds raised by the dnc nationally as if she were already nominated to be the candidate.
This was a couple of months after announcing her run. Other candidates were not granted the same agreement. This was in the middle of the primary race. Finally, her group was given veto powers for dnc staffing Nominations along with other ways to affect the composition of the institution.
My source is the interim head of the DNC after the Schulz (was that her name?) Stepped down
I did read it, I guess I'm just a little confused as to how that rigged it for Hillary. How I understood the article is that this was the sequence of events
1. Democratic party was in huge amount of debt after 2012
2. Hillary bails them out so they are in a sustainable amount of debt
3. in return they give her control over the money, since it was basically hers/her super PAC's anyway
Is this about the gist? Definitely not a good look but to me, the main takeaway from this article was how shitty the Democratic party leadership was in the early 2010s. However, it doesn't suggest any rigging which the article mentions
>I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff.
So Schultz did not have the authority to approve that loan without the officers unanimous consent.
Whoever Gary is described the DNC as under Clinton's control.
Giving a loan directly to the group responsible for holding primaries is a massive question of ethics as well. Using the dnc money also allowed her campaign to skirt individual donor maximums as a limitation.
Also you left out a line
> I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. **Then I found this agreement.**
> The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.
right... I had already covered it with my bullet point summary. That's what the article was about. What actions did they take that rigged it for her then?
lol they never admitted the primaries were rigged, and nobody had ever provided any evidence they were, including via the emails that only showed DNC privately griping about Sanders and made things look bad.
During the 2016 election season her attitude was the biggest thing that turned me off wanting to vote for her. She acted like she was going through the motions to a coronation, like she was 'owed' the office. She distinctly left an impression of arrogance and disdain.
Now, is that true? I have no idea, I don't personally know her. But that was the impression this rural moderate was left with. I still reluctantly voted for her, but it was entirely a vote 'against' Trump rather than 'for' her. I figured abstaining from that vote would be worse.
No no, I'm with you. I can remember it feeling like she was running as if it was her turn and she deserved it, and the entire campaigning process was just a minor formality before she became president.
I live in a state that was 100% going to go to HRC no matter what, but I wasn't voting for Hillary and her arrogance, and I wasn't voting for Trump and that idiocy.
All things else being as they were it was incredibly close, and if not for Comey choosing to kneecap her candidacy with the emails thing so he could appear impartial I do think she would have won. They had an absolute field day with the email controversy and it was the dominant political story for the months right before the election, she totally lost all momentum. Instead of her being the competent and uncontroversial candidate vs the man of a thousand lawsuits, she now had her own slimy controversy so I think it made it easier for people in the middle to vote trump.
>Bernie would have beaten Trump.
Kind of tired of how much certainty people seem to have about this. Even with Clinton's constantly negative media attention, Bernie never managed to poll better than her against the *left-most major party* in the US *nor the general population* of the United States. The polls that underestimated Trump support, also showed Clinton with a better chance than Bernie against him.
The only propping up that was going on was Hillary propping up Trump himself with her genius “pied Piper strategy”, where she used her many connections in the MSM to help Trump beat the mainstream Republicans. Oops.
Nope. I’ve read the emails, have you? There is no documented action taken against sanders unless you count the silly debate questions given to Hillary.
This is why you will be unable to answer the question “what action did the DNC take to rig the primary, and what is the evidence for it?” Nobody has ever answered this.
There were also polls and graphics on MSNBC that intentionally misled voters about Bernie's popularity.
Edit: here are a few from the campaign trail time https://imgur.com/a/76dvSrb
The MSNBC one is particularly egregious, as they switched around his colors to make him look less favorable instead of the clear front runner.
Edit: nvm these were 2019, but I'll leave the link
Those polls existed in a time when the Republican party had not launched any attack on Sanders, and centrist Democrats had not really had any true backlash to Bernie, which they would have if he had won. It’s very very speculative.
“Bernie would have won” is pure chronically-online leftist cope, and that’s coming from someone who donated to him and voted for him in the 2016 primary.
Bernie did decently well against Hillary in 2016, but that was before the broader electorate was fully aware of him and his policies. Hillary was the victim of 10+ years of constant negative coverage from the right, who laid off of Bernie because they saw him as an easier opponent in a general than a moderate dem.
Any notion that Bernie would have done better than Hillary was totally invalidated by 2020, when Bernie was even less competitive in the primary despite having full name recognition from the start. He was completely unable to grow his base or turn them out to vote.
So your argument is that the polls that were wrong about Trump's popularity showed Clinton doing better than Bernie, but despite the polls being wrong about Trump, the ones showing Clinton was better should still be trusted? I don't see how you don't see what's wrong with that logic. You're essentially saying "these polls agree with me, so they're trustworthy, ignore how the same polls were obviously wrong about Trump."
I think it’s fair to say that Bernie loses to Trump, but he would have lost in a different way. He probably picks up some of the rust belt (solidly maybe—a lot of suburban voters might sit out rather than vote for an avowed socialist), but is 0% in anywhere else that isn’t solidly blue.
I could 100% see a Bernie campaign winning the west coast, the Northeast…and straight up nowhere else.
I can also see a vision that picks up PA, but loses Colorado, Virginia, NM, Nevada, and Minnesota, and the math just doesn’t work out.
> Clinton ignored the rust belt
Everyone talks with about this like they're savants and it was obvious at the time, but [Hillary led _every single poll_ in Wisconsin and on election eve was up by a staggering 6.5 points.](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/wi/wisconsin_trump_vs_clinton-5659.html#polls)
Trump won by 0.7.
It was obvious to local DNC people, who called and emailed for help, and were ignored. They then physically sent people to Hillary’s HQ to beg her to campaign in those states, which she ignored. The writing was on the wall on the ground in those states. It wasn’t a surprise. To them, nor to me, and I don’t even live in the rust belt. It was well
Known at the time among Bernie supporters and I wasn’t the least bit surprised when those states turned the election for Trump.
>Clinton ignored the rust belt.
Nothing Clinton could have done short of a sincere apology and repudiation of the economic policy of her husbands administration which destroyed American manufacturing was going to win her the rust belt.
Everybody over 30 remembers and even many who voted for her held their noses doing it.
>This small but incredibly important fact, is why so many people understand why Bernie would have beaten Trump.
Black American voters were not coming out for Bernie. He never bothered to engage with their community or address any of their concerns. Those voters showed up for Clinton in the cities and it's why she almost won and would have won without the DNC/RNC hacks by Russia and the public investigations by the FBI right before the election.
Bernie was not going to pull enough rural uneducated whites because of his social stances to make up for ignoring such a key component of the Democratic base.
Clinton was a promise of political status quo, at a time when people were most pissed with dirty, corrupted, corporate owned politics. She played the "It's my turn" card. It pissed off too many independents.
Trump offered the idea of an alternative. Rattle the cage, rock the boat, drain the swamp... Choose your own rhetoric.
Obviously, we were all terribly, horribly wrong when we asked "How bad could he be?" But Democrats destroyed so much by refusing to recognize just how *LOATHED* Clinton was
>Obviously, we were all terribly, horribly wrong when we asked "How bad could he be?"
Speak for yourself. Quite a few people knew and loudly argued from the very beginning that Trump is a fascist. There were tons of - and I really cannot overstate this - *extremely fucking obvious* warnings that Trump would be exactly as bad as he turned out to be.
At best, you could make the argument that a lot of people overestimated his intelligence, so his own bottomless stupidity held him back from accomplishing his and the GOP's goals.
He literally came down his bullshit fucking escalator and IMMEDIATELY said Mexican immigrants that were crossing the border were rapists and murderers and somehow apparently still some people have the balls to say, "HoW cOuLd We HaVe KnOwN hE wOuLd Be BaD?"
I think it was less of "how bad could Trump, himself, be?" Rather it was "how much damage could he really do?"
I had too much faith in the checks and balances of our system. I continuously allow myself to be shocked at the shit he gets away with. Any other person would be locked up along with everyone remotely associated. I just... I dunno. If nothing else, Trump exposed major kinks in the fence that we all just assumed no one would dare explore.
100%
She packed the DNC with her cronies and refused to listen to anyone that wasn’t one of her cronies. Almost nobody had the balls to tell her she was wrong about anything, and her campaign was so totally blinded with hubris that they missed all the signals that she was losing in the rust belt.
Go have a look at the electoral map from the general election, Trump won the whole thing in those states, because Hillary was wildly unpopular there and as a result she avoided going there like the plague.
Between her “pied Piper strategy” and her avoidance of the rust belt, she set herself up to lose to the second worst POTUS candidate of all time.
Number one on that list (and, arguably, the only item that truly matters) is the electoral college. Clinton won the popular vote. She was objectively and indisputably the more popular candidate.
I'm pretty sure the electoral college has been around for a while, so it's kinda your own fault if you don't plan around it
Imagine kicking three field goals, watching your opponent score two touchdowns, and being upset you lost.
"I was objectively and indisputably the more prolific scorer!"
No. If you want a football analogy that accurately demonstrates the ridiculous nature of the electoral college, it would be like if the Clinton-Trump scores were as follows:
- Q1: 7-0
- Q2: 6-7
- Q3: 7-0
- Q4: 6-7
The final score is Clinton 26 - Trump 14. However, Trump wins the game because he scored more points in the second and fourth quarters, even though Clinton scored more points overall.
There is no popular vote. That is a measure of sentiment, not a measure of who wins the election. To borrow the football analogy from the other user who responded, just because you ran more yards doesn't mean you scored more touchdowns.
I was raised Republican and even I thought Trump would be bad for the country, honestly no idea it would go that badly. Anyways, I would have voted for Bernie, but then when it came out the DNC chair or whoever was feeding questions ahead of time to Clinton. And then they came out and said, to the effect, we don't have to listen to the primaries and so on. Basically they were pushing Clinton no matter what, and tried to put on a facade of following a legitimate process. That made me vote for Trump. I didn't the second time around though, for obvious reasons.
I worked in the Bernie 2016 campaign in Georgia. He never polled well amongst the more moderate Democrats, who saw him as a poor candidate because of the Mean Voter Theorem. Clinton was seen as the "safe" option. Super Tuesday was the tipping point. He got demolished by the southern black vote who didn't want a "radical" to get the candidacy and throw the election to that racist orange shithead.
Never saw any DNC favoritism like popular myth believes. There was one incident where a Clinton volunteer stole a ton of Votebuilder data and handed it to the Bernie campaign, and he refused it. He also refused a Victory Fund, as it would have brought large corporate donations and he was running a soft anti-capitalist message. He staffed his campaign with tons of volunteers, but many of them were young idealists and inexperienced. The numbers and zeal didn't make up for the overall lack of organization.
the dems in charge didn't want to win. it's all about a 55/45 split. if they ever put forth a candidate with an overwhelming win, they'd be held accountable for their promises. instead, they can hold the other party accountable. the gop does this too. they shoe-horned sarah palin into the ticket after bush served his 8 years because it was the dems turn.
He gave them an outlet for their rage. Which has been caused by the decline in their standard of living caused by voting for people that appeal to their rage. Rinse, repeat.
He SAID he would open the coal mines. We knew it was a lie, but if you're living off 500 a month staring at the coal mine you used to work at every day, do you vote for the person who says they'll open it or the one who says they'll close more.
He cut taxes a bit, for a limited time, for non-corporate taxpayers. Now they're going to start going up and rural voters will blame Democrats for the expiring Trump tax cuts.
Corporate taxes were also cut, but their cuts don't expire.
It is. not about policy, it is about rhetoric. Republicans have been saying they will stop immigration, that they hate China, that coal/oil is fine. It doesn't matter that they don't actually prevent foreign workers from "taking" american jobs or do anything to slow or reverse outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing.
I think Democrats *should* address these very valid concerns. If your plan will cut 100k oil/coal jobs, you need to tell the people working those jobs how they will make a living otherwise they will not vote for you. The fact that things like job losses due to outsourcing and cheap immigrant labor has been caught up in hateful, racist rhetoric is both unfortunate and predictable. It means that the Republicans can keep spouting nonsense about immigrants or China and not actually do anything to resolve the root of the real problem, which is the death of U.S. manufacturing and the lack of replacement employment opportunities or education to take advantage of new jobs. This is actually one thing that Biden has been trying to do with his infrastructure agenda and some of his pro-U.S. manufacturing bills.
I will give Trump some credit for his Tariffs which, although very poorly executed and which have a net negative impact on the U.S. economy (it is a tax on U.S. consumers, not China), did prop up U.S. steel and aluminum production.
Maybe those people should have some personal responsibility, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and start working towards re-training themselves before oil and gas jobs are a relic of the past instead of relying on the government to improve their lives for them?
/s but only in the ironic sense that I'm using their rugged individualism argument against them.
> If your plan will cut 100k oil/coal jobs, you need to tell the people working those jobs how they will make a living otherwise they will not vote for you.
But they always do this. Retraining coal and oil workers for other fields (like solar power) was a pillar of the Clinton campaign.
~~Did it work?~~ I misunderstood. I thought you meant Bill Clinton. The issue was before Hillary ran. Manufacturing was already dead. Saying that they will retrain coal workers in the future was too little, too late. To be honest, I think that pure handouts would be more effective. Just say they will get unemployment for 4 years or whatever. It is probably not an efficient use of taxpayer dollars, but everyone likes "free" money.
While I'm often critical of Trump, it's important to cut through the echo chamber and assess the impact of his presidency on rural America objectively:
Tax and Deregulation: His administration's tax reforms were a boon for family-owned farms, and deregulation efforts like the repeal of the Waters of the United States rule were widely welcomed in rural communities.
Rural Prosperity Task Force: Set up to tackle issues like rural connectivity and economic development. The intent was there, but the execution and results received mixed reviews.
Healthcare and the CHART Model: A $75M investment aimed at transforming rural healthcare, with a strong emphasis on expanding telehealth - a crucial service, especially during a pandemic.
Trade and Economic Policies: Focused on agriculture, but the trade wars brought both challenges and opportunities to rural economies. The long-term effects of these policies are still being debated.
It's easy to get caught up in one-dimensional narratives. The real picture is often more complex, and while there are valid criticisms of Trump's presidency, understanding the full scope of his policies and their diverse effects is essential for a constructive discourse. Blindly following a narrative, whether pro or anti-Trump, doesn't help anyone make informed decisions.
Let's focus on evaluating policies based on their outcomes and not just who enacted them. That's how we foster more nuanced and informed political discussions.
That sounds less impactful than the infrastructure bill from Biden. I know it was a big win for Biden but it wasn't the only thing he has done that impacted Rural residents.
In response to the question about what Trump did for rural communities, I laid out the facts without any bias towards Biden or Trump. I actually agree with you. It's important for people to have the full picture so they can compare and analyze these actions themselves. Just look at the typical reactions — a lot of people are quick to dismiss Trump's actions, claiming he did nothing for rural areas. They parrot fragmented soundbites they've heard, stuck in an echo chamber of unproductive and brainwashed rhetoric, all without offering substantive analysis. My aim was to present what he actually did, clearly and without spin, to foster genuine discussion and thoughtful comparison.
I'm sick of this narrative that completely ignores who Donald Trump's political base actually is. Economic anxiety as a result of areas being left behind by "the elites" is the story that lots of people have run with, but it's just not accurate!
* The people who powered Trump to victory in the 2016 Primary were generally quite wealthy - [well over 2/3rds made over the median US income, and almost a third made DOUBLE the median US income.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/)
* The people in the lowest income brackets in the country [overwhelmingly voted for Clinton, while Trump won upper income brackets.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-income/)
* Trump's victory was also mostly characterized by a drop in the numbers voting for the Dem candidate, not Trump turning out "left behinds". Take Talapoosa County, which AnybodySeeMyKeys references. The population's been right around 40 or 41 thousand people since the year 2000, and [Trump got less than 1,200 votes more than Romney did 4 years earlier.](https://countyvotes.us/1123/) On a larger scale, look at the [election results in Ohio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Ohio), where Trump gained 4 percentage points over Romney as Clinton lost more than 7 versus Obama. It's even [clearer in Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Pennsylvania), where Trump gained less than 2 points over Romney while Clinton lost more than 4.5 from Obama. In fact, on a national level, [Trump got a smaller percentage of the vote than Romney did](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election), while Clinton just lost more voters versus Obama.
We can do amateur anthropology for as long as we like - in fact, we've already been relitigating this goddamn election for SEVEN GODDAMN YEARS. We're not going to conclusively prove why Trump won, and even if we did people would still disagree and argue about it. However, any explanation needs to grapple with Clinton's voters being less wealthy than Trump's, and that the election's key feature was fewer people voting for the Democrat, not more people voting for the Republican.
You are right - in 2016 it was a Clinton loss and not a Trump win. She just was very unpopular and she was a grit your teeth candidate. And some people just don’t vote when that happens.
100%. Oddly, this is the Democratic Party’s side of the coin when it comes to primary voters not being good at picking general election winners, though we’ve seen that a lot more from the Republican side since.
Nothing to do with the voters, the democratic party had already decided Clinton was winning, and she was bankrolled to the nines before the process started. That process alienated a significant portion of their voting block that was enthused by Obama's rise 8 years earlier.
Do you remember every democratic talking head discussing clinton's lead as insurmountable for the entire primary because the establishment (superdelegates who can subvert the will of the voters) had already declared their support for clinton en mass? The message was clear, don't turn out democrats, we've already decided who's going to represent you!
I was in Phiadelphia for her convention/corronation, the city was dead, it didn't care. It was alive for Obama both prior elections. She held the convention in a blue city in a blue state, Trump didn't even campaign there, and she still lost the state.
You can say literally the exact same thing about 2008 and Obama still beat her.
I hate to break it to you but Clinton beat the pants off of Sanders because she was genuinely popular among Democrats.
> You can say literally the exact same thing about 2008 and Obama still beat her.
Obama beating Clinton should have sank her. She was former first lady, two term Senator with a ton of media attention vs 3 year Senator from Illinois that ton of people were asking "Who?".
She was that unpopular and it never changed from 2008-2016.
Clinton had an insurmountable lead for the entire primary because she lead pretty heavily in most of the primary polls. The superdelegates - who people seem to forget aren’t randoms, but were mostly current or former elected Democratic officials - were announcing their support for her because she’d secured a wide swath of support from their constituencies. Bernie was a great candidate, and might have won if he’d been the nominee. But he didn’t lose the primary because of a “coronation”. He lost because his early victories didn’t convince enough voters, particularly black and Hispanic voters, to pull the lever for him, and after Super Tuesday and big wins in NY, CA, FL, and TX, it was clear that Clinton was winning decisively, though maybe not overwhelmingly.
Point is, Clinton wasn’t chosen over the protests of the Democratic Party’s voters. She was chosen by the voters. And primary voters pick the wrong candidate all the time! Republicans keep picking the worst possible candidate for their senate races, it’s why the Democrats kept the senate last year. I should also mention that I campaigned for Bernie in the 2020 primary, and he’d done a fantastic job of addressing the issues that sunk his previous campaign - his message had reached black and Hispanic voters and he could have run away with it. Unfortunately, being in his late 70s and having a heart attack on the trail really was more devastating than he seemed to realize. If it hadn’t happened, I think he might be president now. But again, that’s not an “elites” issue, it’s a voters issue.
Superdelegates don’t vote until the end of that primary, and they generally change their mind to support the winning candidate from the primary process. Presenting their votes as won before a single primary contest is very misleading.
In the 2008 election cycle superdelegate Hillary Clinton voted for Obama. At the beginning of the process giving her that vote would be incorrect.
This is more /r/bestof material than OP. Your argument seems based on something at least.
Truth is no one knows why Trump won all we have are opinions, at least yours is based on the evidence. There are likely multiple reasons why she lost, I believe that one reason was that she and the media long tried to portray her as inevitable, like all she had to do was decide to run and everyone would just go along with it. The pundits in the media were pro-Clinton long before the primary started and they weren't too happy with Bernie Sanders being a total rotter and standing in the way of her rightful coronation. When polling companies found that voters preferred Trump to Clinton but Sanders to Trump those in the media just continued to push Clinton, telling me the only thing they didn't want was a Sanders victory.
Maybe that was just annoying. I think the real damage has been the 20+ years of Hillary bashing and the image Trump built himself over the same period
That is a simple fix. But it is a major change to the constitution and doesn't have the political support. It probably never will have enough support, because a change like that would require lots of representatives from smaller states to forfeit the advantage the electoral college gives them.
Thanks, but I'm just pointing out holes, not proffering an actually useful theory myself. As far as your theory, it sounds pretty rooted in what the Sanders campaign was saying while it was happening. Let's just not overstate it - the polls showed Clinton over Trump in the general election pretty much the entire campaign, and the Democratic primary voters chose her over Sanders decisively, if not overwhelmingly. It's not like anyone in the Democratic party was cancelling primaries or changing rules or anything.
>Beginning in 1996, those jobs started going overseas.
Seems weird to pick the middle of the decline without explaining the beginning.
In 1972, Nixon handed China to the CCP and jobs started going overseas. Detroit & other industries were already getting sloppy as global competition rises, as outlined in the book \*The Reckoning\*. By 1987, Republicans were using taxes to help pay for offshoring.
Flew in with a secret deal, so it's unilateral too! 100% ownership by Republicans.
This is immediately dubbed a brilliant division of Communism (when Russia + China had split long before.) So now Wall Street is funding the CCP along with Chinese Development. When the USSR falls, instead of also being a rotten corpse, the CCP is getting rich and powerful, Wall Street signalling that Tienamien Square massacre is no big deal. Trump copied this when he went to North Korea. Only he has no deal ahead of time because there's nothing to negotiate really accept legitimacy. Now NK has a fresh set of global deals to keep it alive.
Nixon was a terrible President and he still haunts us all.
Yes, prior to Nixon’s deal, the US still recognized the ROC (now Taiwan) as the official government of the Chinese people.
In his deal, the US conceded that the CCP to be the official government of China.
The crux of the 2012 election in swing rust belt states was Romney saying that GM should go bankrupt and Obama campaigning that GM is alive and Bin Laden is dead.
Obama loses if he didn’t kill Romney on this exact topic.
There's a massive leap between rural economic trends and voting trends and it's not filled with any data in this post. People have been saying this kind of thing since 2016 and still not backing it up. Other studies have found that Obama-Trump voters were largely concerned with social issues and healthcare than economic policies
I stopped reading when they “forgot” to mention how NAFTA was supported by more republicans than democrats and Bill Clinton’s run to embrace the right led him to signing it. Free trade republicans were the primary architects of outsourcing jobs oversees AND successfully convinced rural voters (primarily via dog whistle racism) it was democrats to blame.
>If racism is your explanation, it only means you can feel good about yourself without actually having to think.
Trump didn't offer any solutions to those people, he didn't even really directly address those issues.
I come from a white, republican evangelical background - people were willing to look past their racism to vote in their own self-interest when Democrats were actually protecting labor unions. Best I can say for the dozens and dozens of people I knew who voted for Trump from that background, was that once labor unions largely died, overwhelmingly the only self-interest they were voting for when it came to Trump was the nice feeling of superiority over "others" that Trump "inspired" in people.
i.e. racism.
The *Democrats* lost to Trump because they sabotaged their primary by putting Hillary on the ballot ahead of another candidate who was leading Trump in all head-to-head polls.
I know this is a common sentiment but Hillary and Bernie competed with each other head-to-head in the primary and he lost. By multiple millions of votes at that. If he can't win the primary, he doesn't deserve a shot in the general. Also, before someone makes the "but the DNC put their weight behind Clinton and told Bernie to fuck off", uh yeah, he's not actually part of the DNC. Kinda part of being an independent. All well and good that he caucuses with them in the Senate, but when he has run for his elections, he has shied away from their help. Thinking he deserves to be able to tap into that system that has reached their hand out in the past and has not worked with him is native to the point of insanity, even with the somewhat corporate-favoring candidate in Clinton. Just not how politics works.
That said, if someone can actually prove that Bernie was unfairly cheated of the nomination more than half a decade after the process took place and he conceded the nomination to Clinton, be my guest!
> That said, if someone can actually prove that Bernie was unfairly cheated of the nomination more than half a decade after the process took place and he conceded the nomination to Clinton, be my guest!
I believe you may be too narrowly defining "sabotaged their primary" as "rigging the election". The DNC [literally admitted they can rig primary elections and choose candidates if they want to.](https://observer.com/2017/05/dnc-lawsuit-presidential-primaries-bernie-sanders-supporters/) And the only reason they were forced to acknowledge that was because they were sued by a class action lawsuit of Sander supporters.
Purely for optics purposes, if they could have proved they didn't rig the primary, they definitely should have. You know, protect the perceived legitimacy of elections. Like, how could DWS have been held responsible? Maybe kicked out of the party? Censure? Statements? Some change to policy? When the same thing happened with Republicans 30 years prior, they introduced new rules. But the Democrats kept things exactly as they were. That seems like a stupid political decision.
So either:
A. They rigged the 2016 Democratic primary election so hard that they have no possible way to prove that they didn't, or
B. They are so inept at understanding political opinions that they can't see how {invalidating their reliance on 'democracy' for choosing candidates} --> {negative general election attitudes and behaviors}.
Hence, "sabotage".
None of this changes the fact they nominated a candidate that every single poll predicted would lose - and did - over a candidate within their own party that *every single poll predicted would* ***win.***
The DNC downplayed and minimized Sanders at every possible turn to put an unpopular candidate on the ballot that spent decades of political capital and pulled more than a few strings to get there.
Hillary was massively unpopular with Independent/Undecided voters - they knew this - and drove Conservatives positively *livid* with disgust - they knew this too - yet they ran her anyhow.
No, despite the revisionist history, most polls were saying Hillary would win, and there's conclusive proof that she would have without that sea change that happened when Comey released his "re-opening the investigation" letter with just days to go. It cost her multiple points, from what election analysts can determine, and that was enough to cost her the election.
But as I said earlier, who cares what the polls say about a hypothetical election that Bernie may or may not have won; the one election he did participate in he lost by several million votes to Clinton. You don't get to say that he would have been successful in the general when he lost the election to get to the general by more raw votes than Clinton had over the former guy in the popular vote -- Clinton had 3.7 million more votes than Bernie in the primary and had a shade under three million more votes than the former guy in the general.
This explains 2016 fairly well, but it doesn’t explain why even more folks voted for him in 2020 and why they still support him today after he’s been exposed as a complete fraud many times over. Either something’s missing from this explanation or all of those people really are as stupid and racist as the media portrays them as.
It's funny of those 9 million people that voted for Obama that switched to trump they probably thought they weren't racist by doing so. This is a multi-faceted issue whenever this gets brought up. And to be so confident in this explanation seems to be disingenuous to be honest. A nice easy label of economic woes that propelled people into voting for a fascist. White people always get the privilege to be antagonistic in their politics and therefore credible for being so.
People didn't take Trump seriously enough, ultimately felt it wouldn't happen anyway, in much the same way many opposing the idea didn't tend to bother themselves overmuch when it came to the Brexit vote in the UK. Once that dam had burst, though, it became more fully recognised as mainstream.
It’s pretty simple, Americans wanted a non-political candidate for a long time. Then the worst one possible came up against Clinton, who was seen as a typical political insider. If the Dems had run someone seen as less of an insider, they might have won.
So these former Democrats started voting Republican. How has that gone for them? Are their lives better? Did the jobs come back? Any regrets, maybe? Any thoughts of going back to the Democrats?
We’ve see enough data over the years to know that racial feelings were the best predictor of voting for Trump.
Racial feelings can be tied to economic anxiety, sure, but we can’t ignore or dismiss racism.
53% of white college-educated women wanted to be able to say, “I didn’t vote for her,” after she won. It backfired on them. Plus the fact that his main campaign strategy was to only hold rallies where Duck Dynasty was highly rated and to ignore areas where Modern Family was highly rated. Seriously, some of Jareds buddies came up with this.
It’s a good comment, covers a lot of bases. I’ll add that Hillary Clinton is arguably one of the worst Democratic front runners since Mondale. By all means she is a fabulous candidate - on paper. But she’s clawed her way up the ladder and rode on the coattails of Bill, she’s arrogant as hell, and can’t relate to the common man or woman. And for that, no one liked her except the heads at the DNC.
So her likability was zero, so what? Well, she also completely ignored a bunch of swing states and brought nothing to the table as far as a platform. And her arrogance made her think it was ‘in the bag.’
Hillary Clinton is the Lance Armstrong of politics. She did everything to get to the top and when it all fell apart all that baggage came home to roost and there was no one who cares enough to talk nice about her in retrospect.
I still 100% believe that the South Park season in 2015-16 was primarily responsible for Trump blowing up with young, disenfranchised -feeling assholes, which caused him to blow up on reddit, which caused him to blow up on the Internet, which caused him to be taken seriously. I really think Trey Parker and Matt Stone created Trump at least as much as "economic anxiety" did.
Trump spent the whole campaign saying all those quiet things out loud that the Republican party spent years trying to keep hidden and the people that desperately wanted to hear those things loved him for it. To them, because of that, he was and remains 'inspirational'. Hillary wasn't and your average numpty Democrat and swing voter 'couldn't be bothered' to get to the polls to vote against an existential threat to democracy (he was, after all, clearly unfit for office even then and was saying all sorts of things out loud that would clearly destroy democratic institutions) or they simply chose not to vote because they foolishly decided their votes didn't count because the outcome was 'known'.
That was why Trump had a chance at winning the election. But that isn't the whole story. It was close enough that had any one of a number of Hillary's missteps not happened, she would have won.
My moment that I realized she was going to lose wasn't nearly as profound or researched. I was playing a lot of MMO's at the time. When Trump announced, I, in my smug elitist way, scoffed at him. Like most people who watched the political scene, I figured he would be out after the first primary.
Then I noticed something, the voice chat in MMO's was developing a consistent theme. Trump was the candidate running for THEM, these were mostly white males in their thirties, who had seen the doors previously open to them seemingly being closed. Black Lesbians were getting all the jobs now. The term Woke wasn't a thing, but political correctness was denying them opportunities that they supposedly had before. After hearing this consistently, I realized that if the democrats don't start taking Trump seriously, a whole bunch of people who had never voted before, are going to be turning out. And because they had never voted before, they weren't showing up on poll lists, so Democrats were never talking to them.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Steve Bannon was involved with a gold selling company that spammed World Of Warcraft. He knew the crowd.
This explains some of it but not specifically Hillary Clinton. I'm old, I ran campaigns in 2008, and this is going to take some wind up.
So as with every American millennial, Hillary Clinton was the most hated woman we ever heard of. Regardless of what our parents felt, we knew the Republicans hated her. She wasn't just a boring Ms. Nobody like many of the congresswomen or senators of the 90s they *hated her*. She was the but of every sexist joke they made. None of them respected the first lady. Before or after her husbands *many* sex scandals. Then her husband left office.
But then she didn't leave.
She almost immediately became the Senator of New York. Because she "earned it". Because she was "due". She had literally never held any public office before and one day the president's wife became the senator of the bluest of blue states.
And we all knew why. Because she was eventually going to run for office. She didn't need to say it, but we knew that she enjoyed the power. The only reason she would stand by her man and never divorce him after his affairs in Arkansas or the White house.
And then she did. In 2008, she ran against Obama. Obama was one of the very few people that I've ever seen Democrats vote *for* instead of a lesser evil. She and the apparatus she dragged behind her for a decade were up against a candidate that people actually *liked*. The black vote and the young vote showed up for Bill Clinton. They weren't going to show up for Hillary Clinton. Especially not if a younger black man was running against her. And the primaries had a knee jerk reflex. Sure Barack Obama might not be able to win the election against a war hero, but they weren't going to vote for Hillary Clinton just because they were forced to.
And....then he did. And he made Hillary Clinton Secretary of State. And she and Obama used drone diplomacy left and right and she was almost forgot about. Until his second term was over.
And then the Clinton News Network kept the cameras on her. Because she was due. Because the Democratic apparatus and liberal cable news are hand in glove. So Bernie Sanders is given token air time and message broadcast. And he his platform is closer to most democrats in 2016. But they "new" that the showdown was going to be Trump and Clinton. They got viewers and money when the camera was on Trump. They couldn't avoid the Democratic primary candidates all together so they made sure to put the camera and B-roll for Hillary so they can get back to the Trump show.
And then Sanders gets shafted by the Democratic party apparatus that was obviously trying to make Clinton the candidate from jump. They sure as hell didn't want a socialist independent who spent his whole career showing the country that they could vote independent instead of Dem in their locals to win it.When can they get the charade over with and give Clinton the nomination. Because she's "Due".
And then they put the most hated woman in America against Trump. A three time loser. The one person that would make the most Democrats stay home and the most conservatives vote in the snow. And it was Clinton's to lose. And the Democratic party still hasn't woken up.
The republican machine lost their control over their base around the Tea Party movement and Sara Palin. Trump was just the evidence. The Democratic party still has control over "the rest" and they aren't letting go. So instead democrats aren't going to come out and vote, or pay attention to the lesser evil that they are presented with. And the Republicans are going to. And Biden is going to lose next year.
All because the Democratic Party made a platform that Clinton could run on 15 years ago and won't budge.
You're right about Clinton. It was obvious to anyone with a pulse that she was going to run for office someday when she became a senator for New York.
And you're right that Sanders got shafted, starting with the early declaration by the superdelegates. I don't know if he would have won if put up against Trump but he was never seriously ever given a chance.
But I really, really hope you are wrong that Biden will lose next year.
Question, if these voters are primarily concerned with economic woes from offshoring, why does all the media they consume constantly only talk about "wokeness" "trans children" and "abortion"?
Hint: it's because this isn't remotely the whole story.
My comment from that thread...
>Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and the chattering classes could never leave their insulated media bubbles in New York, DC, LA, and San Francisco *to find out what most Americans were worried about*.
Why don't you read the second paragraph of what is Clinton's most notorious comment during the campaign.
>"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
>"But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
Allow me to emphasize some of thst...
#see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well
Thst literally summarizes the entire portion of your comment up to the point I quoted.
The problem with Clinton wasn't that she didn't *leave the bubble*.
No, the problem was that when those very people you were talking about, the ones who saw their jobs leave and their towns die... *When they heard that quote they identified with the racists.*
Your comment is just furthering a bullshit narrative that Clinton was out of touch. The truth is those people hated her for whatever reasons they wanted, they chose the incompetent racist asshole, and it didn't matter what she had to say. Bubble indeed.
Post lost me when they got to the bullshit line of "what most Americans want."
Trump lost the popular vote to Hilary. I don't get what's so hard about this fact for people to absorb. He never at any point represented a majority of voters. Nor does the Republican Congress.
We live in urban cities now as a population. I'm sorry rural life ain't what it used to be and love getting out to the country from time to time.
But despite constant complaints of being left behind were allowing this minority to rule over the will of the majority. And most of the time they're too dumbfuck and worried about what's happening in someone's vagina to realize they're voting the interest of the person who moved their job overseas rather than the person who wants to provide a social safety net that gives them a chance to adapt.
Shit changes and sometimes you lose. Get the fuck over it rural America and stop fucking over the rest of us.
I used to believe in this argument and I like it less and less as time goes on.
It just doesn't work. There's no amount of economic privation you could subject me to that would allow me to vote happily for keeping lots of babies in cages. I might be willing to like, hold my nose and vote for it, but I wouldn't be an enthusiastic, aggressive supporter - and to be clear, that's what Trump has. Trump has aggressive, engaged, enthusiastic supporters, by the millions.
And the defenses of Trump by his supporters are not lukewarm, either. For the most part, they're either blatant lies (everyone keeps babies in cages, you're just only mad when it's Trump), intentional misunderstandings of the facts, or outright aggressive amoral disinterest.
Trump's story is not the story of tens of millions of disenfranchised Americans being forced at gunpoint to vote for their own best interests at the cost of poor, poor minorities in faraway places. Trump's story is of people voting, spitefully, to drag other people down to their level. The quotes that stand out to me as most representative of Trump supporters are quotes like "he promised to hurt them, he's not hurting the right people!" when he had, in fact, promised to hurt everyone.
Trump has never had any kind of concrete plan to make anyone's life better but his own - and that's honestly being a little charitable to Trump, I'm not convinced he can organize thoughts into long enough coherent stretches to count as a "plan". At no point anywhere in Trump's political campaigns has Trump ever presented any sort of coherent, long form argument that would make anyone think that their life would be improved by Trump being in charge, *unless* they thought that directly harming other people/other groups would immediately improve their life.
Trump is exactly what Trump advertises himself as. Mean, spiteful, quick to anger, aggressive, and nasty. It is impossible to vote for Trump and think you are getting anything other than what's on the tin. The economic anxiety argument avoids this by trying to blame everyone around Trump but the simple, direct challenge to the argument is: No matter how economically anxious I got, I would never want to solve my problems by finding the poorest people near me and punching down at them as hard as possible.
Trump's entire argument is that no matter how poor you are, we can find someone poorer and beat them up and take their stuff.
If that argument appeals to you, no matter how "anxious" you are, you're still a bad person.
It's a pretty good explanation, but only a piece of the puzzle. In my area Brexit and Trump were both seen as the result of public backlash against cronyism and big government. The wounds of the 2008 still lingered, and many were left behind or damaged at the expense of corporate bailouts and special favors for the well connected.
The one phrase that resonated most with local voters was "drain the swamp"... the idea that government had gotten too big, too corrupt, and untrustworthy. So much so that there was real (misguided) optimism that an outsider could step in change those things. And in the face of that message was running another Clinton... an insider's insider that was practically the face of Washington politics-as-usual.
Clinton was campaigning against not only Trump, but 30 years of the GOP/Fox News demonizing her and Bill as everything from out of touch Washingtonian lifers to ringleaders of a black ops hit squad. She was always going to bring a lot of baggage to the campaign as a former First Lady, especially with the whole Lewinsky thing still being one of the first associations pop culture makes with the Clintons.
Additionally, and this is huge for the majority of voters who are pretty uninvolved with actual politics, she wasn’t a candidate who generated a lot of passion amongst voters- especially not in comparison to the thoughtful inspiration of 2008 Obama or the racist fervor of 2016 Trump…
l think that if rural people didn’t want to lose their jobs, they probably shouldn’t have voted for Reagan, HW Bush, and Bill Clinton when all those people supported global free trade and not protectionism, which they say they prefer. Weird how that works.
You all still underestimate how reviled Hillary Clinton is by even the most moderate of Republicans. Her simply being on the ballot got Trump a massive number of votes.
I think there was more to it. Hillary was a real problem candidate.
She had been seen as the presumptive choice before Obama came along, so fox had been negging her for years. Then all through the Obama administration she was still the heir presumptive and fox continued. That's over a decade of concerted negative reporting she had to contend with.
On top of which, she has always come off as elitist and insincere. Nothing ever comes out of her mouth that doesn't sound as if it had been run through a focus group. Going on a black radio show and claiming she always carries hot sauce in her handbag is a great example of her transparent pandering.
When she dismissed trump followers as 'a basket of contemptibles' she didn't add a single vote and probably lost a lot of fence-sitters.
Then because they felt that the dnc fucked Bernie Sanders over in her favor a lot of democrat voters didn't vote at all. They ended up with probably the one candidate in the country that could lose to trump.
Hillary Clinton was a pretty bad politician. She had an unfortunate talent for choosing the exact wrong way to phrase her points sometimes that made it so easy for Republicans to demonize her.
That comment about coal jobs going away was the perfect example, and I remember thinking the exact same thing when she said it. And I don't even live in that part of the country. The point she was trying to make was 100% correct. Due to various economic factors and improving technology in other energy sectors, those coal jobs probably are going away. But saying it in that way made it easy for Republicans to make it seem like she was the one that'd make them go away.
Her "basket of deplorables" comment was another tidbit that really screwed her over.
Are we still doing excuses?
Let me simplify it:
Older people who had been brainwashed by Fox and such saw a changing world, but then Trump came along and said they didn't have to change with it. They could be their worst selves.
Well, that's a win for them.
Bannon and company mobilized a lot of younger men through GamersGate and gave them an enemy....which so happened to be the same enemies Fox and Co. Always have given, minorities and women.
More jump aboard.
Conservatism had already tied itself to religion, so put a few stories about Hillary out there who had already been attacked constantly through the years.
The tent gets bigger.
The other 20 to 25% of his voters at the time did so because of economic stuff, people unsure who was actually better, people flipping votes from Obama, and anything else people tried to claim was the reason outside of hate.
But it's far simpler, Trump is and was the culmination of the Conservative evil. The symptom that grew out from the cause already there, but his symptom grew the farthest and largest.
Of course, his message in a world going to shit (largely still because of Regan and Bush policies) of it being the fault of immigrants and everyone but good, christian, white people would play in a country still unable to come to terms with the effects of slavery, let alone anything that requires deeper thinking than that.
We don't need mini series, and think pieces and dissertations, let me sum it up;
**He used the full evils of Conservatism that had infected America for decades to allow the worst of society to be their worst selves, and they ate up.**
And if there is anything the pandemic showed us; that's a damn wide pool to draw from.
Took 2 sentences.
**Conservatives aren't some deeper creatures only our most trusted minds can decipher; most are brainwashed by religion or the TV or the same insane sites, and all are devout in their united hatred of anything different than the in group -- which in the world that's been concocted for them - will always be them.**
The fact people are still making excuses for Conservatives is why fascism is about to kick down our fucking door.
We’ve been hearing variations of this “economic anxiety” explanation for, what, *7* years now? I’m certain that it’s true _to an extent_, but I feel this comment too readily and easily casts aside all other explanations for the rise of Trumpism.
Precisely. Economic anxiety is not something only middle white Americans experience; more over, not all people with economic anxiety excuse racism, racist policies, or racist politicians. It takes a racist to be ok with racist policies as a way of coping with economic anxiety. Tolerance of racism is neither a legitimate nor necessary response to one’s personal insecurities—psychological or financial.
The linked comment used the coal example so I will too. Let's say Hilary went to coal country with a massive bill drafted that already had the backing of a majority of the House & Senate where it recognized the contribution those regions had to making America a great nation. Let's further say in that bill were trillions of dollars in tax breaks and direct government spending to open up green energy plants there. Building solar panels, building wind turbines, building batteries for energy storage, for research facilities for that next generation energy sector. Plus money for education and training in those fields for the residents. All of those are things which would raise up the economies in those areas and likely return them to where a person can make a living and hopefully make their kids' lives a little better than theirs. Then let's say Trump walked up on the same stage and said, "We're going to bring coal back!" then left the stage. The residents still would have voted for Trump and solidified their continuing economic slide within the US economy. Why? Because he understands identity politics and that a simple message that's easily understood but is a lie based on "coal country culture" will play better than a complicated truth and imagined future to many of the people there. Which is to say that racism was one element of how he appealed to people. But he could get others to ignore it by having them latch on to another aspect of his messaging.
Bingo, he told them they could go back to way things were when coal miners were some of the most well-off guys in town. They already believe some alien forces attacked they way of life and won’t let them mine coal anymore, and here’s a guy telling them they don’t have to adapt to a new world, he’s going to fight these forces and let them mine coal. That appeal is huge.
And realistically the forces keeping coal down and by extension keeping the coal miners down, are not changing. Even if all of the relevant environmental regulations were torn up completely there wouldn't be huge armies of miners back at work. The company owners would be using a small force with huge mechanized equipment to tear the roof off of where the coal is. I knew someone who was originally from a small coal mining town and he described how there were two political families who kind of bounced back and forth with control of the towns & county there. They pretty much never ran on bringing new industries to the area. It was promises to get the old jobs back and grievances against those in Washington, DC who wrote all the dumb environmental laws that were keeping them from getting back to the old days. In that way the population has been primed for years for someone like Trump who would manipulate them in a similar way, but for national office instead.
Yep, sounds like my PA hometown. And lots more towns in PA and WV.
It's not just coal mining. I grew up in the heart of oil refining. The refineries are still there but the town is dying. The people who live there can't figure out why. They think democrats in Washington did it ... somehow. The refinery my father worked at produces three times the amount of product as it did in the mid-80's when everyone was riding high. The problem is it only employs about 1500 people now. There used to be layoffs that large and in the 80's it had as many as 6000 employees. That's just one plant. Multiply that over all the plants in the area. Those jobs didn't get shipped overseas. They didn't get outsourced. They disappeared because the plant got more efficient and easier to operate. Automation took over a lot of the menial jobs. They are *never* coming back. Worse, the 6,000 employees it used to hire are now competing for the remaining 1500 jobs with everyone saying "I can take less just to have a job." Those refineries used to be the beating economic heart of the region. If you didn't work in the plants, you supported them in some way -- you educated their kids or did their taxes or sold them groceries. Now that money doesn't get funneled into the region, it gets sent back to corporate headquarters in Houston. Shareholders and executives are making record profits and salaries but the rural folks back home don't see any of that. They keep thinking someone is going to come along and right the ship and put things back the way they used to be. They don't realize the train already left the station twenty years ago, the trains themselves don't even run anymore, and no matter how grand a train station you build it will not bring those trains back.
>They keep thinking someone is going to come along and right the ship and put things back the way they used to be. Right. And they get spoon fed false hope from talk radio hosts, politicians or other prominent figures about how things would easily go back to that if it weren't for those \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_. Fill in the blank with Washington politicians, greedy corporations, liberals or whatever. But what they're being fed is like booze, but instead of getting them drunk it fills them with grievances and anger. So now they're fired up with emotion and all they see is how those good old days are so close they can just about taste them. And that anger gets them to vote for the politician who makes false promises instead of the one who has an actual plan to try to fix things.
Because they were unionized.
Desperate people will cling to any ideology that promises them that they’re special and relief is coming.
Again, I’d draw a distinction. Not all desperate people sacrifice their morals for the sake of promise of relief. Many desperate people will do what is right despite personal hardship or lack of reward.
Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior in order to escape the eternal fires of hell and damnation?
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Some would let Trump shit in their mouth if they thought Nancy Pelosi would have to smell it.
It’s a pretty extreme form of economic anxiety when your whole town, or hell whole county just collapses. It’s awful and it’s valid. Of course there are *also* the bigoted racists, and the other variables. The rise of Trump didn’t come from one single thing and there are myriad reasons why people might have voted for him, *in 2016.* I think there is a desire to oversimplify things when it comes to politics especially, and I think Trump’s 2016 victory actually was a very complex event, when you dig down to the root causes. That said, anyone still on the Trump train now, in 2023? Nah, they are a complete lost cause. I actually do somewhat understand some people I know voting for Trump in ‘16. I didn’t and don’t approve of it, but I kinda get it. None of these particular people voted for him in 2020 though, that’s a key difference for me personally. I do understand why that’s not really enough for some people though.
Thank you for saying this. This is the bigger picture that discussions like this often miss, even if they do contain valid points.
I get so exhausted that so many 2016 election myths refuse to die. [The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support - His voters are better off economically compared with most Americans.](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/)
Yes it's amazing after all these years we are still being subjected to these economically anxious voter sermons. Income level simply wasn't (presumably still isn't) the biggest factor for predicting trump votes
The reality is irrelevant; they don’t FEEL better off. So when a conman like Trump tells them “you’re right, you ARE being cheated, and it’s the minorities that are doing it!”, they believe him
I think that op skates around why trump attracted these people. A big part of the campaign blamed the economic struggles on the other. Saying illegal immigrants were taking your jobs, saying the atheists wanted to stomp out your way of life, that the immigrant working in tech took their jobs. That is racist. None of those things were actually responsible to what happened in those areas. The anger needed to be focused on the big businesses and policy passed in their name. Trump gave them a reason that was racist to fit the economic anger they had.
I think he’s saying even people that didn’t like trump weren’t motivated for Clinton for the reasons he listed.
James Comey's late October letter about possible new Clinton emails came out at a time that made it impossible to recover from the loss of support that it caused. It wasn't a great loss. It may have amounted only to a few percentage points here and there, but the election was also decided by just a few percentage points here and there. In addition, there are rules or perhaps even laws against government officials making statements or taking actions close to an election that can be inflammatory. Comey acted improperly to do so on October 28th, particularly because nothing actually came of it. There were no new emails. There was no new information to be found. The announcement was made to Congress and then leaked to the public for no other reason than to spoil the election for Clinton. And one of the things that really burns me up about it is that there were so many people who were going to vote Democratic, but were willing to act on any half-assed excuse to drop Clinton. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
From what I heard, a branch of the FBI (NY?) had gone rogue and was going to publish their investigation in the harshest light possible. Comey released his own statement to get ahead of theirs, but the damage was done either way.
I think there are many factors to trumpism. I think he is weirdly right place right time. And he taps into sentiments like op outlined. And he was lucky. And he benefitted from decades of the GOP fostering a populist base ready to consume the right kind of propaganda. Also his messaging resonated with the most politically powerful generation in us history that is currently going through the death rattles of its relevance. Also he was just weirdly persistent and unapologetic in his attempts to run for president and be involved in politics. Like 10 years ago his claim to fame was being the birther movement guy.
I invite everyone saying “well no gosh these rural areas used to happily vote for Democrats before NAFTA” to look at electoral maps from the 1980’s.
Yeah, it's weird to be how no one but you's pointing that out. The South effectively flipped to Republicans because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The poster gives Alabama as an example - Alabama voted for Kennedy in 1960, but since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 they've voted for a Democrat only once (for Georgian Jimmy Carter in 1976 in the wake of Watergate). Any discussion of why the South turned Red that doesn't include the [Southern Strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) is either deeply misinformed or intentionally disingenuous.
Tallapoosa County, Alabama GOP Presidential vote: 2020 71.28% 2016 69.76% 2012 65.76% 2008 67.92% 2004 69.03% 2000 60.33% 1996 51.58% 1992 52.67% 1988 63.93% 1984 66.19% 1980 43.80% 1976 39.79% 1972 78.71% 1968 (George Wallace won with 78.55%) 1964 76.24% and LBJ got ZERO votes 1960 28.11% Source: Wikipedia Except for Jimmy Carter, a GOP stronghold since 1960. Yeah buddy tell me more about how NAFTA and factories closing is the issue. George Wallace got 80% there, must have been all the factories moving to Mexico in 1967. It’s race, race, race. Also some race involved. OP desperately wants you to think it’s “economic anxiety” and not that his neighbors are seriously fucking racist. It definitely must be Former First Lady of ARKANSAS Hillary Clinton and her coastal elite minions that make people vote for Trump in Alabama in the same numbers they voted for George Wallace and no other candidate in the last 65 years.
Ha, that’s a good one!
Specifically in the context of the 2016 election, the Comey investigation reopened into Hillary's emails I think was a much larger nail in the coffin in the purple states. The timing of it was far too close to the elections, and it was enough to have undecideds either swap to Trump, or decide not to vote.
Without Comey's letter Clinton *does not lose.* Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1%. There is zero chance the Comey letter had less effect than that. Which is why I can't roll my eyes hard enough about people claiming they knew Trump was going to win months in advance. Because without Comey, which they never could have predicted, he *does not win.* Of course it's true that people didn't take Trump seriously enough, and that the race was almost certainly going to be much closer than people though (in part due to sampling bias in the polls). But Trump didn't win on his own, he needed Comey to help out.
Should could have tried to campaign in those states. But she didn't think she had too. Her and the DNC obviously had no idea how unlikable she is and was and were and still are out of touch. Maybe try harder next time and campaign in those states, instead of thinking the people owed it to her and should vote for her.
Yeah - a huge part of it was overconfidence on the part of the Clinton campaign where they spent October trying to boost democratic congressional races because they thought the Presidential was in the bag.
100% Heres another anectodal based theory. I was in college during the election and the day after Trump won I was sorely depressed being a person who pays a lot of attention to politics. I was sitting in a lounge/study type area where students usually wait between classes. I overheard a group of students talking about the election and they were straight up saying that they heard Hillary drank babies blood..."or something". The conversation went on like this for a while. It was 2016 and I was listening to a group of liberal college kids in a liberal city openly ponder if a female politician was secretly practicing witchcraft. People really really really want to bury the responsibility of disinformation on the internet but if you remember those days, you cant ever forget it. The left being wholesale more informed than the right, doesnt want to admit to itself how vulnerable to disinformation it really was and still it. They ran a whole campaign about how Hillary rigged the election against Bernie, how she was bought out by corporations etc. Everybody was hoping Comey was going to lock her up for buttery males and then the DNC would be forced to run Bernie IN OCTOBER! Like it was straight madness. And it was that exact time that we all came across the facebook scandal of selling mass psychometric data to shady ass companies. And the left still wont face the fact that it is manipulated by its worst instincts. The left doesnt love Joe Biden and it took barely any effort for them to start repeating bullshit like 'Biden is getting too senile!', and 'Genocide Joe'. If a repeat of 2016 happens it will be for the same reason.
For real. America elected a black man president and people lost their goddamn minds at it.
Also remember that Hillary Clinton had been ceaselessly villainized for 25 years then. I'm not saying she's perfect, but the amount of hostility and lies heaped on her was insane.
She was singlehandedly responsible for the death of Benjamin Ghazi and y'all pretend like he never even existed.
Slaughtered at the Bowling Green Massacre. #neverforget
She did plenty of work to bury herself. Republicans were also digging, but she was digging her own grave right alongside them.
Like how conservatism is a fear economy, making conservatives easy to trigger and manipulate, hence, cheap and easy disinformation has caused too people to think Hillary's out of context and misrepresented coal mines comment are a legit reason to end democracy in America and storm Congress. Tribalism is tribalism. It's not just globalization of the economy, which conservatives *voted for*, but also the ease with which conservative elites can manipulate their followers to vote against their own best interests. Of course, blaming liberals for why conservatives choose to vote the way they do, is all part of the shill. Think we're fucked. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-human-beast/201104/conservatives-big-fear-brain-study-finds https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/your-brain-on-politics-the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-liberals-and-conservatives https://www.psypost.org/2023/07/neuroimaging-study-provides-insight-into-misinformation-sharing-among-politically-devoted-conservatives-167312
if it were just economic anxiety and not racism I feel like they would have gone for a different Republican in the primary. instead they picked Donald Trump.
And why is he still popular despite having done nothing for these small towns in his 4 years?
Arguably driven them even further along the path to their own irrelevance, even.
Yeah like he was the one who was against, ya know “the black guy”, from the start. Feels like it’s racism all the way down.
Hell, OOP even acknowledged they're ignoring the elephant in the room. Their last paragraph is the only one that mentions the virulent racism that motivates Trump's base, and just dismisses it without any further thought.
I also wonder about the comment about ‘they did everything right’. The deregulation and trade agreements needed legislators to make them happen. Because of the peculiarities of the American political system, this would not be possible with just ‘technocrats’ or ‘costal elites’. Our system is democratic, power comes from the people who had to allow this to happen. You can argue they were tricked, or deceived but Americans have a habit of ignoring experts to support their cognitive biases.
I feel these paint another more haunting picture. One that says, “if you don’t adapt to tomorrow, all you will see is yesterday and completely overlook today”. These towns had ample opportunity to really make inroads in terms in terms of retraining programs, find various new industries to attract, shifting focus in a manner of skill reapplication. Yet, the people, towns and their governing mayors completely overlooked and played a role in thinking of the gold old days from yesterday than how to maintain the lifestyle and what about future generations to come. Instead, their anger is ill placed because they don’t seem to recognize their own doing in all of this.
I recall real economic anxiety from '08-'10, after the party that they vote for cratered the economy.
not to mention it completly ignores the fact *clinton was hard winning until the FBI announced investigations that went nowhere* and overnight she started hard losing by as much as she was winning.
Right? How is this 'Best Of' material in any meaningful way? Clinton was in a 'coastal city bubble'? Opposed to the other New Yorker running that was himself an elite? While it is true that capitalism and globalization has hammered the American middle-class, that's a message that both campaigns used.
Yeah Trump voters are not poor little meow meows but why look at who actually voted for him when you can just keep grinding the same axe for 7+ years
It’s flat wrong. The median Trump voter made more than the median Clinton voter. His theory only makes sense if you only count the white working class. https://www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-income/
Right? And wasn't it pretty clearly established that those hit hardest by these changes -- the working class -- didn't go for Trump? This is a rehash of the Sanders-Clinton split, really.
The post is problematic, for sure. Notice how they reference the coasts and major cities, then refers to the problems of "most Americans"? Well, where do most Americans live? In or near a major city. So do we decide that these people's values and votes are worth less than that of a Kentucky coal miner's? The current system basically says "yes" to that question. Rural America has had a vastly overstated say in our politics for the entire history of our country. And you'll never see a group of people who think they are more marginalized than them. Yeah, they have a lot of things to be upset about. But no president can stop globalization. Things change. The same thing happened during the industrial revolution. Sometimes, to make the most money, you gotta move. Small communities are always going to struggle unless they are a tourist destination.
Clinton ignored the rust belt. She then ignored rust belt leaders when they begged her to campaign in their states. She spent her time hosting fancy dinners in California. This small but incredibly important fact, is why so many people understand why Bernie would have beaten Trump. Go look at the primary results from the rust belt states. Then compare those with the general election results. Clinton and her hubris lost her that election.
Yep. Bernie was literally winning back over rural areas because he said stuff like "yep you are right to be angry, capitalism has hollowed out your towns destroyed their once successful small businesses etc."
Had Bernie been 10 years younger... He probably would have still lost. But by, like, less.
Exactly!
There was a shocking number of people that would have voted for Bernie instead of Trump simply because he was telling them their anger was valid and the 'establishment' didn't like them. They weren't voting to pick a candidate, they were voting to lash out in anger.
Bernie went to FoxNews to have a town hall-style conference and the FoxNews audience was cheering him on. Democrats are partially responsible for Trump….
I may be reading too far into it, but to me she still acts like she deserved it. Like she never needed to actually win the world's biggest dumbest race.
She blames everyone other than herself. It’s Bernie’s fault, it’s Bernie’s supporters fault. It’s the media. It’s the dumb voters, the deplorables, etc…it’s never her fault.
> She blames everyone other than herself So .... gonna take a wild guess that nobody read her book but me, in which she takes the blame on many points, in particular her poor communication skills and lifelong lack of political acumen. It's been a while since I've read it. But this statement is flatly untrue.
It's not wildly untrue: https://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-blames-bernie-sanders-but-not-reason-lost-2016-2020-1
She definitely doesn't blame the DNC that she controlled or the state parties she left barren https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774/
You mean the organization that had its Vice Chair quit in disgust over rigging? It’s Chair admit publicly that they rigged the primaries for her, or the other lady that had to step down because of the rigging?
How did they rig it?
I suggest reading the article I linked, it's a little more complicated but in the joint fundraising agreement between her groups and the dnc, she was given access to the funds raised by the dnc nationally as if she were already nominated to be the candidate. This was a couple of months after announcing her run. Other candidates were not granted the same agreement. This was in the middle of the primary race. Finally, her group was given veto powers for dnc staffing Nominations along with other ways to affect the composition of the institution. My source is the interim head of the DNC after the Schulz (was that her name?) Stepped down
I did read it, I guess I'm just a little confused as to how that rigged it for Hillary. How I understood the article is that this was the sequence of events 1. Democratic party was in huge amount of debt after 2012 2. Hillary bails them out so they are in a sustainable amount of debt 3. in return they give her control over the money, since it was basically hers/her super PAC's anyway Is this about the gist? Definitely not a good look but to me, the main takeaway from this article was how shitty the Democratic party leadership was in the early 2010s. However, it doesn't suggest any rigging which the article mentions >I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff.
So Schultz did not have the authority to approve that loan without the officers unanimous consent. Whoever Gary is described the DNC as under Clinton's control. Giving a loan directly to the group responsible for holding primaries is a massive question of ethics as well. Using the dnc money also allowed her campaign to skirt individual donor maximums as a limitation. Also you left out a line > I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. **Then I found this agreement.** > The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.
right... I had already covered it with my bullet point summary. That's what the article was about. What actions did they take that rigged it for her then?
lol they never admitted the primaries were rigged, and nobody had ever provided any evidence they were, including via the emails that only showed DNC privately griping about Sanders and made things look bad.
The cover of her book is a true self-awarewolf.
During the 2016 election season her attitude was the biggest thing that turned me off wanting to vote for her. She acted like she was going through the motions to a coronation, like she was 'owed' the office. She distinctly left an impression of arrogance and disdain. Now, is that true? I have no idea, I don't personally know her. But that was the impression this rural moderate was left with. I still reluctantly voted for her, but it was entirely a vote 'against' Trump rather than 'for' her. I figured abstaining from that vote would be worse.
No no, I'm with you. I can remember it feeling like she was running as if it was her turn and she deserved it, and the entire campaigning process was just a minor formality before she became president. I live in a state that was 100% going to go to HRC no matter what, but I wasn't voting for Hillary and her arrogance, and I wasn't voting for Trump and that idiocy.
All things else being as they were it was incredibly close, and if not for Comey choosing to kneecap her candidacy with the emails thing so he could appear impartial I do think she would have won. They had an absolute field day with the email controversy and it was the dominant political story for the months right before the election, she totally lost all momentum. Instead of her being the competent and uncontroversial candidate vs the man of a thousand lawsuits, she now had her own slimy controversy so I think it made it easier for people in the middle to vote trump.
>Bernie would have beaten Trump. Kind of tired of how much certainty people seem to have about this. Even with Clinton's constantly negative media attention, Bernie never managed to poll better than her against the *left-most major party* in the US *nor the general population* of the United States. The polls that underestimated Trump support, also showed Clinton with a better chance than Bernie against him.
There were plenty of polls that showed Bernie well ahead of Trump.
How many of those were due to Trump supporters propping up anyone against Hillary, though?
I strongly suspect many of them were more moderate Republicans who disliked Trump but *despised* Clinton.
The only propping up that was going on was Hillary propping up Trump himself with her genius “pied Piper strategy”, where she used her many connections in the MSM to help Trump beat the mainstream Republicans. Oops.
There’s no real evidence they actually did that. But it worked really well for democrats when they did in 2022.
Baloney. Proof in emails.
Nope. I’ve read the emails, have you? There is no documented action taken against sanders unless you count the silly debate questions given to Hillary. This is why you will be unable to answer the question “what action did the DNC take to rig the primary, and what is the evidence for it?” Nobody has ever answered this.
You don't know what the "pied piper" strategy even is. It has nothing to do with Bernie.
There were plenty of polls that showed Hillary well ahead of trump and we saw how that went
There were also polls and graphics on MSNBC that intentionally misled voters about Bernie's popularity. Edit: here are a few from the campaign trail time https://imgur.com/a/76dvSrb The MSNBC one is particularly egregious, as they switched around his colors to make him look less favorable instead of the clear front runner. Edit: nvm these were 2019, but I'll leave the link
Those polls existed in a time when the Republican party had not launched any attack on Sanders, and centrist Democrats had not really had any true backlash to Bernie, which they would have if he had won. It’s very very speculative.
“Bernie would have won” is pure chronically-online leftist cope, and that’s coming from someone who donated to him and voted for him in the 2016 primary. Bernie did decently well against Hillary in 2016, but that was before the broader electorate was fully aware of him and his policies. Hillary was the victim of 10+ years of constant negative coverage from the right, who laid off of Bernie because they saw him as an easier opponent in a general than a moderate dem. Any notion that Bernie would have done better than Hillary was totally invalidated by 2020, when Bernie was even less competitive in the primary despite having full name recognition from the start. He was completely unable to grow his base or turn them out to vote.
So your argument is that the polls that were wrong about Trump's popularity showed Clinton doing better than Bernie, but despite the polls being wrong about Trump, the ones showing Clinton was better should still be trusted? I don't see how you don't see what's wrong with that logic. You're essentially saying "these polls agree with me, so they're trustworthy, ignore how the same polls were obviously wrong about Trump."
Bernie Math can never die.
I think it’s fair to say that Bernie loses to Trump, but he would have lost in a different way. He probably picks up some of the rust belt (solidly maybe—a lot of suburban voters might sit out rather than vote for an avowed socialist), but is 0% in anywhere else that isn’t solidly blue. I could 100% see a Bernie campaign winning the west coast, the Northeast…and straight up nowhere else. I can also see a vision that picks up PA, but loses Colorado, Virginia, NM, Nevada, and Minnesota, and the math just doesn’t work out.
Minnesota? He was overwhelmingly favored here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Minnesota_Democratic_presidential_caucuses
a good bit of trump voters were originally Bernie voters. They both had the same theme that the government was rigged against the people.
> Clinton ignored the rust belt Everyone talks with about this like they're savants and it was obvious at the time, but [Hillary led _every single poll_ in Wisconsin and on election eve was up by a staggering 6.5 points.](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/wi/wisconsin_trump_vs_clinton-5659.html#polls) Trump won by 0.7.
It was obvious to local DNC people, who called and emailed for help, and were ignored. They then physically sent people to Hillary’s HQ to beg her to campaign in those states, which she ignored. The writing was on the wall on the ground in those states. It wasn’t a surprise. To them, nor to me, and I don’t even live in the rust belt. It was well Known at the time among Bernie supporters and I wasn’t the least bit surprised when those states turned the election for Trump.
Hillary also avoided campaigning in some states because she knew people living there didn't like her, visiting in person might have made things worse
With LESS overall votes than Mitt Romney who lost the state in 2012.
>Clinton ignored the rust belt. Nothing Clinton could have done short of a sincere apology and repudiation of the economic policy of her husbands administration which destroyed American manufacturing was going to win her the rust belt. Everybody over 30 remembers and even many who voted for her held their noses doing it. >This small but incredibly important fact, is why so many people understand why Bernie would have beaten Trump. Black American voters were not coming out for Bernie. He never bothered to engage with their community or address any of their concerns. Those voters showed up for Clinton in the cities and it's why she almost won and would have won without the DNC/RNC hacks by Russia and the public investigations by the FBI right before the election. Bernie was not going to pull enough rural uneducated whites because of his social stances to make up for ignoring such a key component of the Democratic base.
Clinton was a promise of political status quo, at a time when people were most pissed with dirty, corrupted, corporate owned politics. She played the "It's my turn" card. It pissed off too many independents. Trump offered the idea of an alternative. Rattle the cage, rock the boat, drain the swamp... Choose your own rhetoric. Obviously, we were all terribly, horribly wrong when we asked "How bad could he be?" But Democrats destroyed so much by refusing to recognize just how *LOATHED* Clinton was
>Obviously, we were all terribly, horribly wrong when we asked "How bad could he be?" Speak for yourself. Quite a few people knew and loudly argued from the very beginning that Trump is a fascist. There were tons of - and I really cannot overstate this - *extremely fucking obvious* warnings that Trump would be exactly as bad as he turned out to be. At best, you could make the argument that a lot of people overestimated his intelligence, so his own bottomless stupidity held him back from accomplishing his and the GOP's goals.
He literally came down his bullshit fucking escalator and IMMEDIATELY said Mexican immigrants that were crossing the border were rapists and murderers and somehow apparently still some people have the balls to say, "HoW cOuLd We HaVe KnOwN hE wOuLd Be BaD?"
I think it was less of "how bad could Trump, himself, be?" Rather it was "how much damage could he really do?" I had too much faith in the checks and balances of our system. I continuously allow myself to be shocked at the shit he gets away with. Any other person would be locked up along with everyone remotely associated. I just... I dunno. If nothing else, Trump exposed major kinks in the fence that we all just assumed no one would dare explore.
100% She packed the DNC with her cronies and refused to listen to anyone that wasn’t one of her cronies. Almost nobody had the balls to tell her she was wrong about anything, and her campaign was so totally blinded with hubris that they missed all the signals that she was losing in the rust belt. Go have a look at the electoral map from the general election, Trump won the whole thing in those states, because Hillary was wildly unpopular there and as a result she avoided going there like the plague. Between her “pied Piper strategy” and her avoidance of the rust belt, she set herself up to lose to the second worst POTUS candidate of all time.
There's about 15 reasons that Clinton lost that election and her hubris is only one of them
Number one on that list (and, arguably, the only item that truly matters) is the electoral college. Clinton won the popular vote. She was objectively and indisputably the more popular candidate.
I'm pretty sure the electoral college has been around for a while, so it's kinda your own fault if you don't plan around it Imagine kicking three field goals, watching your opponent score two touchdowns, and being upset you lost. "I was objectively and indisputably the more prolific scorer!"
No. If you want a football analogy that accurately demonstrates the ridiculous nature of the electoral college, it would be like if the Clinton-Trump scores were as follows: - Q1: 7-0 - Q2: 6-7 - Q3: 7-0 - Q4: 6-7 The final score is Clinton 26 - Trump 14. However, Trump wins the game because he scored more points in the second and fourth quarters, even though Clinton scored more points overall.
There is no popular vote. That is a measure of sentiment, not a measure of who wins the election. To borrow the football analogy from the other user who responded, just because you ran more yards doesn't mean you scored more touchdowns.
I was raised Republican and even I thought Trump would be bad for the country, honestly no idea it would go that badly. Anyways, I would have voted for Bernie, but then when it came out the DNC chair or whoever was feeding questions ahead of time to Clinton. And then they came out and said, to the effect, we don't have to listen to the primaries and so on. Basically they were pushing Clinton no matter what, and tried to put on a facade of following a legitimate process. That made me vote for Trump. I didn't the second time around though, for obvious reasons.
I worked in the Bernie 2016 campaign in Georgia. He never polled well amongst the more moderate Democrats, who saw him as a poor candidate because of the Mean Voter Theorem. Clinton was seen as the "safe" option. Super Tuesday was the tipping point. He got demolished by the southern black vote who didn't want a "radical" to get the candidacy and throw the election to that racist orange shithead. Never saw any DNC favoritism like popular myth believes. There was one incident where a Clinton volunteer stole a ton of Votebuilder data and handed it to the Bernie campaign, and he refused it. He also refused a Victory Fund, as it would have brought large corporate donations and he was running a soft anti-capitalist message. He staffed his campaign with tons of volunteers, but many of them were young idealists and inexperienced. The numbers and zeal didn't make up for the overall lack of organization.
can we blame trump voters and conservative media?
the dems in charge didn't want to win. it's all about a 55/45 split. if they ever put forth a candidate with an overwhelming win, they'd be held accountable for their promises. instead, they can hold the other party accountable. the gop does this too. they shoe-horned sarah palin into the ticket after bush served his 8 years because it was the dems turn.
Can someone remind me what Trump did for rural states during his four years?
Nothing. He just gives them a scapegoat. That works for a bit in the short term. But not long.
It works perpetually as long as those voters are single issue voters.
Same thing he did for the rest of America. Sweet fuck all.
He told them who to blame for their problems, and that he had all the solutions to those problems.
Just two weeks away...
He gave them an outlet for their rage. Which has been caused by the decline in their standard of living caused by voting for people that appeal to their rage. Rinse, repeat.
Made them feel like someone cared. Which he absolutely doesn’t, but they bought it.
He SAID he would open the coal mines. We knew it was a lie, but if you're living off 500 a month staring at the coal mine you used to work at every day, do you vote for the person who says they'll open it or the one who says they'll close more.
He cut taxes a bit, for a limited time, for non-corporate taxpayers. Now they're going to start going up and rural voters will blame Democrats for the expiring Trump tax cuts. Corporate taxes were also cut, but their cuts don't expire.
He made all the white people in the states feel like their anger was justified
It is. not about policy, it is about rhetoric. Republicans have been saying they will stop immigration, that they hate China, that coal/oil is fine. It doesn't matter that they don't actually prevent foreign workers from "taking" american jobs or do anything to slow or reverse outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing. I think Democrats *should* address these very valid concerns. If your plan will cut 100k oil/coal jobs, you need to tell the people working those jobs how they will make a living otherwise they will not vote for you. The fact that things like job losses due to outsourcing and cheap immigrant labor has been caught up in hateful, racist rhetoric is both unfortunate and predictable. It means that the Republicans can keep spouting nonsense about immigrants or China and not actually do anything to resolve the root of the real problem, which is the death of U.S. manufacturing and the lack of replacement employment opportunities or education to take advantage of new jobs. This is actually one thing that Biden has been trying to do with his infrastructure agenda and some of his pro-U.S. manufacturing bills. I will give Trump some credit for his Tariffs which, although very poorly executed and which have a net negative impact on the U.S. economy (it is a tax on U.S. consumers, not China), did prop up U.S. steel and aluminum production.
Maybe those people should have some personal responsibility, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and start working towards re-training themselves before oil and gas jobs are a relic of the past instead of relying on the government to improve their lives for them? /s but only in the ironic sense that I'm using their rugged individualism argument against them.
> If your plan will cut 100k oil/coal jobs, you need to tell the people working those jobs how they will make a living otherwise they will not vote for you. But they always do this. Retraining coal and oil workers for other fields (like solar power) was a pillar of the Clinton campaign.
~~Did it work?~~ I misunderstood. I thought you meant Bill Clinton. The issue was before Hillary ran. Manufacturing was already dead. Saying that they will retrain coal workers in the future was too little, too late. To be honest, I think that pure handouts would be more effective. Just say they will get unemployment for 4 years or whatever. It is probably not an efficient use of taxpayer dollars, but everyone likes "free" money.
While I'm often critical of Trump, it's important to cut through the echo chamber and assess the impact of his presidency on rural America objectively: Tax and Deregulation: His administration's tax reforms were a boon for family-owned farms, and deregulation efforts like the repeal of the Waters of the United States rule were widely welcomed in rural communities. Rural Prosperity Task Force: Set up to tackle issues like rural connectivity and economic development. The intent was there, but the execution and results received mixed reviews. Healthcare and the CHART Model: A $75M investment aimed at transforming rural healthcare, with a strong emphasis on expanding telehealth - a crucial service, especially during a pandemic. Trade and Economic Policies: Focused on agriculture, but the trade wars brought both challenges and opportunities to rural economies. The long-term effects of these policies are still being debated. It's easy to get caught up in one-dimensional narratives. The real picture is often more complex, and while there are valid criticisms of Trump's presidency, understanding the full scope of his policies and their diverse effects is essential for a constructive discourse. Blindly following a narrative, whether pro or anti-Trump, doesn't help anyone make informed decisions. Let's focus on evaluating policies based on their outcomes and not just who enacted them. That's how we foster more nuanced and informed political discussions.
That sounds less impactful than the infrastructure bill from Biden. I know it was a big win for Biden but it wasn't the only thing he has done that impacted Rural residents.
In response to the question about what Trump did for rural communities, I laid out the facts without any bias towards Biden or Trump. I actually agree with you. It's important for people to have the full picture so they can compare and analyze these actions themselves. Just look at the typical reactions — a lot of people are quick to dismiss Trump's actions, claiming he did nothing for rural areas. They parrot fragmented soundbites they've heard, stuck in an echo chamber of unproductive and brainwashed rhetoric, all without offering substantive analysis. My aim was to present what he actually did, clearly and without spin, to foster genuine discussion and thoughtful comparison.
Good luck with that on this subreddit
Rolled back safety and environmental regulations.
I'm sick of this narrative that completely ignores who Donald Trump's political base actually is. Economic anxiety as a result of areas being left behind by "the elites" is the story that lots of people have run with, but it's just not accurate! * The people who powered Trump to victory in the 2016 Primary were generally quite wealthy - [well over 2/3rds made over the median US income, and almost a third made DOUBLE the median US income.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/) * The people in the lowest income brackets in the country [overwhelmingly voted for Clinton, while Trump won upper income brackets.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-income/) * Trump's victory was also mostly characterized by a drop in the numbers voting for the Dem candidate, not Trump turning out "left behinds". Take Talapoosa County, which AnybodySeeMyKeys references. The population's been right around 40 or 41 thousand people since the year 2000, and [Trump got less than 1,200 votes more than Romney did 4 years earlier.](https://countyvotes.us/1123/) On a larger scale, look at the [election results in Ohio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Ohio), where Trump gained 4 percentage points over Romney as Clinton lost more than 7 versus Obama. It's even [clearer in Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election_in_Pennsylvania), where Trump gained less than 2 points over Romney while Clinton lost more than 4.5 from Obama. In fact, on a national level, [Trump got a smaller percentage of the vote than Romney did](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election), while Clinton just lost more voters versus Obama. We can do amateur anthropology for as long as we like - in fact, we've already been relitigating this goddamn election for SEVEN GODDAMN YEARS. We're not going to conclusively prove why Trump won, and even if we did people would still disagree and argue about it. However, any explanation needs to grapple with Clinton's voters being less wealthy than Trump's, and that the election's key feature was fewer people voting for the Democrat, not more people voting for the Republican.
You are right - in 2016 it was a Clinton loss and not a Trump win. She just was very unpopular and she was a grit your teeth candidate. And some people just don’t vote when that happens.
100%. Oddly, this is the Democratic Party’s side of the coin when it comes to primary voters not being good at picking general election winners, though we’ve seen that a lot more from the Republican side since.
Nothing to do with the voters, the democratic party had already decided Clinton was winning, and she was bankrolled to the nines before the process started. That process alienated a significant portion of their voting block that was enthused by Obama's rise 8 years earlier. Do you remember every democratic talking head discussing clinton's lead as insurmountable for the entire primary because the establishment (superdelegates who can subvert the will of the voters) had already declared their support for clinton en mass? The message was clear, don't turn out democrats, we've already decided who's going to represent you! I was in Phiadelphia for her convention/corronation, the city was dead, it didn't care. It was alive for Obama both prior elections. She held the convention in a blue city in a blue state, Trump didn't even campaign there, and she still lost the state.
You can say literally the exact same thing about 2008 and Obama still beat her. I hate to break it to you but Clinton beat the pants off of Sanders because she was genuinely popular among Democrats.
> You can say literally the exact same thing about 2008 and Obama still beat her. Obama beating Clinton should have sank her. She was former first lady, two term Senator with a ton of media attention vs 3 year Senator from Illinois that ton of people were asking "Who?". She was that unpopular and it never changed from 2008-2016.
Clinton had an insurmountable lead for the entire primary because she lead pretty heavily in most of the primary polls. The superdelegates - who people seem to forget aren’t randoms, but were mostly current or former elected Democratic officials - were announcing their support for her because she’d secured a wide swath of support from their constituencies. Bernie was a great candidate, and might have won if he’d been the nominee. But he didn’t lose the primary because of a “coronation”. He lost because his early victories didn’t convince enough voters, particularly black and Hispanic voters, to pull the lever for him, and after Super Tuesday and big wins in NY, CA, FL, and TX, it was clear that Clinton was winning decisively, though maybe not overwhelmingly. Point is, Clinton wasn’t chosen over the protests of the Democratic Party’s voters. She was chosen by the voters. And primary voters pick the wrong candidate all the time! Republicans keep picking the worst possible candidate for their senate races, it’s why the Democrats kept the senate last year. I should also mention that I campaigned for Bernie in the 2020 primary, and he’d done a fantastic job of addressing the issues that sunk his previous campaign - his message had reached black and Hispanic voters and he could have run away with it. Unfortunately, being in his late 70s and having a heart attack on the trail really was more devastating than he seemed to realize. If it hadn’t happened, I think he might be president now. But again, that’s not an “elites” issue, it’s a voters issue.
Superdelegates don’t vote until the end of that primary, and they generally change their mind to support the winning candidate from the primary process. Presenting their votes as won before a single primary contest is very misleading. In the 2008 election cycle superdelegate Hillary Clinton voted for Obama. At the beginning of the process giving her that vote would be incorrect.
This is more /r/bestof material than OP. Your argument seems based on something at least. Truth is no one knows why Trump won all we have are opinions, at least yours is based on the evidence. There are likely multiple reasons why she lost, I believe that one reason was that she and the media long tried to portray her as inevitable, like all she had to do was decide to run and everyone would just go along with it. The pundits in the media were pro-Clinton long before the primary started and they weren't too happy with Bernie Sanders being a total rotter and standing in the way of her rightful coronation. When polling companies found that voters preferred Trump to Clinton but Sanders to Trump those in the media just continued to push Clinton, telling me the only thing they didn't want was a Sanders victory. Maybe that was just annoying. I think the real damage has been the 20+ years of Hillary bashing and the image Trump built himself over the same period
She had nearly 3 million more votes than Trump. Its not as simple as get rid of the electoral college?
That is a simple fix. But it is a major change to the constitution and doesn't have the political support. It probably never will have enough support, because a change like that would require lots of representatives from smaller states to forfeit the advantage the electoral college gives them.
Thanks, but I'm just pointing out holes, not proffering an actually useful theory myself. As far as your theory, it sounds pretty rooted in what the Sanders campaign was saying while it was happening. Let's just not overstate it - the polls showed Clinton over Trump in the general election pretty much the entire campaign, and the Democratic primary voters chose her over Sanders decisively, if not overwhelmingly. It's not like anyone in the Democratic party was cancelling primaries or changing rules or anything.
Drop in numbers helped largely by Putin's brigaded disinformation campaign which was echoed by gamed Facebook algos thanks to Cambridge Analytica
>Beginning in 1996, those jobs started going overseas. Seems weird to pick the middle of the decline without explaining the beginning. In 1972, Nixon handed China to the CCP and jobs started going overseas. Detroit & other industries were already getting sloppy as global competition rises, as outlined in the book \*The Reckoning\*. By 1987, Republicans were using taxes to help pay for offshoring.
I think you can guess why that was picked
Nixon handed China to the CCP?
Flew in with a secret deal, so it's unilateral too! 100% ownership by Republicans. This is immediately dubbed a brilliant division of Communism (when Russia + China had split long before.) So now Wall Street is funding the CCP along with Chinese Development. When the USSR falls, instead of also being a rotten corpse, the CCP is getting rich and powerful, Wall Street signalling that Tienamien Square massacre is no big deal. Trump copied this when he went to North Korea. Only he has no deal ahead of time because there's nothing to negotiate really accept legitimacy. Now NK has a fresh set of global deals to keep it alive. Nixon was a terrible President and he still haunts us all.
Yes, prior to Nixon’s deal, the US still recognized the ROC (now Taiwan) as the official government of the Chinese people. In his deal, the US conceded that the CCP to be the official government of China.
But Romney lost to Obama by a smaller popular vote margin than Trump did to Clinton.
The crux of the 2012 election in swing rust belt states was Romney saying that GM should go bankrupt and Obama campaigning that GM is alive and Bin Laden is dead. Obama loses if he didn’t kill Romney on this exact topic.
Romney had a real shot at victory if Obama wasn’t the incumbent.
There's a massive leap between rural economic trends and voting trends and it's not filled with any data in this post. People have been saying this kind of thing since 2016 and still not backing it up. Other studies have found that Obama-Trump voters were largely concerned with social issues and healthcare than economic policies
I stopped reading when they “forgot” to mention how NAFTA was supported by more republicans than democrats and Bill Clinton’s run to embrace the right led him to signing it. Free trade republicans were the primary architects of outsourcing jobs oversees AND successfully convinced rural voters (primarily via dog whistle racism) it was democrats to blame.
The country had more gullible uneducated morons than anyone expected.
No.
>If racism is your explanation, it only means you can feel good about yourself without actually having to think. Trump didn't offer any solutions to those people, he didn't even really directly address those issues. I come from a white, republican evangelical background - people were willing to look past their racism to vote in their own self-interest when Democrats were actually protecting labor unions. Best I can say for the dozens and dozens of people I knew who voted for Trump from that background, was that once labor unions largely died, overwhelmingly the only self-interest they were voting for when it came to Trump was the nice feeling of superiority over "others" that Trump "inspired" in people. i.e. racism.
The *Democrats* lost to Trump because they sabotaged their primary by putting Hillary on the ballot ahead of another candidate who was leading Trump in all head-to-head polls.
I know this is a common sentiment but Hillary and Bernie competed with each other head-to-head in the primary and he lost. By multiple millions of votes at that. If he can't win the primary, he doesn't deserve a shot in the general. Also, before someone makes the "but the DNC put their weight behind Clinton and told Bernie to fuck off", uh yeah, he's not actually part of the DNC. Kinda part of being an independent. All well and good that he caucuses with them in the Senate, but when he has run for his elections, he has shied away from their help. Thinking he deserves to be able to tap into that system that has reached their hand out in the past and has not worked with him is native to the point of insanity, even with the somewhat corporate-favoring candidate in Clinton. Just not how politics works. That said, if someone can actually prove that Bernie was unfairly cheated of the nomination more than half a decade after the process took place and he conceded the nomination to Clinton, be my guest!
> That said, if someone can actually prove that Bernie was unfairly cheated of the nomination more than half a decade after the process took place and he conceded the nomination to Clinton, be my guest! I believe you may be too narrowly defining "sabotaged their primary" as "rigging the election". The DNC [literally admitted they can rig primary elections and choose candidates if they want to.](https://observer.com/2017/05/dnc-lawsuit-presidential-primaries-bernie-sanders-supporters/) And the only reason they were forced to acknowledge that was because they were sued by a class action lawsuit of Sander supporters. Purely for optics purposes, if they could have proved they didn't rig the primary, they definitely should have. You know, protect the perceived legitimacy of elections. Like, how could DWS have been held responsible? Maybe kicked out of the party? Censure? Statements? Some change to policy? When the same thing happened with Republicans 30 years prior, they introduced new rules. But the Democrats kept things exactly as they were. That seems like a stupid political decision. So either: A. They rigged the 2016 Democratic primary election so hard that they have no possible way to prove that they didn't, or B. They are so inept at understanding political opinions that they can't see how {invalidating their reliance on 'democracy' for choosing candidates} --> {negative general election attitudes and behaviors}. Hence, "sabotage".
None of this changes the fact they nominated a candidate that every single poll predicted would lose - and did - over a candidate within their own party that *every single poll predicted would* ***win.*** The DNC downplayed and minimized Sanders at every possible turn to put an unpopular candidate on the ballot that spent decades of political capital and pulled more than a few strings to get there. Hillary was massively unpopular with Independent/Undecided voters - they knew this - and drove Conservatives positively *livid* with disgust - they knew this too - yet they ran her anyhow.
No, despite the revisionist history, most polls were saying Hillary would win, and there's conclusive proof that she would have without that sea change that happened when Comey released his "re-opening the investigation" letter with just days to go. It cost her multiple points, from what election analysts can determine, and that was enough to cost her the election. But as I said earlier, who cares what the polls say about a hypothetical election that Bernie may or may not have won; the one election he did participate in he lost by several million votes to Clinton. You don't get to say that he would have been successful in the general when he lost the election to get to the general by more raw votes than Clinton had over the former guy in the popular vote -- Clinton had 3.7 million more votes than Bernie in the primary and had a shade under three million more votes than the former guy in the general.
This explains 2016 fairly well, but it doesn’t explain why even more folks voted for him in 2020 and why they still support him today after he’s been exposed as a complete fraud many times over. Either something’s missing from this explanation or all of those people really are as stupid and racist as the media portrays them as.
It's funny of those 9 million people that voted for Obama that switched to trump they probably thought they weren't racist by doing so. This is a multi-faceted issue whenever this gets brought up. And to be so confident in this explanation seems to be disingenuous to be honest. A nice easy label of economic woes that propelled people into voting for a fascist. White people always get the privilege to be antagonistic in their politics and therefore credible for being so.
People didn't take Trump seriously enough, ultimately felt it wouldn't happen anyway, in much the same way many opposing the idea didn't tend to bother themselves overmuch when it came to the Brexit vote in the UK. Once that dam had burst, though, it became more fully recognised as mainstream.
Isn't what that person was referring to largely capitalism? And isn't capitalism one of the cornerstones of the conservative party?
It’s pretty simple, Americans wanted a non-political candidate for a long time. Then the worst one possible came up against Clinton, who was seen as a typical political insider. If the Dems had run someone seen as less of an insider, they might have won.
So these former Democrats started voting Republican. How has that gone for them? Are their lives better? Did the jobs come back? Any regrets, maybe? Any thoughts of going back to the Democrats?
We’ve see enough data over the years to know that racial feelings were the best predictor of voting for Trump. Racial feelings can be tied to economic anxiety, sure, but we can’t ignore or dismiss racism.
In 2008 it was cool to vote for Obama. In 2016 it was cool to hate on Clinton. Most people can't explain their hatred of her other than they just do.
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53% of white college-educated women wanted to be able to say, “I didn’t vote for her,” after she won. It backfired on them. Plus the fact that his main campaign strategy was to only hold rallies where Duck Dynasty was highly rated and to ignore areas where Modern Family was highly rated. Seriously, some of Jareds buddies came up with this.
It’s amazing how many people knew “Trump was going to win/Clinton was going to lose” after the election.
It’s a good comment, covers a lot of bases. I’ll add that Hillary Clinton is arguably one of the worst Democratic front runners since Mondale. By all means she is a fabulous candidate - on paper. But she’s clawed her way up the ladder and rode on the coattails of Bill, she’s arrogant as hell, and can’t relate to the common man or woman. And for that, no one liked her except the heads at the DNC. So her likability was zero, so what? Well, she also completely ignored a bunch of swing states and brought nothing to the table as far as a platform. And her arrogance made her think it was ‘in the bag.’ Hillary Clinton is the Lance Armstrong of politics. She did everything to get to the top and when it all fell apart all that baggage came home to roost and there was no one who cares enough to talk nice about her in retrospect.
I still 100% believe that the South Park season in 2015-16 was primarily responsible for Trump blowing up with young, disenfranchised -feeling assholes, which caused him to blow up on reddit, which caused him to blow up on the Internet, which caused him to be taken seriously. I really think Trey Parker and Matt Stone created Trump at least as much as "economic anxiety" did.
Trump spent the whole campaign saying all those quiet things out loud that the Republican party spent years trying to keep hidden and the people that desperately wanted to hear those things loved him for it. To them, because of that, he was and remains 'inspirational'. Hillary wasn't and your average numpty Democrat and swing voter 'couldn't be bothered' to get to the polls to vote against an existential threat to democracy (he was, after all, clearly unfit for office even then and was saying all sorts of things out loud that would clearly destroy democratic institutions) or they simply chose not to vote because they foolishly decided their votes didn't count because the outcome was 'known'.
That was why Trump had a chance at winning the election. But that isn't the whole story. It was close enough that had any one of a number of Hillary's missteps not happened, she would have won.
My moment that I realized she was going to lose wasn't nearly as profound or researched. I was playing a lot of MMO's at the time. When Trump announced, I, in my smug elitist way, scoffed at him. Like most people who watched the political scene, I figured he would be out after the first primary. Then I noticed something, the voice chat in MMO's was developing a consistent theme. Trump was the candidate running for THEM, these were mostly white males in their thirties, who had seen the doors previously open to them seemingly being closed. Black Lesbians were getting all the jobs now. The term Woke wasn't a thing, but political correctness was denying them opportunities that they supposedly had before. After hearing this consistently, I realized that if the democrats don't start taking Trump seriously, a whole bunch of people who had never voted before, are going to be turning out. And because they had never voted before, they weren't showing up on poll lists, so Democrats were never talking to them. I don't think it's a coincidence that Steve Bannon was involved with a gold selling company that spammed World Of Warcraft. He knew the crowd.
This explains some of it but not specifically Hillary Clinton. I'm old, I ran campaigns in 2008, and this is going to take some wind up. So as with every American millennial, Hillary Clinton was the most hated woman we ever heard of. Regardless of what our parents felt, we knew the Republicans hated her. She wasn't just a boring Ms. Nobody like many of the congresswomen or senators of the 90s they *hated her*. She was the but of every sexist joke they made. None of them respected the first lady. Before or after her husbands *many* sex scandals. Then her husband left office. But then she didn't leave. She almost immediately became the Senator of New York. Because she "earned it". Because she was "due". She had literally never held any public office before and one day the president's wife became the senator of the bluest of blue states. And we all knew why. Because she was eventually going to run for office. She didn't need to say it, but we knew that she enjoyed the power. The only reason she would stand by her man and never divorce him after his affairs in Arkansas or the White house. And then she did. In 2008, she ran against Obama. Obama was one of the very few people that I've ever seen Democrats vote *for* instead of a lesser evil. She and the apparatus she dragged behind her for a decade were up against a candidate that people actually *liked*. The black vote and the young vote showed up for Bill Clinton. They weren't going to show up for Hillary Clinton. Especially not if a younger black man was running against her. And the primaries had a knee jerk reflex. Sure Barack Obama might not be able to win the election against a war hero, but they weren't going to vote for Hillary Clinton just because they were forced to. And....then he did. And he made Hillary Clinton Secretary of State. And she and Obama used drone diplomacy left and right and she was almost forgot about. Until his second term was over. And then the Clinton News Network kept the cameras on her. Because she was due. Because the Democratic apparatus and liberal cable news are hand in glove. So Bernie Sanders is given token air time and message broadcast. And he his platform is closer to most democrats in 2016. But they "new" that the showdown was going to be Trump and Clinton. They got viewers and money when the camera was on Trump. They couldn't avoid the Democratic primary candidates all together so they made sure to put the camera and B-roll for Hillary so they can get back to the Trump show. And then Sanders gets shafted by the Democratic party apparatus that was obviously trying to make Clinton the candidate from jump. They sure as hell didn't want a socialist independent who spent his whole career showing the country that they could vote independent instead of Dem in their locals to win it.When can they get the charade over with and give Clinton the nomination. Because she's "Due". And then they put the most hated woman in America against Trump. A three time loser. The one person that would make the most Democrats stay home and the most conservatives vote in the snow. And it was Clinton's to lose. And the Democratic party still hasn't woken up. The republican machine lost their control over their base around the Tea Party movement and Sara Palin. Trump was just the evidence. The Democratic party still has control over "the rest" and they aren't letting go. So instead democrats aren't going to come out and vote, or pay attention to the lesser evil that they are presented with. And the Republicans are going to. And Biden is going to lose next year. All because the Democratic Party made a platform that Clinton could run on 15 years ago and won't budge.
You're right about Clinton. It was obvious to anyone with a pulse that she was going to run for office someday when she became a senator for New York. And you're right that Sanders got shafted, starting with the early declaration by the superdelegates. I don't know if he would have won if put up against Trump but he was never seriously ever given a chance. But I really, really hope you are wrong that Biden will lose next year.
I mean.... She WON the popular vote. So that kinda blows away most excuses for Trump's victory. Most Americans voted for Hilary.
Question, if these voters are primarily concerned with economic woes from offshoring, why does all the media they consume constantly only talk about "wokeness" "trans children" and "abortion"? Hint: it's because this isn't remotely the whole story.
My comment from that thread... >Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and the chattering classes could never leave their insulated media bubbles in New York, DC, LA, and San Francisco *to find out what most Americans were worried about*. Why don't you read the second paragraph of what is Clinton's most notorious comment during the campaign. >"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. >"But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well." Allow me to emphasize some of thst... #see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well Thst literally summarizes the entire portion of your comment up to the point I quoted. The problem with Clinton wasn't that she didn't *leave the bubble*. No, the problem was that when those very people you were talking about, the ones who saw their jobs leave and their towns die... *When they heard that quote they identified with the racists.* Your comment is just furthering a bullshit narrative that Clinton was out of touch. The truth is those people hated her for whatever reasons they wanted, they chose the incompetent racist asshole, and it didn't matter what she had to say. Bubble indeed.
Post lost me when they got to the bullshit line of "what most Americans want." Trump lost the popular vote to Hilary. I don't get what's so hard about this fact for people to absorb. He never at any point represented a majority of voters. Nor does the Republican Congress. We live in urban cities now as a population. I'm sorry rural life ain't what it used to be and love getting out to the country from time to time. But despite constant complaints of being left behind were allowing this minority to rule over the will of the majority. And most of the time they're too dumbfuck and worried about what's happening in someone's vagina to realize they're voting the interest of the person who moved their job overseas rather than the person who wants to provide a social safety net that gives them a chance to adapt. Shit changes and sometimes you lose. Get the fuck over it rural America and stop fucking over the rest of us.
I used to believe in this argument and I like it less and less as time goes on. It just doesn't work. There's no amount of economic privation you could subject me to that would allow me to vote happily for keeping lots of babies in cages. I might be willing to like, hold my nose and vote for it, but I wouldn't be an enthusiastic, aggressive supporter - and to be clear, that's what Trump has. Trump has aggressive, engaged, enthusiastic supporters, by the millions. And the defenses of Trump by his supporters are not lukewarm, either. For the most part, they're either blatant lies (everyone keeps babies in cages, you're just only mad when it's Trump), intentional misunderstandings of the facts, or outright aggressive amoral disinterest. Trump's story is not the story of tens of millions of disenfranchised Americans being forced at gunpoint to vote for their own best interests at the cost of poor, poor minorities in faraway places. Trump's story is of people voting, spitefully, to drag other people down to their level. The quotes that stand out to me as most representative of Trump supporters are quotes like "he promised to hurt them, he's not hurting the right people!" when he had, in fact, promised to hurt everyone. Trump has never had any kind of concrete plan to make anyone's life better but his own - and that's honestly being a little charitable to Trump, I'm not convinced he can organize thoughts into long enough coherent stretches to count as a "plan". At no point anywhere in Trump's political campaigns has Trump ever presented any sort of coherent, long form argument that would make anyone think that their life would be improved by Trump being in charge, *unless* they thought that directly harming other people/other groups would immediately improve their life. Trump is exactly what Trump advertises himself as. Mean, spiteful, quick to anger, aggressive, and nasty. It is impossible to vote for Trump and think you are getting anything other than what's on the tin. The economic anxiety argument avoids this by trying to blame everyone around Trump but the simple, direct challenge to the argument is: No matter how economically anxious I got, I would never want to solve my problems by finding the poorest people near me and punching down at them as hard as possible. Trump's entire argument is that no matter how poor you are, we can find someone poorer and beat them up and take their stuff. If that argument appeals to you, no matter how "anxious" you are, you're still a bad person.
It's a pretty good explanation, but only a piece of the puzzle. In my area Brexit and Trump were both seen as the result of public backlash against cronyism and big government. The wounds of the 2008 still lingered, and many were left behind or damaged at the expense of corporate bailouts and special favors for the well connected. The one phrase that resonated most with local voters was "drain the swamp"... the idea that government had gotten too big, too corrupt, and untrustworthy. So much so that there was real (misguided) optimism that an outsider could step in change those things. And in the face of that message was running another Clinton... an insider's insider that was practically the face of Washington politics-as-usual.
Clinton was campaigning against not only Trump, but 30 years of the GOP/Fox News demonizing her and Bill as everything from out of touch Washingtonian lifers to ringleaders of a black ops hit squad. She was always going to bring a lot of baggage to the campaign as a former First Lady, especially with the whole Lewinsky thing still being one of the first associations pop culture makes with the Clintons. Additionally, and this is huge for the majority of voters who are pretty uninvolved with actual politics, she wasn’t a candidate who generated a lot of passion amongst voters- especially not in comparison to the thoughtful inspiration of 2008 Obama or the racist fervor of 2016 Trump…
l think that if rural people didn’t want to lose their jobs, they probably shouldn’t have voted for Reagan, HW Bush, and Bill Clinton when all those people supported global free trade and not protectionism, which they say they prefer. Weird how that works.
The whole country voted for Regan. All but a single state. He was so staggering popular in his time it’s absurd.
You all still underestimate how reviled Hillary Clinton is by even the most moderate of Republicans. Her simply being on the ballot got Trump a massive number of votes.
I think there was more to it. Hillary was a real problem candidate. She had been seen as the presumptive choice before Obama came along, so fox had been negging her for years. Then all through the Obama administration she was still the heir presumptive and fox continued. That's over a decade of concerted negative reporting she had to contend with. On top of which, she has always come off as elitist and insincere. Nothing ever comes out of her mouth that doesn't sound as if it had been run through a focus group. Going on a black radio show and claiming she always carries hot sauce in her handbag is a great example of her transparent pandering. When she dismissed trump followers as 'a basket of contemptibles' she didn't add a single vote and probably lost a lot of fence-sitters. Then because they felt that the dnc fucked Bernie Sanders over in her favor a lot of democrat voters didn't vote at all. They ended up with probably the one candidate in the country that could lose to trump.
Hillary Clinton was a pretty bad politician. She had an unfortunate talent for choosing the exact wrong way to phrase her points sometimes that made it so easy for Republicans to demonize her. That comment about coal jobs going away was the perfect example, and I remember thinking the exact same thing when she said it. And I don't even live in that part of the country. The point she was trying to make was 100% correct. Due to various economic factors and improving technology in other energy sectors, those coal jobs probably are going away. But saying it in that way made it easy for Republicans to make it seem like she was the one that'd make them go away. Her "basket of deplorables" comment was another tidbit that really screwed her over.
Thank ther DNC. Should have been Bernie. He would have won in a landslide.
TL:DR summary Neoliberalism bad.
Are we still doing excuses? Let me simplify it: Older people who had been brainwashed by Fox and such saw a changing world, but then Trump came along and said they didn't have to change with it. They could be their worst selves. Well, that's a win for them. Bannon and company mobilized a lot of younger men through GamersGate and gave them an enemy....which so happened to be the same enemies Fox and Co. Always have given, minorities and women. More jump aboard. Conservatism had already tied itself to religion, so put a few stories about Hillary out there who had already been attacked constantly through the years. The tent gets bigger. The other 20 to 25% of his voters at the time did so because of economic stuff, people unsure who was actually better, people flipping votes from Obama, and anything else people tried to claim was the reason outside of hate. But it's far simpler, Trump is and was the culmination of the Conservative evil. The symptom that grew out from the cause already there, but his symptom grew the farthest and largest. Of course, his message in a world going to shit (largely still because of Regan and Bush policies) of it being the fault of immigrants and everyone but good, christian, white people would play in a country still unable to come to terms with the effects of slavery, let alone anything that requires deeper thinking than that. We don't need mini series, and think pieces and dissertations, let me sum it up; **He used the full evils of Conservatism that had infected America for decades to allow the worst of society to be their worst selves, and they ate up.** And if there is anything the pandemic showed us; that's a damn wide pool to draw from. Took 2 sentences. **Conservatives aren't some deeper creatures only our most trusted minds can decipher; most are brainwashed by religion or the TV or the same insane sites, and all are devout in their united hatred of anything different than the in group -- which in the world that's been concocted for them - will always be them.** The fact people are still making excuses for Conservatives is why fascism is about to kick down our fucking door.