So it’s been a little while since the Election. I took a few days away from Politics. Other than the natural osmosis of pop-culture referencing the election and late night comedians giving me bite-sized chunks of the news, I’ve been purposely out of the loop. Collecting my thoughts and coming to terms with the results in my own way while vowing to return, and not tune out in between now and 2018.
So here I am.
Surprisingly I still see a lot of front page articles speculating about why we lost. I thought when I got back to Kos the community would have moved on. That the community would be mobilizing toward some goal. I remember in 2004 we immediately got to work getting Howard Dean the DNC chair position, which was probably the most important thing we did toward winning in 2008.
So since we are all collectively still looking for the answer to why we lost, I decided to throw in my own two cents.
I have seen a lot of attempts to pinpoint the one thing that went wrong or didn’t break our way, which caused us to land in this most deplorable situation. But I don’t think there was one thing. It was lots and lots of things. Most of which have to do with Hillary Clinton being our nominee.
I will say I am not a Hillary Hater. Nor was I a so-called Bernie Bro. I voted for Bernie in the Primaries and I proudly voted for Hilliary in the general election. I was excited about the prospect of our first woman President. But that was all I was excited about.
She was a bad candidate. Let me break down my reasoning into a few categories.
#1: The Bill Clinton Connection
First off she’s married to Bill Clinton. A lot of people here like Bill Clinton, but a lot of people in this country don’t. Why? Mainly because of his right-leaning policies. Policies that looked promising at the time, but ultimately left millions of workers behind.
Things like NAFTA which was technically signed into law by Bush Sr. but was supported by Bill Clinton, left in place by Bill Clinton and ultimately had Bill Clinton as one of it’s biggest most vocal cheerleaders. Overall it created a lot of wealth for this country. But it’s downsides hurt the Rust Belt region hardest and they have yet to recover in any real meaningful way. New jobs that were supposedly on the way for manufacturing workers whose jobs were being outsourced to international markets never actually materialized.
Other right-leaning policies include the infamous Welfare To Work program that forced low-income citizens into low paying jobs, often miles and miles away from where the lived.
In addition to the policies of the 1990s that have yet to pay dividends to the people of the mid-western states, you have all of the personal baggage that comes from being associated with Bill Clinton. The scandals, fake or not are a distraction that muddy the waters and do nothing to help articulate a message. A lot of would-be Democratic voters just plain dislike the Clintons.
You can try to make the argument that she should not be held accountable for her husband's indiscretions, and yes blaming her is an injustice. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Dismissing these very real concerns was a mistake many people made early on.
Failing to address these concerns in a meaningful and forceful way allowed the argument to sway new people who maybe weren’t old enough to be paying attention in 1990’s and also probably don’t remember how great the economy was back then. So all they were hearing was the bad scandal stuff. My point is Bill Clinton had become a liability.
#2: Her Time in Office.
Hillary’s time in the Senate was spent serving the people of New York and if they could have her back as their Senator I have no doubt they would take her. But as far as major legislative accomplishments go Hillary didn’t have any major federal laws attached to her name. Typically former Senators who run for President have a major piece of legislation to point to as an accomplishment. Look at John McCain who rightly pointed to McCain-Feingold as his signature piece of legislation when he ran against George W Bush in 2000.
As I said she did a lot for New York State but when it comes to National Issues Hillary was surprisingly low-key in the Senate. At least that’s the perception. A perception that could have been rectified if she were to consistently hold up examples of her national accomplishments in the Senate. Not doing so left her open to the very criticisms Donald Trump levied against her. The idea that she hasn’t accomplished anything stuck because there was no common knowledge achievement she had accomplished on the national level. This made her votes on things like The Iraq War stand out as the only major defining votes people knew of.
This, of course, leads to her time as Secretary of State in the late 2000’s and early 2010s. I have long maintained that the problem with the Clintons has not been so much an issue of wrong-doing, but a perception of wrong-doing. Benghazi looked bad. The email things looked bad. Even just as the Clintons were about to be cleared of all wrong-doing on the email matter they just couldn’t help themselves. Bill Clinton just had to meet Loretta Lynch on the tarmac ahead of the FBI’s ruling. Not saying it was planned. But the smart thing for him to have done would be to avoid her like the plague because again it just looks bad. He’s been around long enough to know he has to avoid the perception of unethical behavior. For a lot of people, perception is reality.
The more the Clinton’s get accused of violating the law but are then vindicated without ever being charged, the more it starts to look suspicious that they’re never charged. It starts to look rigged. As if a different set of rules apply to the Clintons.
Which is why it perplexes me that after leaving the Obama Administration, which let’s face it was a dumb move on its own, she decided to go give paid speeches to people on Wall Street. It is no secret that Wall Street is at the top of people's shit list. I am not alone in believing a lot of banksters belong in jail. Why purposely associate yourself with them if you have any desire to be President of the United States?
So instead of staying in the Obama administration and running for President while still serving a very popular President, she went and gave paid speeches to the most unpopular industry people in the nation. And then refused to release any transcripts of said speeches. I can tell you one thing, nobody pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to hear a former Secretary of State tell them to fuck off and die.
Again the optics of these things matter. So when the speeches inevitably leaked because oh yeah, email scandal, they appeared to be about as bad as everyone feared, and she had no real defense for her remarks. Just a pivot at the debate.
She should have released the speeches before she announced her candidacy. She could have gotten all that mess out in the open and dealt with back in 2015. Or better yet, she should have never gone to give speeches to Wallstreet Banksters in the first place.
My point is despite what is or isn’t her fault, and despite what was or wasn’t illegal. Despite how much of this stuff is real or manufactured, the perception is bad and that hurt us.
#3: The Campaign
Nothing motivates young people like sabotaging their preferred candidate, right? Oh. I guess that’s not true. So when the DNC servers were hacked and emails about collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign became public, let’s just say it didn’t help anybody. It certainly didn’t help the shady perception people already had of Mrs. Clinton. It didn’t help anyone trying to convince young voters that the deck was anything other than completely stacked against them and it didn’t help Secretary Clinton win over Bernie Sanders supporters.
This one act of gaming the system in her favor ended up costing her a large percentage of young voters and probably the election. Nobody goes to the polls and waits in line to vote for a dead gorilla unless they’re trying to send a message. I know several people who wrote in Bernie Sanders on Election Day. Thankfully I live in California and it didn’t change the result. But I have no doubt thousands of people across the country did the same thing.
We needed a candidate without this baggage. I’m not saying Bernie would have won. Maybe Mike O’Malley was our best bet. Maybe Joe Biden, Michelle Obama or Elizabeth Warren. I’m just saying we need a candidate that is free of so much personal and legal controversy. Preferably a charismatic/charming candidate that can appeal to people on a personal level, not just with policy proposals.
When the most consistent narrative of the campaign is that nobody likes either of the two choices for President, you have a problem.
I agree with the people who say she’s not relatable. But it’s not because of her voice or her pantsuits or anything stupid like that. It’s that she doesn’t want to be liked. She wants to be respected. She is not the fun, goofy, let’s go get ice cream grandma. She’s the mean, cold, gets the fucking bills paid grandma that never wanted your mother to marry that thing you call a father and no you don’t get any Christmas presents from her because the last time she checked that asshole still owed her $200 dollars…. Sorry that got way more specific and personal than I intended. Moving on!
#4: The Party’s Blind Spot
I’m not going to add my voice to the chorus of conventional wisdom spouting pundits that are now suddenly obsessed with the preferences of Highschool Educated White Male Voters. The problems the party has in its platform, its policies and perception go far beyond one gender or race. It’s a class issue. Say it with me….
Working Class Americans.
Working Class Americans have always been the bread and butter of the Democratic Party. Now granted people living paycheck to paycheck can't and don't donate or vote as much as people with college degrees and high paying jobs. But when they do vote they swing elections, and they tend to vote more when they're angry and feel like they've been forgotten. And whichever party is in power tends to be on the losing end.
Since the 1990s Democrats haven't done enough to rebuild the working class. The middle-class gets lip service all day every day from both sides of the aisle. But the working poor of this nation have been forever forgotten. Republicans do what they can to destroy the social safety net the poor depend on to make ends meet, and Democrats are content to simply maintain that system of entitlements. Never making any effort to actually better their communities or give them the means to better themselves. It starts to feel like the Government wants to keep them down.
Meanwhile, incentives for companies to reinvest in downtrodden places like Detroit, most of Ohio and chunks of Pennsylvania have been few and far between. Telsa would have certainly built their giga-factory in the Rust Belt instead of Nevada if it were financially appealing to do so.
In the eyes of Working class Americans, the Democratic Party has just stopped caring. Our leaders don’t stand up for unions, they’re too scared of the special interests label. They want slow, incremental progress when people don’t have time to wait around for change.
Democrats with a few exceptions didn’t stand up to the banksters who screwed working people out of their homes, the single largest investment most people will ever make. Instead, the Government actually bailed out a lot of Wallstreet Banks that caused the problem. Obama should have at least proposed some sort of bailout for regular Americans. Low-interest debt consolidations programs in exchange for the big bank bailouts at the absolute least. Maybe even a debt forgiveness program. Instead, we got austerity measures that just made everything worse.
The bottom line is it’s not Working Class Men or Working Class Whites that we need to focus on.
It’s Working Class Americans. Poor Americans.
All colors, ages, and genders are struggling in many regions of this nation. Do you think Bernie Sanders packed stadiums while talking about Free College and a $15 dollar minimum wage because White Collar College Educated Middle-Class people were super excited about that message? NO! Those stadiums were full of people who want to go to college, who are smart enough to go to college, who understand the importance of college but don’t want to instantly be put hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. They’re people who are a fender-bender away from bankruptcy and nobody in Washington seems to give a shit about providing a path forward for them.
#5: The Election
As has been pointed out time and time again Democrats and Liberally minded people didn’t have anything to vote for! The prospect of the first Woman President was a start, but it’s just a start. Just about every Democrat had another woman in mind when it came to who they’d like to see as the first Woman President. There will always be another chance and another female Candidate. Hillary’s loss did not ruin it for all woman. So the idea that Hillary might not win didn’t really bother anybody until they realized that the choice was her or Trump!
By the way what purpose did the Tim Kaine pick serve? He’s not Presidental material so setting the party up with a future leader was obviously not the plan. He wasn’t a populist or anti-wall street so he didn’t appeal at all to the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. He didn’t have anything to make those who live in the Rust Belt excited. The only thing he seemed to offer Clinton was a vacancy at the DNC (he was chairman after all) which could and was filled by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And we all know the rest of that story.
Again, that might not be how it went down but it sure looks bad.
Once she had the nomination the Clinton campaign seemed to operate in any one of three modes. The first was attack mode. Instead of getting people to like Hillary Clinton they focused on making Donald Trump as disliked as she was. This is a good idea if it’s part of a strategy that includes efforts to improve your own image. Unfortunately, they seemed to think tearing down Trump somehow automatically elevated their own candidate.
The second mode was damage control. This was only activated when something would go wrong or some piece of information that was not good for the campaign would come out. The Clinton campaign was terrible at this by the way. Their first instinct seemed to be to hope it went away on it’s own, flat out lie about it or redirect attention to something else.
Remember when Rev. Wright burst onto the scene in 2008 with that explosive video of him acting like a crazy religious person? A lot of pundits declared Obama’s candidacy over, but Obama went into damage control mode and turned what could have been a long-running scandal into an opportunity to talk about race in America, a subject that until that point had been just below the surface. A subtle context informing the coverage of the race up until that point but never spoken about directly. Obama owned damage control. Clinton flailed around everytime something went wrong.
The third mode was over confidence. The plan for a large portion of the campaign seemed to be to let Trump dig his own grave. Just sit back, let Trump say Trump-like things and voters will reject him. And to be fair in a normal election that might have been a winning strategy. But when our candidate is just as disliked by the other side as Trump is on our side, you’re not winning any converts. The Republicans dislike Clinton, Democrats dislike Trump. But by standing back and letting Trump do his thing you’re not only allowing Trump to normalize his abnormal behavior but by not engaging and calling it out for what it is, he went unchallenged for a good portion of the campaign. This also put Clinton off the air so the only message going out was Anti-Hillary.
And sure, there aren’t all that many undecided voters for Trump to have swayed with his lies and distortions but we also didn’t lose this election by very much!
That seems to be the fact that a lot of people are glossing over as they talk about the demise of the Democratic Party and how much rebuilding we have to do. We lost by single digits in a handful of states and won the Popular Vote by what will probably be about 2 Million votes.
This isn’t some Conservative Apocololypse that will result in Democrats wandering the desert for 40 years. We lost by a few percentage points in states that are known for swinging back and forth every few elections. Thus the name SWING STATES. But these little problems I’ve discussed matter a lot when the difference between winning a state and losing a state is so narrow.
You could argue that our inability to retake the House and Senate are indicative of a larger problem. But that problem is one of gerrymandering and will be rectified in 2020 if we get our collective heads out of our asses and organize in time for the census and redistricting fights that will take place in state legislators all over the country.
#6: Depending on flawed data and ignoring history.
Democrats spent the last few years obsessed with Demographics. This lead to the belief that we have some built in advantage based on ethnic groups and demographic trends and that all we needed was a well-oiled get out the vote machine. The 50 State Strategy Howard Dean built during his campaign and as the head of the DNC wasn’t designed to automatically elect any generic Democratic Candidate. It was designed to put any competent Democratic Candidate over the top. Even the best Get out the Vote operation is no replacement for a good candidate with a message that resonates with voters.
The Clinton campaign seemed convinced that Latinos, Blacks, and Woman would turn out in record numbers and break heavily for her. That doesn’t seem to have happened. At least not in the numbers Clinton was expecting and certainly not in the swing states. They might have turned out in record numbers if the Clinton campaign had given them something more than fear mongering to vote for. Or if we had a candidate that was more likable. This election was unique not just because the GOP ran a madman racist that looks like an Oompa loom pa with a patch of alpaca fur on his head, but because we ran a candidate that all demographics disliked on some level.
In addition to trying to spreadsheet their way to 270 electoral college votes the Clinton campaign seemed to ignore the fact that it’s been a VERY long time since the Democratic party has held the White House for more than 8 consecutive years. Add to that the fact that we have never elected a female President and there should have been no such thing as over-confidence. This was an uphill climb like no other, but it was treated like a sure bet.
#7: Outside Forces
There were quite a few outside forces influencing this election. The most obvious being Wikileaks who leaked and published not only hacked emails from Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta's personal Gmail Account as well as the hacking of the DNC's email. But there were also quite a few emails published that Hillary Clinton turned over to the FBI who then released them under Freedom of Information Act requests. There was also the apparent involvement of the Russian Government in said email hacks.
And of course the cherry on top, an FBI director with the worst timing and judgment ever!
OH MY GAWD I FORGOT ABOUT ANTHONY WEINER’S PENIS!
This fucking guy. When I first heard Anthony Weiner’s investigation was the reason “new” emails emerged and the FBI was revisiting the case against Clinton, I wished for a moment that the conspiracy theories regarding Hillary Clinton offing people were true.
People have been pointing to the FBI November Surprise as the “One Thing” that ruined our chances, but it only mattered at all because of all of the other things I have mentioned. This perception that Hillary Clinton is always caught up in some scandal seemed a lot more real when the email nonsense came back to haunt her right before the election. It made people stop and think about what other shoe was going to drop? What other potential scandals are out there? How many skeletons are in this woman’s closet.
The fact that the FBI was revisiting the case 10 days before the election was bad. The fact that it was tied to Anthony Weiner made it even worse.
But again if there were no damning emails to publish there would be no email scandal and if there were no email scandal there would be no investigation to revisit 10 days before the election. If you aren’t yet seeing a pattern here I will lay it out for you in one last category.
#8: Unforced Errors
The “Basket of Deplorables” comment while at the very least mostly true, was a gaffe. Plain and simple. Refusing to visit a doctor when she felt bad resulting in a collapse in front of TV News Cameras at the September 11th Memorial Service was bad. She looked weak and frail at an event that was all about America looking strong.
Not having a Trump destroying card up her sleeve for the final week of the campaign and believing she could coast to victory was a bad idea. She needed another Access Hollywood tape. But instead, she had nothing. So when the FBI pulled that shit with the Weiner Emails, she had no last minute Trump Card. That was just a lack of effort. Someone who worked at The Apprentice has tapes of Trump saying terrible things, they also have a price.
Allowing a narrative of inevitability to prevail was a bad idea. That aura of inevitability ultimately made staying home on election day seem like a perfectly safe bet to already unenthusiastic voters. Flip Flopping on TPP cut into her trustability numbers. Not addressing the criticisms that Donald Trump was throwing at her (demonizing late-term abortions, so-called “bad experience” etc) in a forceful and passionate way was a mistake.
In Conclusion:
That about covers all of the things that went wrong. You can blame racism. You can blame sexism. You can blame third party voters. But if we’re honest with ourselves and we really look at the biggest problems with this election the “one thing” that caused us to lose was Hillary Clinton.
Any candidate not carrying this amount of baggage could have beat Trump. We didn’t lose by much. The difference in most states was probably less than the amount of Democrats who just dislike the Clintons. It was likely less than the amount of people who were angry and disillusioned by what Hillary pulled with the DNC. You can point to any one of the examples I laid out and say that’s enough votes to make a difference in Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Florida. But most of these examples are Clinton specific.
Generic Female Democratic Candidate would have beat Donald Trump in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote.
Again, not trying to bash Hillary Clinton she’s done a fine job over the past 20-something years. The problem was 20 years is a long time to accumulate baggage. It’s a long time for people to decide they just don’t like you, or they’re tired of seeing you on TV.
My goal is not to beat up on Mrs. Clinton but to end this constant speculating about why we lost and hopefully stop the party and this community from mimicking the GOP the way the Democrats did after the loss in 2000 when everyone in Washington was suddenly Bush-lite and we got things like the Iraq war because bending over backwards to appease knuckle draggers was the prevailing conventional wisdom when the 2004 election came around.
And we all know how that went.
