We lost. Now, let's break some bad habits.

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Sunday November 13, 2016 · 8:07 AM PST

2016/11/13 · 08:07

Secrets-For-Breaking-Bad-Habits-Colin-Shaw-Featured-Image.jpg

First things first — Hillary Clinton lost, fair and square. The American people have delivered their verdict, and it’s not what we were hoping to hear. In a healthy democracy you lose on a regular basis, and the key to building a lasting coalition is that you accept the verdict, analyze it, and come back stronger with better answers.

Also, it should be noted that this is entirely inward looking at the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton. You can certainly make excuses, and blame James Comey, the Electoral College, or voter suppression, whatever. But the bottom line is that many, many things needed to go wrong to lose to Donald Trump. All those other things shouldn’t have mattered because this should have been a Nixon/McGovern or Johnson/Goldwater level blowout.

So without further ado...my steps for being more competitive going forward:

Do not insult large swaths of voters. First, I want to address Hillary’s fatal flaw. She is the only major party politician I know of who regularly carves out huge chunks of voters on the other side and mocks / insults / demeans them.

It started with Obama’s coalition, who were just a bunch of misguided young fools who saw Obama as their “messiah” and didn’t really have the proper judgment to elect a president. Then it was the “Bernie Bros”, who were all racist, sexist white guys just out causing trouble. Then it was the “basket of deplorables”, a group of racist and sexist evil people who should be put in a corner and shamed as much as possible.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but you don’t win over voters by insulting and mocking them. Donald Trump had plenty of flaws, but even he understood that attacking voters who don’t support him at the moment is a terrible strategy. Hillary wrote off tens of millions of people by insulting them directly, and pissed of tens off millions more by insulting their fathers, mothers, brothers, husbands, wives, etc.

I have to stress that this is mainly a Hillary thing. Obama clearly has a sizable contingent of people who opposed him for his race, and he rarely brings it up, and even then never says bad things about the American population. A perfect example is birtherism — He showed Hillary exactly how to beat Donald Trump. Mock Trump, embarrass Trump, delegitimize Trump, but don’t ever attack the millions of ordinary people who believe Obama is not a legitimate president. This is just one example — you can go back as far as you want and look at any prominent campaign in any country. Bottom line is decent politicians simply don’t attack voters.

Have a well-defined campaign message. Quick, what was Hillary’s campaign message? And no, “I’m With Her” is not a campaign message. It’s the result of having a good campaign message. You know what is a good campaign message? “Make American Great Again”. Also, “Yes We Can”, “It’s the Economy, Stupid”, and “It’s Morning In America Again”. Winning campaigns stand for something. Hillary mostly stood for “My opponent is basically Hitler, and everyone who doesn’t support me is a terrible human being.” Shockingly, it didn’t inspire.
Favorability ratings matter. Let’s step back to the nomination. Hillary Clinton should have never been able to carry the mantle of the Democratic Party. Why? Because she had has never, at any point in 2016, even remotely approached a net positive favorability rating. And when the competitive part of the Dem primary was wrapping up, she was sitting at -15 favorability. To put that perspective, at the same point in 2008 Barack Obama was +20 and John McCain was +10. Mitt Romney was -3 in 2012. And, of course, Bernie Sanders was +10 in 2016.

It matters that people like and trust your candidate. And I’m sure you’re saying “yes, but they liked Trump even less!”. Well, sure — but the key point here is that the Republican Party leadership recognized the problem and did everything in their power to stop Trump. They obviously, if given the chance, would have replaced Trump with Marco Rubio. There just weren’t enough ways for them to turn the tide.

Democrats actually have a way (superdelegates) to stop a poisonous candidate, but they used that mechanism to push the widely disliked candidate over the one who had a healthier general election position. There is absolutely zero precedent for a candidate with a positive favorability losing to one who has a deeply negative favorability, and we could have had that situation. Everything we know about politics would suggest that a replacement-level Democrat like Joe Biden (or yes, Bernie) would have won in a landslide. But we aggressively made sure this didn’t happen.
Democrats need turnout and must campaign positively. Fundamentally, the Dems lost this year because they didn’t turn out a chunk of their voters. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Clinton significantly underperformed Obama 2012 while Trump did about what Romney did. If Hillary turns out Obama’s voters, she wins, and it’s not close.

Generally, it’s known that Republicans win low turnout elections and Democrats win high turnout elections. It’s also known that brutal, negative campaigns depress turnout. So it should follow that Democrats should do everything in their power to avoid brutal, negative campaigns. I hope we can all agree that this is not what happened this year. It’s so easy to go negative against Trump, for so many reasons. But the end result of it all was that millions of Americans were weary of the election by the time it came time to vote. And, just like in most other elections, the weary ones who didn’t show appear to have been overwhelmingly Democratic.
This goes hand in hand with the previous two points, but it is absolutely essential for a Democrat to have a positive message, get people feeling good about the candidate, and drive turnout. This year proved that even the scariest scare message isn’t enough to win an election.
Outrage over everything is outrage over nothing. A popular meme both here and on my Facebook wall goes something like: Here is the list of all the Trump scandals: <super long list of all the things he’s done>. Here is the list of Clinton scandals: Emails. This is supposed to show how misguided Trump voters are.

But I see this as an encapsulation of a problem with the left in this election. Every week, there was a new thing everyone was freaking out about. There was no focus, and no discipline. Somewhere along the way, it became easy for people to just say “well, there they go again, all pissed off about some other thing”. Clinton did not pick her battles, and at some point it became white noise. Please note that I am not saying that any single Trump scandal is OK. They all have merit and are worth talking about. But from a campaign tactic standpoint you have to pick just one or two things that are the most damaging and rail on those, week after week, month after month. And you have to generally ignore the other stuff, no matter how enticing. It’s tough, and it takes discipline. But it’s the way to actually make attacks stick.
The middle class is hurting. Help them. The election result has opened the eyes of the media to the very real plight of the middle and working classes in this country. All of a sudden, there have been people rushing to look at the stories of people in small town America who have seen their way of life crumbling around them. I won’t try to summarize them all in a couple sentences, but if you haven’t read any of these, I would suggest this one to start.

I can speak personally to an anecdote: My mother-in-law is a second grade public school teacher in a small town in Michigan. She voted for Trump. Her explanation to my wife was like this (we live in San Francisco): “You live in a bubble. It used to be that a man would work a job, and could support a good life for his family. Now, people here work one or even two jobs, and still watch it get harder and harder to simply live a comfortable life. Trump at least is something different.” Trump carried her county by 25,000 votes. Romney carried it by 6,000. Those 19,000 votes in that one county would have swung the whole state of Michigan to Hillary.

And a word of note — people in economic distress aren’t always terribly pleasant to deal with. Anger takes hold as they feel left behind, and anger can quickly turn into bigotry and extremism. This isn’t an American flaw; the pattern has been repeated thousands of times in human history. Mocking and judging is the easiest thing to do, and may make you feel morally superior, but we all lose in the end if you take that easy way out.

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So...that’s my synopsis thus far. The goal here is that we take a close look at ourselves and come back a stronger party ready to save the country from the very likely backwards slide that will happen over the next two years. I am open to suggestions — it is so important that we have a dialogue on how to do better. Let me know what you think the comments.

Hillary's problem, in two photos

RationalistSF

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Tuesday August 11, 2015 · 10:21 PM PDT

2015/08/11 · 22:21

Two Democratic candidates visited LA this week. The differences between the two candidates' strategy can best be summed up in two photos marking the most significant photo op of each candidate's visit:

I am currently a Bernie Sanders supporter. But I really do want there to be a honest discussion of the issues and I want to make my final choice based on a honest and civil debate. The problem right now is only one candidate is speaking to me. A few more thoughts on this beyond the squiggly.

RationalistSF

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Saturday August 08, 2015 · 7:53 PM PDT

2015/08/08 · 19:53

I hope we can all now agree that it appears BLM is leading a targeted attack on Bernie Sanders. Between upstaging two of his events and now unveiling their laser-focused-on-justice hashtag #BowDownBernie, it seems priorities 1, 2, and 3 are submarining his campaign, with maybe priority 4 being something to do with saving black lives.

Now, I have an uncomfortable truth for people: organized attacks on a candidate NEVER come out of a vacuum. It literally just never happens - I would love to hear a story about an organized group that came out strongly against a candidate that WASN'T affiliated with an opposition candidate. It would be the first I know of.

So I'm reacting to this the same way I reacted in 2004 when a group of "Swift Boat Veterans for Justice" started attacking John Kerry: This is an organized bullying campaign to attack Bernie Sanders on a key issue, carried out under the auspices of Black Lives Matter. And they aren't just attacking, they're actively subverting the Democratic process and stopping him from campaigning. It needs to stop, now.

RationalistSF

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Friday August 07, 2015 · 12:00 AM PDT

2015/08/07 · 00:00

In one of the most spineless news dumps ever, Chuck Schumer announced his plans during the GOP debate to join the Republicans in undermining the President and pushing us towards war towards Iran. At the exact same time, a billionaire named Haim Saban also released a statement saying he opposed the deal and would fight it.

What do these people have in common? They are top-tier Hillary Clinton surrogates. Chuck Schumer endorsed Hillary's 2008 run in 2006, and her 2016 run in 2013, the first senator to do so in both cases. Saban is a top donor to Clinton's Super PAC, having given $2m thus far.

Hillary was quite responsible for our first foray into the Middle East, duly joining George W. Bush and the neocons in a yes vote for an irresponsible and pointless war. Now, it appears she is sitting idly by as her highest level surrogates are ready to lock arms with Republicans and fight the President in favor of yet another war. She herself has given the most tepid possible backing to the deal, and has shown zero inclination toward fighting for votes to support the president.

RationalistSF

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Thursday June 28, 2012 · 10:28 AM PDT

2012/06/28 · 10:28

So it's clear the tack that the right is going to take after the constitutionality of Obamacare is upheld: "It's a tax! OMG Obama raised taxes on everyone!"

The retort to that is easy. Obama taxed America for health care? Then Romney taxed Massachusetts! How does the GOP support a guy who does such a thing?

Mitt Romney had a tiny bit of wiggle room that he could use to pretend that it was OK to implement Romneycare in Massachusetts, but that Obamacare was unconstitutional. He claimed healthcare was a states' rights issue, and that each state was free to do what it wanted but the federal government was out of its jurisdiction to implement a national plan that was just like his plan.

But now, the SCOTUS has said that argument is totally bunk. Instead, they have labelled Obamacare as a tax. And FOX News and the like have jumped all over this - the chyron on FOX News after the decision was "Supreme Court upholds Obamacare as a tax". Conservative talking heads have been repeating "tax tax tax taxity tax tax" until they're blue in the face.

Except there's one problem here - Mitt Romney imposed this EXACT same "tax" on the people of Massachusetts. Not only that, but he pioneered the use of such a tax! And the wiggle room is gone - there's no coherent way to say "a state tax for health care is OK but a federal tax is unacceptable!"

So this should be a slam dunk. If it's a tax, Romney embraced this tax with open arms, and he's your nominee. You have to own that now. Good luck with that.

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We lost. Now, let's break some bad habits.

Hillary's problem, in two photos

This is a swift boating.

Hillary has some serious explaining to do.

Repeat after me: Mitt Romney taxed Massachusetts