I was wrong about a lot of things this year.
I was wrong when I thought that we as a country had moved past racism and sexism as motivating factors in a national election. Flat out wrong.
I was wrong when I thought that the country being happy with the job that Barack Obama did as president would translate to additional democratic presidents. It didn’t, and Obama could not cover for the flaws in the campaign this year. He will also have his own list of regrets, I think.
I was wrong when I poo poohed Hillary’s e-mail server for months. Clearly that, and Comey, was a much bigger liability than I thought back in the spring. We can blame others for this happening the way it did, and we should, because it’s a bullshit story, and James Comey’s FBI is fucking horrible and headed by a fucking horrible person. But I was simply wrong for not being more clear-eyed about the consequences of the bullshit story.
I was wrong when I thought that the Michigan democratic primary was an aberration, a shot in the dark. The midwest electorate is pissed, and is looking for answers, even if they seem radical. I think it has been this way for some time, since the recession and 2010 at least, and I have kept ignoring it. The GOP in these states have been offering right wing radical solutions for a while and they have cleaned up. I think the electorate, at least in the midwestern states where the election was lost, was primed for a liberal populist candidate, and will be even moreso after 2-4 years of the corporatists running the show again in Washington. Hillary Clinton is liberal, but is no populist, and the people who were decisive in those states (places like Youngstown, western WI, university towns in the midwest, etc.) knew it. Now, I am not necessarily saying that Bernie was the guy here. Obama wasn’t a full-throated populist, but he talked to these people in a way that Hillary was unable to, and they supported him in a way that they did not support Hillary. I was wrong for not noticing that.
I was wrong when I coddled Hillary Clinton as a candidate. I avoided talking about things that gave me disquiet, like when I would overhear young people talking another table over at a restaurant about how much of a so-called criminal she was. In a liberal area, those sorts of things should have been red flags. I also avoided taking seriously her disapproval ratings, explaining them away without dealing with the likely consequences of the fact that they were what they were. I also didn’t think rallies were an indication of broader support or enthusiasm. I support her strongly, and I still think she would have been an excellent president, but I also wish I had been more objective regarding her campaign flaws going back to the primary.
I was wrong when I thought that we were at a place in this country where significant gun control was an acceptable thing even in the face of all the murder. I had Obama-voting friends who flipped to Trump in northern WI, largely because of the way Hillary talked about guns. In a state we lost by about 25k votes all of those people matter. We who believe in reasonable gun safety shouldn’t give up, but we need to find a better way to talk about all of this to people who are in rural areas, try to find some way for people to understand each other.
I was wrong when I thought we were okay not doing more to bring in the Bernie people before the convention. While I make no excuses for the Sanders campaign, particularly the way it acted at the very end toward Clinton, I also think the Clinton campaign made some bad strategic decisions. They decided to point to Trump and say “how horrible” — without being able to break through on the policies that would excite our people. My hot take is that fewer people believed her on TPP than we in the Clinton camp thought, and that perceived insincerity ended up ceding trade to the Donald (and Bernie in the primaries, frankly). Some of that is the media, and some of it is Trump, some of that is Bernie, but some of it is Hillary’s campaign, too. Again, in the midwest, where this election was likely lost, trade was yet another canary in the coal mine that I should have noticed.
I was wrong for believing the polls when my eyes in real life were telling me to be more nervous. I was wrong for not getting out more to volunteer in Madison, WI where I could have made more of a difference.
I was wrong for assuming that third party votes would bring down Trump, not Hillary. I was wrong for thinking it was okay for GOPers who didn’t want Trump as President to vote Gary Johnson. (One thing I was right about is that only idiots voted for Jill Stein. I’ll take that opinion to my fucking grave.)
I’m sorry that I was so wrong. My only excuse, a shitty excuse to be sure, is that a lot of other people, from Bernie people to Clinton people to independents and moderates and the democratic party itself, were wrong too (which I will write about later). Now, can you forgive me so that we can work together to keep our republic?