Several months ago I remember when this site started clamping down on Bernie Sanders posts in order to coalesce support around the eventual nominee. I remember a brief exchange where I was asked why I was still holding out against Hillary Clinton. My response “Electing her gets us President Trump.”
I really wanted to be wrong about that.
I’m frustrated about a lot of things with this election, but I think the biggest issue that sticks out to me at this minute is that we knew Clinton was a weak candidate all along. We knew it during the 2008 Primary. We knew all about Clinton’s email issues and transparency issues and her connections to people like Huma/Weiner. We knew all about the lack of transparency over speeches and emails and all of these scandals real or not and god-damned Benghazi AND the Iraq War vote! We knew about all of these things. There was no “October surprise” here.
Add me to the growing chorus of folks who is now saying “I told you so” about nominating Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders...
What about third parties?
I’ve heard from a few Liberal friends who are already blaming the Gary Johnson voters for tonight. The problem with this line is that Gary Johnson’s voters are not Democrats! They’re conservatives who want a sane alternative to the GOP. Bless their hearts, they’re never voting for our candidates! Spend a few minutes actually talking to a Libertarian voter or candidate and you will see that we’re not adding them to our ranks.
Jill Stein… is a statistical anomaly. A blip at best. She got a whopping (as of this writing) 590 votes in North Carolina. Not the “spoiler” many were concerned about.
Heck, lets say you guys are right and that every single Jill Stein and Gary Johnson voter would have voted 100% for Hillary if they were not running… Based on the results right now Trump would still win North Carolina by 108,000 votes!
What’s funny is that I got no less than four pieces of mail warning me against a 3rd party vote. Was that a more effective use of money than making a strong case for Clinton?
But Bernie is a Socialist!
Yes, Democratic Socialist. And yes his wife had that one scandal with a college. Big deal. Clinton has 30 years of scandals and failures to attack her on! It doesn’t matter how much of it was true or not, because the American people are too dumb to fact-check and half of them think “facts” are misleading anyway. I’ll take my chances with the guy that voted correctly on Iraq and hasn’t had literally 30 years of opposition research piled up against him.
The whole “he hasn’t really been attacked” point has some merit, but what people failed to see was that those opposition pieces and hit pieces would have taken time and resources to produce. The GOP doesn’t have a massive folder of possible attacks to throw at Sanders like they had ready to go since 2008 for Clinton. I think this relative lack of preparation on the GOP’s part helped Obama run up the score in 2008. Even in 2012 Obama had a smooth re-election because there simply wasn’t a lot of material to work with beyond the Affordable Care Act.
Bernie-or-bust voters ruined this election.
No they didn’t. At least I don’t think they did. I wasn’t one of the 17 people who wrote in Bernie Sanders in North Carolina, nor one of the 590 Jill Stein voters. I voted for Clinton and I know my Bernie supporting friends who worked so hard for him bit the bullet and voted for her too. Maybe some Bernie voters stayed home that I don’t know about, but I think/hope that is an insignificant number of votes. Maybe a few hundred votes per state. I hope I’m right on that.
***
It’s going to take some time to fully digest just how badly our party screwed up this cycle, so in lieu of a full post-mortem here are some quick thoughts before I wrap up this diary:
1. The electorate doesn’t care whether a candidate is a “bigot” or “racist” or “sexist”. To many voters these things we find “deplorable” (and justly so) they see as a strength. We need to find a way to show strength that doesn’t let bullies like Trump gain the upper hand.
2. No one cares about tax returns. Anything that needs to be analyzed by some pundit or media outlet isn’t going to work as an effective political tool because the majority apparently cares more about “strength” than facts or figures.
3. We need to drop guns from the platform, period. That issue is causing us to lose MANY elections. Maybe we need to drop Abortion as well. I don’t know, but it seems clear to me that we are in the minority on both of these issues and that we are losing a ton of votes because of single-issue voters on these issues alone. We can’t make progress on anything if we can’t win elections.
4. We should never again nominate a candidate with negative favor-ability ratings for POTUS.
5. Not enough people care about demographic victories in this countries. We have been obsessed as a party with nominating women and African Americans and other groups that have not been represented in positions of power for decades. This is great! I wish more people cared… but they don’t.
6. Experience does not matter. Hillary was perhaps the most qualified person to ever run for POTUS, and she is losing to a real estate hack who had a successful reality TV show. We’re talking about someone who has spent decades in D.C. in several positions, and she is losing to a dude who has spent literally zero days in elected office.
7. The field strategy does not work. Trump is winning with no or close to no field team. I think we won big in 2008 and won by a decent margin in 2012 because we had Barack Obama on top of the ticket drawing in a higher number of African American votes than usual. I think Obama won in spite of, not because of, the field operation. I want to be wrong on this too, but the results don’t lie where we used this plan in 2010 and lost, and 2012 and lost some legislative seats, and 2014 and lost, and now 2016 and losing everything.
***
Our party is weak, spineless, and incompetent. The DNC and its corporate sellouts have killed this party. They have no idea how to win an election. Their ads are useless. Their field game is a joke. Their candidates are weak and unprepared. Their connections to the mainstream media backfired. Their pollsters and statisticians are dead wrong. Their messaging is weak and too tame for America. The corruption is killing this party from the inside. Everything about this party is wrong!
Our country needs a strong liberal party. Whether that is the Democratic Party after major introspection and a complete clean sweep across the DNC and many state party organizations, or another party, I don’t know.
All I really know is that I’m frustrated and depressed and feeling a lot of negative emotions right now and not a lot of positive ones over tonight. Tomorrow is going to be a rough day.
(So apparently I have two accounts on DailyKos, and this is the older account that I forgot about. Is there some way that they can be merged? I’m not trying to break any site rules, but typed in my email and got logged into this account instead of the other one… and I forgot what that other username was.)