Russians, FBI and 9 days of endless, highly speculative and false TV waterboarding…it’s not so hard.
Good. Some democrats want to blame everyone else but themselves. 7 million votes less? What was wrong with democrats this time that wasn’t wrong in 2008 and 2012? Perhaps it was first and foremost the candidate?
…thanks in part to the irresponsible decision of Justice Ginsburg not to retire early in Obama’s second term
irresponsible??? The author clearly does not know the meaning of the term. When you are appointed for life there is no “responsible” time to retire. You have no duty to retire early. What is irresponsible is to presume to know when Supreme Court justices should depart.
Voter suppression did not help, but honestly, the fact is, Democrats just fucking blew it. Let’s not be Republicans in a closed bubble and misinterpret the reasons we got our asses handed to us in an election, blaming everyone else but ignoring our own role in it. Dems are the party of working people, and voters this year did not feel like they were given a compelling reason to believe that was true, allowing a guy EVERYONE KNOWS is complete fraud to occupy this space. It doesn’t matter whether we think Hillary did everything she could do to connect with voters or not, or whether we think that’s fair - she didn’t.
It’s time for the sweater wearing old white men and the pant suit wearing old white women of the DNC to step aside and let the new generation take over.
lol…of course there is not enough evidence…BECAUSE you cant prove a negative…(when you dont want to)…but…can you trust voting in ohio when the machines used to vote with have their “safety” ability (the switch in the machines that creates a paper trail) INTENTIONALLY disabled?
how about wisconson where 300,000 voters were just thrown off the rolls and where AA voters turnout was 13% off in the states lowest turnout in 20 years?
geez…how about the people who tabulate the votes?
you want a list a few pages long about those stunning results?
look…NO ONE in this country will ever go there…even michael moore certainly not hillary or bernie…but…for the rest of us who know what we know… voter suppression is real …machines being hacked is real and the false tabulation of votes is real.
but… i am not surprised …you probably believe trump won ALL the swing states and virtually ALL the polls were wrong.
There is thus far not enough evidence (as I’ve shown in this post) that these laws actually affected the outcome of the presidential election. We have statistics on a fewer number of polls open or early voting days in some of these states, and we know courts have found in some cases that up to hundreds of thousands of voters lacked the right kind of ID to vote in some strict voter id states.
So, wait until there is enough evidence before you tell me what to do or think. Until then, voter restriction had something to do with it. The burden of proof is on someone else to convince me otherwise. I don’t fault people for not being able to stand in line for up 4 hours in some cases. I would have, but I am not everyone else. I am at a loss as to why you’d write this article until you were certain that voter ID laws and voter restriction tactics were not, in part, responsible. So, I exercise my right to believe what is.
Careful. Such an opinion may not be very well received on this site. However:
Hillary obviously was a weak candidate…i remember thinking a million times…“where the hell is she?”…after hearing about trumps rallies…and sanders would have trounced trump…because he carried no baggage and was speaking to the same people only as a decent human being.
Voter suppression is a factor. So is the stream of lies directed at Clinton for the last thirty years, and especially the last two. The personal assassinations against her from the media, the alt-right, the GOP, the Senate, the FBI, Bernie Sanders, the Greens…it’s to her credit that she still won the popular vote.
Exactly. What the lines do not tell us is how many tens, hundreds or thousands drove away from the polls because they just could not afford to be late for their minimum wag jobs or any myriad of reasons.
I’m getting really sick of this “right candidate” stuff. If Dems can only win with a WJC or BHO they’re sunk.
What the D’s haven’t managed to do is build voter commitment to progressive agenda that’s as strong as the R-voters commitment to the conservative agenda. Trump picked up WWC votes, but he also held the R core, Evangelical voters who cared about the supreme court who can’t have seen him a their first choice candidate. Dems have a harder time doing that.
Strawman argument. Until this article, I had not seen one person "blaming the loss’ on suppression. All acknowledge it as a factor but no one is hanging their hat on this as a reason.
We have to brace ourselves because it is going to get worse.
I’m very proud that the Democratic party was the first major party to nominate a woman for the presidency. But, even though that was a laudable thing to do, and Hillary was among the best qualified candidates ever nominated, those things weren’t the most persuasive factors with the electorate of this country at this time. And that was fairly obvious before Hillary was nominated. Voter suppression was not a factor in her loss either, as the article makes a good case for. The personal assassination - especially as aided and abetted by the media - certainly was a factor.
However, it would be a very grave mistake to disparage Sanders as at all a significant part of that. The savage treatment Sanders and his supporters received from some mainstream Democrats needlessly alienated many people, and surely was a factor in Hillary’s loss. Think about it. If you supported Sanders and read how hateful some (not necessarily most) Democrats were to his candidacy… wouldn’t you be kind of put off?
I don’t think it was democratic voter suppression. I think it was white voters that haven’t done well under Obama, even though maybe a hell of a lot better than they would have under McCain or Romney, showing up and voting R because they think Donald and Rs will help them more. Unfortunately I think they are sadly mistaken. Hopefully they will realize this and in 2 and 4 years vote D again.
Awful lot of white privilege built into this.
No, it’s not why we lost Wisconsin and Michigan. it was a significant part of why we lost North Carolina. And it will sure as hell be a big part of why we lose all of them next time if we don’t fight it.
This isn’t about the effect in this or any particular election. Fighting it and being seen to fight it is essential. It is the antecedent core value of what the Democratic Party is and what it stands for and, above all and most critical to its electoral viability, who it stands for.
I am often seen here rolling my virtual eyes (if not giving a virtual sneer) about “Emocrats” who reduce complex policies to shiny bauble symbols that must be delivered to prove the fealty of the elites to the base. But there are issues where that’s appropriate. There are issues where the symbolism is more important than the facts, times when delivering on what is, by some measures, a symbolic rather than empirical objective is of paramount, even defining, importance. This is one of them.
Voting rights is a core Democratic value. It’s the altar upon which Lyndon Johnson sacrificed the party’s electoral viability in the South, in his South, for generations to come because it was the right thing to do. Indeed, and ironically, expansion of the franchise and preservation of the right to vote are core values of the party going back to its slave-owning founders, Jefferson and Jackson. It’s the value for which suffragettes were jailed and brutalized and scorned, for which civil rights workers were murdered, raped and beaten. The right to vote is the beating heart and living soul of the Democratic Party. The day it stops fighting for it, or gives up on infringements because they aren’t sufficiently important from an empirical standpoint is the day it becomes just another morally and intellectually bankrupt zombie party like the Republicans.
I think Comey had a hand in this too. As for Sanders, well that is politics. It is a tough business, but I think Bernie and Hillary did okay at the end. There are always hurt feelings. Now is somewhat different what with Herr Trump taking stage and his minions foisting their anti-first amendment upon us. All I can say is: hold on. Cheers!
Obviously,the vote in the “blue wall” was taken for granted. I know I did. As a Texas Democrat,I certainly don’t have my finger on the pulse of the electorate in MN,PA,MI or WI. WI was the only one of those 4 I was ever concerned with but the final Marquette poll soothed that concern. I’m not gonna get into the unprovable argument that Bernie woulda been a better candidate in that region. The shellacking we took there in the 2010 and 2014 midterms tells me it’s a problem for the Party in that region