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TigerTiger wrote:

Thejeff, I'm making the argument that in the context of the electoral college, Hillary Clinton made a strategic misstep in failing to address the economic plight of Rust Belt voters. I'm further suggesting that Trump used this gap to his advantage to win the election by seizing on the issue to win key firewall states. Finally, I'm suggesting, in the context of the electoral college, that the Democrats not make this mistake again.

I haven't articulated it fully yet, but I'm starting to suspect that Clinton's campaigning served mainly to run up the score (in popular vote terms) in states she was already going to win, while doing nothing or even costing her votes in states that were still up for grabs. I'd suggest the Democrats not make that mistake again either, because the popular vote is irrelevant in determining who wins the Presidency.

So with that said, could you elaborate on the argument you are making? It seems to be something about social issues and racists/bigots but I'm not following the finer points of your thesis.

Jumping back to an earlier post, bypassing this morning's digressions...

Mostly that I'm not nearly so convinced that this election really turned on economic issues and that racism/sexism/bigotry of all flavors played no real role in an election with the most openly bigoted campaign (and nominee) in my memory. Seems to me the denial might lie there and not in economic or campaign strategy issues.

As for her specific strategy, she certainly spent a lot of time and effort in the states that were expected to be close. If she didn't spent a lot of time in the Rust Belt, it's more that the polling was off and those looked solid for her. It's not like she was actually spending time campaigning for votes in NY & California.

If her campaigning served to run up the score on the coasts & hurt her in the central & southern states, maybe it was things like support for BLM that cost her?


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Post Deleted: Nevermind - got google to work for once :p


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Entirely possible. A lot of law and order folks oppose any criticism of police, especially when it comes from those evil blacks who commit all the crimes. "Have you looked at the statistics?!?!"

She also had a lot of enemies, like it or not. The fact that the Republicans won house and Senate is more due to hatred of Hilary than anything else.


Just a reminder once again....though very disheartened by the totally off the topic craziness that was just recently in this thread, this WAS a thread about the Republic...

In regards to electors, they have the responsibility to vote with their conscience. It was one reason why the Founding Fathers had the presidential election actually done by electors rather than the popular vote...why we vote for electors who will do the voting, rather than have our votes directly requisite.

This is an odd situation in some ways...and one has to wonder what may happen. It most likely will be that they will vote for who their constituents tell them (and some are bound by law, but some of them don't have hefty penalties, if they choose to vote against their electorate).

One of times they had three presidents who had been over terms of 8 years apiece prior to the next election was with Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams in 1824 (which was the same situation as the election of 2016). Andrew Jackson won the plurality (meaning the highest percentage) of the popular and electoral vote, but did not manage to get a majority of the electoral vote and win the Electoral college. It was then turned over to the House of Representatives, who chose John Quincy Adams.

Now, this had reverberations 4 years later. John Quincy Adams was a very protectionist type president, and shot tariffs up to 60%. Imports were much more costly.

In the election of 1828 Jackson thumped Adams in both popular and electoral votes, getting 56% of the popular vote and 178 (out of 261 then, with 131 needed) electoral votes to Quincy's 83.

To compare that to current events, there are two ways to see that. In the first, it could be interesting (though unprecedented), if the electors do NOT vote the way intended and neither candidate gets the majority.

I could only see that happening if Trump was convicted of an extremely major crime or something similar within the next 30 days...but it could be an interesting item. At that point, it would go to the House. I would expect the House would vote for a conservative candidate...but who knows what would happen?

The other aspect is if Trump does stop the NAFTA (which is one idea he has had which I actually am all for) and the TPP, it could also be seen that he may raise taxes on imports. In fact, he could raise it quite a bit.

In that light, if those taxes turn out to be as popular as they have been in the past (meaning, they've been highly unpopular, as most of our stuff would shoot up in price by...well by a lot...and it would take years to regulate itself down again as we brought jobs back to the US...sort of like what happened to the oil business in the US when oil prices went up through the roof for a while)...it would mean the population would have a similar response as they did to Quincy in the second time around with Quincy and Jackson.

In some ways, there could be interesting parallels between the two elections of 1824 and 2016.


The Thing That Should Not Be wrote:
Irontruth wrote:

The original Constitution didn't even enshrine all white men as being equal, let alone women and people of color. Also, it came after the failed Articles of Confederation (a truly small and limited government). You're also failing to recognize how much of our system was actually based on English common and represented only minor tweaks to the overall system.

Lastly, something can't be both unique and exceptional. Or rather, one of the terms is redundant, and since unique is an absolute term, it should take precedence and just drop the "exceptional". Unless you're using "exceptional" to mean "superior", which case you're contradicting yourself since you say you're not trying to place the US above other nations.

Democracy isn't unique to the US. It didn't originate in the US. Actually, what makes us exceptional (rare/uncommon) is that we were one of the first people's to declare war against our rulers and win. But that doesn't really have that much to do with democracy. Most previous examples were conquered people's regaining their former kingdom/empire/etc or staving off a foreign invader.

The words of the Constitution don't make mention of race or gender as having different tiers of rights - it simply stated that all men (mankind) are created equal (with the notable exception of the 3/5 compromise which is almost always taken out of context as a black person only being 3/5 a person instead of the voter-to-representative issue that came to life as a sort of "many states abhor slavery but we have to compromise for the time being so we can get all states on board" issue that it was. We had to stand united at that point in history, but mere decades later that all came crashing down) Whether equality was practiced or not isn't at issue - of course it was not. But the principles are there and were meant to be.

I somewhat agree with your comment about how we patterned our government after the English but that is to be expected since the vast majority of...

Gonna try, but there's soooo much wrong in this post.

Go read the Bill of Rights 1689. Then tell me that no country ever enshrined a right prior to the US Constitution.


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Grey,

I thought this thread was about my need to get more chocolate and peanut butter for all of the republic...

Sovereign Court

thunderspirit wrote:
thejeff wrote:

But yeah, the idea that Sanders would have sailed to victory is enticing, but really hard to know. We don't know what the line of attack on Sanders would have been, or what unforced errors he would have made. He didn't really face a lot of attacks, even in the primary. Were there skeletons in his closet that could have been brought to light?

Some of the attacks on the east coast elite socialist Jew pretty much write themselves.

Not hard to know; demonstrably false.

A self-acknowledged democratic socialist who wrote an essay (fictitious, to be sure) about a woman being raped by three men — yes, it's far more nuanced than that, I know — and was co-sponsor on a bill to send nuclear waste to Texas was not going to have an easy time in any hotly-contested race, let alone one against a person who has never found a sound byte he couldn't twist to his advantage. And that's before you get to Sanders' religion/heritage, his age, and his lackluster appeal to people of color.

Waiting for the bomb shells. Not really as bad as being an actual segregationist or voting for the Iraq war. Any lackluster appeal he may have had with the African American community probably boils down to public knowledge. Everyone has heard of Clinton and Trump, who knows Sanders? People know him now but when he entered the race he was known in Vermont and known in Washington and probably no where else. Maybe Bernie should have gotten into the race sooner, done more work in the South, but I very much doubt Bernie got into the race thinking he could win, rather he was more interested in shifting policy to the left, and it wasn't till about the halfway point that he probably started to realize that he actually had a shot.


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I don't want to get dragged back into the Bernie debate, because I never supported him, but I seem to remember him getting red-baited by Team Hillary for his support for the Sandinistas (which, IIRC, wasn't that far left back in the days when the Democrats were passing the Boland Amendment to stop Reagan from funding the Contras) and his positive comments about Castro.

Anyway, article I haven't fully read yet--

Ship of Fools: What Trump Teaches--

but I was taken by one of the points: if a couple hundred thousand of those Hillary votes were spread throughout other states, we'd all (well, not me) be talking about how progressive and equality-minded the American electorate is.

In other news entirely, I recently discovered that Trump Supporting Teamster voted for Obama in '08 and was arrested with his father-in-law sometime in the late eighties/early nineties for punching a Klansman at a rally somewhere in the Massachusetts North Shore area.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, etc.

Liberty's Edge

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So far as I can tell, the primary reason Trump won this election is that Democrat voters didn't show up.

Trump got virtually the same popular vote tally as Romney in 2012. However, Clinton came up about four million votes short of Obama's total that year (still more than Trump, but not ENOUGH more to overcome the GOP electoral college advantage). Indeed, in 2008 Obama got about eight million more votes (69 million) than Clinton did this year... and thus beat McCain, who again had about the same total as Trump (60 million).

That's it. There was no big surge of new GOP voters or a big voter swing from one party to the other. The GOP vote total has been basically the same the past three elections (and less than they got in 2004). The problem has been fewer people turning out to vote for the Democrats. Which is a fairly common phenomenon... people who support the party in power are less motivated to get out and make a change.

Of course, that narrative has now flipped. The GOP is clearly in power over every part of the government. So I think we can likely expect higher turnout of Democrat voters in 2018 and 2020.


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CBDunkerson wrote:

So far as I can tell, the primary reason Trump won this election is that Democrat voters didn't show up.

Trump got virtually the same popular vote tally as Romney in 2012. However, Clinton came up about four million votes short of Obama's total that year (still more than Trump, but not ENOUGH more to overcome the GOP electoral college advantage). Indeed, in 2008 Obama got about eight million more votes (69 million) than Clinton did this year... and thus beat McCain, who again had about the same total as Trump (60 million).

That's it. There was no big surge of new GOP voters or a big voter swing from one party to the other. The GOP vote total has been basically the same the past three elections (and less than they got in 2004). The problem has been fewer people turning out to vote for the Democrats. Which is a fairly common phenomenon... people who support the party in power are less motivated to get out and make a change.

Of course, that narrative has now flipped. The GOP is clearly in power over every part of the government. So I think we can likely expect higher turnout of Democrat voters in 2018 and 2020.

Yeah, the point about the people supporting the party in power being less motivated is incredibly true.

Interestingly, all of these observations are actually magnified by the fact that the US voting age population has been going up quite a bit over these last 8 years. Per Wikipedia:

- In 2008, voting age population (VAP) was 229.945 million
- In 2012, VAP was 235.248 million
- In 2016, VAP was 251.107 million (6-7% growth in the last 4 years)

If you consider the increasing voting age population, just maintaining the same proportion of voters in your camp requires you to have increasing total votes for your side each election cycle.
Trump's slight increase in turnout from Romney is actually a significant decrease in the % of the voting public that turned out to vote republican.

Of course, Hillary was even worse than it looks based on total votes counted. In 2012 Obama got 28.0% of the total voting age population to vote for him vs. Romney's 25.9%. In 2016 Hillary only got 24.9%. In 2008, Obama got 30.2%!

As far as I can tell (and despite news media narratives to the contrary), this election was less about Trump being amazing at bringing in new voters, but more about Hillary being staggeringly less appealing than Obama.


Wei Ji the Learner wrote:

To get back to the Republic:

The most important question is 'HOW do we fix this admittedly broken system?' not 'WHO is at fault for the broken system?'

Bring back jobs, first and foremost.

Seriously, that right there will probably fix most of it. Get incomes growing and people employed. I don't care about race, sexual preference, gender, or anything like that. Just get them working.

As long as people have no hope, as long as they have no reason to feel represented or that things can improve, they're not going to vote or they're going to protest vote. At least some of the people who voted for Trump did so purely on a "take everyone with me" basis.

Once the people are working again, then focus on other things. You can even focus on it entirely from the focus of improving productivity, as I will now demonstrate.

Do they need healthcare? Great! National healthcare system would work wonders and solve all of the problems with the ACA. And have it run by the feds, not the states. If people want to opt out, let them. If they have the money to afford it, no reason to stop them.

People want to marry the same sex? Shouldn't that create jobs in the marriage industries? Let them! Letting them be happy is less stress on the mental health side of the healthcare system. Lower costs.

People are trans? Well, solving problems they have will mean lower medical costs in the long term. So, solve away!

Women having trouble? There's at least half our workforce with a problem. Solve it! Easy access to abortions and birth control also means they will have less stress about potential pregnancies, which in turn helps them be happy. Easy access to abortions and birth control also means they will have less stress about potential pregnancies, which in turn helps them be happy. Happier workers are more productive workers.

Men having trouble? That's at least half our workforce with a problem. Solve it! Curing the insanely high rate of depression among men alone would be serious healthcare savings. And, happier workers are more productive workers.

Blacks not employed enough? There's an unproductive portion of the workforce! Incentives, education efforts, employment opportunities, better-trained police who are more sensitive to their problems... There are so many areas we could improve to make this portion of the workforce happier.

Immigrants? Hello, new workers! How can we make you happy and productive?

There's a good argument for the Republicans to get off their butts and actually end discrimination. The Democrats don't need an argument, but this could also work for them to sell it to the people. Because there's no good, legitimate reason for it to continue.


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Crusinos wrote:
Wei Ji the Learner wrote:

To get back to the Republic:

The most important question is 'HOW do we fix this admittedly broken system?' not 'WHO is at fault for the broken system?'

Bring back jobs, first and foremost.

Seriously, that right there will probably fix most of it. Get incomes growing and people employed. I don't care about race, sexual preference, gender, or anything like that. Just get them working.

As long as people have no hope, as long as they have no reason to feel represented or that things can improve, they're not going to vote or they're going to protest vote. At least some of the people who voted for Trump did so purely on a "take everyone with me" basis.

Once the people are working again, then focus on other things. You can even focus on it entirely from the focus of improving productivity, as I will now demonstrate.

Do they need healthcare? Great! National healthcare system would work wonders and solve all of the problems with the ACA. And have it run by the feds, not the states. If people want to opt out, let them. If they have the money to afford it, no reason to stop them.

People want to marry the same sex? Shouldn't that create jobs in the marriage industries? Let them! Letting them be happy is less stress on the mental health side of the healthcare system. Lower costs.

People are trans? Well, solving problems they have will mean lower medical costs in the long term. So, solve away!

Women having trouble? There's at least half our workforce with a problem. Solve it! Easy access to abortions and birth control also means they will have less stress about potential pregnancies, which in turn helps them be happy. Easy access to abortions and birth control also means they will have less stress about potential pregnancies, which in turn helps them be happy. Happier workers are more productive workers.

Men having trouble? That's at least half our workforce with a problem. Solve it! Curing the insanely high rate of depression among men alone would be...

So your proposal for solutions is to put in power the party that did everything they could to fight all the things you want?


Wei Ji the Learner wrote:


To get back to the Republic:

The most important question is 'HOW do we fix this admittedly broken system?' not 'WHO is at fault for the broken system?'

We don't. Not in any fundamental sense. We can come up with theoretical solutions, that we can't implement and would probably just introduce new problems we don't see yet.

What we can do is participate in the system. Vote. Organize. Get involved. On the local level even more than for presidential years. It's work. Hard work. Work I'm really lousy at doing :)

But it's the only way to make democracy work. There's no way to fix the system so that it works when don't actually participate in it. If we do, I don't think it matters too much that it's flawed. It's obviously not so horrendously broken that it can't work - we've somehow survived more than 200 years with the basic structure.


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The more I look at American politics & political history the more I see so much of it as driven by racism.
Slavery was the political issue for most of the 1st hundred years, leading up to the Civil War and its aftermath. Expansion of the US was all twisted around needed to keep a balance of power between slave states and free states - or trying to break that balance of power.

Once Reconstruction was gutted, racism became a much less active issue for the end of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th, but the Solid Democratic South still had a huge impact on the political landscape and was almost entirely due to the residual loathing of white Southerners for the Republicans who started the War of Northern Aggression. No matter what other policies the Democratic Party followed, they always had that strong base to rely. It's worth noting here, in the context of "Republic" discussion, that this amplified white Southern power even more than the original 3/5ths compromise had. Under Jim Crow blacks now counted equally with whites for representation based on the census, but still had no political power.

Of course, racism was less of an active issue for most of this time because both parties were basically okay with it. Blacks in the south couldn't vote and blacks elsewhere weren't enough of a political force, even when they were in a position to vote, that they couldn't make changes.

The Civil Rights movement in the 60s changed the political landscape again. Things had been shifting even before, as I said in an earlier post, but this completed the movement of African Americans to the Democrats and sent the former Dixiecrat voters to the Republicans, who deliberately capitalized on this.

After that switch, the only Democrat to win the presidency until 1992 was Carter, in the aftermath of Watergate. The Democratic coalition was pretty much done. Their mid-century dominance of Congress gradually faded as well.

Policy was affected as well, not just which party held control. White flight devastated the cities. The economic and social welfare policies that had won the white working class since the New Deal became much less popular once blacks had access to them as well and they could be and were demonized as taking money from hard working real (white) Americans and giving it to minorities. Reagan's myth of the Welfare Queen had a very definite black face.

The rural/urban divide, which has always existed (there's talk about back in Roman times) takes on a racial caste in the modern era as well. Whatever the truth of it, the mythology of the US as wholesome white rural folks and minority controlled urban hellholes is very strong - along with liberal elites who cater to those urban types. Our policing and justice systems all exist in this context.

There are certainly other things going on in the changes in our politics and there are certainly real economic problems that affect us all, but how we address them is still all viewed through a racial lens. White rural poverty is treated fundamentally differently than minority urban poverty.


The truth is, bringing back jobs is not an easy fix for anything. See, jobs in the production sector need to be able to compete with such jobs in other places, or they will die. With lower wages in other countries, that is a very tall order. Those jobs were exported to China, where people worked insane hours for cheap. And then they moved from there to other places where wages and costs were even lower. China is feeling the same heat these days.

What to do? Well, unless you either lower wages in America or raise wages in the cheapest country around, jobs will stay where they are. Unless, of course, you either add in punishment taxes (which kill your export sector when trade partners do the same thing), or put some quality requirements that mean workers that produce your stuff need to have more education yadda yadda (meaning you get to pay more for all your stuff), or something similar. There are options, but you need to accept that basic production of simple stuff is not a market you WANT to compete in. New jobs WILL impact prices in various ways. Can you sell that as a politician, you think? Go for it.


Caineach wrote:
Crusinos wrote:
Wei Ji the Learner wrote:

To get back to the Republic:

The most important question is 'HOW do we fix this admittedly broken system?' not 'WHO is at fault for the broken system?'

Bring back jobs, first and foremost.

Seriously, that right there will probably fix most of it. Get incomes growing and people employed. I don't care about race, sexual preference, gender, or anything like that. Just get them working.

As long as people have no hope, as long as they have no reason to feel represented or that things can improve, they're not going to vote or they're going to protest vote. At least some of the people who voted for Trump did so purely on a "take everyone with me" basis.

Once the people are working again, then focus on other things. You can even focus on it entirely from the focus of improving productivity, as I will now demonstrate.

Do they need healthcare? Great! National healthcare system would work wonders and solve all of the problems with the ACA. And have it run by the feds, not the states. If people want to opt out, let them. If they have the money to afford it, no reason to stop them.

People want to marry the same sex? Shouldn't that create jobs in the marriage industries? Let them! Letting them be happy is less stress on the mental health side of the healthcare system. Lower costs.

People are trans? Well, solving problems they have will mean lower medical costs in the long term. So, solve away!

Women having trouble? There's at least half our workforce with a problem. Solve it! Easy access to abortions and birth control also means they will have less stress about potential pregnancies, which in turn helps them be happy. Easy access to abortions and birth control also means they will have less stress about potential pregnancies, which in turn helps them be happy. Happier workers are more productive workers.

Men having trouble? That's at least half our workforce with a problem. Solve it! Curing the insanely high rate of depression

...

I said much earlier that the Republicans won't do anything about it. And that by all evidence, neither will the Democrats.

Neither party is the solution for my area. So, there were people in my area voting to take everyone with us.

Sissyl wrote:

The truth is, bringing back jobs is not an easy fix for anything. See, jobs in the production sector need to be able to compete with such jobs in other places, or they will die. With lower wages in other countries, that is a very tall order. Those jobs were exported to China, where people worked insane hours for cheap. And then they moved from there to other places where wages and costs were even lower. China is feeling the same heat these days.

What to do? Well, unless you either lower wages in America or raise wages in the cheapest country around, jobs will stay where they are. Unless, of course, you either add in punishment taxes (which kill your export sector when trade partners do the same thing), or put some quality requirements that mean workers that produce your stuff need to have more education yadda yadda (meaning you get to pay more for all your stuff), or something similar. There are options, but you need to accept that basic production of simple stuff is not a market you WANT to compete in. New jobs WILL impact prices in various ways. Can you sell that as a politician, you think? Go for it.

Why not green energy production?

We cannot compete with China on solar panels. But we can compete on wind turbines and a few other products. So, why can't we become the lead producer of those? Could you imagine how much we would stand to gain both in pollution reduction and in economy if we were the world's producer of wind turbines and parts for geothermal?


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Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens Subscriber
CBDunkerson wrote:
So far as I can tell, the primary reason Trump won this election is that Democrat voters didn't show up.

Nothing to do with coordinated voter ID and early voting law restrictions implemented in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin (and maintained, in spite of a Federal court ruling, in Wisconsin), though.

Liberty's Edge

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thunderspirit wrote:
CBDunkerson wrote:
So far as I can tell, the primary reason Trump won this election is that Democrat voters didn't show up.
Nothing to do with coordinated voter ID and early voting law restrictions implemented in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin (and maintained, in spite of a Federal court ruling, in Wisconsin), though.

Voter suppression is a real and serious problem. Without it, the Republican party could no longer exist in its current form.

However, I don't think it is credible that new voter suppression efforts over the past eight years wiped out eight MILLION Democrat votes.

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