Heavy_D206
Member
Clinton and the DNC are delusional if they think they can place the blame on anyone but themselves.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Clinton aides blame loss on FBI, media, sexism, Bernie, everything but themselves
- Thread starter chubigans
- Start date
- Status
Right?
SodiumBenzoate
Member
4 million people voted for HRC, sure. But how many people would have voted for Biden or Warren if they had run?
You can't seriously make that argument without addressing how the primary field was literally cleared for her, and the only reason Sanders didn't fall in line was because he's not even really a Democrat.
It was 100% prearranged by the DNC and the rest of the Democratic establishment that she was going to be the nominee. To pretend otherwise is a bit silly.
You can't seriously make that argument without addressing how the primary field was literally cleared for her, and the only reason Sanders didn't fall in line was because he's not even really a Democrat.
It was 100% prearranged by the DNC and the rest of the Democratic establishment that she was going to be the nominee. To pretend otherwise is a bit silly.
Plenty of blame rests on Clinton/DNC, but just like the DNC cant discount their own culpability, the rest of us can't discount the outside factors that played into it.
The field was cleared because everyone knew she would win, because the activist base of the party wanted her. Far more so than they did in 2008.
It wasn't some evil folks in the DNC who stopped people running. People didn't run because they looked at poll numbers, and supporters, and where the vote was going in democratic primaries and realised it was a suicide mission.
It wasn't some evil folks in the DNC who stopped people running. People didn't run because they looked at poll numbers, and supporters, and where the vote was going in democratic primaries and realised it was a suicide mission.
SolidSnakex
Member
The south is interesting for Dems. On one hand you'll find people that will quickly note that the south can't be ignored. But on the other hand that's precisely what nearly every Democratic candidate does once they get the nomination. Hillary pushed some ads there and sent a few surrogates, but she never went to those states to campaign. Which is what you do when you actually think you have a shot in a state. And that's because they really have very little chance of winning there during the GE. For example, South Carolina was one of the states that was notable for how badly Clinton beat Bernie. But then she would go on to get blown out by Trump by 14% there in the GE.
Lights and Waves
Member
Thank you.
I agree with most of what you're saying but I also think we never really saw Trump or the republicans even rev up their anti-Sanders engines.
D
Deleted member 231381
Unconfirmed Member
lolno. The activist base of the party wanted Warren - don't you remember the enormous #DraftWarren efforts?
EDIT: In fact, looking at very early Democratic primary polling (before candidate announcement), Warren would have been the early favourite.
It's the same for the Republicans - a necessary side effect of having a national primary system. Trump won overwhelmingly in the north eastern states that would never in a million years go for him.
adamsappel
Member
But, did that translate to votes? Didn't it turn out that his online/millennial base didn't go to the polls, just like always?
Beyond his honeymoon to the Soviet Union (I really don't think people still understand just how toxic that is to the older electorate), Bernie outright said he was going to raise taxes. That's poisonous.
Possibly using different terms here.
By activist, I mean the bit of the base that takes party in democratic politics regularly - the organisers, the ground level troops, the door knockers, the people who have voted in every primary for the last 20 years.
(I do think that the "Draft warren" movement was also very closely tied to Bernie though - I don't see both of them doing as well in a process where they are both active. there was room for one "anti-clinton candidate, not two).
Yeah. Media treated her differently because they thought she was going to be the next president. Let's see how Trump scandals sit when the only scandals that can drown them out are his own subsequent ones.
RustyNails
Member
And there it is.
As progressives and democrats we need to face facts. The republicans had a fair and robust primary process. And the Democratic Party had a sham fixed un-democratic process that put forward an arrogant and out of touch candidate. Hillary and her entourage deserve a lot of blame. Th Clinton aides will never admit their failures. They are as bad as Trump in terms of self reflection. The Democratic Party will continue to lose big if we don't purge the Clinton leadership cronies from the party ASAP.
teruterubozu
Member
It's certainly one of the factors, but the crumbling of the firewall states tells a far more complex story.
D
Deleted member 231381
Unconfirmed Member
I am skeptical of this but it is hard to prove either way because primary polling from before the candidate announcements is very scarce and there's certainly not enough to make any inferences from the crosstabs. I think we will have to agree not to contest this point because it won't go anywhere.
I actually agree with this - a splinter from #DraftWarren turned into Sanders for President, and then we know the rest of the story. They wouldn't have both been able to operate in the same campaign, and as much as I think Sanders is the better candidate (and this is in no way a disparagement of Warren), Warren would have done better, and Clinton would overall have won in a landslide as Warren and Sanders split their vote. In a straight Warren-Clinton where Sanders doesn't run, my money is probably on Warren, though.
However, conversely, if Biden had never dropped out (well, he never announced, but you know what I mean), I am convinced Sanders would have won. Biden leached votes from Clinton, not Sanders.
This is getting pretty sidetracked, but I think the general point is true: Clinton was not an unbeatable primary candidate. Just, nobody bothered. Sanders was a message candidate with no infrastructure and a campaign team composed of the misfits and got 46% to 54%; and this softness was apparent very early on when you look at how much better Warren's early polling was than Clinton's. If some of the serious Democratic stars had really looked into it, I don't see how they could have come to anything other than the conclusion she had a soft underbelly. Their decision not to run, I think, probably reflects backroom machinations more than Clinton's strength as a candidate.
Funky Papa
FUNK-Y-PPA-4
Putting the DNC's utter incompetence aside...
Russia has meddled with plenty of elections before, but Putin finally managed to potentially alter the outcome of America's.
Incredible, really.
Of all the external factors, this one is the most worrying.
Russia has meddled with plenty of elections before, but Putin finally managed to potentially alter the outcome of America's.
Incredible, really.
Of all the external factors, this one is the most worrying.
So now we're gonna go back to trusting the same data nerds who were saying 90%+ chance of a Clinton victory?
I am a data nerd btw
I actually think it's the opposite. It's because he was so vocal and upfront about it that took away any of their ammunition. If we've learned anything from this election it's that you can sell anything to voters as long as you are charismatic about it. It's all about being a salesman, and imo, Bernie was doing great at selling the idea.
Vanillalite
Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Not only that but a lot of new comers didn't want to run against the Clinton $$$ war chest.
TheLaughingStock
Member
It's not about trading votes. The problem is that the AA vote during the primaries was too lopsided in favor of Hillary Clinton given the platform other Democrats were running on that benefited minority groups. She obliterated all of her opponents like they had nothing proposed to help minorities. Now if the vast majority of this group preferred Hillary Clinton because she had a better platform than others fine. And I've seen articles on liberal sites like Vox about the alleged silent majority Hillary had particularly with AA women.
However, if the driving factors were irrational nonsense about electability and risk, then this was a dumber than dumb political decision. Especially given the fact the people who should be the most "anti-system" or "anti-establishment" are the minorities who are losers rather than the whites who are doing relatively well. The latter showed up in the election and the system justification bias by the most vulnerable in America tbh makes zero sense. And now it's going to be a living hell socially and the liberal agenda that could help these people is put on hold depending on what Donald does. It's really sad how the fear of risk and bias for the status quo cost minorities big time. Maybe they'll be more willing to fight for what they believe in vs. who they guess can win next time.
Even going into election day, thinking the polls the media put out were wrong, I didn't think Trump had a shot in Hell at flipping Wisconsin. Michigan, yes. Wisconsin won him the election.
lastflowers
Banned
These are mutually exclusive analyses that show why we lost the election. You don't have to trade Minority votes for white votes. You have to appeal to both. Clinton didn't do that, and specifically spurned large swaths of the electorate.
D.Lo
Member
Millennials didn't go to the polls for Clinton. It's ultra-obvious they would have more for Bernie. And during the primary a lot were disenfranchised since states required you to registerer as a democrat a long time before the Primary and they had only been engaged in the campaign recently.
lastflowers
Banned
http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-millennial-voters-502298
The liberal punditry might be forgiven for underestimating the depth and seriousness of these differences had these young people not voted overwhelmingly and across all other demographic lines for a different candidate. The Clinton campaign might be forgiven for imagining these voters would “come home” had it not spent the weeks since the Democratic Convention fundraising and playing Bush administration endorsement bingo. The trouble is not that young people are insufficiently familiar with the neoconservative horror show of their own childhoods. The trouble is that the candidate they are meant to support does not appear to find that show particularly horrifying.
Indeed it is difficult not to imagine that the punditry has refused to endorse the maddeningly simple conclusion that young voters are reluctant to support a candidate who does not represent their policy preferences because such a conclusion might undermine the need for so much well-compensated armchair psychology on their part.
All of this consternation is made stranger still by the fact that despite all of this, millennials remain Clinton’s strongest age group in the election. Kevin Drum insists that this is not the point (rather, he argues, “The issue is relative support compared to previous years... [that] millennial voters prefer Hillary Clinton at far lower levels than they preferred Barack Obama four years ago,” which is to say that a different group of millennials preferred a different Democratic candidate against a different set of opponents in a different election), but surely if we are going to begin assigning blame for a theoretical Trump Presidency we ought to assign it to the generations actually breaking for Donald Trump. This would be like asking whether or not George W. Bush’s 2000 victory over Al Gore had something to do with the hundreds of the thousands of registered Democrats who voted for the Republican candidate: it might suggest something has gone wrong not in the fickle minds of young people, but in the Democratic Party.
They are being asked to support her against Donald Trump, a candidate vastly more alien to their preferences. They are being asked to bite the bullet and pull the lever for the same system that has walked to the precipice of the presidency a man too clownishly inept to even qualify as a proper fascist because that system, in the short term, is their best chance to deny that clown the White House. This case, when stripped of its usual attendant condescension (“self-indulgence”, “purity”, “foolishness”, “I was young and didn’t vote for Gore/Carter/Humphrey once”, at least has the benefit of appealing to young leftist’s immediate interests: We accept that Hillary Clinton is not your ideal choice, but we’re playing defense right now. It is not that the present rash of Millennial diagnostics have not included appeals to the Trump Threat—they always do. What is notable here is that pundits lack the confidence to believe that this threat, on its own, is sufficient. Why is it so important that Clinton not only be nominally preferable to Trump, but that objections to Clinton—even in a vacuum—must be explained away?
I would like to suggest that the threat these young voters pose to technocratic liberalism is not the possibility of electing Donald Trump. Despite Clinton’s flagging numbers, her chances of success remain high. Rather, the fear is that if younger voters really are committed to a host of ideological positions at odds with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, then that Party, without a Trump-sized cudgel, is doomed. It should not escape anybody’s notice that politics by negative definition—the argument, at bottom, that “we’re better than those guys”—has become the dominant electoral strategy of the Democratic Party, and that despite the escalation of the “those guys” negatives, the mere promise to be preferable has yielded diminishing returns. At some point, the Democratic Party will either need to embrace a platform significantly to the left of their current orthodoxy, or they will lose.
There are only so many times one can insist that young voters capitulate to a political party’s sole demand—vote for us!—in exchange for nothing.
http://www.newsweek.com/young-american-voters-trump-clinton-511794
theignoramus
Member
Welp....
water_wendi
Water is not wet!
Man if you all don't get grip and stop acting like PoliGAF is some humongous country wide organization that wields the power to swing entire elections, Im gonna lose my mind. Jesus Christ, never has a community thread been so overhyped.
i made some posts about Sanders and his supporters being horrible people in the most vile and hateful language i could muster to see if the dogpilers would say i was out of bounds. Instead i got support. i got banned because what i said was so awful but if any Clinton supporters objected to what i had to say they didnt say anything.
Audioboxer
Member
Sure. It wasn't her fault at all. So the best strategy moving forward obviously is have her run again in 2020. Right?
Maybe if she runs in 2020 with the slogan "Yas Queen!" it could work.... /s *cry*
yep, blow it up. start from scratch. this coupled with that DNC meeting shows an enormous lack of accountability as well as learning absolutely nothing from what just occurred. maybe this is just sour grapes for now and they'll wise up but I'm not optimistic about those chances.
theignoramus
Member
No, your campaign poisoned that well by saying Sanders millennial werent needed to win. Good Lord, the hubris.
PeskyToaster
Member
A candidate should be able to handle and address a hostile media, bad news, or whatever else. They should have found a way to address it and stop it from festering. None of these things are like "omg how do we do this" to these people.
The people that voted for trump didn't want another politician. That's why he beat out all the other republicans, that's why he beat out Clinton. Bernie wouldn't have made a difference. Those red states may be full of idiots, but they are losing jobs and in trouble. You can't just blame it on sexism.
diablos991
Can’t stump the diablos
We dodged a bullet.
Imagine if these were the people in charge of the country.
Imagine if these were the people in charge of the country.
Zantetsuken
Member
This is why I don't even understand why we have political pundits, forecasters, etc. Most of them couldn't take the rose colored glasses off. CNN, etc are still wondering what happened, like they didn't have a hand in this.
Absolutely confounding person.
It's not worth it man.
no. many many people on here and elsewhere saw the writing on the wall. this is not hindsight for many, this is what we were worried about with a clinton trump match up.
legacyzero
Banned
And GAF pretended otherwise the whole time. I've seen a lot of primary voters remorse in the last few days
Still contorting to defend her stunning defeat, huh?
We don't NEED to try and be analysts. The signs and warnings were there. And the voting numbers show it.
DNC was too focused on maintaining the establishment, and a lot of her voters were either focused almost solely on breaking that ceiling, or trying to keep Trump out, when really, they should have fought populist fire with populist fire. Either way the populist was going to win
water_wendi
Water is not wet!
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
I'm not sure if ignoring Wisconsin until the end is campaigning correctly.
Why are you so inclined to keep blaming minorities for not voting the way that you thought they should have voted?
The Albatross
Member
She's done. Her political career is over in terms of elected office. She's suffered two embarrassing personal losses, one in 2008 to a political nobody when she was the heir apparent of the DNC. Their reconciliation kept her in politics, and then she could tune up for 2016. She lost the most embarrassing loss to the most unlikable presidential candidate in American history. It's over for Clinton in elected office. And that's not the worst thing in the world for her, she gets to sit back, write books, give speeches, and make hundreds of millions of dollars.
Amazing political career never the less.
Funky Papa
FUNK-Y-PPA-4
Echoes of Romney's 2012 campaign, Stinkles.
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Locked