Election 2016

[RobbyPants]

"This election is like if your friends pick dinner and 3 vote pizza and 2 vote “kill and eat you”. Even if pizza wins, there’s a big problem."

As it stands, it looks like it's about an 80% chance of three people voting kill you and eat you. My state (Michigan) is dangerously close to being called red

This fucking country.

[Leress]

My state voted Trump...shocker [/sarcasm].

[MGuy]

Why would they be blaming the DNC right now? Honestly, if anything, I'd be shaking an angry fist at the people who are burning votes on Stein and Johnson.

[RobbyPants]

I'm going to be such shit at work tomorrow. I haven't been able to sleep for 90 minutes.

[RobbyPants]

Why would they be blaming the DNC right now? Honestly, if anything, I'd be shaking an angry fist at the people who are burning votes on Stein and Johnson.

Because they're mad and they didn't get their way. They need someone to blame.

Well, it looks like Lago is getting his (stupid) way.

[Voss]

America, you're drunk. Now fetch me a cooler, a fiddle and a lighter.


And a great big fuck you to my car insurance company. I really don't need my bill right fucking now.

[name_here]

The worst part about following the 538 liveblog is that they have a live facebook comments widget in their sidebar and I keep making the mistake of looking at it.

It's full of people who do not understand what "21% chance" means.

[DSMatticus]

Voters 18-30 went almost 10ppt third party, apparently.

[PhoneLobster]

Even if Hillary scrapes a win, which is looking doubtful, it will soon be time to play the blame game so of course it's time to start smearing Sander's supporters.

And third parties, they will be totally to blame too. How dare people vote for anyone other than the anointed one. It is THEIR duty to vote for HER not HER duty to convince them to do so!

Oh and lets not forget that one frail sunlight deprived US political prisoner locked in an Ecuadorian embassy who totally is a Dirty Commie Traitor Ruskie Spy of bond villain proportions because he released documents of public interest that confirmed some very mild non-criminal allegations that were already pretty obviously true and well known to everyone "Oh wow the democratic establishment really did prefer and support Clinton as nominee? You don't say? Well nice to have that well known non-criminal detail in documented form I guess... WHAT HOW DARE YOU TRUMP IS NOW YOUR FAULT YOU RUSSIAN SPY!"

And the media the media is to blame and... actually they probably partially are but even they, eventually, turned on Trump to a degree beyond anything pretty much anyone could have hoped for. And if you can't win the media war against candidate pussy grabber you can't win ANY media war and shouldn't be running for office.

But lets be clear. The people who probably won't be blamed are the ones most clearly and directly responsible. They are Hillary, the establishment who supported her, and the Democrat voters who fell for the lie that she was so damned much more electorally viable and thus did indeed perfectly legitimately elect her like a bunch of dumb chumps.

Because those guys are the one's who made the multiple poor political judgements that led to them (at this stage still only very very probably) losing against a man who, quite frankly was a joke candidate who constantly fell on his own face lacked the sort of support Clinton had and quite frankly shouldn't have been able to win an election against a rock with googly eyes glued on it.

Trump had one thing going for him. Being the "outsider" candidate in an electorate that remains very VERY angry at the establishment. Well OK two things, the racist reactionary thing is huge too. But the party of Obama was never going to compete with that group they COULD have solidly won an anti-establishment vote with their own wildly popular grass roots supported "outsider" candidate.

They had their chance, and they turned it down stupidly thinking they had a safer bet with a firmly establishment figure who was arguably one of the already at that point most hated presidential candidates in history. (Eclipsed only by the man she can't seem to beat)

There was one candidate in this election that was given her candidacy on a platform of "You have just ONE fucking job".

So can the centrist dumb shits who rabidly supported Hillary at this point eat a turd pie and admit they were fucking wrong on their constant mantras of "only Hillary is electable" bullshit.

As an outsider aside from some very serious concerns about some very bad news on international climate change policy (not nearly sufficiently widely publicized because fuck it the democrats were dumb enough not to run on it) this is probably not all that different for the international community. Trump will bomb some different shit, invade some different shit, destroy some different economies and likely trigger a global economic crisis with marginally different timing (possibly starting with right fucking now), but some variation of that was on the cards regardless and fuck it, he, cross our fingers, might even actually be slightly less likely to provoke another major world power into world war three for no fucking reason.

But for US residents? On basically all domestic policy fronts? You guys are fucked. Can't say much of the world won't be feeling a fair bit of schadenfreude though. You guys dug your own hole and only kept digging every step of the way. I don't even expect a Trump presidency to be a turning point in that particular trend.

[Voss]

Trump had one thing going for him. Being the "outsider" candidate in an electorate that remains very VERY angry at the establishment. Well OK two things, the racist reactionary thing is huge too. But the party of Obama was never going to compete with that group they COULD have solidly won an anti-establishment vote with their own wildly popular grass roots supported "outsider" candidate.

You're simplifying this a lot, despite obviously knowing he isn't an outsider.

It was more a matter of uneducated people falling for the lies of a famous person, which is something people are ridiculously susceptible to. Especially uneducated religious voters which are rampantly immune to reason.

As for Bernie, I don't honestly care about your bizarro world explanation that as another non-outsider, he would have magically competed for votes from the crazy rednecks that helped push Trump up. He lost- he doesn't matter.

Clinton will probably lose due to a lot of her own baggage, her lack of personal charisma, and to be honest, the media fascination with both the Trump story and the non-scandal 'scandals.' Relative lack of turnout may also be an issue, but its too early for that sort of finger pointing.

But ultimately she was electable- electability isn't a measure of 'oh, well, they lost in the end.' That's just losing. That she may not be elected is noteworthy, but it's a story of failures (and grudgingly, Trump exploiting the shit out of white men for a wide variety of reasons), not centrists being wrong about her electability.

Apparently, for example, the BBC just said voter turnout in Philadelphia was actually up from Obama's election, which is pretty fucking amazing. But the rural Pennsylvania vote is also up, and that is pretty much fucking unprecedented. And those rural Republican folks would not have come out for Bernie.



And fuck the BBC. They just pointed out that theoretically this could come out in a electoral tie at 269 each. On that note, I'm going to bed, and I'll see what's on fire in the morning.

[MisterDee]

Well, I'm done hoping for a miracle. "Interesting" times ahead, for sure.

[maglag]

As an outsider aside from some very serious concerns about some very bad news on international climate change policy (not nearly sufficiently widely publicized because fuck it the democrats were dumb enough not to run on it) this is probably not all that different for the international community. Trump will bomb some different shit, invade some different shit, destroy some different economies and likely trigger a global economic crisis with marginally different timing (possibly starting with right fucking now), but some variation of that was on the cards regardless and fuck it, he, cross our fingers, might even actually be slightly less likely to provoke another major world power into world war three for no fucking reason.

Fucking amen.

In particular because if nothing else, Trump showed the signs of being more friendly with China and Russia, and even Putin made it pretty clear he likes Trump more than Clinton, aka miss "Beijing and Moscow can go fuck themselves for all I care".

But for US residents? On basically all domestic policy fronts? You guys are fucked. Can't say much of the world won't be feeling a fair bit of schadenfreude though. You guys dug your own hole and only kept digging every step of the way. I don't even expect a Trump presidency to be a turning point in that particular trend.

Watch as they keep calling everybody else names and telling them to shut up, denying reality again and again. Their tears are delicious.

[Whipstitch]

Even if Hillary scrapes a win, which is looking doubtful, it will soon be time to play the blame game so of course it's time to start smearing Sander's supporters.

And third parties, they will be totally to blame too. How dare people vote for anyone other than the anointed one. It is THEIR duty to vote for HER not HER duty to convince them to do so!

You're forgetting blacks. I'm sure we'll have plenty of people shitting on their turnout and for going "only" 80%+ Democrat.

[MGuy]

Well

1) even as someone who wanted Bernie to win he didn't. Like, not even close. People voted Hillary in the primaries so even if the establishment knew Bernie was going to go blue AND be a real competitor it doesn't matter because people didn't vote for him.

2) The problem isn't 'just' Trump. It's his party and we don't have a 9th Supreme Court Justice.

I'm not sure how you think this would've worked if Bernie had been lead on the ticket either because while I like the man he's a Jew and a Socialist and stupid right wingers are easy to get riled up over anything they don't understand. About the only thing that would've made it easier on Bernie is that he's got a dick and they probably wouldn't have had as much shit on him as they did with Hillary.

[Whipstitch]

Sadly, I feel like the has a dick thing is probably a huge deal.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You dumb, smug fuckers were warned. You were fucking warned about Clinton. Granted, I didn't expect her to shit the bed that badly. I expected her not to have the Senate and get about 3-4%. Whereupon she gets destroyed in 2018 and 2020.

Now we get to test my hypothesis that, in the long run, a Clinton defeat now will cause less pain than Tom Cotton in 2020. That additional 4 years of getting to enact actual climate change legislation/redistribution to developing countries may make or break us. We may very well get Trump in 2016 and Pence in 2020. But Clinton in 2016 and Cotton in 2020 would've fucked us even harder. So it's only a chance. Which brings me back to my next point.

The only path forward is working class solidarity. This means making a clean break with Clinton/Obamaism. No more of this bullshit of 'but the opponent is a clown rapist' or 'if we EDUCATE the voters more they'll like the ACA' or 'you either give up your job so that poor Bangladeshi can have a shot at a better life or you're a RACIST' nonsense. Trump is going to dismantle the ACA and he'll probably also gut Medicaid and Social Security for the <67 set. It's going to be fucking painful, but if you try counterattacking with limpdick liberal wonk solutions the Republicans will eat your dinner. Embrace Bernie-style class warfare, shit on liberals (not neoliberals, capital-L liberals) like Krugman and Stewart and Chait and Klein and Silver and Brazille and Pelosi and Reid and especially fucking Clinton at every opportunity until they swear fealty to the working class.

Same goes to the Greens. If you're a leftie and you don't have labor, you don't have shit. I could not bring myself to vote for Jill Stein because it's obvious that the party is nothing more than a shitshow designed to give the upper-middle class lefties stiffies. That she probably performed worse than Nader in 2000 is ample evidence.

Also, the SCOTUS? Fuck decorum, fuck the Enlightenment, anything but critical theory. If we make it to 2020, we're packing that shit as much as the public allows.

[Windjammer]

As another foreign national, albeit one who now resides and works (legitimately, I probably should add in the 'new climate' we're facing) in the US, my impressions largely mirror PhoneLobster's above.

I remained pretty neutral (as a non-voter, hey) throughout the election, though my wife (who's a US citizen) had her car keyed for daring to have a Bernie bumper sticker in the liberal state of Colorado. That was as close as I got 'in' on the action.

Due to that neutrality, I didn't comment on this thread, except to post the Nate Silver site - and which, like nearly all other polls, led us vastly astray.

One thing that shocked me about this thread was the entitlement coming from Hillary supporters. It reminded me strongly of the 2008/2009 climate on Enworld and elsewhere when disgruntled 3.5 fans were told by the 4e establishment that 'hey, we can do without you - go away, buy Pathfinder'. Turns out the groups who were continuously told they were dispensable - and then voted 10% or more for a 3rd party - would have made a difference to this election. Even Trump voters interviewed on NSBNC say 'this election is not so much about Donald as it is about Hilary'.

I don't for a moment think Sanders would have carried this election. He'd have fared worse. That said, I live in southern Colorado, which is full of military people, and a lot of them are highly educated and identify themselves as liberal conservatives. I have it on personal authority that they'd have voted for Sanders, since they found Donald an opinionated dick who couldn't be trusted with actual leadership. But the Donald was running against a candidate with a 20 year track record of lying through her teeth whenever the opportunity suited - for often laughably low stakes, and for not so low ones either. So there's this episode where Clinton claimed, in recorded footage / interview, to have been under sniper fire in Bosnia back in the 90s. Turns out, that was a fabrication to ramp up her credentials and international experience.

Now here's the weird thing with all those highly educated people in the army bases. The majority have been in action and either directly under fire or lost friends, close friends, to military action. And you don't go out there and lie about that, and say you've been shot at when you were in perfect safety. It's a huge insult to the armed services, to any veteran and their families.

Now, this is such a minor grievance, you'd think people would let it go and not let it color their feelings on a presidential election. (I certainly wouldn't let it sway me.) But that's the catch, for me, in a nutshell - that it did sway, and that across a wide spectrum of the electorate, Hilary had this thing here or there that alienated her from people who'd have otherwise voted for her. Over Trump. Over Sanders. But her campaign continuously emphasized, sometimes as aggressively as in this thread here, that none of these grievances were worth taking seriously, and that people who had a moral problem with her lying about Bosnia or other stuff could go fuck themselves.

Maybe on a factual level, most of those grievances could be dismissed as insufficiently substantial or simply not worth addressing. (I actually believe that.) But from a campaign perspective, dismissing all these concerns as white trash idiocy was a mistake with rather large consequences. And that people coming out of the 2008/2009 D&D edition wars and learning its lessons (i.e. the aftermath) would then turn around in 2016 and think that that's smart strategy in a much larger arena - that, to me, is one of the more enduring puzzles about this forum.

Anyway, good luck America, and here's to four years of we know not what.

[PhoneLobster]

You're simplifying this a lot

Let's simplify this some MORE however.

Clinton and her supporters only ever had one argument in favor of her, that despite polling to the contrary, somehow actually played well and stuck. You HAD to select her because her opponent would lose the election and she would not.

Then she lost the election. Pretty fucking spectacularly. Against a total tosser.

Sanders could have done that too. He also might have done better.

Sanders supporters claimed Sanders could win they had some actually pretty reasonable arguments and polling. Hillary's supporters said that everyone to the left should shut up and compromise because only Hillary could win they... had the party establishment on their side and basically little fucking else to back their assertions.

Only one of those groups had their claim tested. The leaders of that group proceeded to have control over party election strategy. That group was wrong. That group just lost the election (well ok technically still "very very likely lost the election" but these results are clearly bad enough to play the blame game which WILL be happening).

[Leress]

Holy Shit, it Lago!

[PhoneLobster]

You're forgetting blacks. I'm sure we'll have plenty of people shitting on their turnout and for going "only" 80%+ Democrat.

Can't be those guys, they fucking love Hillary (and no one else), her supporters told us so repeatedly back when they were explaining how very electable she was.

[DSMatticus]

Lago, the Supreme Court will be conservative until at least 2030, 2040 if Trump wins his second term. Your goals mean jackshit. Absolutely jack shit. It will be a generation before you even have the chance to take a single another step towards a progressive America. That you thought a 5-6 majority on the Supreme Court was a potential "win" state is a testament to your stupidity, and it's not a naive dream you'll get to enjoy very long.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Three final thoughts.

One: stop wringing your hand and whining about labels like socialism and fascism and whatever the fuck. We have the MSM and much of the liberal/conservative establishment flat-out and credibly calling Donald Trump a murderous, plutocratic, rapist fascist. And it didn't do shit. If a wonk, especially a liberal wonk, starts wringing their hands about decorum and civility then ignore them. People don't care about fucking labels. They only care if A.) you're on their side and B.) you're going to do what they way.

Two: Prejudice is hugely driven by right-wing authoritarianism. Seriously. Look up the literature on RWA. And Right-wing authoritarianism is driven hugely in the short-term by fear. If you want to understand the Trump supporter, unless the thought 'what causes ordinary people to embrace RWA' is dancing in your head, your analysis will be utter fucking shit.

Three: This is probably my most important one. You know all of that electioneering bullshit that the Democratic Party, especially the 'rationalist' Democrats obsess over? Flotsam like celebrity endorsements and ground games and voter organization apps and media callouts and (especially) fundraising? None of that horseshit means anything. Hillary Clinton had one of the best ground games ever and Trump had almost nothing. She still fucking lost.

Get this through your stupid, thick heads: by far the most important part of a campaign, like any product, is the branding. The Democratic Party has a contradictory and confusing brand. The Republican Party's brand is contradictory and evil, but it's at least clear. I've regularly had Democrats liberalsplain to me on blogs like Balloon-Juice and DailyKos and Booman Tribune that, if you min-max the proposed policies, the Democratic Party comes out the clear winner... completely inured to the fucking fact that none of that matters if you have a shit brand.

Upthread, I recommended that the Democratic Party's new strategy should be to go full-on working class worker class warfare. It's simple and easily tells a voter what the party stands for: "I'm in favor of anything that increases worker power." You don't have to go with that, but if you don't have a good brand that can appeal to a wide swath of voters -- and as we've seen last night, demographics aren't changing fast enough for a brand of multicultural meritocratic nationalism to work -- you can just shove your thinkpieces and policy papers straight up your ass.

[CapnTthePirateG]

So does anyone know what the fuck Trump is going to actually do?

I mean I suspect go down the "brown people R bad" route and more gridlock...but you could power the country off his waffling.

[Kaelik]

But the Donald was running against a candidate with a 20 year track record of lying through her teeth whenever the opportunity suited - for often laughably low stakes, and for not so low ones either. So there's this episode where Clinton claimed, in recorded footage / interview, to have been under sniper fire in Bosnia back in the 90s. Turns out, that was a fabrication to ramp up her credentials and international experience.

Okay you are dumb. As a brief aside, as if I have to say this, I have been one of the most "Stop being such a Clinton Dick" people on TGD.

So let's go over this:

1) The video you saw was not the only landing in Bosnia, they then used a Helicopter to make jumps around, including, but not limited to multiple "Assault" Landings and Takeoffs which is where everyone on board had Bullet Proof Vests, and Helmets on, and the Copter when down really fast and hard, and lifted off really fast and hard. There are no reported instances of being fired at but:

2) Remember when that News Anchor totally thought he was shot at? I ask because it's a well known facet of memory that people alter their memories to believe some more traumatic event they imagined during the events than the actual events. So yes, over 12 years, her memory of a specific set of events changed to be inaccurate, just like every other human being.

Get over it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Lago, the Supreme Court will be conservative until at least 2030, 2040 if Trump wins his second term. Your goals mean jackshit. Absolutely jack shit. It will be a generation before you even have the chance to take a single another step towards a progressive America.

The fact that the apparent plan was to hope that two justices retired in 2018-2020 window (which probably wouldn't have even worked even if Hillary Clinton somehow took the Presidency) showed that your nightmare scenario was going to happen any fucking way. Seriously, were you going to put poison in Thomas's coffee? What was your fucking plan if, God forbid, a SCOTUS doesn't die in the next two years? Fuck, what was your fucking plan if HRC wasn't going to get the Senate?

So, new strategy. Pack the fucking SCOTUS.