Yeah… So, THAT happened.
Of far greater importance, in my opinion, than the purely hypothetical Obama ’12/Trump ’16 voters that we’re supposed to tailor our message to now… is the question of just what, exactly, Bernie Sanders thought he was doing? The media is all over the ‘did this cost Clinton the votes?” which is reductive and irrelevant. We’re told, now, we gotta get all ‘Sanders style’ for 2018 but what, exactly is that? And to what effect?
Fewer people had less cause to be righteously angry than Hillary Clinton and few still have kept their composure more.
On the other hand, the only person with less cause to be angry than Bernie Sanders is Donald Trump and, yet, both trade in a venomous malice and simple-minded bellicosity, for their own gain. As with Sanders, so too with Trump: it won’t turn out like they think it will.
Thank you.
This needs to be said. The data in your link needs to be repeated.
It’s too bad that the new blog technology blocks images in comments. The key takeaway from your link is this:
The accompanying graphic shows how pronounced this is. The URL for the image is:
<img src=”https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DH7IpIJXUAA8yes.png:small” />
Not surprisingly, primary supporters of Bernie Sanders who voted for Donald Trump in the general election did not approve of Barack Obama.
And, finally, yes — there WERE enough of these defectors to swing the election. In the three battleground states, the data is stark:
State | Sanders-Trump voters (est) | Trump 2016 margin of victory
MI | 47,915 | 10,704
PA | 117,100 | 44,292
WI | 51,317 | 22,748
Anger is not a political position.
In addition. we must not ignore the role that racism and sexism plays in our culture. Especially racism and sexism among those who vote from their anger — because anger almost always needs a scapegoat, and blacks and women are a favorite target in 21st century America.
Finally, it needs to be said one more time:
A majority of Americans — about nearly sixty six million of us — voted for Hillary Clinton. That’s about three million more than those who voted for Mr. Trump.
When we analyze these results — and characterize these voters (because I suggest that we MUST do that in order to guide our future path) — we must remember that we are talking about a TINY SLIVER of America.
This election was changed by 77,744 votes out of about 129 million votes cast. Those 77,744 votes for Mr. Trump compare to 65,853,516. That’s about 0.12% of Ms. Clinton’s voters.
Talk about dominance of the 0.1% — there we have it.
Clinton lost because she and her grotesque version of the Democratic Party was not seen by working class citizens as something that would finally turn things around for them.
It seems to be the political version of the neoliberals who still keep denigrating working class citizens as racists and misogynists because they refused to vote for an anti-working class candidate.
I don’t understand how this is a valedictory for the Clinton campaign that it lost a swath of voters Barack Obama held easily against Mitt Romney for years prior. Maybe learn from the kind of populist rhetoric and anti-elitist message both of those effective campaigns used?
Maybe ask why white working class voters are failing to view themselves as racially privileged (though they undeniably are) in an economy that’s increasingly leaving them behind?
No question race and misogyny played a major role in support for the Republican nominee-it always has and always will. More so this year. But let’s not pretend Trump occupies a role they wasn’t paved for decades by the Southern strategy and anti-woman and anti-gay policies of the religious right.
That said, the Greenberg and Drutham data shows there is tremendous overlap between this swath of voters who liked Bernie’s anti-special interest message and folks who are also highly nativist and xenophobic. We need to find a way to appeal to their pocketbooks without sacrificing our hearts and commitment to minority rights.
Tom rightly points out how Bill Clinton did this. Barack Obama did this. And in the primaries, Bernie Sanders did this. The key is finding a candidate who can increase minority turnout while also closing the deficit with blue collar whites. Nobody is arguing we can win a majority-the cultural divide is too wide. But we have to cut the deficit in half if we want to win the electoral college again. It’s not an optional strategy.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Bill Clinton promised to help the working class but his legacy of welfare “reform” and his crime bill coupled with his deregulation of Wall Street and NAFTA can hardly be seen as a boost to the working class.
Along comes President Obama who managed to bail out the banks but strangely virtually no one is prosecuted or jailed for what most anyone can see as criminal acts by the bankers. Then again, working class homes are repossessed by the thousands, all while candidate Clinton refers to “plenty of blame to go around”, (reminds me of Trump’s infamous “both sides” comment), putting the con artists in the banks on the same level as ordinary working class citizens.
And of course, the “great recovery” from the great recession, as we all know, wen to the 1%, not working class citizens.
We have a Hell of a lot of work to do, a Hell of a lot if we want to regain the trust of the working class citizens of this nation.
More lies about what happened to working class families during the administration of Bill Clinton.
No mention from our resident Clinton-basher about what happened to working class families during the preceding 12 years of Ronald Reagan and then George H. Bush. No mention of what would have happened to working class families if Mr. Bush had been re-elected in 1992. No mention of what Bob Dole (remember him?) would have done to working class families.
Meanwhile, we should not forget that this commentator has written, several times, that he was a Rush Limbaugh listener during the Bill Clinton years. Comments like this confirm that history.
In what ways did Clinton’s welfare reform and crime bill help working class families? How did the deregulation of Wall Street help working class families? If all you have is “it was better than Reagan or Bush”, that’s clearly not good enough and why we lost the house, senate, and have Trump in the White House.
We’ve been over this countless times, one more time won’t make a difference.
We have? So your point is that Clinton’s welfare reform and crime bill helped working class families as did the deregulation of Wall Street and you’ve been over the details many times…..
I would think I would recall at least one such post……
I don’t see any claim that this a valedictory for Ms. Clinton.
This piece is talking about a very tightly focused group of voters — self-professed primary supporters of Bernie Sanders who voted for Donald Trump in the general, specifically in MI, WI, and PA. These are most emphatically NOT voters that “Barack Obama held easily against Mitt Romney for years prior”.
Please review the following (emphasis mine):
This block of voters were drawn to Bernie Sanders during the primary campaign, and voted for Mr. Trump in the general.
I enthusiastically agree about the Southern strategy and the anti-woman and anti-gay policies of the religious right. In my view, this piece is about this tiny slice of voters. These are voters who, according to the article, already embraced the Southern strategy. These are voters who did NOT support Barack Obama. The piece offers no data about their attitudes towards gays and women — other than that they chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
You write this:
“Nativist” and “xenophobic”? Those sound like nice-sounding euphemisms that are just lipstick smeared on the pig. “Nativist”? I don’t think you mean people who support the plight of native Americans. I think you mean people who embrace or tolerate white supremacists.
I suggest that the learning here is that the Bernie Sanders campaign attracted short-term support from a demographic that cannot be relied on to win elections and that demands that we betray our core values to satisfy their demands.
This nation is filled with “blue-collar whites” who embrace the values that are dear to we Democrats. Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012 without the voters this poll is talking about.
I think we’re better off mobilizing those who share our values than trying to win over those who do not.
Yeah, we working class types can feel the love…..
About 65 million “working class types” (using our favorite 99% number) felt the love enough to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Yeah, not enough,eh? We came up short, way short if I accept your premise that she was the most qualified and talented person ever to run for the office but she lost to a first timer with no experience and bad haircut. And you want to stay the course! (and deliver a second term to Trump…)
“Way short”? Now you sound like Mr. Trump. She won the popular vote and lost the EC vote by a razor-thin margin.
I have never said that we should “stay the course”.
More of them voted for Obama in 2012 then they did in 2016 for Clinton. We know this since he carried more of them than she did, since he won the states she did not, and exit polling showing as many 8% of Obama voters defecting in the states that mattered.
We have PA officials like Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, Sen Bob Casey, AFLCIO President Trumka, and Scranton native Joe Biden arguing that we lost conservative Democrats and blue collar independents who voted for Obama and defected to Trump.
We can’t have a reality based approach to fixing this real issue if we deny this reality. It also is a tautology that’s is self contradicting.
Either they are racists who aren’t real Democrats so their participation in our primary is irrelevant or they are sour grapes Democrats who disliked that Sanders lost. It cannot be both of those things simultaneously.
I am not trying to argue the primary for an umpteenth time. What I am arguing is the the data is only helpful if we are honest about its implications.
This thread is talking about a much more restricted set of voters than you seem to be responding to.
This thread is talking quite specifically about voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary and Donald Trump in the general. Among THIS group of voters, only about 25% of voters said they approved of Barack Obama.
This thread isn’t talking about “conservative Democrats” or “blue collar independents”.
This thread is talking about voters in WI, MI and PA who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary and then voted for Donald Trump in the general. THIS is part of the reality that we can’t deny.
The implications of THIS data about THIS group of voters are pretty clear:
1. They did not vote for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012 (less than 25% of them said they approve of Barack Obama)
2. They did vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary
3. Nearly 50% of them disagreed with the statement “white people have advantages”
4. They voted for Donald Trump in the general
I enthusiastically agree with you that we must be honest about these implications of this data.
Who said anything about a ‘valedictory,’ even if you do know what that means… and think you’re using it correctly (you’re not).
Bernie Sanders played with fire with talk of ‘revolution’ and angry rhetoric about Clinton. We all got burnt. It was effective for Bernie, for a short time. Then it was not. and not at all for the Democrats.
You want us to burn that way again. Maybe you just ain’t all that smart.
How dare a politician be mildly critical* of an opponent!
*and significantly less harsh than Obama was
In 2008, 25% of Clinton’s primary supporters voted for McCain in the general. Hell, 9% of Obama voters didn’t vote for him in the general. What does that say about them??????
https://twitter.com/natemcdermott/status/900449405874188288
I don’t think Democrats should target these angry, racist people, but we also shouldn’t be targeting moderate Republicans to win either. There’s plenty of people who could come out and who could have made the difference last year. Poor targeting and a campaign of fear-mongering against the opponent wasn’t going to do that. GIVE PEOPLE SOMETHING TO VOTE FOR!!!!!
What do you think it says about them?
Here’s what Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks about some of them:
You think it’s out of the realm of possibility that 25% of Hillary Clinton voters in 2008 did so because faced with the choice between white and black they went for white with a vengeance? First for Clinton and then for McCain? I don’t.
OK, it’s not a political position.
Just don’t deny its validity. Both parties — yes, both parties — need to confront the woeful inadequacy of our government.
I absolutely deny the validity of anger as a political position and, indeed, as an answer to anything: if anger allowed Trump to seize power then it is anger, and not Trump, that is the problem.
Cher announced she and her business will provide sanctuary to Dreamers : ” Those who can must take a Dreamer into their home & protect them ! I’m ready to do this & others in my business will do the same ! SANCTUARY
If the argument is that Clinton lost because Sanders voters went over to Trump after the primary, that may have merit. However, if the assumed reason they did so was because they were racists, misogynists, and bigots, that’s going to be a hard case to prove and in the least, portrays Senator Sanders and many of his supporters past and present as racists, misogynists, bigots instead of the truth. They are staunch supporters of the working class.
Read the thread-starter.
The link there provides evidence (repeated here) that most voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary and Donald Trump in the general did not support Barack Obama.
That group of voters also, by a very large margin, disagreed with this statement: “white people have advantages”. That’s the evidence — characterize that as you will.
The only evidence of whether or not being “staunch supporters of the working class” was relevant is that there is was no observable difference between this group and the others on “Opposition to TPP”.
This piece does provide a reference to another piece (from January of this year) titled Explaining White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism”.
From that paper’s conclusion (emphasis mine):
The evidence points, compellingly, towards the importance of racism and sexism in the electorate in determining the outcome of the 2016 election. We can and should discuss what we DO about that fact, but we should not deny it.
… most of the [dramatic polarization in the vote choices of whites] appears to be the result of racism and sexism in the electorate, especially among whites without college degrees.
That’s the reality that we must all face.
How did all these racists vote for Obama twice and then Trump?
Jeesh! Which part of the following is hard for you to understand: “most voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary and Donald Trump in the general did not support Barack Obama.”
The voters we’re talking about DID NOT vote for Barack Obama.
I’d still like to know why education level plays a role in racism and sexism. Seems to me it should not require a college degree to not be racist or sexist. Pretty sure my 18-year old pre-college self was not racist and sexist only to be enlightened by four years at GWU.
@Christopher: Perhaps you should read more of the literature about racism, sexism, and education. The data really isn’t hard to find and it isn’t even a little bit ambiguous.
Did you read the link I posted above?
I didn’t deny the data; I asked why – it makes no sense.
Then you might be the exception that proves the rule.
I did not meet an openly homosexual person until I was in college. Until I was in college I did not meet a women in a position of power (a dean) who was able to make me respect her.
I have never been racist myself. I guess I’m ‘lucky’ that way. I vividly remember my first experience with ‘racism’ when my mother made mention of a boy name Kwame, whom she taught as a first grade teacher.. Kwame had a crush on her and forthrightly said he wanted to grow up and marry her. My mom may have laughed it off as childish, but she brought it up in the context of ‘not even remotely a possibility’. The laughter, and the joking, of my father, and his drinking buddies, was far more sinister. and had to do with the retribution they might have liked to visit upon him for daring to even voice such thoughts. I remember, clearly, feeling that my parents were being unfair and wrong. I was in the second or third grade, a little older than Kwame, but was, at the time, because of my parents, attending a Catholic school (uniforms and everything). I did, however, have some nascent feelings about Sister Ruth, a lovely and gentle Latina nun who took a particular interest in me… and I wondered, as any child might, if my interest in Sister Ruth might, or should, bring about the kind of reprisals towards me that my fathers drinking buddies hinted should be brought against Kwame for his feelings for my mother.
As much as I pride myself, however, on my lack of racism, I can’t claim to any such lack of sexism… and I straightforwardly fold up any homophobia into that sexism. And it wasn’t until college that I was faced with it.
It was college that exposed me to the problem, gave me the tools to grapple with it and the wider circle of all manner or people to explore different ways of being,,, ways of being different than I had previously accepted as ‘normal’.. I’m sure that, had I not gone to college and stayed within the entirely parochial confines of my ‘working class’ upbringing I would have neither been confronted with the wrongness of it, nor capable of adequately developing the tools to explore options…
OK, for me it just never would have occurred to me or my family to think anything less of women or non-whites. My late grandmother several times mentioned to me that as early as age five I expressed disbelief and incomprehension that something as superficial as skin color would make a whit of difference. The South Pacific song says “you’ve got to be carefully taught” to hate and I never was. I’ve also never known women not to be in positions of authority politically, religiously, in the context of employment, etc. The one group I had to consciously learn to be accepting of is the LGBT community, but even that was when I was still young (I wrote to Clinton asking him to veto DOMA while in high school), but once it’s clear that’s how the Good Lord made them, there’s really only one choice in that regard as well.
I’m not denying that race and misogyny played a decisive role in Trump support. Romney won the votes of people who didn’t want women to work, gays to marry, and what color do you think his 47% remark applied to? He’s quick to condemn Trumps racism now but was AWOL when Gingrich called Obama the food stamp president. All Trump did was take the dog off the whistle.
And he definitely outperformed Romney with white voters on aggregate by doing so. He also was different than Republicans on economics, substantially more moderate than Paul Ryan. Even today he cut a deal with Chuck and Nancy to avert a shutdown that President Ted Cruz would’ve welcomed.
So I think there’s a Ven diagram of popilists, racists, and overlap. We can’t win the racists, we can’t waste too much time on the overlap, but those popilists genuinely liked what Bernie and Trump had to say about getting money out of politics, fighting Wall Street, and fair trade.
It would seem to me fighting on those three issues should be major priorities for our 2018 and 2020 candidates. Bob Casey, Al Franken, and Steve Bullock already found success this way. So did Bill Clinton winning back Reagan Dems in the 1990s. We can actually fight for our principles on both fronts and win.
Let’s recap. I said:
So, in other words, anger can be valid without being a political position. The electorate is furious. We don’t listen. For some people, apparently, there was no more patience with our woeful inadequacy. Fred can downrate me all day if he likes, but that doesn’t help matters.
Anger, like all emotion, is real. In that sense, it is absolutely valid and we must acknowledge it. There may even be kernels of truth in our anger.
Anger passes. The very real consequences of what we do while we’re angry often do not.
That’s why I think it’s crucial that appreciate the distinction between anger and political policy.
Yes of course. But it’s the link between the policy and the anger that concerns me.
Ok. Here’s the link: anger prevents appropriate policy from being implemented. It always has, and it always will.
Senator Sanders thought he could harness anger to propel himself into power… presumably so he could implement the appropriate policies. He failed at that.
You know, when I first penned this diary I thought the pushback would be along the lines of ‘Sen Sanders wasn’t that angry.. You’re making things up.” But nobody has disputed the depth and breadth of Senator Sanders vitriol. Nobody has said it wasn’t that way.
When the angry citizenry was done with the Sen Sanders they voted Trump because he continued to feed their anger. He didn’t feed their need for logical argument or sound policy. He fed their anger and only their anger. Sanders fed their anger for a time and when he was exhausted they searched for another source of nourishment for their anger and found Trump..
It actually speaks very will of Hillary Clintons character that she did not appeal to this anger. She could have…. very easily. But she did not. She didn’t even lose her temper… not even when a troglodyte like Trump was looming over her at the debate.
You are concerned about the link between public policy and anger? The only link is that anger prevents sound public policy. Always
Oh, and yes, anger may not be an answer. But it is a RESPONSE, and I think we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to ask what the electorate was responding to. In short, don’t dismiss the anger just because it’s anger. Ask yourself why people are angry.
This blog and our party is by and large incapable of that kind of self reflection. Far easier to bash the other than see why our nominee was viewed as the lesser of two evils when stacked up against him. Our politics is broken, our political system is widely mistrusted on all sides, and our global governing class has responded poorly to the needs of the working families across the US and Europe. It’s hard to deny that the Chinese and Indian middle classes are growing while ours is stagnating. And the folks who authored the TPP, and even some folks on the left, buy into the idea that this rising global tide will lift all boats. That eventually the workers left behind by these policies will get jobs.
They didn’t. They are trapped in their communities which are now drug and crime ravaged. Inner city blacks in Detroit and Gary were the first communities our country left behind when it deindustrialized. Obama organized in black communities devastated by the first wave of steel mill closures. We do a disservice when we think of deindustrialization as a white problem that whites exclusively suffer from. The black unemployment explosion was immediately followed by the crack epidemic and mass incarceration.
We are now seeing downscale white communities suffer the exact same cycle of despair. And they are absolutely resorting to racial resentment since they feel they are losing their whiteness and the access to middle class prosperity that used to secure. That’s absolutely part of it, the Greenberg surveys are explicit that they hate going to get food stamps like blacks. And they really hate fresh off the boat immigrants are in the same lines.
But the way to cut that resentment is to end the need for food stamp lines entirely by eliminating poverty and redistributing wealth back to the bottom 50% of the country. The way to stop the drug crisis is to pump jobs and investments back into these displaced areas. To connect low cost communities to high paying jobs through American made 21st century infrastructure. It’s such a simple solution that no Democrat or Republican really wants to touch. A Better Deal gets us part of the way, and Krugman has finally woke up to it with his pieces on housing costs, but we really need to think in terms of connectivity. Connecting the places globalization left behind to the global growth engines of our prosperous cities.
And it’ll help reduce the racial resentment that fuels bigots like Trump while actually delivering the economic revolution Sanders promises with policies that will work, unlike many of his.
I mostly agree with this, but … and this is a significant “but” … I think you need to be REALLY careful about your assumptions.
This line jumps out at me: “they hate going to get food stamps like blacks. And they really hate fresh off the boat immigrants are in the same lines.”
You do understand that whites have ALWAYS been the dominant group receiving food stamps, right? You do understand that, in fact, if the number of people ELIGIBLE for food stamps compared to the number of people who sign up for them are partitioned by race, blacks and Hispanics are under-represented. There is a reasonably strong argument to be made that even our social net programs are implicitly racist when measured by their effectiveness at reaching their eligible populations.
While it’s certainly true that in some future Nirvana with no poverty, there will be no food stamp lines, it’s also true that we need to address anger in the meantime.
We need to help whites who hate going to get food stamps “like the black” see that:
1. Needing food stamps is nothing to be ashamed of, and
2. MOST food stamp recipients are white, and
3. Blacks are just as angry at whites as whites are at blacks, and that such anger hurts themselves more than their chosen scapegoat.
I’ve been quite vocal that my mother and sister have been on food stamps and welfare at various times in their lives. Our family is no stranger to the WIC line even when I was coming up and had my father in our household which my older siblings did not. My parents would be impoverished today without Social Security.
I agree with your point 100% that those stereotypes are wrong and untrue. I also think the way to beat them is to recognize the angst they cause and try and cut it off with a more compassionate government than the one we have.
Inserting step 0:
0. The ‘hate’ the whites feel for doing something purported to be ‘like the black’ is based upon a narrative that is an outright racist lie. Any hate and the anger that derives from this untruth is not valid.
Continue…
I would also add a another step: whites loss of privileged status is not oppression; making America equal is not making America less than great…
Slow your roll a bit, JC.
What you say is probably true for SOME people who are outraged. But there are plenty of people who are just pissed, even if they’re not suffering in this economy.
We don’t need to make this a racial discussion.. Yes there are racial issues and they need to be addressed, but that’s a much longer battle. In the short term, we need to:
a. Gain more power.
b. Demonstrate that government can work.
c. Demonstrate that government can do more than work, it can help.
Ok. I would say that’s been my consistent argument. There is a massive majority for more government on the economic Y axis of the Drutman graph. If Bannon recognizes this, so should we.
Speak for yourself, ‘history teacher” and UIP flunkie.
When you learn to read better, then you can come here and say what you think about the capabilities of this blog and ‘our’ party. Until then, refrain from speaking for anyone else, please.
Is the villain here the voter or the candidate? People online are speaking of these 1-in-10 voters as if Bernie Sanders somehow won Trump extra votes. Why aren’t we congratulating Sanders for having a progressive message so attractive that it even would have converted sexists and racists to our side?
This is more evidence to me that Sanders, an unapologetic Progressive, was the antidote to Trump’s campaign of Hate.
And all the more reason Trump voters can’t be let off the hook. Many states allow unenrolleds to vote. They could have chosen Dem ballots and voted for Sanders rather than GOP ballots and voted for Trump. Enough of them would have given Sanders the Dem nomination and denied Trump the GOP’s. As a Clinton supporter I would have been disappointed, but not angry or scared.
Was it the progressivism of his message or the fury of his tone? Which do you think got the more immediate and more fervent response? This is what I mean when I say anger is not a political position
Maybe, just maybe, people referenced the ‘unapologetic’ part more than the progressive part…. But, like I says, anger is not a political position.
Sigh…
If any of y’all bothered to actually READ what I wrote you would not be, again, re-hashing debates you didn’t win last time. But then again, in a medium solely comprised of the written word, few of you read very well anyways. I’m sure you all pride yourself on the technical ability to use your eyes to consume lots of words quickly, but you don’t comprehend and you certainly don’t contemplate. You scan quickly and pop-off on whatever fragment most fits your chosen meme, theme, dream or scheme or whatever.
I said, quoth: “The media is all over the ‘did this cost Clinton the votes?” which is reductive and irrelevant. ” This was NOT a cue to re-hash the debate. In fact, it was the opposite.
And then I said. “We’re told, now, we gotta get all ‘Sanders style’ for 2018 but what, exactly is that? And to what effect?” Some old curmudgeon bungies into the Democratic Primary (Party, even) to scold and to whip up fervor and foment. He had some apparent success, but come to find out, not so much as we thought, and certainly didn’t translate any of it to the nominee. ( If you contrast that with the ’08 primary, which was longer and closer, and some argued rougher, in the end the loser (Clinton) brought it all back home to the winner (Obama). ) But we’re told, repeatedly, ‘be like Bernie’ to get progressive wins when in fact, by all appearances, the effect of his accomplishment has been to set back the cause of progressivism.
The point of the entire diary being to point out: the efforts by Sen Sanders did not affect the purported outcome. Or, put another way, it isn’t the success story you think it is.
And, now, we should move forward with that? Why?
Because. Anger. I guess.
We don’t know the answer.
But we do know, both from the energy Sanders generated as an outsider, and from the eventual election loss, that we need something different. I really don’t think Sanders-ism, for lack of a better word, is what we’re pushing for. (I know I’m not.) I just want the party to wake up a little, and listen to people, and not be dismissive.
Thank you JimC.
I really think his diehard supporters reading a mandate for socialism are mistaken. It’s that he was the outsider and Hillary was the insider. And in the general she was the insider while Trump was the outsider.
So in 2020 Trump is just another politician with broken promises and we need to nominate an outsider to beat him. Not sure that’s any of the three front runners (Warren, Biden or Bernie).
I understand the appeal of such shorthand phrases and simplistic analysis. I fear it leads to gravely dysfunctional government. Donald Trump is far more than “just another politician with broken promises” — in 2020 or today.
People who cast their vote for Mr. Trump “because he was an outsider” put an utterly incompetent, ignorant, pathological liar (and bigot) in the Oval Office.
When we’re talking about “insiders” and “outsiders”, surely basic fitness for office is important.
I may have said this elsewhere, but I think the whole qualifications argument backfired on HRC. Voters agreed she was qualified, I think, but she was qualified to maintain the status quo, and beyond that, the things that established those qualifications were on trial.
Look at our last three presidents:
Bill Clinton beating George H.W. Bush, easily the most “qualified” candidate of our lifetimes.
George W. Bush, a figureheard governor of Texas, beating Al Gore, former Senator and Vice President.
Barack Obama, a first-term Senator beating John McCain, a long-serving Senator.
In short, qualifications schmalifications.
Fair enough.
Surely Mr. Trump nails down the other extreme, though (although it was George W. Bush that Mr. Putin tweaked with his comment about US officials not knowing the difference between “Austria” and “Australia”).
Perhaps we can agree that our candidate should be more qualified than Mr. Trump and less qualified than George H. Bush?
I’m getting punchy tonight. 🙂
In your last graph, I think you might mean GHW Bush and not his son, GWB. There are not many who reached the Presidency with lower qualities than GW Bush and none with better experiential qualifications than his father.
Then again, it has been a long time since we had a President who personified heart and soul. I would be thrilled to be able to vote for a candidate like FDR knowing full well the Oliver Wendel description of him: “A second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.”
I attempted to present continuum, with Donald Trump anchoring the “least qualified” and George H. W. Bush anchoring the “most qualified”.
I agree with your characterizations of both George H. W. Bush and his son.
Qualified means experience, nothing to do with the status quo one way or the other. Speaking for myself, she and Sanders could have completely swapped positions and I still would have been with her.
Your post was bad. The most reasonable read is that it was an attack on Sanders, not an attack that isolates his fervor from everything else. But sure, criticize our reading comprehension ability and don’t at all reflect on what you wrote.
Did Sanders not actively campaign for Clinton? Polling also shows that more (about twice as many) Clinton primary backers defected from the Dem in the general than did Sanders’ backers. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, 2008 had something to do with there being an effective candidate who ran a very good general election campaign.
Where was single payer before he ran? Where is it now? A $15 minimum wage? More talked about and advocated for now or less?
Agreed. I really don’t get this line of argument. I’ve been arguing for the last 7 months that Bernie-Trump voters were the new swing voters and we should appeal to them. Petr and Tom have argued that is foolish and we should focus on increasing turnout among minorities already heavily concentrated in blue states. Now that the data is proving us right-they are instead blaming these voters they pretended didn’t exist.
This isn’t a line of attack against Bernie. It either proves that Bernie would’ve won the general election, sine a genuine outsider populist beats a fraud any day of the week, or it proves that these voters ere so sour on Clinton than anybody else would do.
I hope we can all agree this data should throw cold water on any Hillary 2020 talk. If anything, Bernie is more likely to deliver the states Trump flipped based on this. From a cold electoral calculus-he was and remains the safer bet.
That said, from a policy standpoint I would like to see someone new. Especially since diehard Hillary and Bernie supporters are movements own worst enemies. I’d vote for her again if she won the nomination, and I’d vote for him again if he ran for it. Ideally I would like to work with Hillary supporters on someone new. But this data shows that his ideas, his direction, and his rhetoric are far more appealing than her baggage.
I also think everyone overestimated how happy people were with the Obama administration and our geopolitical and socioeconomic status quo. A lot of folks were left behind by this recovery, and they are killing themselves with actual opiates and the opiate of nativism and racism.
What I’ve said is that we should rebuild our party from the ground up. I’ve said that we remain faithful to our values. I’ve said that we should have zero tolerance for racism, bigotry, and xenophobia.
In my view, there are two clear reasons why WI, MI, and PA went for Donald Trump in 2016:
1. Racist white Republicans who did not turn out for John McCain or Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012 did turn out for Donald Trump in 2016, and
2. Urban minority voters who turned out in droves to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 stayed home in 2016.
That is not a proposal that “we should focus on increasing turnout among minorities already heavily concentrated in blue states.”, it is a statement of fact.
My proposal is that we focus on increasing our turnout among working-class people, especially in these 3 states, and others as well. We should focus on our extreme wealth and income disparity — bearing in mind that minority voters and women are disproportionally affected by that. The GOP is waging war on blacks, Hispanics, and women — and perpetuating our wealth and income disparity is one of their go-to weapons.
You’ve not yet acknowledged what the piece cited in this thread starter shows — that the “Bernie-Trump” are not “swing voters” at all. They are Republicans who didn’t like Barack Obama. About half of them are racist — how else do you characterize somebody who disagrees with the statement that “white people have advantages”?
This data isn’t “proving you right”. I certainly don’t see how this data leads to a conclusion that these “Bernie-Trump” voters are worth focusing on, particularly if your proposal is to “appeal to them” rather than let them come to us.
I certainly hope that Mr. Sanders doesn’t run again. I feel the same about Ms. Clinton and, for that matter, Mr. Biden. Their times have come and gone.
I don’t see anything in “this data” that supports your last sentence. Nothing.
This data — not some other data, not what you or I want to see, but THIS DATA — shows that Bernie-Trump voters in WI, MI and PA were never Democrats, did not support Barack Obama, and didn’t care about TPP. Half of them disagree that “white people have advantages”.
In my view, this data demolishes your claim that we should pay any attention at all to these “Bernie-Trump” voters.
There was also Comey’s 11th hour rehash of the emails and I think a sense among some they could stay home and acquiesce to Clinton’s election without actually having to vote for her. To me it’s important to remember polls showed her leading in those three infamous states right up to the day before. The Clinton campaign made every reasonable decision based on the available data.
Arguing that the Clinton campaign was good (or that HRC was a good candidate) is seriously terrifying for the future prospects of the Democrats.
I don’t see anybody arguing that “the Clinton campaign was good” or that “HRC was a good candidate”.
What I see is some hard data that informs our speculation about how much attention we should pay to the “Bernie-Trump” voter group.
Yes and we should be winning them back. This data proves my point not yours!
How on earth do you conclude that this validates her terrible strategy is cognitive dissonance of the first order. The Democratic party will continue to lose and will deserve to lose if it follows your advice of doing the same old thing and hoping it works.
This data proves beyond any argument that Bernie and is arguments win over Trump voters. If the party actually cared about winning elections it would be embracing him instead of charging people $2400 an appearance to bitch about him and Comey.
The Clinton machine once again is putting its own financial self interest over the interests of the party it claims to serve. You don’t see Jeb Bush profiting off his failure, why should she?
No. You can’t win them back. But even if I thought you could I’d say no because for every one of the nearly 63 million Trump voters to whom you pander you will alienate MORE of the nearly 66 million voters who responded to Hillary Clintons campaign.
Nearly 66 million votes. less than 70K difference between Obama ’12 and Clinton ’16… or a difference of less than .001 percent. Hardly in keeping with a ‘terrible strategy.’
And cognitive dissonance can’t be ordered. That’s what makes it unpredictable.
Where is the party charging $2400 to complain about Sanders and Comey. Whether HRC was a good candidate or not depends on how you mean. If it means she was stellar at the art of running for President then she may have a few weaknesses, but if you mean she was the strongest choice to actually be President with running only being incidental to how you get there in our system, she was among the best.
Are you trying to add innumeracy to your illiteracy?
MORE THAN 65 Million people voted for Hillary Clinton. Yet you want to jerk off the others, who made demonstrably bad decisions based on demonstrably bad information and demonstrably bad motives. What affect, do you think, that will have on the 65 million whom we both agree, did the right thing here? You want to punish them and coddle the deplorables and their (deplorable) hurt feelings.
Anger is not a political position. Nor is stupidity.
LOLOL. Yes, President Clinton is great and ran an incredible campaign.
How on earth does this make any sense?
Either they are relevant or they are not. They can’t be irrelevant and the single biggest factor in her defeat simultaneously.
You are conflating this Block of voters with Block #1. They are not the same. We’ve been over this, many of them are angry popilists happy to shake shit up, many are racists, some are both. They are not all racists as youbcharge nor are they all angry populist as John assumes.
I’ve repeatedly linked to studies that back up this phenomenon with real data along with anecdotal explanations in the states that count.
You’re right 20,000 morr black voters in Milwaukee would’ve made a difference. They also thought Hillary Clinton was a status quo Democrat who didn’t give a shit about them. She didn’t bother campaigning in their state, let alone their neigjvorgood, so how can we blame them?
You want to get serious about reaching out to black voters you shouldn’t call them super predators and should white splain to BLM as she did.
You want to reach out to black auto workers in Michigan you shouldn’t call them deplorable for fearing immigration and trade.
The Clinton’s and their corporate cronies in the DNC were the single biggest barriers to a truly grassroots Democratic party. The donor class and its interests are widely different from the bottom up needs of the communities both parties have left behind for the last the decades.
Nobody will argue with your passionate pleas that Trump is evil and opposing him is righteous. But simply being opposed to evil is not enough. You can’t oppose the rhetoric of white supremacy while enabling it with policies that favor big business over people and jailers over the communities of color that are jailed.
I fear we’re talking past each other again.
The piece cited in the thread-starter is very explicit. It is data gathered about voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary and Donald Trump in the general in WI, MI, and PA.
That’s the group we’re talking about. This piece doesn’t tell us who its “Bernie-Trump” respondents voted for in 2008 or 2012, but it DOES tell us that they disapproved of Barack Obama.
This piece doesn’t tell us that this block of respondents are explicitly racist, but it DOES tell us that about half of them disagree with the statement that “white people have advantages”.
I didn’t say that all the voters in this “Bernie-Trump” group are racists. About HALF of them said they were, and I repeated that.
I also didn’t say that we should reach out to the minority voters in these three states who couldn’t be bothered to show up in 2016. I am, frankly, pissed off at them. I think that any minority voter, or any women voter, who couldn’t see that Donald Trump was an unmitigated DISASTER for them should have thought about that when they were deciding to stay home.
At what point in this process do we admit that votes have consequences, that each of us bears SOME responsibility for the choices we make, and that the consequence of not voting (which is what those urban minority voters in WI, MI, and PA did) is to completely cede power to those who DO vote?
I think that focusing on the Bernie-Trump cohort studied in this piece is a wasted effort.
Yes, James. I argue that it is foolish because IT IS A THING NOT POSSIBLE TO DO. It is an impossible task.
A ‘swing’ from Sanders (Angry Socialist) to Trump (Angry Fascist) is a swing too far. A swing powered by something other than political calculus and rational thought, and powered by something which you’ve resisted acknowledging for 7 months and, once having acknowledged, you tepidly dismiss as irrelevant.
And trying to win them back is going to cost you much more in non-racist, non-sexists votes… you know, the nearly 66 million (a majority) who voted for Clinton: which votes you ferociously dismiss as irrelevant.
I think we can be a working class party that strongly rejects racism and xenophobia. I would argue we have never been that party in the past, and neither of the candidates we supported in the last primary fully embraced that vision. I think that is the best takeaway from this data-which shows a huge deficit in working class trust, and the fact that minority turnout dropped substantially despite the threat of Trump.
I think we can and should engage working class black voters a lot more than we currently are. And I think the TNC piece we are discussing elsewhere on this blog gives us a great roadmap to checking and chucking our white privilege once and for all at the door.
Trump was and is the most overtly white supremacist candidate to run for President since Wallace. Yet the candidate our party nominated was unable to inspire sufficient black turnout or Latino turnout to beat that threat. She managed to lose the votes of white people in all demographics and genders across the board, far worse than Barack Obama did, who managed to win the presidency twice despite the most racist opposition ever arranged against a sitting President.
So I think we have to recognize that there are certain strategies that work and certain strategies that won’t work. I think after Charlottesville it is next to impossible to divorce this presidency from its racism. Neoconservative foreign policy expert Elliot Cohen had no problem challenging his friends Kelly, McMaster and Mattis to resign rather than serve a racist anti-semite President on WBUR the other day.
Why can’t Democrats start making that attack? Why can’t Democrats obstruct every single nominee this White House puts forth? Those accusing me of ignoring racism also whither at the prospect of getting angry to defend our country or obstructing this president. Either we fight or we don’t fight. There is no longer a sane center to salvage.
At the same time we fight back and fight harder to protect minorities, why can’t we also say a firm no to continuing to rely on corporate cash and corporate benefactors to run our campaigns? Why can’t we articulate a foreign policy that rejects false military solutions to conflicts like North Korea, Iran, or the continued quagmire in Afghanistan? Why can’t we pressure Israel to make concessions? Why can’t we embrace the labor movement instead of holding it at arms length? Why can’t Medicare for All be a litmus test as strong as our commitment to defending abortion rights and gay rights? Why can’t we push for a truly progressive education system that empowers teachers and cuts down on teaching to the test? Why can’t we actually propose trade policies that make sense for workers and the environment as well as our foreign policy interests and business? Why can’t we propose a radically more compassionate approach to drug addiction and put so many imprisoned people back to work and off the streets? Why can’t we protect a truly universal right to free speech while at the same time being more forceful in exercising our right to protest and counter protest?
I think too often we look to individual candidates or political parties as saviors for our chronic civic indifference, racist and sexist power structures, and the corrosion of our democracy by corporate power. All of these issues don’t start or end with Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton. They start and end with us. And it’s time for us to get angry and take our country back from the oligarchs and racists alike. Many of whom aid and abet one another. The agents of intolerance as well as the agents of greed. We need a real spiritual awakening and spiritual cleanse of the original sins that this country was founded on. Indifference to black, brown, female, and indigenous lives and unfettered capitalism indifferent to labor. It’s all been the same fight and always will be. We need candidates, campaigns, and above all citizens capable of recognizing this and willing to get angry and fight back.
And I think you are about as wrong as you can be, whilst still remaining coherent. Y0u spent the last 8 months stridently rejecting the notion that the other side is a white working class party that strongly EMBRACES racism and xenophobia, and sexism.
You, first, rejected that notion and then, after being forced to confront it, you continue to act as though racism and xenophobia are just these add-on things we have to deal with, over and above, the normal, everyday, give-and-take of politics, as though racism and sexism are just a strong wind at a ball game: something aside from the rules of the game that has to be taken into account only when it affects the game.
It’s not that way at all: we’re actually talking about things that have defined the rules, as we know them.
You think that’s her fault?
I think it’s your fault. It has taken you 7 months to come around to the notion that maybe, sorta, could be, racism and sexism had something to do with her loss. You dismissed the possibility at the time, and fought the possibility for months.
And it’s her fault that she didn’t see a threat you, and I, dismissed at the time?
It’s too easy by half to say it’s her fault after swastikas are flying and neo-Nazis are running people down in the street. But it was impossible to get you to even countenance the idea at the time.
Once again we saw two different races. I think both Sanders and Clinton were strongly pro-worker and anti-racism.
@”Yet the candidate our party nominated was unable to inspire sufficient black turnout or Latino turnout to beat that threat. ”
Sorry, this is just back-asswards.
In the 2016 election, of ALL elections, black and Latino who stayed home — especially in WI, MI, and PA, have only themselves to blame. They figured out how to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and and 2012.
In my view, it is patronizing and infantilizing these voters to say that it’s the job of the candidate to inspire them to turn out.
No. A thousand times no. It is the job of each and every voter — and especially of each and every Black and Latino voter — to inspire THEMSELVES to turn out in every national election. Especially when the choice is as stark as the choice was in 2016, and when the nation is as racist and bigoted against Blacks and Latinos as it is today.
As others have said here, do you really believe that “illegals” from Ireland are what the GOP bigots have in mind? Why is it so darn hard to admit that it is MEXICANS — “Wetback” — that these bigots are attacking? Do you think people want to send Dreamers back to Austria, or Poland, or similar white European nations?
Of COURSE not. It’s Hispanics that Donald Trump and the GOP are targeting.
Like it or not, we are a racist and bigoted nation. One of our parties has been pandering to, celebrating, and enabling those racists and bigots since the Nixon era. The other party has been doing all in its power, however imperfectly, to fight racism and bigotry during that same time.
Who was the enemy in the illegal Contra war, what party waged that illegal war, and what party tried to stop it? What party and what presidents have been trying to make our immigration policies sane? What party and what presidents have using Blacks and Hispanics as scapegoats?
Was it a Democrat who pardoned Mr. Arpiao?
Blacks and Hispanics who had an opportunity to vote for HRC in WI, MI, and PA and who stayed home have only themselves to blame for what is happening now.
Their decision to stay home is on THEIR backs, not Ms. Clinton’s.
Again. Maybe, just fucking maybe, the candidate inspired people to come out and vote.
This thread is reinforcing many fears I have about Democrats. Any soul-searching that could result from 2016 is not happening and we are going to repeat all of the mistakes in 2018 and again in 2020.
Lawdy, lawdy, hep us from gettin 66 million votes,and a majority, agin. What a mess that would be…. .
I see. So you double down on the premise that it is our fault that these voters stayed home.
Maybe, just fucking maybe, voters need to act like adults instead of toddlers.
Do you really think what you are doing is “soul searching”? Because what I see you doing is digging on attitudes that you and others harangued us with. More attacks on Ms. Clinton. More attacks on everybody except the people who actually make the decision to vote or not vote.
I, frankly, don’t see any “soul searching” at all.
Blame the voters, never the candidate. It always works out well.
It appears to me that you are unable to distinguish between “treat with respect” and “blame”. It depends on what you mean by “works out well”. If we respect the voters, then we hold them responsible for their choice. When you characterize my stance as “blaming the voters”, you patronize and infantilize those voters.
There were three realistic choices for most of 2016 (alphabetically) — Hilary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump. By the November election, there were two choices.
A large number of minority voters voted in 2008 and 2012 and could have voted in 2016. They knew, as did the rest of us, who the candidates were. They chose to stay home. You blame Ms. Clinton.
I think its long past time to stop making excuses for black and Hispanic voters in WI, MI, and PA who chose, of their own volition, to stay home. They made a choice, and we all have to live with that choice.
That is not “blaming” anybody. It’s reminding us that votes have consequences and that in a democratic republic, our decisions matter.
Those minority voters could have and should have voted in 2016, just like they voted in 2008 and 2012. That’s on them, not Ms. Clinton and not the Democratic Party.
A better candidate and better campaign would have had those 08 and 12 voters coming out (plus others) and this election would not have been close. The Democrats chose a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign, and who is still blaming Sanders, Comey, Russia, and even Matt Lauer for the loss. You, and many others on this site don’t think there were problems and seem inclined to make similar choices in upcoming elections.
I didn’t say there weren’t problems. I always hope that our candidates will be amazing. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. Would-a, could-a, should-a — we had the candidates we had and the campaign we had.
Still, in the 2016 election, the choice was between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton was far and away a better candidate than Donald Trump, especially for black and Hispanic voters.
Had those black and Hispanic voters in WI, MI, and PA gotten themselves to the polls and voted, the outcome would have been different. That outcome is the DIRECT result of the choice those black and Hispanic voters made.
The outcome had nothing to do with Comey, Russia, Matt Lauer, HRC, or anything else. Donald Trump is president because THOSE VOTERS chose to stay home.
The Democrats chose the best candidate of the primary field (yes, she was and yes, they did). Do I want better next time around? Sure. Nevertheless, the bottom line of EVERY election is the voters. Not the campaigns. Not the media. Not the debates. Not the candidates.
The voters.
One quibble: I do think Comey’s 11th hour comments about emails may have swung the election not only just enough to make some sit on their hands, but late enough for it not to register in the polls. We must never forget that not only did she win the national popular vote, but was leading in those states until the day before.
Yes, it’s true that the comments from Mr. Comey hurt.
But still, the point is that the voter segment we’re talking about sat on their hands instead of voting. I’m just not buying arguments that this was caused by anything except a choice made by each of those voters.
I don’t think that choice was caused by anything external.
If we want to win, we need candidates who inspire and campaigns that are competent. Your argument is that those don’t matter, which makes no sense.
I didn’t say that candidates who inspire and campaigns that are competent “don’t matter”. Of course we need candidates who inspire and campaigns that are competent. Ms. Clinton was inspiring enough, and her campaign competent enough, that a majority of American voters chose her in 2016.
The attacks like this on Ms. Clinton as a candidate who allegedly did not sufficiently “inspire” voters overlook a very large group voters who she very MUCH inspired — women. Especially professional women, who each and every day face the same obstacles faced by Ms. Clinton. In my view, it is not coincidental that those berate Ms. Clinton completely ignore that large group of voters &8212; they’re just women, after all — many of them even college educated women with an attitude. America is full of men — and yes, women — who feel that way. We even have some here at BMG.
The world is full of things we do that matter, and that when done imperfectly do not “cause” a particular outcome.
You seek to blame Ms. Clinton personally and deride her campaign as incompetent because this specific group of voters decided to stay home. I think that your posture patronizes and infantilizes this group of voters.
As much as we hate to admit it, we are going to lose close elections from time to time. When we do a post-mortem of those elections, there will always be geographically specific demographic groups that, in hindsight, turned out to be the or a deciding factor in the election. We cannot, in foresight, identify and win over each of those groups. If we could, we would never lose another election.
One egregious failure of this approach is that by focusing on the failures, it ignores the many other areas where the same candidate and campaign produced a far more successful outcome.
At the end of the day, I suggest that we must:
1. Do the best we can to choose candidates who are competent, qualified, and inspiring
2. Run campaigns that are competent and inspiring
3. Recognize that the final choice is ALWAYS with each individual voter. When a voter stays home or votes for a different candidate than we wanted, the responsibility for that decision lies with the voter, not our candidate nor our campaign.
We don’t know what caused the urban minority voters in WI, MI, and PA to turn out for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. We don’t know what caused those same voters to not turn out in 2016. What we DO know is that nearly all of those voters who got themselves to the polls in 2008 and 2012 could have turned out to vote for Ms. Clinton in 2016, and chose not to.
You characterize that as a personal failure of Ms. Clinton and an institutional failure of the Democratic Party that nominated her. I characterize that as choice made by the voters who decided to stay home.
I stand by my characterization.
Your constant insinuations that criticisms of Clinton are sexist are very tiresome. Sexism played a big role, no doubt, but she was still an awful candidate, ran a bad campaign, and was running against the person best able to exploit all of her electoral weaknesses (yes, including exploiting rampant misogyny).
As far as Clinton being uniquely inspiring among women as you claim, she lost to Trump overall among white women and she received less support from women than Obama did in ’08 and ’12.
I think the biggest mistake of the last couple years was Clinton deciding to run and major Democratic donors deciding to back her and push Biden out of the race. Not running the popular VP of a popular administration is the dumbest thing a party can do, and the Democrats did it to back Clinton. It is a historically tragic decision, and it was an institutional one. (The storyline about why Biden didn’t run evolved to be a story about grieving Beau’s death but early reports were about him being pushed out, including by Obama, and in interviews about it now, you can tell how mad Biden is.)
Yes we do. Obama was an awesome candidate and ran a great campaign, including doing the bare minimum of campaigning – showing up in the areas you need to win or not running a 100% negative campaign over the final six weeks. Clinton and Trump were historically disliked by the electorate, and Clinton ran an awful campaign.
I hope we don’t run candidates hated by independents with tons of baggage and self-inflicted wounds (stupid fucking email server, closeness to Wall St) and I really really hope we stop turning to the same Dem campaign managers and consultants who make a ton of money and keep getting hired no matter their failings. I think we will because too many Democrats and Democratic donors have shown no interest in changing course.
Whatever.
6 6s for the above comment by Tom!