Back in 2010, during the special election contest between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown, among other election activities, I stood for many hours on street corners with Coakley banners. I and my colleagues, and probably many reading this as well, suddenly found ourselves subject to an ongoing torrent of taunts, threats, “finger pointing,” and other verbal harassment by a seemingly unending stream of mostly guys in pick-up trucks with American flags waving from the cargo hold. While our local Brown supporters were generally a bit less aggressive, there was nevertheless an edge to their presence on the same or opposing street corners that was new in two decades of experience of local politics in our sleepy Metrowest town, and very disconcerting. The “Brownies” as we began to call all of them, were all about “Taking America Back,” and the level of aggressiveness was alarming.
While Scott Brown was off-putting and wrong in so many ways, he was not demagogic and so the fervor and implicitly violent enthusiasm of some of his supporters was unexpected. But I, and everyone I knew, responded to these taunts and provocations with friendly waves and “Have a nice day.” We were all very clear that we did not want to get into reacting in some equivalent or otherwise hostile manner that would further provoke them. Nothing ever escalated, but the unrelenting ugliness of some of the Brown supporters made it that much more difficult to accept that Scott Brown won and I remember writing a letter to the editor of our local weekly saying, essentially, that despite the ugliness of the campaign and the setback of a Brown win, we would regroup for the next election and that we would not “go back.” Thankfully, Elizabeth Warren won the rematch with Brown in 2012.
Fast forward to today and think about the tone and example being set by Donald Trump for the upcoming general election. Unlike the (thankfully) relatively milk-toasty Scott Brown, Trump has been pretty systematically priming and encouraging very aggressive and often violent behavior by some of his supporters. Trump is a demagogue, who has shown he is naturally inclined to encourage and leverage the intimidation and violence amongst his supporters in is quest for personal glory and power. (See the very interesting analysis of this here: http://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/3/1/11140876/trump-demagogue).
Given the preview we saw in the Brown campaign, and given how Trump is acting, I believe that we are in for a very, very nasty general election campaign, not just here in Massachusetts, but all around the country. The same people who were so threateningly “juiced” by Scott Brown’s candidacy, are likely to be much further amped-up. And, nationwide, if Trump becomes the Republican nominee, the stakes for his supporters will be much higher than in the primary. The level of aggressiveness, threatening and intimidating behavior could dramatically escalate.
So as Democrats, the question is, do we need to prepare for this? Do we need to begin preparing for the possibility of a startling level of aggressive confrontation, intimidation, and provocation? I am beginning to think so.
Make no mistake, intense aggressiveness, even that which we have seen at Trump rallies, can be very intimidating. It can cause people to avoid being visible in support of one’s candidate. It can cause people to keep their heads down and uninvolved. It can keep people away from the polls. It can cause otherwise good and decent people to react badly or in ways that serve to escalate the threats and create further intimidation and reaction. In the face of mass and organized intimidation, it is not enough simply to steel oneself to this seeming inevitability. In the context of a campaign, we must look to help one another and all of our voters and communities to manage and cope with tactics that are anathema to a civil democratic process.
Back in the Vietnam and civil rights era, the threat and reality of violence was ubiquitous, from the threat of being assaulted for being a hippie, to horrible beatings and murders of civil rights workers and champions.
Martin Luther King and many others modeled non-violence and positive, peaceful engagement as the alternative and best path towards a better future. This model was really hard. Adopting it not just in theory, but in practice, required extensive discussion, reflection, training, and reinforcement. It was extensively taught and work-shopped in communities around the country and reinforced with trainings before every demonstration or sit-in, etc. Still, many people had their heads bashed-in or worse. Without this modeling, training, and ongoing reinforcement and solidarity with others pursuing the same peace course, the capacity of people to stand-up to the intimidation would have been impossible. Back then, especially horrifying was that often, public policy was misguided, and all too often government officials turned a blind eye to abuses – or even committed or sponsored some of them. Thankfully, this does not appear to be a major issue at this time. However, uprising and the type of campaign that Trump is leading is ominous enough all by itself, and we underestimate it at our peril.
It sickens me very much to say this, but I think we need to prepare ourselves for some of the worst (un)civil ugliness we have seen in many decades. Among other things, I would hope we would start discussing this at the state committee and town/city committee levels, in concert with statewide party leadership, as well as nationally. We might begin conversations with other civic organizations, community leaders, and officials. We should start planning trainings on how to deal with provocation and intimidation. The actions of individuals and some small groups at Trump rallies to date, as well as those at the larger intervention of anti-Trump protesters at the recent Chicago Trump event need to be understood and analyzed for whether or not, when and how, there are lessons to bring forward. It would be important to try to reach out to Republican Party organizations at local, state, and national levels to try to work out agreements on principles of civil campaign conduct, for instance.
If things do start moving in a menacing direction, we should be prepared to mobilize larger solidarity initiatives and public demonstrations designed to call-out and defuse the politics of demagogy and violent intimidation. If such politics do emerge, we should also be engaging with law enforcement. Obviously, all of this would need to be informed by and work to inform, the messaging and electoral strategy of the Democratic candidate.
It could well be, and I certainly hope, that this is an overreaction and that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, etc. But if not, we must go into this election prepared. I know from the experience of the Brown Campaign that the shock of the menacing and intimidation factor can have a major deterrent and disengaging effect on unwary and unprepared volunteers, communities, and voters. Mass intimidation can interfere with voter outreach and GOTV efforts, and keep our voters from the polls, and lead to electoral defeat.
There is a meme circulating through Facebook to the effect that, “If you ever wondered about the Civil Rights movement and what role you would have played in it, this is it.” Unfortunately, it looks like it’s time to dust off some of the old non-violent action manuals, update our knowledge and training for this new, emerging situation, and prepare to defend and promote our civil, voting, and constitutional rights in the context of the 2016 presidential election.
I can’t believe I just wrote that.
Go volunteer as an escort at a health clinic where they provide abortions. It will test your ability to handle stress, and dispel any lingering illusions about the other side.
Since you mention it: One of those clinics once asked me to help train volunteers for this purpose, and I did crack open those old nonviolence training manuals, even down to the old “hassle lines” from civil right days.
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Will you vote for Trump in the general, Porcupine?
of amping up?
Voted for Anderson in 1980. Depends on alternatives in November
So as a Republican, you see Trump as quite possibly a better exemplar of what you want the party to be than Ronald Reagan was. Interesting.
The Clintons and their ThirdWayDNC have done whatever they can to @#$% with Bernie – #$%&ing with the debates, @#$%ing with Bernie’s mailing list, calling Bernie and his supporters racist and sexist, lying that Bernie never fought for civil rights, lying that he’s a fan of the minuteman militia, lying that he takes money from the wealthy elites, lying that he wants to lock up undocumented immigrants forever, and so forth.
Hopefully Bernie can overcome this and become our nominee. Otherwise, we’ll have the sad situation of a Democratic nominee who’s far to the right of the likely Republican nominee on starting wars and sending jobs offshore.
And who might get indicted at any moment for her jaw-dropping mail server stunt. And the Clinton Foundation? LOL!
And who has almost zero track record of getting anything helpful done through her years of public service – Bernie’s been too polite to call this out, but her Republican opponent surely will.
this primary has been bad, you’d be spending the next 8 months wetting your pants if Sanders ended up the nominee.
Sanders is done. I’m glad that he’s continuing his campaign, but it’s time to stop stamping your foot and saying, “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”
lying, and incompetence. And are confused between the concepts of reporting the truth and bed wetting.
It happens. Often, apparently.
Helps explain why the country is in the state it’s in, no?
You sound like a right-winger: “the concepts of reporting the truth.” Facts can be reported, truth rarely.
Arguing with you would be no different than arguing with my FoxNew-watching brother-ln-law. You present your biases as facts and call it truth: “war-for-kicks, lying and incompetence.”
You exhibit the classic traits of the marginalized left: 1) an unwarranted confidence in your opinions 2) a belief that revolutionary change will fix things 2) an off-puttingly strident tone.
Such is the intellectual consistency of the Third Way, well done.
So, to sum up… Clinton cheerled the most murderous US policy disaster of the past five decades, and highly deserves to be President.
I, on the other hand, suck and wet my pants.
Got it.
He said you SOUND LIKE a right-winger (which you do), and he said you “exhibit the classic traits of the marginalized left”, which you also do.
Your response exemplifies precisely what mark-bail is talking about.
Running an establishment insider candidate against a charismatic outsider when the nation is in a populist mood has been tried a few times in the past and it never wins. But you and others are insisting that this time, doing the same thing will yield a different result.
Can you please clarify what campaigns you have in mind?
More specifically, please cite a “charismatic outsider” nominated by either party comparable to Mr. Trump.
I ask this because the most extreme “outsider” I can recall was Barry Goldwater — his opponent, LBJ, was as “establishment” as any candidate could be (when the phrase ‘the Establishment” came into our lexicon it referred to LBJ), and LBJ won in a landslide.
Ronald Reagan was charismatic, but was no outsider. Hillary Clinton is no Jimmy Carter. Surely you are not attempting to compare the current campaign to the 1980 Reagan/Carter race.
So what campaign DO you have in mind?
the primary is over here. What are you guy’s trying to prove? That you’re right and everyone else it wrong? That Bernie supporters are better than Clinton supporters? The war may not be over the battle is done in Massachusetts.
No matter how many half-thoughts you and other Bernists put together here, they don’t matter. All the kvetching and complaints about Clinton are days late and many dollars short. It’s time to start deciding if you’re going to learn the game and play it or stand on the sidelines and complain when your side loses. If Bernie wins, I’ll wholeheartedly support him. We just had our caucus this morning. One of the more radical members of our committee–a Raging Granny, a frequent protester, and a Bernie supporter–said, I hope we’ll come together and support whichever Democrat gets the nomination.
And won’t be until June. I don’t recall anyone here asking me to suck it up for HRC in 2008 just because she carried MA. That ultimately didn’t prevent my preferred candidate from being nominated and winning the general. We had the tired electability argument thrown against him as well, even though that was fundamentally a change election and a rejection of the bipartisan Washington establishment that screwed up in Iraq. Now we are seeing a sound rejection, in both primaries, of the tired Washington establishment that has thrown the working class under the bus.
I respect where you’re coming from Mark and largely agree with you about the math and need to unite behind the nominee at some point. And it’s highly unlikely Sanders will be that candidate. But Johntmay really is one of the few authentically working class voices we have on this blog and his perspective is valuable. When he is concerned his friends and family vote Republican, it’s a real concern coming from a good place.
where I’m coming from.
The primary is over in Massachusetts, as I said. I don’t have problems with John’s or Manny’s points of view, but bitching and moaning about Clinton is at best worthless.
If John or Manny were expressing a concern, the word “you” wouldn’t have featured so prominently in their comments. At no time did I suggest Bernie supporters suck it up, but unless there is some sort of benefit to claiming that their candidate is best, and that Clinton supporters are responsible for her delegates, it’s time to move on.
NOTE: Our comments have no political effect on the primary now that it has moved beyond Massachusetts. They didn’t have much, if any, effect then. We are not the world or the electorate. Our comments are just that, comments. Blaming each other for their effects or the effects of our votes is ridiculous. And these are what John and Manny’s comments assume.
I just strongly feel that there is still an ongoing national primary and everyone should vote and have their say, but I’ve been quite clear in denouncing excessively negative rhetoric about HRC from his supporters or Sanders from hers.
California and New York haven’t even weighed in yet, there is a lot of time to go and a lot of ground to cover. I might add, the longer the debate continues on our side the better we look in the fall for having a civil and contested nomination that did not degenerate into a fratricidal melee filled with bigotry.
that Bernie has continued his candidacy. No reason not to. But we’ve had our say in Massachusetts, for now.
To the contrary, we should be complaining about this loudly.
I can’t say for sure it was to one or the other’s advantage, but every caucus and many primaries have been a fiasco. There were ballot shortages, caucus goers given incorrect instructions such as being dismissed before caucuses were over, large precincts being collapsed into one polling location, campaigning inside polling places, blocking polling places, new voter ID requirements, closed primaries, a last minute attempt to block 17 year olds from voting, and so on.
And then there is the blatantly biased media blackout and the media trumping up of Drumpf.
We should all be stamping our foot about these unfair undemocratic practices and, at least, working to fix them for next time.
It still has nothing to do with our primary being over.
…until I read the above comment, which is frankly the worst I’ve seen from anyone:(
that Bernie supporters NEVER call Hillary names. 😉
What’s the point of writing stuff like this? Do you think that it actually helps Bernie? It doesn’t.
I like Bernie and will enthusiastically support him if he is the nominee, but I like Hillary as well and when I read comments like these, it makes me want to have absolutely nothing to do with Bernie zealots.
If Bernie does become the nominee, I really hope his most fervent supporters find a way to turn off the hate.
But Hillary and Martha have run with the campaign of the insider, the establishment, the status quo. Martha lost twice on that. Hillary has lost one, so far, and is running the same campaign this time but she and her supporters are expecting a different result.
Brown won as the outsider and was eventually beaten by a better outsider who exposed him as a fraud.
Hillary is running as the consummate insider at a time when a populist revolt is sweeping the nation.
made an absolutely brilliant selection of opponent. That does not make him a populist.
The truck and barn coat are also insufficient to make him a populist.
Not everyone who runs against the establishment candidate is a populist. Most aren’t. Brown wasn’t.
The truck and the barn jacket were to give the appearance of a populist, just as Trump’s rhetoric gives him the sound of one. Both men are narcissists.
were definitely forerunners of Trump. Voters identified with Brown. One of my friends had a Brown bumper sticker and another that said, “I’m Not a Democrat, I work for a living. A lot of people voted for these people because of what they represented, not what they had accomplished or could do.
I want to remind us that Scott Brown lost as soon as a he faced a reasonable opponent, and Sarah Palin lost the election that thrust her into the national limelight.
I’m reminded of the old joke about faux-Texans — “Big hat, no cattle”.
Real cowboys have shit on the OUTside of their boots
was so big, they couldn’t fit him in a coffin. An wily old man that worked for the undertaker suggested an enema. They ended up burying the Texan in a shoebox.
A Texan was bragging about his ranch to a Mainer.
Texan: Mah ranch is SOOO big, it takes me three days to drive around its fences.
Mainer: Ah-yup. I had a truck like that once.
He was a faux populist running up against an establishment cookie cutter candidate. Up against a real populist he got his ass kicked. My roommate is a Cambridge firefighter and his house went for Brown against Coakley and for Warren against Brown since she bothered to go to Florian Hall and asked them what they needed before she asked for their vote. Clinton has to learn how to do the same, and quick. She should visit the Carrier plant like she went to Flint, and she should make restoring the American middle class the theme of this election.
as a United Independent party member supporting Bernie Sanders in the primary why you feel compelled to constantly critique my Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton ?
The endless carping pontificating against Hillary just grows tired and offensive to those of us who view her as the ONLY viable, progressive candidate standing between il Douche the Loser and the White House.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Come on Fred, you were happy to uprate all my posts praising her foreign policy experience and drawing contrasts with Sanders less than credible views and experiences on that subject. Or when I bashed Ryepowers harsh and personal criticism or unprovable claims about electability.
My party doesn’t have a candidate on the ballot. The primary isn’t over, but I’ve consistently said I’m for Bernie in the primary and Hillary in the general. That hasn’t changed, she gave a great speech at AIPAC on her foreign policy vision. But I’m making the exact same argument Warren is, by saying we have to work hard to beat Trump and not underestimate him. And not simply write off all his supporters as racists or assume this will be Goldwater again.
He is far more electable in a general than many of his competitors and he has cross partisan appeal to independents, moderates and conservative Democrats we have to be mindful of. If Hillary can maintain her statesmanlike poise like she did at AIPAC and focus on the economic woes of the middle class as her campaign centerpiece than she can beat him. If she fails to do both, she will lose. And I think it’s incumbent on us as progressives to call out our nominee if she is not doing what we think she needs to do to win.
….I doubt very highly will vote for Trump. They are probably as anti-racist as they get for the most part.
I’m old enough now that I am comfortable voting against Trump and for Clinton as the more qualified choice, but a lot of these younger college aged folks want to vote for someone and something. And they will need a hopeful vision for a new economy and better society to say yes to Hillary. As you have argued and agree with me on, the solutions for the 90s are insufficient for the problems of today. So are that eras politics.
…who may strike some as Sanders-lite, but is still advocating most of the same things, or at least the same goals if not tactics.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a Sanders operative that I met a few campaigns ago. His premise was that there was no difference between Clinton and Trump; and his hatred of Clinton was so intense that he planned to support Trump post-convention.
I cannot speak to how widespread this feeling is, but I’ve encountered it from a lot of people (their activist/campaign experience notwithstanding).
There is a crazy dynamic out there, and the Clinton campiagn ignores it at their peril.
…but at some point you have to acknowledge that a person like that is lost to reason.
…if HRC is nominated 5% of Dems will bolt, whereas if Trump is nominated 12% of Republicans will bolt, so net gain for us there.
Anybody who is seriously asserting that there is no difference between Ms. Clinton and Mr. Trump is either living on a different planet, lying, on both.
It is indeed crazy, and I think ignoring is the only sane response.
and not vote for Trump or Clinton
with utterly no polling behind it.
Where have I read that before? Hm.
We keep forgetting that the candidates themselves will just move on with maybe just a bruised ego, but the people will suffer if the wrong person gets elected. If HRC doesn’t get elected for example, she can just go back to giving Wall Street speeches for a lot more money than a presidential salary anyway:)
Hillary and Martha but Brown.
Could we maybe confer a similar degree of formality and dignity on female politicians as we do male politicians?
Although this is an unusually first name race, with Bernie and The Donald running.
IMO, first name reportage/referring is a barometer of media contempt, like Carly vs. Kasich earlier on.
And ithe is overwhelmingly female in application overall
when there are teeth to gnash and loins to gird?
I try to use the names or minor variations on names that people choose to use and that are unmistakeable for any other person, so I refer to HRC (I am old school), Sanders, and Trump, but Sen Warren (there are too many Warrens in the world, like Tolman), and for participants on BMG I always use STom, not Tom because I have no idea how many other Tom’s are here. I use Porcu instead of spelling out her full moniker and do it with respect. David and Dave-from-Hvad are names I take special care with their names lest readers be confused.
I spent a lot of time long ago near the legislature where you cannot even refer to a member by their proper name on the House or Senate floor: the “gentleman from Hvad,” the “lady from the Cape,” or “the gentleman in the Corner Office” are the appropriate terms. Go ahead and thump their bad ideas in debate but it is not personal. Some of my best friends are Republicans. And Democrats. And Greens. And outside the US, Communists, Sunni, Shia, military police and everything in between. Having a political disagreement with someone does not end a relationship. Otherwise I would have to write my own name in for every election.
I believe this is the old New York Times standard — either first name and last name (“Hillary Clinton”, “Scott Brown”) or “Mr./Ms. ” (“Ms. Clinton”, “Mr. Brown”). No honorifics (Ms., not “Doctor”, “The Reverend”, etc).
It’s easy to remember and seems to work pretty well.
When referring to BMG participants, I spell out the handle in its entirety (preserving case) or I abbreviate it (“TBD” instead of TheBestDefense, “CMD” instead of “CentralMassDad”).
I abhor using a single first name for anybody in public life. Too me it reeks of tabloid rubbish, regardless of the person in question.
The NYTimes uses the title of the person and their name on first mention (Secretary of State Clinton) and then Ms or Mrs Clinton on subsequent mentions. I remember during the GWB days somebody complaining to NPR for referring to “Mr. Bush,” not “President Bush,” and they explained it on air. Seems pretty civilized to me.
and try to refer to Clinton and Sanders in parallel fashion. Bernie and Hillary don’t seem to mind.
That seems right.
I call it “the Times standard”, but I learned it many decades ago when I entertained fantasies of being a journalist (during the Watergate era). I didn’t get it first-hand, and it was a long time ago.
The AP style book is the grand-daddy and the most used of the style books but I don’t really care about the micro details. It is here and worth a perusal, if you have a lot of time.
https://www.apstylebook.com
I will never in my life use a person’s name to try to diminish them. Except my younger brother. LOL
Also tend to think that some of this first name usage is part of branding done by the candidates’ marketing departments. The campaign may be trying to sell you some Bernie but it is Mr Sanders’ candidacy that we are considering.
That said, it was very difficult not to refer to the former Florida governor as Jeb! Bush.
I was never willing to waste the extra effort of the exclamation point key stroke on Jeb. When did a personal name become a verb? Or an expletive?
To correct myself, I need to take note of a second definition of a word that needs to be considered with all sorts of warnings, a Santorum. Originally it was the final name of a virulently homophobic US Senator and Presidential candidate. Sex & relations columnist Dan Savage got ahold of it and asked his readers to come up with a new definition of “santorum.” The winning entry was
A Santorum is part of a part of our culture.
The exclamation point was all for mockery.
The logo that HRC chose, a big “H” with arrow makes it difficult for people to think otherwise.
….just to be subtle
points forward. Progressively. Not backward (conservatively).
But HRC made her first name a major part of her campaign when she put the letter H front and center on her logo.
in my original comment.
She has run as Hillary much more than Clinton for a decade. So I use Hillary.
Plus there may be circumstances wherein the Clintons could be confused.
Hoping the Obama coalition will show up and running in the status quo this year is a foolish, and potentially fatal mistake. Running as the candidate of reason, experience, and civility has been a miserable strategy for the major Republicans who tried and failed using it against Trump in that primary. Dismissing all Trump supporters as racists is a similarly bad strategy.
Hillary has to show she will be a champion of working people and will be more aggressive than Obama at fighting Wall Street and reining in corporate excess. This is pretty hard to do when she is still cashing their checks, and also repeatedly cashed the checks of her likely opponent whom she is now condemning as a racist. Junkies like us get that there is a transactional side to politics that arguably makes her a better inside player than Bernie at actually getting shit done, but it won’t play in Peoria.
I fear you forget that the domain of the GOP primary season is “people who vote in GOP primaries”. This is a VERY narrow sample, a sample that I argue is very non-representative general election voters.
Voters who seek “reason, experience and civility” do not vote in this year’s GOP primary. There were no candidates who represented those values. NONE. In my view, the apparent failure of the “No Trump” campaign ads has a similar explanation — people who vote in the GOP primaries LIKE what those ads disparage.
I fear you also miss the mark when you speak of “dismissing all Trump supporters as racists”. The reality is that the GOP has been pandering to racists, misogynists, xenophobes, and anti-intellectuals for decades. I suggest that those populations are over-represented in GOP primary voters (in comparison to the general election voters), and that fact goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of Donald Trump among voters who self-identify with today’s GOP.
The GOP, led by Mitch McConnell, launched a personal and racist attack on Barack Obama at the dawn of his administration. The GOP spent the last eight years opposing EVERY initiative of Mr. Obama, and causing IMMENSE pain and suffering in America while doing so. They spent the last eight years fanning passions about “voter fraud”, a thinly disguised assault on voters of color. Whether intentional or not, the result has been to create and worsen pain and suffering for millions of working-class Americans, and to simultaneously blame that pain and suffering on our first black President and the communities that elected him. This explicit and intentional strategy poured the kerosene of bigotry and prejudice (against blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, “liberals”, and anyone else who is “different”) ALL OVER the floor, and Donald Trump lit the match. The GOP is now SHOCKED, just SHOCKED, at the ascendancy of Donald Trump and the evil he represents.
I think the question is whether the resulting fire can be extinguished before the house burns down. That is not “dismissing all Trump supporters as racists”, it is instead acknowledging the reality of how toxic the GOP actions and words have been.
I think your last paragraph is simply incorrect. I think ANYBODY who has been paying attention to politics for the past twenty years knows that Hillary Clinton is a champion of working people, and especially working people of color. I think a totally different dynamic is at play. I think Bernie Sanders does well in an electorate like Vermont. I think Hillary Clinton has shown that she does well in electorates like New York and Arkansas (she had a great deal to do with Bill Clinton’s success in Arkansas).
I think Arkansas and New York are far more representative of the general population than Vermont. I think that Ms. Clinton’s proposals for reining in Wall Street and the “shadow banking” industry are tougher, more concrete, and more achievable than anything offered by Mr. Sanders, and are more than enough to sway voters who value reason, rationality, and who pay any attention AT ALL to law and regulation. I think her campaign is more than capable of bringing that message to the voters.
I fear you overstate the appeal of Donald Trump in the general election, and greatly understate the strengths of Hillary Clinton.
He has won states Santorum carried and Romney carried. He won areligious and moderate/independent leaning New Hampshire by double digits. He has the most support of self described moderates, independents, and conservatives out of the Republican field. 20,000 unenrolling should be a big deal and a wake up call.
Paul Simmons has done excellent work here showcasing the clear enthusiasm gap and that Clinton’s minority support is story relative to Sanders but weak relative to Obama’s levels in 2008. Our electorate is divided and unsure of its nominee while theirs is coalescing around him and substantially more enthusiastic about him in the fall. He puts the Midwest and rust belt back into play and can run on a white is might strategy to win over those states. Likely no, but it is you and too many good friends on this site who are in the bubble. Go out to the south shore, western ma, or central mass sometime and you will be deep in the heart of Trump country. Let alone the blue collar Chicago suburbs.
He is appealing to non voters and infrequent voters, not the Republican base.
And it’s primarily a populist and economic appeal, as Thomas Frank deftly pointed out. Hillary has her work cut out for her convincing the broader electorate she cares about working Americans when not even a majority of her party believes that.
…the REPUBLICAN PRIMARY in states that other candidates previously carried. HRC has pointed out that she has received more votes than either Sanders OR any individual Republican. It’s the GOP that can’t quite say what will happen at their convention yet, but our outcome is becoming clearer. Besides, to the extent Trump is winning it’s in part because he consistently presents himself as a winner. Maybe we should take the hint and present our side as winning and leave aside all this pessimism. The general election hasn’t even started yet. Dukakis was up by 17 points as of the convention in 1988. How did that turn out?
a mere plurality in most of those races.
Clinton has to do one thing: earn the majority of the votes in the right states. She will have a strategy to do that. She may be an insider, and her campaign, in spite of some efforts to the contrary, may still reflect a slightly outdated orientation; however, she has and will continue to have Sanders there to fan the progressive flame and decide the future of the DNC’s organization.
Clinton will also have the GOP to work with. Trump is scary, but he has peaked. If he’s the nominee, he’ll have minimal help from the party establishment. If he’s not, the GOP nominee will have a whole host of other problems to contend with. Establishment conservatives are trying to rally around Cruz, but almost every single one of them hates his guts and doesn’t want to see him leading the party. Experts are starting to evaluate the general election:
And if the Dems show any foresight they will throw a ton of resources into retaking state legislatures back in anticipation of the next round of redistricting. The Dems had a good lead in that area until about a decade ago, largely because of lefty grassroots activism, and threw that away with a top-down strategy that now haunts the nation with non-competitive gerrymandered seats at federal and state levels.
To me, one of the most interesting fight about the federal courts is whether they will reject gerrymandered seat as happened in NC.
at the Princeton Election Consortium has developed a simple statistical test to decide whether a district is gerrymandered.
Interesting stuff on gerrymandering
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2671607
There is still plenty of room to slant the districts one way or another without going overboard into Gerry land.
agreed, which is why I questioned whether the DNC will devote any resources to legislative races. For example, Dems are killed in NC Congressional districts despited their numerical parity in voter registration, a part of the “packing and cracking” court fight that might only yield a minute change in the fed courts.
I almost always prefer direct action over lawyering to protect democracy.
The latter is excited about Trump and genuinely convinced he will become president, the former is actually committing party suicide by openly trying to stop him. I get why, they would rather elect Hillary than risk becoming a party of class and race resentment, particularly since class resentment doesn’t help their usual tilt towards Wall Street. The political class is getting upended this year and we are realigning away from culture and towards class as the fault lines.
…and I still think we can, but class resentment being channeled through a guy who epitomizes 1% wealth and attitude boggles the mind.
Hillary has negatives, but they matter only in relation to the eventual GOP nominee. Comparing her to Bernie or some ideal candidate is crap. She has to do well enough to get more electoral votes than her GOP opponent. Focusing only on her negatives is focusing on a single variable in a complex equation.
It’s too early to predict the general election, particularly because there are far too many things to play out on the GOP side. An enthusiasm gap is likely on the GOP side. Antipathy for the GOP nominee is likely to bring out more voters.
But here’s what could happen:
1) Trump’s magic begin to wear off as he testifies in the Trump University scandal. He loses some voters and fails to gain new support.
2) Moderate unenrolled voters support Clinton, reluctantly or not, because Trump is crazy and they hate Ted Cruz who is too conservative for the electorate.
3) The Republican Convention is a mess. The party either tries to box out Trump and alienates his voters or ends up with Trump and loses donors and the enthusiasm of establishment.
4) Money for candidate Trump because the GOP’s typical donors don’t support him.
5) Trump doesn’t want to spend a billion dollars of his own on his campaign.
6) Trump supporters are alienated by candidate Ted Cruz, stay home, write in Trump, or support some other wackjob.
On our side,
1) People of color, who overwhelmingly support Clinton, come out in record numbers.
2) Voters unite against a Trump candidacy, overcoming reservations about Clinton.
3) People, reluctantly or not, support Clinton because her agenda is close to Sanders, and Sanders supports her.
4) Elizabeth Warren supports Hillary.
than Bernie thus far according to a report I heard yesterday.
Furthermore, though 5% of Democrats have crossed over to vote for Il Douche — 12 % of Republicans have crossed over to vote for Hillary. 12 beats 5 🙂 12 is a WINNER and 5 is a LOSER ! Get it ?
So, in conclusion, as the former conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain, Benjamin Disraeli, used to say : ” There are lies, damnable lies and statistics.”
I like our chances to win this now because I believe we will unite soon behind our nominee and I wouldn’t change places with the party of Douche
even if you paid me Hillary’s speaking fee 🙂
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Was that an intentional misspelling of Il Duce (Mussolini) or did your fingers take liberty in calling him a douche? LOL
I couldn’t resist the Fascist Trump bromance with that douchbag who was hung in the public square by my honorable ancestors — the true patriots of Italy.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
You are describing the GOP primary. That is different from the general election. The GOP has spent decades pandering to the extreme right, scapegoating at every opportunity, and lying about what the actual effect of their policy is. Moderate voters who have common sense, rely on rationality and logic, and who expect our government to do the same have been purged from the GOP and its base. Given all this, the ascendancy of Donald Trump in the GOP primary is unsurprising.
In my view, your assertion that “[The Republican Establishment] would rather elect Hillary than risk becoming a party of class and race resentment” flies in the face of explicit GOP posturing at least since the onset of Rush Limbaugh and certainly since the election of Barack Obama.
The Tea Party is all about “class and race resentment”. The GOP attacks on immigrants, Planned Parenthood, Barack Obama, voters of color (with voter ID scams), and a multitude of others are solely about generating and then appealing to class and race resentment. The GOP establishment was blind-sided by Donald Trump’s ability to hijack that energy.
I suggest that a majority of the general electorate is horrified by Donald Trump. While I agree that the general electorate has finally recognized that class warfare lies at the heart of our collective suffering, I see no evidence that the GOP base has given up the bigotry and prejudice that the GOP has nurtured for so many years.
I think the GOP base will vote for Trump or his stand-in. I think they will lose, because I think they are still — thankfully — a minority. I think a majority of voters, even GOP voters, still value courtesy, rationality, and common sense. I think the “Tea Party”, and the ugly mob that has gathered behind Mr. Trump that is even more extreme than the Tea Party, will be defeated and marginalized.
I think the post-election challenge will be how to manage, diffuse, and contain the hate and violence stirred up by eight years of GOP mud-slinging against minorities and immigrants.
I think that this election will be ALL ABOUT “culture”, as in Trumpism (even if Mr. Trump is not the nominee) versus Democratic populism (as practiced by FDR, LBJ, and now Elizabeth Warren).
I think Elizabeth Warren will find her voice after we Democrats nominate a candidate (almost surely Hillary Clinton). I think Ms. Warren’s voice will be full-throated, eloquent, and persuasive. I think Bernie Sanders will join Ms. Warren in campaigning vigorously for Ms. Clinton.
I think Ms. Clinton will win the election. I think there’s a good chance that the Democrats will retake the Senate, and some chance that the Democrats will retake the House.
2008 was fundamentally a change election and a rejection of the bipartisan Washington establishment that screwed up in Iraq, in the primaries as well as the general. Now we are seeing a sound rejection, in both primaries, of the tired Washington establishment that has repeatedly thrown the working class under the bus.
David had a prescient post earlier in the primary pointing out how realigning it is for a Republican frontrunner to be for entitlements, for fair trade, for single payer, and against the free market orthodoxies that both traditional wings of that party espouse. We are already seeing how easy it is for him to pivot to a general and abandon religious conservatism as well.
We underestimate this significance at our peril, and pointing out how it threatens our base of support is not the equivalent of rooting for Trump or rooting against Hillary. I would strongly hope this community rejects the more tribal aspects of our ideological foes and continues to permit this kind of constructive critique of our nominees failings and the poor timing to be running her style of Democrat in the general.
No, that doesn’t mean I want Trump to win or that I think he is going to. It does mean that I think he has been underestimated at every turn by his opponents to their detriment and it would be foolish for us to do the same. I also believe his supporters are on a Venn diagram. One chunk clearly attracted to the racism, another chunk attracted to the populist outsider arguments and some overlap in between. That former group is a true threat to lowercase democratic and republican American virtues. We have to condemn them in the loudest terms and defeat them. That latter group used to be our base, and can be again if we develop policies that work for them and articulate those policies in stark class based polarizing language. It’s high time for Clinton to hire Sanders or Warren as her speechwriter. 25 point proposals won’t cut it with the lunch bucket crowd, nor will paens to civility. Telling them they got fucked and here is how we will take the country back from the fuckers is the only way.
Setting aside their narcissism about knowing what’s best for others and their condescension towards anyone who works with their hands and is free of debt servitude to the Academic-Industrial complex, their first response to ANY problem is a study, a new law, or a court case if they cannot get their way.
How can they be sincere, or even interested in, overthrowing the Mandarin bureaucracies of the entitlements and employment hub of the tired Washington establishment?
Why aren’t you getting back to me
?
I wanted the link one.
setting aside its psychopathy that blames everyone for not working hard enough as it uses its political influence to drastically redistribute wealth to the .1% all the while calling it freedom?
I agree with you about the Venn diagram. I think the question, that we will only know after the November election, is how it splits between the two groups you suggest. Another aspect of this is to remember that the “U” (“Universe”) of that diagram — the overall population that is depicted — is different for the general than it has been for the GOP primaries.
I understand that you’re not supporting Donald Trump. I actually don’t think this campaign is really about Mr. Trump, I think it is instead about the electorate that he is appealing to. This is why I like your Venn diagram approach.
As an American and an optimist, I MUST believe that the first chunk you describe (those attracted to the racism) is a minority of America. Vocal, yes. Dangerous, yes. A symptom of a malaise that requires attention, YES. I need to believe that this minority is NOT enough to swing a general election to Mr. Trump. As I’ve already said, I don’t think we’ll know until we see the November election results.
Nothing we do is going to get a significant number of votes from that first chunk. It is the rest of that Venn diagram that matters. I don’t share your opinion that we must tell them that they “got fucked …” in that language. Yes, it is class warfare. Yes, they have been exploited and plundered.
I think that one of the ways we heal our culture is to show respect to EVERYONE. For many years, a now-shuttered downtown Boston Episcopal church served hot dinner to the homeless. That dinner was a sit-down dinner, served on china plates with silverware and glasses. Volunteers from area parishes served the guests. That stance — that the homeless were our guests, and that our role was to serve them — was an important way of demonstrating respect, and was a healing experience for all parties concerned.
Whether we talk about them or not, the only way we SOLVE these problems is to have 25 point plans and leadership able to make them happen. It is not a “paean to civility” to avoid vulgar language in our public discourse., no matter who our officials address. I expect a holder of high office to avoid the use of vulgarity when addressing the Congress, when addressing foreign governments, and when addressing the Court. I suggest that the use of such vulgarity when addressing the “lunch bucket crowd” is itself an expression of contempt for the audience.
In my view, the best way to build a strong, vibrant, and healthy America — and to win elections along the way — is to appeal to the BEST in people, rather than the worst.
I actually like your example of the Episcopalian homeless outreach (though I lament that the practice you describe has been discontinued), and I would argue that for years we have been the party talking down to working voters.
The gist of our pitch is, you idiot clinging to old fashioned guns and gods, why are you voting for that guy when our 10 point health plan is so much more affordable for you? And it doesn’t help that every single one of our nominees since Johnson has been educated at eastern elite colleges and largely part of the professional class, and appealing to that classes cultural prejudices and aspirations while denigrating those of working people. Flyover country, scorn at truck drivers, etc.
No Ivy leaguer ever lost a job to foreign trade or illegal immigration, which is why that resentment politics makes little sense. So this is important to note, and we can speak to their aspirations by telling them as clear as day, as FDR did when he said he welcomed their hatred, and Warren and Sanders have done, that the system is rigged against them and voting in politicians who aren’t part of the problem will empower ordinary people instead of big dollar donors.
When has Hillary made that pitch in her recent career, largely spent in boardrooms with world leaders and with big donors? She has been the one with the HW Bush in awe at driving again and complaining about debt the way Marie Antoinette complained about cake. More than competent, more than capable, certainly more so than any of her opponents in either party. But competency and capability aren’t what this year is about, empathy for he working stiff is how we beat Trump’s appeal to their fear.
I agree with nearly all of this.
I think Ms. Clinton has spent a LOT of time pitching to working-class people in working-class neighborhoods, especially people and neighborhoods of color. I don’t think we’d see the overwhelming support for her in those segments if that were not the case — especially in comparison to Mr. Sanders. Ms. Clinton has been building that support for decades, and the primary results reflect that.
My issue was with your earlier comment, when you wrote:
I enthusiastically agree with this (apropos the same theme):
I agree with the latter. I prefer to leave the first to the Trumpists.
…you are having a hard time distinguishing between the “general electorate” and the plurality of GOP primary voters. I propose a JFK trying to win the primary in largely Protestant West Virginia. As I recall it he basically said I know you guys aren’t religious bigots and you can show that by voting for me. He went on to carry WV and put to bed the fears that a Catholic could not win Protestant votes. Likewise we can say to the vast majority of Americans that we know they are not racists and call on their better angels to reject racism. Obama was the one who blurted out the line about clinging to guns and God, which I cheered despite still being an HRC supporter at the time, but he went on to win. I also must be watching the wrong channels. Everyone says that Trump is great on working class issues, but I have yet to see it, and I would rather lose the election than in anyway accommodate or acknowledge the validity of xenophobia.
Not wanting to have one’s head cut off is xenophobia??
Imagining that every person of color is an agent of ISIS or some other type of criminal is xenophobic and outright racist.
You are far, far more likely to be shot by a family member or killed by someone texting while driving than you are to be killed by a foreign terrorist. Pretending otherwise is paranoid and stupid.
xenophobia cut off is more of a problem.
You guys really have to stop burying your heads in the sand.
Is that IS wanted to elect Trump and LePen and retaliate for us capturing their man. I say fuck them! I can have my liberty and a tolerant multicultural society even if it offends their imams and their twisted brand of Islam. It would be nice if we armed the feminist socialist PKK fighters taking the fight directly to these clowns.
…really represent a 1B strong religion to you? I would think someone whose people are widely acknowledged to have been victims of a genocide (assuming your handle is accurate) might be a little more weary of generalizing about a given population.
Economic anxiety from white working class voters is entirely appropriate and legitimate, they are hurting and this is the party that should be ready to rush in and fix it and I just don’t get that urgency from HRC who is basically running on the status quo.
Well the status quo isn’t working for the workers in Indiana who just got their pink slips from Carrier which is literally moving all their jobs to Mexico, yet another Midwestern company moving overseas. Today’s Times had an illuminating piece in their reaction to this news and how Trump has already included their story in his stump speech.
Haven’t heard a peep from Hillary about this. Perhaps I’ll write a longer post on that story when I have time, the quotes are really stunning and show workers soundly rejecting the racism in their statements and embracing Trump anyway over trade. Which shows that running an anti racist campaign alone won’t win these voters back. His bigotry is secondary to his perceived empathy to their plight. The fact that support for Hillary was nowhere to be found is cause for concern.
…and we HAVE heard that from HRC, but I’m still going to have trouble wrapping my head around “soundly rejecting the racism in their statements and embracing Trump anyway over trade”. I’m sorry, but in my book some attitudes are just so beyond the pale that you cannot justify simply ignoring or rejecting them. The candidate projecting such attitudes must be considered entirely disqualified. This excuse especially doesn’t hold water when people have the opportunity to vote for someone like Sanders whose economic populism doesn’t come with a huge helping of bigotry on the side.
And if you’re that laid off factory worker, you just heard Trump say he would kick Carriers ass and tariff the hell out of them. What will Hillary do? I haven’t heard her plan or her response yet, neither have those workers. And if you don’t think that’s a problem or if you think calling those voters racists will solve it, you’re in a bubble my friend.
didn’t mean to downrate.
I hear him talk about how bad NAFTA and TPP are, but no concrete proposals about what he would actually do in their place. I have no idea what he would do about Carrier.
Bernie has talked about negotiating “fair trade” agreements, but, you’re right, he has not specified what exactly that would entail.
I think of it as taking into account real world disparities between countries that basic economic theory seems to ignore. If costs are higher in our country because we have environmental and labor and other regulations that we believe are necessary, why is it OK to instead import from other countries without those regulations? Protections seem appropriate. They could be in the form of tariffs (classic protectionism) or requiring some minimum regulations in the trade agreements. I would support tariffs commensurate to the disparity in regulation.
The TPP is particularly perverse and egregious. It is neither a “free trade” nor a “fair trade” agreement. It takes the latter approach of requiring minimum regulations in other countries, but not for labor or the environment, but only regulations that protect the profits of large businesses. It forces some of the worst U.S. laws on other countries, like near-infinite copyright terms and other IP regulations that, among other things, make pharmaceuticals outrageously expensive in the US compared to other countries. At the same time it makes it more difficult (at best) for any parties to enact necessary environmental regulations.
…and I have heard HRC talk plenty about imposing an “exit tax” and otherwise railing against those who jump ship from the United States, especially after having been helped by the taxpayers. Hitler and Mussolini appealed to the disaffected too – doesn’t make it right.
I never said Trump was right, ever! Nobody wants him to lose more than me which is why Hillary and other Democrats need to get their heads out of their asses, listen to Thomas Frank and look at the enthusiasm gap Paul Simmons points out, especially in rust belt states, and start working on a plan.
If all we are running against is racism, we will lose. Trumps appeal to blue collar workers transcends the racial animosity he exploited in the primary. I would be remiss to remind you that facism wins when liberalism is impotent to address the needs of the people. FDR understood this, he didn’t blast his opponents as uncivil he welcomed their hatred and fought them head on.
…that we should ignore blue collar grievances, but I don’t see evidence of HRC doing that (and in fact plenty to the contrary). When HRC is getting more primary votes than any other candidate in either party I have a hard time seeing an enthusiasm gap, but OTOH the GOP is more entertaining for better or worse (mostly worse). That just means we are on the side of slow and steady winning the race. We should run hard against racism too, however.
ignoring the disaffected is wrong in just about sense of the word.
I fear you are egregiously misrepresenting the history, campaign, and public policy of Ms. Clinton when you allege that she is “basically running on the the status quo”. She is NOT.
Consider, for example, her
very first speech about her economic policy, from last summer (emphasis mine):
Let me just repeat and emphasize that conclusion:
We must raise incomes for hard-working Americans so they can afford a middle-class life. We must drive strong and steady income growth that lifts up families and lifts up our country.
That was Ms. Clinton’s FIRST speech on economic policy. She has been repeating these themes for nearly a year. When you say that you “haven’t heard a peep from Hillary about this”, I fear you haven’t been listening.
Hillary Clinton HAS BEEN addressing anxiety from working class voters. ALL working class voters. I hear the urgency from her in this speech and many others (this happened to the first I found on youtube).
We do NOT have to be racist to be populist. Hillary Clinton HAS been addressing the central issue with urgency — she calls it “the defining economic challenge of our time”.
I think it’s time to STOP mis-representing the record and the campaign of our likely nominee. I think it’s time to STOP being negative and unfairly critical of her. I think it’s time to emphasize what she is FOR, highlight the multitude of ways, times, and places that she IS saying what needs to be said.
Donald Trump is boor and a playground bully. He DOES need to be stopped. We will not accomplish that out-bullying him, or by attempting to match his racist epithets. We will accomplish that by putting and keeping him in his place, and by treating ALL voters with the respect they deserve.
I think Hillary Clinton is doing JUST FINE in this regard. I think it’s time to stop mis-representing her. Ms. Clinton is NOT “basically running on the status quo”, and you do all of us a disservice to inaccurately say that she is.
For all the excuses for why people like Drumpf, somehow I don’t see this mentioned here. Donald Trump, like Bernie Sanders, has convinced many people that he cannot be bought. That he is a solution to a fundamentally corrupt government. That is a very powerful message if you can get people to believe it. That’s what Obama won on and then made it that much more powerful and that much harder for another politician to carry by failing at that role.
Clinton hasn’t been able to reinterpret her family’s financial position during the primaries because of the vigorous critique lodged by Sanders and his supporters (of whom I am one). But shouldn’t she be able to make the same argument as Trump in terms of:
(1) independence: she has made their own money fair and square, has no personal reason to be controlled by big donors once she is elected
(2) financial competence: if people want someone who can manage money and make a deal, the Clintons have shown they are pretty good at it!
(3) establishment credentials: Jeb Bush (son and brother of presidents, grandson of a Senator) is establishment. John McCain (son and grandson of admirals) is establishment. Mitt Romney (son of a CEO, Governor, and presidential candidate) is establishment. The Kennedys are establishment. The Clintons (especially Bill) did not have these kinds of connections. Younger voters who weren’t around for Bill’s campaign in 1991 don’t have a good sense of that, but it’s something she could still turn to her advantage.
ran some devastating commercials in Fla about Rubio’s misuse of campaign credit cards. In the general election a 30 sec clip of Clinton saying she and Bill “were dead broke when they left the White House” is going to play well for Trump with the “Carrier factory” crowd.
…”dead broke” (technically accurate BTW) pales in comparison to the outrages that have come out of Trump’s mouth.
If all you think Clinton has to run is him saying racist and misogynist things than you and Right to Rise, Marco Rubio, and Jeb! can join Mike Dukakis in the losers circle.
I want to be in the winners circle, and I strongly for the sake of my country as a patriot, want Trump to be in the losers circle. It won’t happen with this strategy when it has failed repeatedly to do anything.
I am gonna have to do my own thread, nobody here knows how bad this really is going to get.
I cannot think of a single anti-Trump TV ad that I have seen. When Right to Rise wasn’t promoting Bush it was attacking Rubio, not Trump. A strategy can’t possibly be said to have failed when it hasn’t even been tried. Why do you assume it will get worse? Trump has probably hit his ceiling already – a plurality of the slice of the electorate that votes in GOP primaries.
There were a lot of anti-Trump commercials running in Fla before the primary (mostly PAC sponsored), and Rubio could not fill the bleachers at a high school football field. That is when I knew Trump would win Fla.
Mass is like a different country so no anti- Trump commercials will air there.
…and the warning signs that Trump was likely to win there were present early enough to have mounted aggressive anti-Trump advertising which I would have seen, but didn’t.
Quartz analyzed all of them by effectiveness and found nearly all of them failed to resonate.
It had this conclusion:
*I bolded for emphasis
Reagan Democrats who have been either abstaining from voting Republican or holding their noses for Obama are coming back to the Republican party in droves to vote for Trump. 20,000 of them in Massachusetts alone. Ads about racism won’t sway them since they don’t care. Trump is appealing to their economic interests and their wallets. He will lower their taxes, protect their entitlements and protect their jobs from trade or immigration. In a time of severe economic anxiety and a crippled and dwindling middle class, that is an awfully tempting message.
And you bet that will be his only message going into the Fall. The media will probably aid and abet him as he tones down the racism and moves back to the middle on social issues like choice and marriage. He is evil, but I agree with Sen. Warren when she said on Facebook it would be foolish to underestimate him.
…with those who are already in the vote for him no matter what crowd. It is the rest of the electorate that needs to be reminded just how awful he is, which I don’t think constitutes underestimating him at all. If I were underestimating him I’d say don’t run any ads and just let him shoot himself in the foot without our help. There needs to be positive stuff from our side as well, but like Lee Atwater said of Willie Horton in relation to Dukakis, we need to make David Duke his running mate. I still don’t buy your 20,000 vote stampede in MA theory or your interpretation thereof.
You’re a diehard Clinton supporter and defender of NAFTA. You’re not the voter Trump is appealing to, but you are making the cardinal sin of forgetting the Venn diagram and saying “I don’t want those voters”, well you and Hillary will be begging for them in October and by then it will too late. Like Pauline Kael you’ll be saying “but all my friends voted for Hillary”
Mitt Romney tied him to David Duke and he went on to dominate the next round of primaries. I don’t see that being enough. And The wait for him to implode strategy has worked out so well for the Republican establishment, hasn’t it?
…Romney tied him to David Duke IN THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY. It’s unfortunate that it doesn’t work in one of our major parties, but why can you not tell the difference between the GOP primary electorate and the general electorate? Yes, there does come a point where I will say there are certain voters I don’t want and will take the loss rather than appeal to baser instincts. If we can appeal to them other ways, great, but I have emphatically NOT argued we should not wait for him to self-implode, though that would be nice in 2016 America.
It’s not like the voters in MA or NH are arch conservative Republicans. If they really reflected the authoritarian base they’d be voting for Cruz. I bet more than a few NH voters who saw the “last dog die” speech in Portsmouth helped out Donald over the top, overwhelmingly. He won moderates, he won independents, and he won conservatives. That’s Reagan or McCain 2000 levels of support. He did far better in MA and MI than Buchanan did running in the same platform in 92′.
What’s more interesting is that he beat a guy like Kasich in MA and a guy like Cruz in Alabama, meaning the base is with him AND he has a massive cross over appeal. The 20,000 wouldn’t defect for Cruz, they did for Trump. That means something, and denying it does doesn’t change that.
I was at Arties diner in Peabody getting coffee with my folks when I heard several guys grumble “my unions with Clinton, but I’m with Trump”. That has shades of 1980 if I heard it, not to mention Brown/Coakley where dad heard the same sentence at a deli in Woburn.*
*Hillary wants the job more and will work way harder than Martha, the comparison is to the kind of voter the other person is attracting
Really, this gloom and doom you’re peddling just doesn’t line up with the stats.
I didn’t say he’d win MA, but he outpolled her in Michigan for sure, and there is a profound data backed enthusiasm gap that Paul Simmons is discussing you keep glossing over. Look, it’s not doom and gloom. It’s called be prepared!
Senator Warren gets this, she said Trump is a loser but he isn’t losing yet. I strongly think Sec. Clinton should heed Warrens advice. She recognizes the threat and isn’t being attacked by her fellow progressives for doing so. I don’t think Sec. Clinton is preparing this campaign in an effective way, I’ve been told BMG is read in the corridors of power and you’re on the state committee so let’s get to work to intelligently campaign and appeal to voters anxious about the shrinking middle class instead of assuming she will win since Trump is so loathsome. That assumption and that strategy has failed in the primary and will fail in the general. I even outlined how she can win, so I’m not a negative Nancy.
Sanders: 595,222
Clinton: 576,795
Trump: 483,751
The enthusiasm gap is one of several memes out there that don’t withstand scrutiny.
THEN WHY THE HECK AREN’T THEY VOTING FOR SANDERS!?
In record numbers in Michigan. There was significant geographic overlap in their pockets of support in that state. But working class whites aren’t enough to swing the Democratic primary, they are enough to swing the Republican primary and the general election in those key rust belt states that have low Latino populations, even lower Latino turnout, and high percentages of jobs lost to trade.
And in the general do those Sanders primary voters who had a non racist populist option vote for Trump? I think many of them will, and that frightens me.
Clinton can easily do this IMO, but it won’t argue itself. The other mistake you keep seeming to make is that the race is static when in reality it hasn’t even started yet.
That suddenly after the primaries are over you have an electorate terrified of Trump and willing to give Hillary a landslide. You and her campaign are foolishly betting that the convention will implode or something dramatic will happen that finally takes the curtain down revealing the empty suit.
She has to make her own destiny, and it would behoove her to start dramatically and emphatically attacking Trump every chance she gets as a phony and a fraud who doesn’t care about working people the way she does. And she should say Bill was wrong on NAFTA the way he successfully apologized for mass incarceration. She should say Bernie is right about healthcare, ACA isn’t enough and only she has the scars to get the next round done. She should say he is right about trade and President Obama is wrong. She should spend every last minute of this primary praising Bernie and stealing all of his ideas while condemning Trump on the inconsistency of his economics. How can he back Norquist on taxes and Gingrich on entitlements while promising not to touch Medicare. Link him to Congressional Republicans. Mention he endorsed Romney who outsourced thousands of jobs. He always says Carl Ichan will be treasurer, that dude sent thousands of jobs to China.
There is a lot she can do that attacks him on his perceived strengths and turns them into liabilities. This is what Obama did to Romney, defining him early as a businessman who made his money on the backs of the working man. Draft dodging Bush made a bona fide war hero into a pussy. Hillary has to turn Donald friend of the people into Donald the flip flopping politician. She has to be relentlessly negative since there is nothing positive for her to sell to this electorate. That’s what LBJ did, and that’s the only way she can win let alone get Goldwater numbers. The high ground is under water in 2016.
How’s THAT going to go over with the crowd that already doubts her credibility and thinks she’s too much a politician? As for going negative on Trump, is that not EXACTLY what I have been arguing this entire thread? I do think the general electorate will come into this a lot more terrified to start than a GOP primary electorate does.
That’s how I’d run, and she has the dexterity to recognize the times are different than the 90’s were. You’ve said repeatedly that Clintonian economics and policies made sense for that era and are not a good response to this one. It’s how Bill deftly handled the mass incarceration issue. And I think for her to morph into Warren or Sanders, as she tried at the beggining of the campaign, is the only way to win.
Read the interviews in the Times piece. They really don’t trust or even like Trump either, they just want to see someone as pissed off as they are at the status quo take charge. Bernie isn’t that guy, but Clinton could be that candidate if she starts co opting Bernie and using his fiery rhetoric.
And you want her to go negative against Trump on his racism, but that’s already a well known liability. Winning campaigns turn strengths into liabilities which is what Clinton should do. Don’t spend another dime attacking Bernie, spend the massive amount money blitzing the airwaves to talk about Trump’s links to outsourcers like Romney and Icahan, and his promises to Grover and the Republican elite. He badly wants to be accepted by the establishment at the end of the day, and it’s better to hang the around his neck than hang him around theirs.
I think that voting in a GOP primary is different from “coming back to the Republican party”. Again we see the “20,000 Democrats in Massachusetts alone”.
The fact that somebody votes for Donald Trump in a GOP primary does not mean they’ll vote for him in a general election. This is particularly true of voters who “have been either abstaining from voting Republican or holding their noses for Obama”. Please tell me how someone who voted for Barack Obama — even while holding their nose — can vote for Donald Trump?
I think this is a misreading of what’s going on, and I think it exaggerates the appeal of Mr. Trump in the general population.
The message of every successful demagogue is tempting. While we should of course avoid underestimating the appeal of Mr. Trump, I also think we should avoid going overboard in the other direction.
Trump and Sanders have both have drawn in those who don’t usually vote in primaries. Both appeal to voters who want economic populism, a dismantling of the establishment, a change in status quo and business as usual.
In November, who are these independent/non-partisan voters more likely to choose – Clinton or Trump?
MI, PA, OH, and WI. Enough to get him to 271 even if he loses the popular vote. Has anyone campaigned in those states? I have.
Paul Ryan’s district is a shithole, and he has done nothing to fix it. Yet he wins every year since all the seniors think he’s saving their social security. I had one bankruptcy client call in just to talk to me about how great that “nice young man saving my Medicare is!”. These people have been fucked for so long they don’t know their right from left.
Kenosha is the center piece of his district, hasn’t been the same since AMC shut down. Shuttered storefronts, tattoo parlors and pawnshops. Lots of opioid and meth additions. Lovely waterfront where they put some gated condos and a vintage trolley line hoping to attract tourists and Chicago commuters since its at the end of the commuter line. Reminds me of Lynn because of the former or Fitchburg because of the latter.
Has a private college surrounded by a dense forest far away from town. South Bend is the same fucking place, a city that hasn’t been the same since Studebaker left that Notre Dame is too good to share a zip code with. Plenty of places in Ohio or outside of Pittsburgh look exactly the same. I’ve been there. Anyone who’s traveled west of 495 knows who got plenty of places just like that here. Worcester County and Lowell voted for Brown, they’re Trump country now. The Democrats under Clinton choose to be the party of inner city minorities and suburban professionals. Not a good look in the year that class will trump culture as the fault line of the electorate.
The Merrimack Valley at least has long been a little redder than the rest of the state, in part because we either think or wish we are NH circa 1980s. Frankly, that includes some members of local Dem committees:(
It’s the economy, Tom! I encountered a voter, retired cop, Union member and Vietnam vet in Indiana still mad US Steel shut down. Asked him if he was voting for Obama. He opened the door and I could smell the cigarette stench and see the bud light bottles that had collected on the front porch.
“Sure as hell am. Economy’s in the shitter I’m voting for the n—-r!”.
There are a lot of voters like that who felt McCain didn’t have their back and wanted to take a chance on Obama. Some of them, like this man, you’d have written off as racist. There are plenty of Trump voters quoted in that Times piece who voted for Sanders in the primary and backing someone they perceive to be a populist in the general. We are junkies who know the ins and outs of policy, most voters aren’t.
Most voters like my sister hear “free college!” and vote for Sanders or hear “bring all the jobs back” and vote for Trump. My mother’s best friend torn between Bernie and Trump this cycle voted for Bush because her son was in the service, despite the fact that he sent him to a hellhole and was a draft dodger while Kerry served. She voted for McCain because Palin had a son with Down syndrome like she did. She voted for Obama in 2012 because Romney cut aid to mental health as Governor and “made his money shipping jobs overseas”. An easy idiom she likely picked up from Obama’s effective April ad blitz that the media played over and over, and the fact that Mitt was a wierdo opinion about tree heights and awkwardly singing America the beautiful.
Americans don’t like awkward. Hillary is really awkward. Trump is filthy rich, but as John Mulaney points out, he’s lived like a poor persons ideas of what a rich man should be like. And he’s perceived to be unfiltered and uninfluenced by the usual bullshit politicians have to pretend to care about.
Carrier just closed a plant in the heartland and is shipping the jobs to Mexico. Trump says “I’ll get Carriers ass and tariff the hell out of them so that they have to stay here!”, and he’s been saying that line in every speech across the country. Mitt couldn’t say that since his Harvard MBA brain thought outsourcing was good for the economy. Hillary can’t say that since she largely feels the same way and it’s her husbands bill that let the plant owners get the opportunity to do that in the first place. Hard for her to say she welcomes Wall Street’s hatred when she’s cashing their checks. Hard for her to say Trumps a racist when she’s cashing his too.
There’s only so much we can do about voters’ selective hearing. What is it exactly you want us to do that also lets us sleep at night, or that we aren’t already doing? There will of course be people who vote for Trump; you can’t win them all. However, I think it is achievable to marginalize him to roughly Goldwater levels.
You’re dreaming. Against Clinton he might be their most electable candidate. Name a Republican state from 2012 Hillary can carry? I can name five Obama states Trump has a 50/50 shot in. OH, MI, WI, PA and NH. I can see him carrying ME-2 as well. Clinton could win NC and NE-1, other than that, I don’t see her carrying a Romney state.
Trump is at least as scary as Goldwater. In fact AuH2O looks quite reasonable by comparison. That daisy ad ran a grand total of once, then ran on free exposure. In 1964 the Dem ticket bashed him over the head repeatedly for voting against the Civil Rights Act. We can and should take a page from their playbook to make the opposition so scary as to be completely unacceptable and crush him. Never assume we should write any state off and FWIW may money is on Clinton on all the states you mention. I’m more afraid of Kasich from a beating HRC standpoint.
But it’s not against the racism or lack of fitness for commander in chief, she has to run a scorched earth campaign pointing out how he outsourced jobs and how he is part of the same Wall Street establishment people are scared of. Turn all his strengths into liabilities. The perception is he can’t be bought, he’s an outsider, and he cares about American jobs.
The reality is, he is desperate for attention and acceptance from the establishment and craves it, he’s an insider of the first order who is a crony capitalist donating to all sides, and he usually hires “illegals” outsources everything his company produces. Clinton should run the attack ads now, and just say ‘i agree with Bernie and will fight hard for our shared agenda!” at every debate with Bernie.
Real Clear Politics has several recent polls that have Clinton (Sanders too for that matter) leading Trump in OH, PA, and in one poll even UT by a couple of points. Kasich as I suspected comes up most often as a successful GOP candidate.
…almost twice as many Dem ballots were cast in MA than GOP ballots and both Clinton and Sanders got more votes than Trump with plenty of room to spare. I’m not nearly as nervous as jconway about our prospects.
That’s arrogance of the highest order, and arrogant candidates get punished. I heard the same thing about Bush both times, Tom told us at Saloon how he partied when Reagan won the nomination. I watched the Dukakis-HW Bush documentary on CNN and it was looking like President Dukakis right through Labor Day. People want someone on their side, and too many people think Trump is on theirs and not enough feel Hillary has their back.
You saw Warren’s Facebook post and recommended it. But it came with a warning:
That’s all. I am not saying he will win, I am saying he will win if we assume if will lose and the election will be a cakewalk. He will win if we assume he is the devil and Hillary is perfect, and that everyone in America thinks the same way we do. He will win if we dismiss his supporters as racists and don’t bother reaching out to their economic anxiety with hope to ease their hurt. He will win if we dismiss the Goldman stuff and the emails as not a big deal. He will win if we assume he will lose. He absolutely is a loser, Sen. Warren was right, but she was also right to point out we ALL lose if he wins. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.
I have never said otherwise.
People think she made her money giving speeches to Goldman Sachs, and that she only has money because of trading on political favors. And every time they hear that she will not release the transcripts from these speeches they are more sure of it.
You think this is what they think? See #1
Bill was not establishment, she is. 1991 was 25 years ago. Leaning on her husband’s credentials is not what she should be doing. It is not “Establishment” that people do not like, it is “Political Establishment” they don’t like.