Blue Mass Group

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BMG Election Night Headquarters

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    • If I were watching Australia, or the UK, I’d be calling for Trump. She’s not winning where she has to.

      I am going to live in a country where the president of Russia and the director of the FBI have essentially chosen my leader.

  2. It’s after 10 and HRC is behind in both the popular and electoral votes. I’m trying to remind myself that the DUMB candidate hasn’t won any surprises yet, but why do we have to beg for our states and the Republicans get theirs so easily? There is NO EXCUSE for voting for a DUMB candidate and a voting booth is NOT the place to throw your temper tantrums!

    • had a populist candidate who was viewed as an outsider running during their primaries. The Republicans chose theirs and the Democrats ignored theirs , mocked his supporters and instead, bet on a government insider with no real ties to the working men and women in the USA. So who you calling dumb?

      • I’m calling YOU “Collaborator”. You did everything in your power to elect Donald Trump, and you succeeded. This comment, like so many of your others, is pure and unadulterated rubbish that is not worth a response.

        The “pitchfork and torches” mob has won, and you are among them.

        I hope you are now happy.

          • I think you need to remind yourself of what a scapegoat is.

            I don’t doubt that you expected to be blamed, because I think you knew and know full well what you were doing — and you succeeded.

            Be careful that the torch you’re carrying doesn’t catch your hair or clothes on fire.

            • She pulled a Coakley and lost the easiest election in human history to a mad man. This is entirely Clinton’s fault. She spent next to no time in Wisconsin or Michigan, states I’ve been warning about for months. She did everything she could in PA, but the loss of counties that were solidly Democratic for Obama was too much to bare.

              Are he voters across Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Michigan who live in counties that went double digits for Obama that went 5-10% for Trump suddenly racist? Or do we blame gender? How about we look in the mirror and see that our messenger ended up being more flawed than theirs, and her message failed to cut through his.

              We have a lot of healing and outreach to do. Trump is going to be an unmitigated disaster, this we know for certain. I voted against him and put my money where my mouth was donating to Hillary. My wife was sobbing last night, and her sister was openly asking me if they needed to carry passports on them to stay on campus. My in laws gave up on returning to the Philippines because they elected a Trumpist candidate, close to Putin and China and disregarding the rule of law.

              But the poor people there love him! He is outside the five families that control all the land and government, and he is honestly delivering make work jobs, land, and food to those people. He’s a Mugabe wannabe, not a saint. But he knows the poor and working classes are the folks who elect a President in a democracy. There was a time when Democrats were like that.

              Hard to credibly say ‘i welcome their hatred’ when you are cashing their checks. The check cashing era ends now. Let’s become a grassroots party that’s populist and progressive again. I just rejoined today. Third parties are fucked, it’s time to put the last sane one we have back in order.

              Fuck Stein voters, Fuck Johnson voters, they are white privileged assholes who never had to fear the state or rely on it for assistance. I get that. But fuck Hillary Clinton for losing this campaign. Time to move on and rebuild.

              • I did all I could to elect Hillary, including urging her and her supporters to drop the “she’s the most qualified ever!” bragging about her years of being an insider at a time when the man and woman on the street have had enough of insider politics. I pleaded with her to release the Goldman Sachs transcripts to prove once and for all that she was not part of that crowd. While I only donated a few bucks to her campaign, I did manage to get my town to vote for Clinton and even my district voted for her despite the fact that I live in a typically red district. And this: my father-in-law is 96 years old and until yesterday, NEVER voted for a Democrat. He lives in Pennsylvania and yeah, I got him to vote for Clinton.

                So what’s next? Who is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party? If it’s not a real progressive populist, we’re screwed.

              • She concentrated on Metro Philly, to the exclusion of everything west of Scranton. Rallies in Pittsburgh don’t cut it: the city is an outlier in Western Pennsylvania.

                This made it personal for a lot of folks back home, to the point that a sizable chunk of Trump’s organization came from organized town and county Democratic committees.

                Simply put, in Central and Western Pennsylvania, there was no credible Clinton organization.

                FWIW, same dynamic obtained in Ohio and Michigan.

                • I was in PA in July and saw no sign of HRC, no HQ where I could help, but shitloads of Trump lawn signs and an office. As long as the Dems treat PA as Carville said as “Philly and Pittsburgh with Alabama and Mississippi in between” then Dems will lose not just PA but every industrial area that does not make the transition to a new economy.

                • I drove Rt 84W to 81S a week or so ago. Stayed in Harrisburg. I saw homemade Trump signs the size of billboards from the road and never saw a Hillary sign.

                • in otherwise red central PA. It went D again this year – voted Romney in 2012 but went big for Obama in 2008. Clinton had an HQ there.

                  May its wisdom spread in all directions.

                • You’ve been even more ahead of the curve warning against this, and I really wish people hadn’t dismissed you.

              • …in this age of mass and instantaneous media, how much effect a candidate actually coming to a state affects that candidate’s chances in the state? It seems that I can turn on C-SPAN or cable news to watch a rally from anywhere (especially if it’s for Trump, but I digress). Sure, it’s cool to attend in person if convenient, but the live audience is usually mostly an exercise in preaching to the choir anyway, right?

          • I respect Tom and his anger and actually take nothing he throws at me today personally. He is upset, as we all are. But I refuse to admit we lost our country. I refuse to stop fighting, and part of that regrouping is around the class solidarity rather than identity politics. We absolutely have to remain pro-choice, pro-gay, pro black lives matter. But we can do that while also reaching out to voters who aren’t, by emphasizing family economic issues. Over and over again.

            • I appreciate your words but his language is beyond the bounds of civility.

              It was pure vile coming from a guy who is in the top 20% economically but thinks anyone who disagrees with him is “a liar” as he wrote this past year, or now informs us anybody who voted on his other side as a “Collaborator.”

              How is he different from a Democratic Trumpeter? Like you, I do not take anything he says personally. But I know this elitist form of east coast democratic urbanism is the death sentence of democracy in the US and around the world.

              • I expected just this from you.

                I call people who lie liars. The people of my parents generation called people who cooperated with and advanced the Nazi agenda “Collaborators”.

                I call the people who put this incompetent bigot in the Oval Office “Collaborators”, because that is what they are.

                As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m eager to extend forgiveness and acceptance to any Collaborator after he or she admits how utterly wrong their vote was. The first move, however, must come from them.

                You may hurl any insult you like, I’ve grown very accustomed to them from you.

                • I called your COMMENT vile, not you. The word “Collaborator” (your capitalization) is a clear reference to aiding the Nazis after they had killed thousands. People who voted for Trump have done no such thing. Trump is horrible but has not committed genocide nor have his supporters. They don’t need nor likely would accept your “forgiveness.” They don’t give a rat’s ass what a ten percenter thinks.

                  You might want to consider how to show them what Trump does while in office that hurts them rather than pretend that you have a god’s power of forgiveness.

                • I see.

                  So when the citizenry of German heard the hate-speech of the nascent Nazi party, before anybody had been killed, which would have been better:

                  a: Call those who supported them “Collaborators” and perhaps head off or reduce the bloodshed
                  b: “Reach out” to them, feel their pain, and hope they didn’t actually ACT on what they clearly said they were going to do

                  Donald Trump has not YET killed thousands. What do you think will happen if he starts “bombing the shit out of them” (where “them” is whomever he doesn’t like at the moment)?

                  See, I think we ought to listen to what Donald Trump has said he wants to do, listen to these people (whatever we call them) when they loudly say they want him to do those things, and take them seriously. He has said, multiple times, “lock her up”. He has promised to build his wall countless times. He has said, countless times, that he wants to block Muslims from entering America. It sounds to me as though you are still in denial about what tens of millions of Americans want to do to blacks, women, Hispanics, immigrants, Muslims, and even women they find “fat” or otherwise unattractive.

                  It’s not like Mr. Trump whispered these things in private, so that this voters could pretend he didn’t really say them. He has been shouting them from rally stages for months.

                  I fear that you and too many others are so busy spinning your rose-colored touchy-feely fantasies about some progressive Nirvana that you stay in denial about what these people have already said they want to do. It sounds like you STILL don’t believe them.

                  You do understand that a great many Jews went quietly to their deaths because they couldn’t believe that “civilized” Germany would kill them, right?

                  Last night, Donald Trump supporters were yelling “lock her up” while they waited for their final victory. That is just one of the many rallying cries that the mobs of Donald Trump supporters have been yelling for a year. Every voter knows what he has said he’ll do if elected.

                  It sounds like you are saying that we should ignore all that and wait until these crimes against humanity are actually perpetrated. Is that what you mean?

                  How many thousands or millions of people needed to be rounded up and trucked to who knows where before you and we take these people seriously?

                  Regarding who can and cannot offer forgiveness, I invite you to contemplate the model offered by Desmond Tutu (emphasis mine):

                  When the disaster did not overtake us, there were those who said, “Wait until a black-led government takes over. Then these blacks who have suffered so grievously in the past will engage in the most fearful orgy of revenge and retribution against the whites.”

                  Well, that prediction too was not fulfilled. Instead the world saw something quite unprecedented. They saw the process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when perpetrators of some of the most gruesome atrocities were given amnesty in exchange for a full disclosure of the facts of the offence. Instead of revenge and retribution, this new nation chose to tread the difficult path of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

                  In my view, Donald Trump and his supporters have ALREADY gone far outside the envelope of acceptable public behavior. I think they owe civilization confession and repentance before they are welcomed back into the civilized world. We, in the civilized world, do not throw our political opponents in jail. We do not THREATEN to throw them in jail.

                  Maybe you’re ready to just forget all that and hope for the best. I am not.

                • STom, don’t try to call me out about being inactive against the right, and Trump in particular. I have spent almost a half-century of full time, even 60 or 70 hours per week of activism. You are not in that league. I am inclined to invite you to join this effort that real activists do but your anger towards Trump voters makes me want to encourage you to just write here on BMG.

                  One of the big differences between you and me is that I KNOW progressives bring voters when we offer them a better alternative, when we show them that what they voted for is not what they hope for. When you wrote that Trump voters need to personally apologize to you, you wrote the words of a failed pseudo-progressive idea.

                  The ideas that you project on me are both inaccurate and obnoxious. I am not a supporter of inactivity against Nazi type politics. Your words should have been censored by the moderators but I ask that they be left in public to demonstrate your thinking.

                  When you are ready to take time out of your professional life, let me invite you to a place where politics is real, not just two hours in NH on a Saturday afternoon. Take your vacation time in 2018 in a battleground Congressional district outside your Somerville zone. It can be a great experience if you can open your mind.

      • …when I call Trump DUMB in all caps it is a convenient acronym for Dangerous Unqualified Misogynistic Bigot. I don’t want to relitigate the Dem primary, because it’s still no excuse.

  3. For a while, I have been saying that working class women had zero pride in electing the first woman President if she didn’t care about them. That working class people in general were angry at being mocked and disregarded by progressive elites. That within the bright blue bubble of Massachusetts, there was zero understanding that WE are the outlier, that most of the nation did not want your solutions imposed on them.

    I hold no brief for Trump, but I cannot say I am surprised.

    • The Republican Party saw someone who declared that he was going to enact a program that would have embarrassed — and did embarrass — every living Republican president and presidential candidate. And they did NOTHING. They laughed at the racism. Cheered on the sexism. Rushed to exploit fear and ignorance, excuse criminal acts.

      You own this guy. You own what you will be wrought in this nation. You own the pain coming into this world. It was purchased with your cowardice as a party.

      • Who assumed the paeans wouldn’t vote against their own interests, cultural progress, or the whims of their betters.

        We have to face the reality that hundreds of millions of dollars, many of them corporate, went up against a genuinely grassroots campaign that was abandoned by the institutional party it was purported to represent.

        Just because corporate dollars were on our side, doesn’t make us any less right. Just because grassroots organizing pulled off one of the biggest upsets in history doesn’t make his side any less threatening to the long term health and security of our country and democracy.

        Porcupine, God Bless her, still underestimates the genuine threat and pain this demagogue can cause to the country. Especially to people of color. My wife is sobbing right now, along with our lesbian friends, and the Latinos I celebrated in Chelsea with earlier tonight are genuinely worried about their families. It is a white privilege to deny this reality.

        But the appeal and competency of Clinton was also genuinely overestimated by many of us, myself included. It is time to regroup and rebuild from the grassroots up and move decisively to the left to remobilize working people around pocketbook issues.

        A retreat to the center, blaming sexism and racism for Trump, etc. does not explain bastions of unionized Democratic strongholds abandoning our ticket in droves. I’ve been consistently warning about this, and consistently dismissed. I didn’t expect these results, but I am not surprised at how he managed to win and the coalition he assembled.

        There will be many post mortems. I think the best one is to just accept that class matters more than identity politics and shift our coalition accordingly. We will be genuinely surprised at how much easier it is to win elections while vocally adhering to a progressive platform.

        • I think you’re trying to sugarcoat a lynch mob.

          What we are seeing is the pitchforks and torches crowd.

          If this comes to pass, America as we know it is dead.

          • Sure, I didn’t think a plurality of this country would vote to deport 12 million people, ban 1 billion people from the country, and jail opposition leaders.

            lf that makes me an elitest, than the makes this country a different one than where I grew up.

            • But I think any post-mortem that exonerates the lefts failures to organize working people into a cohesive political force let’s the real culprit off the hook. Bernie was right but was too old a messenger, I think the generation he inspired will lead to the sustainable progressive majority we want. Not simply
              waiting for the demographic train to let us off at the left station.

              Where I have hope is the universal condemnation everyone my age has for this outcome and our sustained resolve to fight it tooth and nail. We are living in a post-Clinton party, and we should rise to the challenge and opportunity it presents.

              • It’s Brexit. It’s an unprecedented high score for the Front National in France. It’s Syriza in Greece. Minor parties getting record vote shares in Australia, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal.

                The middle class is getting screwed and voting for anyone to try to stop it. Donald Trump is anyone.

                • What this election proved is that the best way to reach these people is through overt, unapologetic racism and xenophobia. So much is lost: Obama’s legacy in foreign affairs; ACA, which will be repealed; the Supreme Court will be lost for decades. But the greatest loss is a sense of decency, which perhaps was always but an illusion. It is an illusion no more: ours is not a country of fundamentally decent people, but a country of mean, nasty, violent and vindictive people. Once we viewed ourselves as a Shining City on a Hill; now it is revealed that the Shining City is an abandoned ruin.

                • His legacy will be reversed and it was entirely avoidable. He will go down as one of the greats, and hopefully not the last of the greats. I always said he reminded me of Marcus Aurelius as a stoic leader, but I did not mean as the last of the ‘good’ emperors. Others have written America off before, we have bounced back from worst. It will require a lot more work and effort than we expected, and everyone here has to be willing to fight.

          • And they are a core element of his support. I am not sugar coating anything. Donald Trump is a racist, assaulter of women who doesn’t believe in the constitutional separation of powers. And plenty of rational people voted for him anyway because they hated or feared her presidency more. And they cite a distrust, they cite the Foundation, they cite her collusion with Wall Street and a disgust at Washington in general.

            Many assumptions of this campaign that I had were proven wrong, many were proven right. It’s time to learn form her mistakes and be honest about why we lost a key bastion of our support. This could be a potentially realigning election that shuts the Democrats out of the presidency for decades to come. I would rather avoid that outcome rather than give up on my country or blame racists exclusively for it’s ills. They are part of the problem, but we gotta look at the mirror too.

            • I’m sorry, I just categorically reject this false equivalence.

              Hillary Clinton was destroyed by three decades of unprincipled, unsupported lies promulgated by tens or hundreds of millions of dollars spent by right-wing extremists (much of taxpayer money hijacked by those extremists).

              My mother throughout her long lifetime asked over and over again how the Germans allowed Hitler to come to power. I am glad that she died before seeing this happen here, it would have broken her heart.

              Hillary Clinton demonstrates that American cannot and will not accept a smart, powerful, and articulate woman. That was her “crime” in 1992, it stayed with her for her entire career. After three decades of lies about her “corruption”, “dishonesty”, and all the other lies, absolutely NOTHING has stuck. Meanwhile, we have elected a MAN currently being prosecuted for fraud and investigated for worse in multiple districts.

              Some of us throw brickbats about Ms. Clinton’s alleged hostility to workers, while we are supposed to “reach out” to angry white males who completely ignore the fact that Donald Trump spent his entire career stiffing workers and declaring multiple bankruptcies. He actually BRAGGED about it.

              Sure, we need to look in the mirror, I agree about that. I think we need to drum the “Blue Dogs” out of our party. I think we need to drum the bigots and the racists and the misogynists out of our party. A huge drag on the first 100 days of Barack Obama and the ACA was DEMOCRATS who insisted on sexist anti-abortion measures. I want them OUT of my party.

              When Barry Goldwater lost in 1964, the conservative movement did NOT “reach out” to liberals. They instead went back to their core beliefs, and spent a decade reshaping America to reflect them. We are still paying the price for their success.

              We need to do the same. Let the Collaborators work with their representatives in congress to get what they want — I want them to face a giant blank concrete WALL when they approach my Democratic party.

              I want no truck with Collaborators. After a Collaborator comes to me, says “I was wrong, how could I be so wrong”, then I will forgive and welcome him or her into the party. That first step of heart-felt repentance is the necessary starting point. That was precisely the standard set by Archbishop Desmond Tutu when healing the rifts of Apartheid, and they are appropriate when we rebuild our Democratic party.

              I have NO USE WHATSOEVER for bigots who stand and yell at me about how angry they are while demanding that I kow-tow to their biases. None.

              • Hillary Clinton demonstrates that American cannot and will not accept a smart, powerful, and articulate woman.

                My daughters will be able to become President, so can yours. Fairly or unfairly, this wasn’t a candidate people got excited about and it wasn’t a candidate people in Democratic strongholds wanted to vote for. The issue isn’t massaging the ego of white working class men and women who deserted her in droves, the issue is moving past her brand of incrementalism and giving these voters the radical change they demanded. Radical change that will actually help the country, rather than break it even further in two.

                I am arguing for actually campaigning in communities we have taken for granted, in all 50 states, and actually listening to them. We need to offer up a bold Wellstone style agenda where everyone does better when everybody does better. He didn’t say Democrats do better when blacks do better, he didn’t say Democrats do better when Hispanics or women or gays do better, he said everybody does better when every body does better. It’s time for our message to be simple and more universalist. Sanders, Warren, Brown, and Franken are leaders who know how to communicate this message to working people.

                MN is a progressive bastion in the prairie precisely since its leaders know how to organize around broad based class issues. Brown overperformed Obama in 2012, is a favorite for 2018, and could be a great 2020 candidate. He wouldn’t have lost Ohio this year that’s for sure. Time to move on and learn from our mistakes and regroup for the battles to come. It’s a long night ahead of us.

                • You skip over the sexism in your light-hearted “fairly or unfairly”. The point is that the attacks on Ms. Clinton were untrue, unfair, and unrelenting for thirty years since her famous 1992 line about cookies and tea.

                  It is moot anyway, though. Bill and Hillary Clinton will no longer be public figures. Ted Kennedy is dead. The right wing will have to find other targets for its hate and ire. Pocahontas, perhaps?

                  We don’t know yet what will happen to your daughters or mine. We don’t know if that glass ceiling will be broken in a few years or in decades.

                  I remind you that the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in 1923. It was passed by Congress in 1972. It is FORTY FOUR years later, and still not the law of the land. I remember when the ERA passed (I was 20 years old). You weren’t born yet. I was confident sexism would be defeated soon, just as we thought we had defeated racism with the civil rights act. We were wrong about both.

                  I fear you greatly understate the sexism in our society, and the role it played in ending Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions.

                • if Democrats believe that people voted for him mostly on issues of sexism and racism.

                  While there were certainly a number of misogynists and racists in the Trump numbers, they were most certainly dwarfed by the number of Americans who voted on the economy.

                • But when those people get fucked over during these years: Health Insurance, lost. Social Security, cut. Medicaid, cut. Wal-Mart prices, up. Job, lost. Unemployment benefits, gone— who will they blame?

                  Absent a very significant change in their habits that have been established for many decades, they will blame minorities, and will vote for Trump. Maybe they will express their economic insecurity by burning down a mosque, or by cheering when a local cop kills a black kid in cold blood, or by calling some woman somewhere a “c–t.”

                  You can’t fix stupid, and it is pointless to try.

                • She made this election a referendum on racism rather than a celebration of the jobs Obama saved, the health insurance he delivered, and the wars he ended. She choose poorly. As did the voters, but a substantial number of them voted for Obama who has record popularity and still voted for a guy who denied the presidents legitimacy.

                  I will never vote for Trump, and I do think sexism played a role and racism played a role, especially in his nomination. My wife sobbed last night as a foreign born woman of color living in Trump’s America. I am going to work really hard to avoid that ever happening again in our life together, and that means figuring out why he won and working to avoid that outcome in the future. And I believe if we run the same campaign again, we lose.

                • … because she was a very weak candidate. Nominating her was a roll of the dice, in hindsight. She started out with 100% name recognition and very close to 50% of the electorate had already made up their minds about her, to the negative. That left a very narrow path for her. Throw in the fact that she is a poor retail politician, which was also well known, and the stage was set for the debacle that ensued for her as an establishment candidate in a populist climate.

                  I think she is smart and tough and would have made a fine president, but she lacked the political skills and instincts that are critical in a national election. She couldn’t get it done with a huge advantage in money and organization, and an opponent that did everything he could to lose.

                • This is a group that hasn’t been in the Democratic Party since the 60s. Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis ran on these issues; they voted for the Republican.

                  Trump didn’t offer these people a single thing other than a target for venom: Mexicans, Muslims, women. That was the entirety of his campaign. And they ate it up. They “lynched” Obama in effigy. They chanted “Hang that Bitch.” They got their “Get the Muslims Out!” bumper stickers. They laughed about sexual assault.

                  I really used to think that the divide between these people and the Democratic Party was cultural and Dems could bridge it consistently with a little cultural literacy and a cessation of the snootiness about coffee, beer, wine, and NASCAR. This election has changed my mind, and I now despair of that.

                  Put another way: what ethnic minority would you like the Democrats to scapegoat in order to “reach out” to these people.

                  I don’t think I would be interested in voting for any party or candidate that would stoop to pander to them.

                • If you think that the typical Trump supporter was a misogynistic, racist, bigot with an NRA sticker on their truck, you fell for the stereotype that was promoted by the media. While these characters existed, most were and remain working class people who have been screwed by the economic policies of Republicans and Democrats for the past 40+ years.

                • I have been looking in vain for a Republican worthy of a vote for many years. I live in a Republican neighborhood. I followed the campaign more closely than most, so I know what Trump was selling, and it wasn’t Trump steaks.

                  The only thing he did was to tap into anger. He offered no solutions that bear 10 seconds of scrutiny by a dunce. He convinced them that their economic problems are because of Mexicans, and got them to buy a trade war, which, if it comes to pass, will ruin them. He convinced them that their health insurance is expensive because of Mexicans and black people.

                • Put another way: what ethnic minority would you like the Democrats to scapegoat in order to “reach out” to these people.

                  Look at the counties that went to Trump and the counties that went to Sanders. I might add, Obama didn’t scapegoat minorities and was a minority and won their votes decisively in 2012 in those communities. Look at the counties that went for Obama by double digits, for Bernie in the primary, and Trump in the general. That’s the only post mortem that matters for 2016 and is the only way to avoid similar defeats in the future.

                • As they have voted Republican for every election since 1964. Fuck those guys. It’s the Democratic strongholds of Scranton, Akron, Green Bay and Wayne County that we should be worried about. The white working mom on food stamps who voted for Trump since he promised to reopen the plant. That’s the demo I am talking about. And we dismiss them at the risk of losing another election. It would be nice to win without them, but apparently that’s not an option is it?

                • Excuse me, but a man or woman so desperate, ignorant, or both to believe the lies of Donald Trump is not reachable with anything except lies.

                  I submit that our choice to offer them the truth in as gentle a form as we can find, or let them go. It is not “dismissing” them to refuse to lie to them.

                  I think you’re saying, in essence, that we should have lied to them — and I disagree.

                • He lied.

                  All of his shit was pie in the sky nonsense, because there wasn’t any money to pay for it all. And he kind of skipped over the “Families with incomes over $100,000 will have to pay significantly more in taxes” by pretending there is all of this untapped tax potential among the “rich.”

                  So, I suppose that the way to reach these people is to deceive them, intentionally, by telling them what they want to hear, even though it is complete bullshit. And then to hope that no Republican targets minorities.

                  But Hillary was the dishonest one because they just said on Fox that she hasn’t apologized about email (in the last 15 seconds).

                • Campaigning is essentially a game of liar’s poker. Those that are good at it usually win, those that aren’t usually don’t. Hillary is not good at it.

                  If you think about it, has any candidate ever had a wider path cleared for them than Hillary? She was appointed to powerful senior positions in government, handed a senate seat in the money capital of the world, and twice teed up as the presumptive nominee. She has run in only two competitive races and lost them both. You could say she was unlucky in 2008 because of the emergence of Obama, but a better campaigner would have held him off. This year she struggled to put away a fringe candidate in the primary and then … this.

                • …that campaigning and governing are two very different skill sets. She may not have been world class at the former, but one of her strongest arguments was that she was top of the class at the latter. Such is the curse of democracy, and a key reason why it is, “the worst form of government – except for all the other forms which have been tried from time to time.”

            • And plenty of rational people voted for him anyway because they hated or feared her presidency more.

              … about Hillary Clinton they voted for a liar. That’s not rational.

              I think you should stop with the self-congratulatory hair shirt you’re trying to put on. Just stop. You’re only making a complete fool of yourself.

        • Class is more important than identity.

          And that us what the missus needs to understand. Her fears are exaggerated, as are those of her gay friend. At the end of the day, he is from Manhattan not Texas like Cruz.

          Identity has been weaponized to turn people against each other in the name of pride. We need to begin to deal with each other as humans.

          • This man has said he will:
            – reverse Roe v. Wade
            – betray our NATO allies
            – repeal the ACA
            – jail Hillary Clinton

            and a long list of other things.

            Tears are the only appropriate response to what seems to be unfolding, especially for a woman in America who is not a natural-born citizen.

            YOU are the one who should be weeping, along with the rest of us.

        • Regular Democrats are not heard by establishment Democrats.

          But the appeal and competency of Clinton was also genuinely overestimated by many of us, myself included. It is time to regroup and rebuild from the grassroots up and move decisively to the left to remobilize working people around pocketbook issues.

          There was no appeal. Secretary of State/POTUS Clinton is a complete disconnect from the woman Hillary Clinton of the 90s who wrote, “It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.” She represents the past vision of the D party. Bernie a fresher vision but the wrong package.

          Trump is a despicable candidate. We need to double-down and save what we can, strategize for the future.

        • One thing I noticed on a trip down the east coast was the assumption that Clinton supporters had that Hillary’s organization would be enough to win. The commercials were hateful on both sides but Trump’s understanding of marketing may be what won it for him.

          Hillary’s commercials from Mass to Fla were the same (mostly), attacks on Donald’s character and treatment of women. She doubled down on that and ran the same ads over and over.

          In Penn and NC Donald ran ads with Hillary saying she would change the application of the 2nd amendment. In Fla the commercials concentrated on the Clinton Foundation and Hillary saying they were broke when they left the White House, nary a mention of guns. There was even a cartoon commercial which seemed to be created for Fla about moving Clinton baggage into the White House, never saw it in any other state.
          I bet everyone wishes Gary had been invited to the debates.

        • That’s one minority I honestly don’t recall him saying anything against. In fact, what I do recall is his coming to their defense after the Orlando nightclub shooting (which was of course still awful as another excuse to attack Muslims) and him expressing gratitude at the GOP convention for getting applause when he defended their rights.

      • Porcu has long been on record as opposed to Trump. Blaming her for his victory is akin to blaming you for DeLeo. No single person is responsible for what their party does when they oppose that act.

        • Losing campaigns have to listen to the voters of their opponents rather than double down on what didn’t work. Labeling half the country as deplorable didn’t work. Relying on a nationwide sisterhood committed to electing the first female President didn’t work. Making this a referendum on decency and decorum didn’t work. Making this a referendum one Trump’s qualifications didn’t work. He had the best night of any Republican since Reagan, and we have to concede he created a winning coalition by wide margins of the white working class.

          A trend I’ve been warning about and have been criticized for here. In May I said PA was vulnerable, in June I questioned the veracity of Latino or African American turnout-which ended up being lower than it was for Obama. I mentioned we needed to pick a midwestern populist like Brown, who would’ve won Ohio and likely helped her in the rust belt.

          A Trump voter my age came out to me in a private Facebook message. We are are the godparents of his children. Like me, his wife is Filipina. He said he didn’t like being called racist or being told what to do by the elite, which shifted him from Johnson to Trump. He is atheist, pro-choice, pro-gay, drives a smart car and we enjoy watching art house films and drinking craft beer together. But he’s a gun nut. But his dad got laid off from a factory that moved overseas. He’s lost friends in Iraq and to drug overdoses. He hates the corrupt Democratic machine in his state (IL) and feels the religious right was defeated yesterday and fiscal conservatives “got their party back”. He also voted for Sanders in the primary and feels he would’ve won the general. Hard to say I disagree after last night.

          • ….suburban and rural working class people without a college education.

            And from what I’ve seen, Democrats will continue to ignore them, or at the most, tell them to get a better education and become a liberal minded member of the professional class if they want to be a real modern day Democrat.

            • College-educated white men voted for Trump by a substantial majority. C-E white women did not. Most white women did.

              Large components of minority-voter populations also went for Trump.

              Clinton was the wrong candidate. The electorate has woken up to the fact that the political Establishment doesn’t care about their well-being, and Clinton was the purest example of the Establishment. Enough people held their noses and voted for Trump because they believed that Clinton would continue to give them the shaft. To them, the Devil they knew was worse than the one they didn’t know — and in many cases, they probably worked hard to not know. That’s a measure of how little they trusted Clinton.

              • I watched as Massachusetts Democrats lost with Coakley and then lost with her again using the same argument in support of her and the same scapegoats in the losses.

                And now I see Democrats saying they lost because Democrats are the lone moral educated people in a sea of immorality and ignorance. We lost because they are stupid and vile!

                How about “we lost” because we’ve ignored or marginalized a large section of the electorate, dismissed their plight as irrelevant to ours for the moment and if only they became more like us with more education, they would see the light and join us.

                • And now I see Democrats saying they lost because Democrats are the lone moral educated people in a sea of immorality and ignorance. We lost because they are stupid and vile!

                  … it was proved without doubt that Donald Trump sexually assaults women, brags about it, lies when convenient (and even when not) makes appeals to nakedly racist segments of the population and actually made appeals to a foreign country to commit espionage upon the United States.

                  So, yeah, stupid and vile. Not, as some have suggested, merely ignoring the stupid and the vile in order to vote for him but actually and actively stupid and aggressively vile. When something insane happens, why are you surprised when people say it was insane?

                  I don’t think Donald Trump is going to last very long. I think the first year will be an insane and chaotic mess and in the second year, conveniently timed for the mid-terms, the Republican Congress will impeach him “for the good of the country” and use that to broaden their gains in the House and the Senate. In other words, a coup.

    • I don’t care how dismissed and put upon people feel. You do NOT vote for the second coming of George Wallace in 2016 (and as a Governor, one could even argue that HE was at least somewhat qualified!)

    • In Franklin, we has dozens of folks holding Clinton signs and there were only six people holding Trump signs, one middle aged man, one old man, and four middle aged working class women.

  4. We have had a problem with the D party for a long time. I don’t believe that Hillary’s negatives were all of the reasons why she did not squash an inferior candidate.

    I solidly point – as I have for over a decade, to the incestuous self-serving nature of the democratic party (Wasserman-Schultz, Brazile, Clintons) and the baby boomers that became complacent with age and comfort. Superstar and connected insider status vs. fresh, bright and progressive.

    An earlier post topic skewers Gov. Baker for being in bed with Peter Picknelly, the Donald Trump of Springfield. When not too long ago Governor Patrick was enjoying elite fundraisers at his home and opening the Commonwealth to Papa Picknelly’s wet dream – a casino in Springfield. All connected….connected. That is what is repugnant to white, working class Americans.

    • Ticket splitting is dead. I would’ve thought the likeliest outcome was a Clinton presidency and Republican Senate. Turns out I was wrong. This election was a referendum on Clinton and it turns out while a majority of Americans dislike both candidates, they dislike her more.

      We have to resist calls that our platform was too liberal or our nominee too leftist coming from the center right. We have to resist the rest of the left just dismissing a majority of Americans as deplorable and giving up on the country. I always said there’s a third that says “he’s a bigot and an ass but I just don’t trust her”, heard that from a whites female professional at a diner in Salem this morning and another socially liberal professional friend who voted for Trump.

      David Duke is happy, people of color are scared, the most qualified female candidate in history lost to a charlatan who was the least qualified. All of this can be simultaneously true with the fact that she just made Coakley look like Obama. This is now a post-Clinton party, and it’s a challenge as well as an opportunity.

      • There you go with that “but I just don’t trust her” meme again. You fail to acknowledge that the REASON you hear that is because it is been repeated over and over by the “liberal” media for thirty years — and always without truth.

        This is now a nation led by a man who has promised to shred our fundamental values, rights, and obligations. He has publicly demonstrated his contempt for fellow humans.

        Right now, I don’t much care what kind of political party we are. I think the immediate challenge is to protect our wives, husbands, sons, daughters, grandchildren, neighbors and friends from this despicable bully and from the sixty million Americans who just gave him a mandate.

        I’m wrestling with what choices does my family have to make to protect ourselves over the next few days, months, and years. The formative experiences of my wife’s family were fleeing first the Russians and then the Germans during the 1930s and 1940s, and then again during the 1950s. Her family had loved ones and friends trapped in East Berlin because they waited too long to flee. My younger children don’t have passports — I think they need them. We will likely need funds in European banks, because it may become quite hard to get money out of US banks. How much? Who knows. I submit that, from what you’ve said about your fiance, the two of you should be doing something very similar. This is not a time to pretend that her fears are unjustified and her pain not real.

        We are already in “unthinkable” land. The question now is HOW unthinkable. I doubt that I’ll have very much time to think very much about politics.

    • whose guess of a 269-269 tie (an outcome we regarded a week ago as pessimistic) won the BMG electoral vote prediction contest.

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