So, what happened?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > So, what happened?

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

So should I laugh when Trump inevitably fails to bring jobs back to rural America or should I feel bad for these people?

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 03:17

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:34

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Both, honestly; they really did bring it upon themselves. I'm from rural PA and the anger these people feel is legitimate. They have a ton of genuine, real grievances that are totally justified. Neither party has been kind to them at all and the rampant, crushing poverty is causing all sorts of problems. Really they have every right to be furious at the system right now. Conversely their absolute refusal to vote for anybody that isn't an increasingly insane right winger is destroying them. They were given promises of prosperity by the GOP in light of bringing jobs back thanks to deregulation and tax cuts. When they failed to materialize they blamed the Democrats.

Democrats, for their part, have done gently caress all to reach out to these people. And really who can blame them? The Democratic party represents a secular, tolerant future where they can't create their little pocket theocracies. The right has done such a good job of courting the religious right and single-issue voters (abortion, gay marriage, etc.) that there isn't much point in Democratic reach there. As soon as you say "yup, gay marriage is fine" you lose massive swathes of rural Americans. They are people drowning in a river who won't accept help except from certain groups. It's crazy.

Meanwhile drug addiction is as rampant as poverty. Their lives are increasingly awful and they have little or no way out. Their jobs are vanishing. Their retirement funds evaporated 8 years ago. The last decade has been incredibly difficult; much longer in some areas. The Rust Belt in particular has been suffering something fierce since the 80's.

I'm feeling a mix of schadenfreude and pity right now. Whether I like it or not they're my people; that's where I came from. I grew up in the woods and in the decay right smack dab in one of the nastiest casualties of the state. I felt the same anger they did when I originally signed up to vote as a Libertarian, really. Neither party gave a single rat's rear end about us. Every time a factory closed the message was "well that's unfortunate, but..." The dismal recovery after the recession was met with a message of "well that's unfortunate, but..."

The American establishment has failed.

This makes me feel as if the blame for this predicament is on the republicans. Democrats aren't going to be motivated to help these people if they're not going to vote for democrats.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 04:21

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

gradenko_2000 posted:

I think it was in the first post-debate analysis that people were saying that one of Trump's genuinely workable attacks on Clinton was:

"You had 30 years to fix this, why didn't you fix it?"

Now, in the media-savvy, debates-are-all-about-scoring-points level of discussion, Clinton managed to deflect the attack. Get Trump to say something stupid, change the subject, whatever.

But Clinton never actually answered the question, either.

And perhaps people noticed.

It doesn't matter that Trump can't actually do it. People want to be pandered to.

Forget what have you done in 30 years. What did Obama do in 8 years? He saved the economy in 2008 but since then we still kind of stuck in limbo. She can't run as the continuation of the status quo when the status quo is lukewarm for the country and downright horrible for certain people.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 16:08

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

theflyingorc posted:

The state polls being so off also meant that Clinton, the ultimate pragmatist, didn't realize she was missing a key voter block in rust belt whites. Had weaknesses there shown up in August, she would have heavily targeted them. Had the election not been so obviously "already over", more people would have been motivated to vote and make sure Trump didn't win.

I think without the polling errors, there's a very good chance this wouldn't have happened.

Yeah I agree. She was flying blind and therefore had no opportunity to adjust.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 21:23

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

theflyingorc posted:

It was difficult to predict, and I saw literally nobody but Michael Moore (lol) expecting it to go down like this.

Without the influence of polls, Clinton might have not avoided important groups.

It's hard to say what the right tactic is in regards to polling data because Romney ignored polls and went with his gut and got owned, Clinton went strictly by the polls and got owned.

I think you have to go with the polls. You look at data and that tells you how you are doing and you adjust if you're loving up in some areas. The data isn't always accurate for example in Clinton's case. But without data you're basically making poo poo up.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 21:48

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

Cerebral Bore posted:

The big sin of Clinton's campaign was complacency. At some point they very clearly concluded that they had the whole thing in the bag, and therefore felt that they could ignore warning signs they had no business ignoring. And when you've convinced yourself that you've already won you're in the biggest danger of all, which is something that a supposedly professional and competent campaign staff should not have let happen.

Hell, this one chinese guy figured this poo poo out about two and a half milennia ago. It's not hard.

Dude they looked at the totality of the data and concluded what any reasonable person would have.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 22:19

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

Lt. Danger posted:

No, you dummies, I'm not talking about bad polling data or whatever, like if Clinton just had more accurate info she would have made the right choices. There were deep structural factors at play here, too many perhaps to be mitigated. You can't campaign-rally your way out of the insider/outsider narrative, or 1990s conservative talk radio, or end-of-history political complacency.

She lost MI by like 10k votes. There's no structural problem. If she was made aware by accurate polling numbers I'm sure she could have found the 10k votes somewhere.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 22:21

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

Lt. Danger posted:

There was no reason for Michigan to be that close in the first place.

Rather, there were lots of reasons Michigan was that close, but the Democratic campaign didn't see or didn't want to see them (e.g. because even the promise of radical economic reform was off the table).

I think sean10mm is right that it was so close that one or two days could have turned the entire thing around - but why was it so close in the first place? National elections are chaotic systems, but they're not arbitrary.

They were so close because she was doing all the wrong poo poo because she was flying blind. She had no idea what she was doing was wrong and no idea what she should be doing to correct it.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 22:32

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

mastershakeman posted:

it was her time. what else could possibly matter?

Yeah I think she did her best. She gave several speeches with pneumonia that she could have missed and she collapsed at a ground zero ceremony.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 23:07

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

Squinty posted:

Polling shouldn't be the first and last indication of popular opinion. Really, Occupy Wallstreet should have been the first red flag. Bernie the second, Brexit the third, and Trump's success over establishment republicans the last. At some point the democratic party became the party of corporate America and the financial sector instead of the poor and working classes, and when we were all bragging about how Hillary was outspending Trump 2:1 in every state, no one stopped to think about where that money was coming from and how hosed that is.

No I don't agree. All those things you listed aren't even quantitative.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 23:22

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

Cerebral Bore posted:

Politics isn't quantitative for gently caress's sake.

Well look. If you want to make a good decision you have to have the right information. The best information is quantitative. As in choice A is 50 and choice B is 20. Therefore I choose choice A since 50>20. Of course life is imperfect and those numbers may or may not be correct. But given the choice between decisions from numbers or things not quantitative I would always choose the numbers.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2016 23:31

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

TheOneAndOnlyT posted:

Honestly I think what it comes down to is that Hillary didn't offer something to vote for that was genuinely exciting. Hillary's campaign basically presented a vote for her as a vote for four more years of Obama. The problem is that the last four years of Obama have been marked by Congress doing jack poo poo, Obama complaining about Congress doing jack poo poo, and just in general jack poo poo getting done except through the Supreme Court. Nobody is going to get excited about voting for four more years of the same old poo poo with nothing getting done, especially when there are a huge fuckload of problems that need to be addressed. What needed to happen is that Hillary needed to show why people should vote for her instead of against Trump. I think there's a couple of approaches she could have taken:

1) Spend more time playing up the fact that she would have been the first woman president. I mean yeah, it was obvious without her needing to say it, but in all honesty she never really used it as a major issue. Making it a central part of her campaign that it's time for a woman to lead, or that she would be a voice for women in the government that they've never really had, would have probably increased enthusiasm among female voters. Granted, I don't know if it would have caused a backlash from men, but most of the men who viscerally hate the idea of a woman president were probably voting for Trump anyway.

2) Incorporate more of Bernie's platform into her own, or even make him her VP. People made the argument that Hillary's platform was the most leftist campaign platform in recent memory, but she could have gone further, especially considering that Congress was never going to pass anything even in her actual platform anyway. This was the same mistake Obama made as president, using the moderate reforms he wanted as the starting point for negotiations, rather than starting from further to the left and making the "truth in the middle" something that was still a decent improvement (even if Congress was never going to pass it). People wanted big changes to the status quo, and Hillary wasn't offering any.

I don't know if either of these would have won her the election, but given how slim the margin was, I don't think either approach would have hurt.

Yeah I agree. For whatever reason be it obstructionism or whatever after 8 years with Obama the economy is still just 'meh'. That's a tough load for Clinton to have to carry.

Also Obamacare wasn't doing too well at just the wrong moment.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2016 04:52

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

This circular firing squad is so depressing.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2016 03:40

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

sean10mm posted:

Obama's "majority in Congress" included a large number of blue dogs barely less conservative than the GOP itself, including at least one straight-up turncoat. He didn't have the free hand to reinvent everything that people seem to assume.

Not that I think he was a secret radical, but even if he didn't try to play ball for longer than he should have his ability to make huge changes to everything in America forever was really limited, to put it mildly.

Didn't a bunch of democrats lost their seats because they voted for ACA? If that's he case, I don't think it was possible to push it any further than Obama did.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2016 21:28

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

gradenko_2000 posted:

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obama-clinton-campaign-work-231370

Obama suggests Clinton didn't work as hard as he did

Clinton is like 70 and Obama was 45 in 2008. No way she could have went to every home Iowa. She put in as much work as she could--she collapsed on national TV.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2016 05:35

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

enraged_camel posted:

Someone posted an article earlier in which the author likened Hillary Clinton to a Human Resources Manager.

Which is actually an incredibly brilliant comparison, and perhaps single-handedly captures why so many Dems didn't vote for her. Because you see, just like an HR Manager doesn't actually care about the employees and tries to first and foremost protect the company from liability (and is willing to actively gently caress over the employees to achieve that goal), Hillary also didn't really care about her constituents, and at the end of the day was beholden to her corporate donors. Lots of Dems saw through her disguise, which is why nothing she said resonated with them.

edit: the same article also pointed out the same thing many posters here are saying: Trump spent the majority of his speeches actually talking about policy ideas and telling stories about him connecting and empathizing with people. The media completely failed to report on this and, much like with Clinton, caught on to a few extremist points and sound-bites.

edit 2: found it: http://nonsite.org/editorial/listening-to-trump

That's not true at all. Clinton had a poo poo load of plans she wanted to enact. And they were specific unlike trump's.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2016 21:19

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

enraged_camel posted:

We're talking about her level of perceived sincerity: she sounded about as sincere as an HR Manager does when they tell you that they will totally look into the complaints you've brought up regarding discrimination (while talking to the legal team behind your back about how to fire you quickly).

And the reason she was perceived to be insincere is that the Democratic voters looked at the things she said she would do if elected and compared them with things like her voting record and the sources of her income and they saw someone who didn't practice what she preached, unlike Bernie.

Wasn't her voting record like 95% similar to Sanders?

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 02:56

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

That statistic only has so much meaning when 90% of votes are "repeal Obamacare y/n" over again.

Wasn't she out of the senate and Secretary of State by the time ACA rolled around?

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 03:05

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:34

Vladimir Putin: Mar 17, 2007; by R. Guyovich

PT6A posted:

Why all this fascination with machines? In Canada, we use wonderful technology called "a pen and a ballot paper." If you make a mark in the designated box, your vote is counted for the corresponding candidate. We count them using "people."

There are some things that just don't need to be mechanized.

People also make mistakes when counting believe it or not. Also the population of Canada is about 15% of the population of the US. Would that even scale up?

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 17:56

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > So, what happened?