|
Obama's approval rating is 56%, and has been on a steady upward trajectory since around this time last year. It has dwarfed either candidate's approval for the entire election I believe. That's the status quo at president, right there. http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/gallup-daily-obama-job-approval.aspx Now let's look at the election numbers: 2012 O 65,915,795 R 60,933,504 Note that Obama's approval rating wasn't particularly good in 2012, and was notably worse than now. Like 50%ish, give or take. 2016 T 59,692,974 (-1,240,530) C 59,923,027 (-5,992,768) There was no massive white racist Republican wave in 2016. Trump SHRANK the GOP base by >1.2m. Clinton on the other hand lost just under 6m votes that didn't go to Trump, but simply went away. This was a low-turnout "get out your base" election on both sides, where Trump did a mediocre to poor job, and Clinton did a DISASTROUS job. Clinton didn't lose voters to Trump in meaningful numbers, and Trump didn't get a wave of hidden turbo-racists to vote - she failed to get out HER PARTY'S OWN BASE. The people who had just voted for black gay Muslim communist Satan Barack Hussein Obama in 2012, at a time when the public liked him LESS than they do now, just stayed home. e: I'm well to the left of the Democrats, but I don't think the "status quo" label killed them per se, because the "burn down everything" candidate lost the GOP votes compared to  of all loving people, and Obama's popularity remains high. What killed them was that Hillary didn't excite and motivate her own base, and wasn't liked generally, and the electorate chooses almost entirely on feelings rather than facts. Trump combined huckster charm and a message of "gently caress the other side" that worked on at least most of the core GOP base, even though everyone else hated it.
sean10mm fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Nov 10, 2016 |
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 16:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 06:36 |
|
|
KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:A good deal of that is less campaign strategy and more inherent weakness of the candidate. You might have missed my edit but that's basically what I think. People already predisposed to vote for her party didn't want to vote for HER, specifically. That's the definition of a bad candidate, honestly - if you can't win your own side, you're DOA. sean10mm fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Nov 10, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 17:02
|
|
|
Pedro De Heredia posted:The polls being so off, as well as the outcome of the election itself, should make you be a bit skeptical of what this number means and represents. This is kind of apples and oranges though, the favorability numbers always showed Clinton being really bad, which was in fact true to the election outcome. It was the state Trump vs Clinton polls that were garbage. That's what all the predictions were based on, and the fact that even the R-leaning polls were like C+5% turned everything into poo poo. sean10mm fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Nov 10, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 17:08
|
|
|
Obama is almost certainly a trillion times better liked than HIllary Clinton, and it's entirely due to personality, charisma and rhetorical skills. People don't like the status quo generally, but they like it 100x better from him than from Hillary. He's also way more convincing when he spins incrementalism as Big Deal Progress. Also, Republican attempts to pin manufactured scandals to him failed really hard compared to their attempts to do the same to Clinton. She is just sketchy enough compared to him that they always gain more traction. Outside of political junkies, nobody understands anything about policy beyond dumb catchphrases. Substance means almost nothing, Trump ran on totally self-contradictory gibberish. W was an open moron who won because people FELT LIKE he was a good ol' boy like them. Reagan was a bastard who went senile, but who also won blowouts because he was everybody's sweet old grampa. e: I also agree the DNC as an institution has been a trash fire since Howard Dean left. e2: It also wouldn't surprise me if we learn that Clinton made some kind of strategic blunder like she did against Obama in the 2008 primaries. She lost all the swing states but ran up the popular vote score in a) states she had no hope of winning, and b) the bluest of the blue states. Maybe she got greedy and spent all those GOTV resources trying to win 400 EVs by taking Georgia and Texas instead of locking down PA? I dunno. sean10mm fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Nov 10, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 17:24
|
|
|
Cerebral Bore posted:What happened is that third-way centrism is and always has been complete horseshit and without a charismatic candidate like Obama to paper over the flaws it collapsed completely. Without a charismatic candidate you almost always lose, full stop. Unless the other guy is somehow even more of a gray lump, like HW vs. Dukakis or some poo poo. E: Most voters don't know what third way or neocon even mean, but they know who they like. Voters are shallow as gently caress. sean10mm fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Nov 10, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 18:22
|
|
|
SickZip posted:The focus on "The Economy" as a abstract is a massive part of the loss of Hillary and repudiation of Obama in this election. The Economy was saved but whose economy? The banks for sure and some abstract country averages went up, meanwhile most Americans simultaneously got hosed, stayed hosed, and got to constantly hear about how the great the economy was doing. I think Obama is seen as more progressive than he really is pretty consistently. It's easier to project left-ish hopes on him because a) he didn't openly run as a "splitting the difference" guy like Bill Clinton did in the 1990s, and b) congress is so monstrously obstructive to him that anything to the left of Pinochet is DOA anyway, so it's easy to imagine him with a good agenda that is just being stymied by THOSE FUCKERS. The entire Clinton political identity was unapologetically built on openly splitting the difference to catch Republicans wrong-footed, not (unfulfilled and/or impossible) Hope & Change. Also, the negative legacy of 1990s "war on crime"/"entitlement reform" poo poo seems to be more in the popular consciousness now. Basically "actively did a thing that has a bad legacy" is a bigger stain than "failed to do more (that he couldn't get through Congress in a million years anyway)."
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 19:29
|
|
|
WhiskeyJuvenile posted:A lot of handwringing over the fact that like 100k voters in a 120m voter election decided it People are handwringing because Trump seems uniquely terrible and he won. A narrow loss to a generic business vermin Republican by the same margin wouldn't upset people nearly as much.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 21:05
|
|
|
Predictions based on aggregating polls were EXTREMELY accurate in 2004, 2008, and 2012. And nobody provided a good reason to think all polls would be C+5% outta nowhere before the election. Nate was still very wrong (he had like 80% Clinton win probability on election day), just less wrong than others because he literally just had a 10% "meteor outta nowhere kills everyone lulz" factor in his model. Which in retrospect looks really smart compared to taking polls at face value, but he didn't actually predict that all the polls would turn into poo poo simultaneously in this election. Like, even if you went by all the historically Republican-leaning polls Clinton was going to win walking away. It was bizarre and nobody has explained it yet that I know of.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 21:46
|
|
|
Polygynous posted:A system where organizations gauge public opinion by calling people and asking how they're voting is willful ignorance, ok. Yeah, you can't really call it "willful ignorance" when people made so much effort and spent so much money to collect and analyze the polling data that taken together was extremely correct in 2004, 2008 and 2012. Like crazy accurate, in fact. People made judgments based on methods that were demonstrably correct in 2004, 2008 and 2012 that spontaneously turned into poo poo in 2016 for reasons nobody has even explained yet. If Clinton looks like she's cruising to a win based on the best evidence available, you aren't being willfully ignorant, your bowing to the (apparent) facts.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 21:55
|
|
|
theflyingorc posted:I think the issue is one of these three things: It might be the reverse of the embarrassed Trump voter - the Democrat who voted in 2012 for Obama that would never choose Trump over Clinton in a poll, or admit that they won't vote, but also had no actual motivation to go out and vote for her. I mean, the main thing to explain is Democratic turnout dying completely since Trump actually did under-perform Romney, which you would think would predict a loss. But really I have no idea. All polling everywhere turning into poo poo outta nowhere was the craziest thing.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 22:05
|
|
|
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. When you lose 6 million votes into thin air compared to the last presidential election for your party, you're a really bad candidate no matter how you spin it, yeah. The polling thing is just weird to me, and maaaaaaybe because it was so close Clinton could have won a squeaker against a terrible opponent who lost 1.2 million votes compared to if she wasn't totally clueless about what was happening. But the big story has to be that Democratic base wanted nothing to do with her in a year when the Republicans were running someone historically terrible and scary as gently caress, and she had bottomless resources.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 22:14
|
|
|
RaySmuckles posted:its really disturbing/disappointing seeing all the people try to act like the election was just the result of some campaign mismanagement. hillary lost millions of democratic votes because they didn't show up. trump was historically bad, underperforming romney too. but those two things don't come from the same place. The campaign problems maybe explain tens of thousands of votes going one way or the other in key areas. Like maybe a better campaign gets more votes in key counties in swings states by not wasting time in states or counties that are in the bag or are unwinnable. However, she underperformed compared to Obama 2012 (a bad year for his presidency, remember!) by MILLIONS of votes. She lost like 5x as many Democrats as Trump lost Republicans vs. 2012. That's insane. The real problem is orders of magnitude bigger than can be explained by "bad polling hurt Clinton's ability to make tactical decisions."
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 22:42
|
|
|
Cerebral Bore posted:It's now clear that the third-way Clinton wing of the Democrats is incapable of delivering anything except disaster at the ballot box. Therefore they need to be removed from power and replaced with people who aren't completely out of touch. However, neoliberals aren't know for giving up power unless they're absolutely forced to, so if we put the blame on the voters it will help the aforementioned fuckups wriggle away from their own responsibility, which is pretty bad for the future. Nobody of any stripe gives up power unless forced to. But here's the thing: if you can't get elected, the party doesn't give a gently caress about you. Clinton's huge influence was predicated on the assumption that she would get elected and reward people with appointments and access and pork and poo poo. If you can't win nobody gives a gently caress about you in party politics. She's just a liability to everyone in the party now. I don't think the Democratic party will be sincerely super socialists now, but they will at the very least move more towards the rhetoric of Obama that was built on the promise of big changes (even if he personally didn't/couldn't/wouldn't/whatever do it) simply because they got more votes that way. Clinton had a nice platform nobody read, no charisma at all, and a public image that was radioactive to both the left AND the right. The Democrats might try something else hugely stupid, but it will probably be a different kind of idiot failure we haven't even thought of yet.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2016 20:48
|
|
|
Cerebral Bore posted:Clinton's influence was predicated on her building up networks in the party for decades. It's not guaranteed that this influence will just disappear overnight. Those networks were sustained by the assumption that participating would have rewards. If she can't get elected she can't reward for poo poo. I mean, every rear end in a top hat won't go away in the party structure obviously, but they won't be loyal to her anymore, and most will jump ship for anyone who looks like they can win now because they're generally self-interested jerks with no principles. Crowsbeak posted:Which is why all he should ever get to be is a governor or a vp. We need Neoliberalism dead. I think this conversation in general (not you specifically) tends to mix two mostly unrelated things. One is ideology, what we actually want to happen in politics. I pretty much agree with everyone that more left would be more better. The other is what wins elections, which is almost entirely about image and has nothing to do with substance, because the electorate is dumb and has never given a poo poo about substance. Put another way, a Democrat with the exact same ideas as Clinton who was charming and knew how to run a campaign would have won walking way. That's not GOOD but I think that's the reality.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2016 21:09
|
|
|
I kind if don't care about Trump voters because he got fewer votes than Romney. There was no white wave of hate vote, the Democrats lost like 6m people who voted Obama in 2012 when his popularity was down. Clinton and the DNC lost it way more than Trump won it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2016 17:05
|
|
|
Xae posted:The lesson from 2000-2016 elections is that policy doesn't matter. Charisma does. LOL it goes back way further than that. Like back to Roosevelt giving speeches over the loving radio.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2016 20:18
|
|
|
Rexicon1 posted:I think the lesson is actually that simple economic policy is what matters and social/racial/gender issues don't matter in the slightest. Evangelicals don't give a flying gently caress about evangelical issues, Women don't give much of a gently caress about women''s issues. The only thing we care about in america is money and hope. Promise the world and then do what you were going to do anyways. Reduce it to economic SLOGANS and you're probably on the right track. Nobody understands or cares about policy detail.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2016 20:38
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2016 20:52
|
|
|
kaynorr posted:I'd like to poke at this further. So Obama comes into office knowing that we're in for a massive shitstorm of a recession and he has a non-filibuster proof majority in Congress. Are you saying that the recovery package we got was as good as could have ever happened and that the economic malaise that followed was inevitable? I dont know about that, but I'm skeptical he could ram through something orders of magnitude bigger than he did like some think. The GOP was purely obstructive all along and the blue dogs made Hillary look like Bernie so I'm pessimistic. Basically I think he could have done somewhat better if he was more aggressive early on, but that the HISTORIC CHANCE OF RADICAL CHANGE talk is unrealistic because his majority was full of almost-Republicans who all got wiped out at the next mid terms.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2016 18:35
|
|
|
Yeah, the blue dog Democrats basically died because their constituencies decided why vote for a diet Republican when you can just vote for a Republican? Essentially they were late adopters for the realignment between Democrats and Republicans that happened after 1964 - Democrats by the standards of 40+ years earlier who finally fell off the party's rear end like a dried out Dixiecrat dingleberry. It's kind of like how Rockefeller Republicans basically died out or just became moderate Democrats when they finally realized the GOP had gone hambananas. e: The blue dogs also tried to run by distancing themselves from Obama while he was still really popular, which worked about as well as you'd expect. sean10mm fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Nov 15, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2016 22:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 06:36 |
|
|
Mans posted:Additionally, there's also a tale of Trump winning with less votes than Romney got 4 years ago. Is it true? It looked that way, but a lot of votes got counted really late because our elections are disorganized garbage. It ended up virtually identical. The tally now looks like this: 2016 T 61,251,881 C 62,413,443 2012 R 60,933,504 O 65,915,795 Trump gained like 318,000 votes over Romney 2012. Clinton ended up 3.5 million behind Obama 2012. e: fixed dumb math mistake. sean10mm fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Nov 16, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2016 18:37
|
|