US Politics, December 2022: "They're now the working class party, man."

2016 was as much of a watershed election as 1980, which was picked over endlessly, too

Also similarly shitty outcome.

HRC could have won with a better campaign that understood Trump's appeal. Whether it's her fault or her peoples' fault — almost certainly both — it's not true that she couldn't have won, she obviously could have. They underestimated and misunderstood Trump. But to be fair so did lots of people, including people who get paid a lot of money to understand politics.

Anyway. Trump in 2015-16 was pretty entertaining, and definitely his experience as a loudmouth TV celebrity was a big part of it. He's not nearly as entertaining any more in all sorts of ways, and neither are any of the other likely GOP contenders. Lightning in a bottle is a hard to come by.

I sometimes daydream about going back in time and assassinating Reagan

hillary sucked in the way only a legacy hire can, she never wouldve made it to the primary if she wasnt a clinton, truly one of the absolute worst at politics people weve ever seen, if you need proof she did lose an election to donald trump

xp - Squeaky Fromme chose the wrong target.

that time trump hooped up his throws of paper towels to hurricane victims is how i perceive all of his humor to like, every extent. xp

― normal AI yankovic (Hunt3r), Wednesday, December 14, 2022 11:51 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

imo the funniest moment was when he had to do that trick or treating White House event and there was some kid in a Minion costume who had his basket tucked out of view or something. Trump just doesn't know what to do so he just puts the candy on his head. IMO that's kind of what made Trump's whole shtick work - the entire GOP platform is based around this idea that everything is simple and easily solved and you can only pull that off with a candidate who never makes an effort to do anything and instead just constantly falls upward

democrats just accepting the clinton dynasty as cool and normal is yet another data point in a vast constellation of terrible worthlessness

the fever is breaking we all love Fetterman now

btw as long as we're relitigating 2016 I still wanna point out that Hillary "won" by 3,000,000 votes and almost certainly would have won the election if not for Comey putting his thumb on the scale. I agree she was a garbage candidate but it's not like Trump was some unstoppable force. I mean at one point he was down so far in the polls that his own party was urging him to pull out.

Remember when the takeaway for five minutes post-2016 election was "Dems need to start to listen to these very real concerns voters in the Rust Belt have before everyone conceded that many of these voters were also very racist

Trump was never President we all died the night before the election

imo the funniest moment was when he had to do that trick or treating White House event and there was some kid in a Minion costume who had his basket tucked out of view or something. Trump just doesn't know what to do so he just puts the candy on his head.

If it had been a Big Mac, the kid and his head wouldn't have stood a chance

btw as long as we're relitigating 2016 I still wanna point out that Hillary "won" by 3,000,000 votes and almost certainly would have won the election if not for Comey putting his thumb on the scale. I agree she was a garbage candidate but it's not like Trump was some unstoppable force. I mean at one point he was down so far in the polls that his own party was urging him to pull out.

― frogbs, Wednesday, December 14, 2022 1:04 PM (three seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

trump was a historically unpopular candidate, and just a gross dude, and hillary still found a way to lose to him

Trump was a historically unpopular candidate, and just a gross dude, and Comey still found a way to stan for him.

Remember when the takeaway for five minutes post-2016 election was "Dems need to start to listen to these very real concerns voters in the Rust Belt have before everyone conceded that many of these voters were also very racist

comey was very bad for her for sure but shit happens you know

Alfred, do you want to do a coup in Honduras or something?

Like I think you’re great but the Hillary stanning is just NOT it.

Now? I have a Zoom in 30 mins. Ask me later.

coup brainstorming sesh no doubt

I'm not stanning, I'm repeating what tips and frobgs said.

Plus, it's Wednesday, and I'm passing the time till my critics group settles on Brendan Fraser playing a fat gay man in The Whale.

ask not for what the comey stans. it's not you.

*back in the brainstorming sesh*

what about a triple coup on new years day

we need to get an aristocrat failson in the mix here

With a Negroni.

I mean I do think the entire party coalescing around someone the Republican party has spent 20 years attacking and devising bizarre conspiracy theories about was probably not a great idea. like they straight up admitted the whole point of the Benghazi hearings was to damage her reputation. that stuff really does have an effect on people who don't really follow politics closely.

yeah theres an interesting dynamic there where if she were good at politics she wouldve recognized that they already cooked her and not run, but because she was terrible at it she just moved right on with the plan

Hillary being a place where ease and charisma went to die was a major problem for her, she couldn’t move past herself and her missteps without it seeming stiff and lacking confidence. Eminently qualified (in the sort of terrible American sense of political experience and what not) but Trump being an entertainer won out obv.

it was her second time being the presumptive nominee too lmao, and she still almost lost to a grumpy old socialist from vermont that no one had ever heard of

Biden being a sort of milquetoast mannequin and everyone’s fourth or fifth choice in 2020 didn’t matter bc Trump was at that point totally poisonous, I just imagine what if the Dems had any decent candidates beyond Bernie and Elizabeth. It wouldn’t be as close as it was and 2024 wouldn’t be as much of a worry.

and hillarys wooden arrogant persona was only like third on the list of fatal political flaws

Hillary got a lot of flack in our monthly threads prior to the election for various mis-steps, but the "she ran a bad campaign" narrative started the day after the election. we all thought it was over. and none of us (at the time) thought Comey's stupid memo was going to hurt things.

even Iago Galdsdon, who regularly taunted us about how Hillary was going to lose, had said "meh, I've conceded she's going to win" not long beforehand.

so

but the "she ran a bad campaign" narrative started the day after the election.

Her reasons for pretending MI/WI didn’t exist and expending resources to run up the score in CA weren’t known until after the election.

If it had been a Big Mac, the kid and his head wouldn't have stood a chance

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 14, 2022 12:06 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

remember when trump had those college football players in the white house and they brought in all this cold mcdonalds and had it under heat lamps? this shit seems like a fever dream now

Her campaign was def poorly run, in terms of focus; should have let trump hang himself rather than worrying people wouldn’t notice he was “a real jerk”, and gone exclusively with the messaging about herself and her vision. but I don’t think anyone was imagining it would matter.

lag∞n's position is supported by the fact that Trump lost to Joe Biden, about whom exactly nobody has any real enthusiasm, and he did so even after the four years of free pr that comes along with being president

as "interesting" as this discussion is, there were also a lot of us who naively thought there were limits to the depravity people were willing to vote for, even acknowledging that there were plenty of people who had no problem voting for Reagan or Bush after starting the Iraq war.

I have had the pleasure of becoming a voter in a time where Republican candidates were already malodorous, evil shitbirds, and couldn't be tempted to vote for one even if they had an autographed photo of Tom G. Warrior taped to their dicks, but millions of dummies fondly remembered the Reagan Democrat era and didn't mind crossing party lines to vote for a liquid-brained Klanidate, because "come on, he's just saying that to get elected! I want him to create jobs, so he hates gay people and minorities, that doesn't mean I have to!"

Trump ran a poor presidency.

xxxxxposts

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_but the "she ran a bad campaign" narrative started the day after the election. _


Her reasons for pretending MI/WI didn’t exist and expending resources to run up the score in CA weren’t known until after the election.

Her campaign didn’t want to put people on the ground in the upper Midwest because then Trump’s people would know her internal polling was ugly. In CA they wanted to run up votes because they were afraid of losing the popular vote but winning the EC.

lol If we are really doing this just for fun — It aggravates me to no end that I never hear anybody admit that Bernie ran two bad campaigns for president. Which is as many as Hillary ran. The dude was not ever a very viable or attractive national candidate, and his fans and stans somehow never understood that. Sure, you can argue he overachieved for a lefty coming from one of the smallest states in the country, but so what? Bill Clinton overachieved coming from one of the smaller states in the country and fucking won the election. I don’t have a problem saying Hillary was a wrak candidate, I don’t have a problem saying Biden was a weak candidate, I just wish people would stop pretending that Bernie was not also a weak candidate. It is what has permanently skewed this discussion, the idea that there was some great option in there that was somehow stolen from people. If Bernie had been a better candidate, maybe he could have won. But he wasn’t and he didn’t.

The actual lesson is that it really helps to have good candidates running good campaigns.

Lol “wrak” — The dreaded combination of reek and whack.

and none of us (at the time) thought Comey's stupid memo was going to hurt things.

― Fash Gordon (Neanderthal), Wednesday, December 14, 2022 12:30 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh well I definitely did! I nearly had a panic attack when it happened. if you followed the more serious forecasters who did more than just aggregate you'd hear them talk a lot about how we've never had an election between two candidates this unpopular and thus you had to give a wide latitude to how independents would break. ultimately that's how it went down, Dems got the turnout they needed but independents killed them by going 2:1 for Trump. as mentioned ITT a lot of that probably had to do with Trump being such a political blank slate; notice how Republicans got pummeled pretty hard in every election afterwards.

My favorite candidate out of the last two presidential cycles was Elizabeth Warren, and she tanked because it turned out that she too was a weak national candidate. I don't have a problem admitting that or spend any time sitting around complaining about how the DNC stole the election from her or whatever.

The actual lesson is that it really helps to have good candidates running good campaigns.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, December 14, 2022 12:59 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yea something that needs to be emphasized is that having good views does not necessarily make you a good politician, what makes a "good candidate" is such a nebulous and evolving concept but things like personality, looks, and humor arguably matter more than your political stances or voting record. Clinton and Obama very much had *it* - Hillary did not, Biden kinda doesn't (but he was running against Trump so it didn't matter much), and Bernie really doesn't either. maybe AOC does.