POTUS Election thread

[Montmorency]

He was a personally likable/popular president that kept shoving unpopular policies. He didn't feel much pain from it due to his personal popularity, but his party suffered significant damage.

Of course, the Party itself had a large role to play in many of these policies. Despite gaining the POTUS office, he never did have much clout within his own political organization.

[Hooahguy]

I've been reading/listening to a good bit of discussion about this election and one thing that jumped out at me was the case the Obama completely gutted the Democratic party.

He was a personally likable/popular president that kept shoving unpopular policies. He didn't feel much pain from it due to his personal popularity, but his party suffered significant damage. I forget the exact numbers, but over 1000 local, state and federal Democrat office-holders have lost their seats since Obama came into office. He had a majority in both houses of Congress and lost both. The majority of state legislatures and overwhelming majority of state governors are GOP controlled. It was an interesting angle I hadn't really thought much about.

The tragedy for Republicans was that the worst candidate won. The tragedy for Democrats was that they had no one better to run.

Yes, I remember reading that the party basically purged the Blue Dog Democrats from the party, largely under the leadership of DWS. Maybe if they rethink that they could make headway in places like Nebraska or whatever, since you arent going to get a moderate Dem to win in those states. The whole party has to be rethought, last night was a rude awakening. Everyone thought, including me, that the GOP was in deep trouble. We were so wrong.

[Montmorency]

the GOP was in deep trouble

Oh, they are. But navel-gazing and manifest destiny are not a party platform, so it shouldn't have been comfort in the first place.

[Montmorency]

An example:

If this is indeed the last gasp of the dying Great White Majority, then what reason would minorities have to stick with a hegemonic Democrat party in 20 years, especially given that minorities tend to lean right on social issues and the party has done nothing much to address this?

[a completely inoffensive name]

I've been reading/listening to a good bit of discussion about this election and one thing that jumped out at me was the case the Obama completely gutted the Democratic party.

He was a personally likable/popular president that kept shoving unpopular policies. He didn't feel much pain from it due to his personal popularity, but his party suffered significant damage. I forget the exact numbers, but over 1000 local, state and federal Democrat office-holders have lost their seats since Obama came into office. He had a majority in both houses of Congress and lost both. The majority of state legislatures and overwhelming majority of state governors are GOP controlled. It was an interesting angle I hadn't really thought much about.

The tragedy for Republicans was that the worst candidate won. The tragedy for Democrats was that they had no one better to run.

My main thoughts on this election (on a subject no one has mentioned here) are incoming, but I will reply to this first. The GOP have been very successful at separating the national candidates from the SCOTUS candidates from the state/local candidates in the eyes of their constituents. Although both parties have been shifting state politics towards the polarizing state of the Federal government, the Democrats seem to demand a much more uniform message across the board, perhaps as over compensating for their big tent demographics. I have seen the GOP be much more flexible on this manner. Obama had a clear mandate and he failed to deliver a product that the working class liked, but that in no way means House or Senate or State Democrats had to go burning down with him. Bob Dole didn't bring down the GOP majority in Congress in 1996.

[a completely inoffensive name]

I deliberately held off on posting here, not just because my soul sucking job demands all my time for crappy pay but because I am not strong enough to think beyond the talking points until they stop filling the room.
With a day to think about the demographics of Trump's win and the obliviousness of multiple groups to his rise, I think that there is another angle at play here that needs to be discussed. We can blame the Dems and the Republicans and the media all for failing to see the dire state that the white working class of the rust belt is in and how they are going to respond in the booth. But I think that we all know that Donald made good politics by telling them he will bring their jobs back, but he is making (if he follows through) terrible economic and geopolitical decisions.

Our situation reminds me of Ecclesiastes 9:12 (I am trying my best to read the Bible and see what others see in it). In the past twenty years we have found ourselves caught in a net of globalization and more importantly, automation. These rapid changes in technology are simply too overwhelming for our institutions to fully mitigate the negative effects. Any talk by the Dems or GOP on re-training coal miners or assembly line workers into the next generation of green technology technicians is a joke. These people have no viable path to the same standard of living that their demographic had in the past (and neither do the well educated either). The answer is not to cater to them, since their struggle breeds the kind of sentiment that promotes the kind of unstable, possibly xenophobic strongman leadership that was just elected. in my opinion, the political elites need better structures for deciding viable candidates that are able to both listen to the needs of the public without being wholly subservient to them and that starts with reforming the primary systems that the parties use.

What the replacement is, I do not know. Back room deals of the 1800s clearly proved unable to meet the basic demands of the public who grew more progressive for every gilded age candidate that attempted to stomp on labor. But the primary system clearly failed not just in one way but two. The GOP structured their system with too much freedom and power for the public in the hopes of setting up a snowball effect for their establishment candidate and preventing drawn out fights (ex. Romney v Santorum). This allowed a populist movement to capitalize on the state of fragmented establishment candidates. Trump was winning entire states delegates that voted 60% or more against him! On the other hand, the Dems showed just how terrible it is when you limit the voice of the constituents too much. Hillary was never what the people wanted, but it was what the elites had agreed to in their internal power struggles. They stacked the deck in her favor and as the hacked emails show, they actively rigged the system to suppress the candidate who was speaking to the people's demands. The DNC might as well have said forget the primaries, we will just let you know when to vote for her.

There is something wrong with the political calculus our politician's make when making choices and I do not think it is because of anything inherently wrong with them as individuals or groups. The current decision making structures seem to promote oddly constructed moves that ultimately leaves an angrier and more polarized society. This in my opinion is a much bigger threat than Hillary simply writing off white working class voters. What we saw was an across the board failure among all establishments left and right to break this type of thinking, which was the only way that an individual like Trump could ever be granted the keys to the oval office.

EDIT: Fuck, I am a terrible writer. Why do I repeat the same adjectives a million times.

[edyzmedieval]

The outcome of the election is pretty much this - the United States of America is more likely the Divided States of America. The country is really divided, and the fact that Hillary won the popular vote and Trump the electoral vote will create more tension.

[Pannonian]

The outcome of the election is pretty much this - the United States of America is more likely the Divided States of America. The country is really divided, and the fact that Hillary won the popular vote and Trump the electoral vote will create more tension.

It sometimes happens. Churchill polled half a million fewer votes than Attlee when he was elected PM, which in 2016 US terms would be around 4m votes. AFAIK Attlee didn't complain about the distribution of votes, but got on with preparing his party for opposition. Trump won traditionally Democratic states as a result of the Democratic vote going drastically down. The Bush era with its even clearer divide of blue and red was a clearer picture of a divided America. This election was a demonstration of how much Hillary Clinton is disliked.

[Montmorency]

The GOP structured their system with too much freedom and power for the public in the hopes of setting up a snowball effect for their establishment candidate and preventing drawn out fights (ex. Romney v Santorum). This allowed a populist movement to capitalize on the state of fragmented establishment candidates. Trump was winning entire states delegates that voted 60% or more against him! On the other hand, the Dems showed just how terrible it is when you limit the voice of the constituents too much. Hillary was never what the people wanted, but it was what the elites had agreed to in their internal power struggles. They stacked the deck in her favor and as the hacked emails show, they actively rigged the system to suppress the candidate who was speaking to the people's demands. The DNC might as well have said forget the primaries, we will just let you know when to vote for her.

Actually, it is a good point that Clinton's selection more closely cleaves to the old manner of selection, except the local party machines are just replaced by a direct Clinton campaign machine. Still poorly executed; untold millions wasted on what? Might as well spend no money and tell people to read her extended platform on her web zone or off.

The popular vote difference is not much to speak of on its own terms. Original projections were a 3-4% over Trump, then when she was well enough defeated and all that was left was to count votes, it was to be ~1%. It has settled around 0.2%. No one should take away that this was a narrow defeat or blame it on the electoral college (anyway the behavior of voters would change without EC considerations). You can't shift the numbers around in a flattering way.

But you may see a change coming regardless with the expansion of the National Interstate Popular Vote Compact. Perhaps this isn't what reformists typically advocate, a total shift to raw popular vote count.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their respective electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who wins the most popular votes is elected president, and it will come into effect only when it will guarantee that outcome.[2][3] As of 2016, it has been joined by ten states and the District of Columbia; their 165 combined electoral votes amount to 30.7% of the total Electoral College vote, and 61.1% of the 270 votes needed for it to have legal force.

[Xiahou]

Any talk by the Dems or GOP on re-training coal miners or assembly line workers into the next generation of green technology technicians is a joke.

I know this is only a small point from your post, but I felt the need to point out Obama almost single-handedly killed the coal industry in the US by regulating coal powered electric plants out of existence. I lived in coal country for a couple years and it was sad to see all the workers incrementally getting laid off, knowing that their livelihoods weren't coming back.

I think this probably fed somewhat into Hillary's defeat too. Dems long took union support for granted. These were life-long union workers that were losing their jobs because of Democrat policies. Their anger and frustration is understandable.

[Gilrandir]

The working "class" (a much less sweeping term here than in Europe) was frustrated and angered with an anemic GDP growth rate and regulations etc.

I don't think the working class think in the terms of GDP growth and marginalizing regulations. It is rather

they want to work and get paid

[edyzmedieval]

It makes it a very difficult question to answer with regards to workers in industries who will eventually shut down completely.

What do you do with them? You need to get them jobs so they can work, survive and then thrive as individuals, families and societies. But what do you do when you're going to have to close for example all of those coal factories - climate change is real, it's a disaster and coal factories heavily contribute to this. We need to save both our planet (our home) and the workers who are displaced by the sudden shift in policy and essentially... life.

Retraining them is one thing, and it's not a joke. You need to ensure they are retrained so you can give them a fair, solid chance in this new environment.

But what else can you do, that's the important question, apart from just retraining them.

[Strike For The South]

I'm going to use the term "Hispanic". I'm not particularly fond of the term, but it's the one I'm going to use.

So Trump captured more of the Hispanic vote than Mittens did. This is after the DNC and Spanish media tried to shove the "he's going to deport you all" narrative down the groups collective throat. I remember when Trump got into it with Ramos, the DNC hooted and hollered because the insulted a Hispanic mans pride. The DNC is hiliraously racist and thought this would bring out the vote.

The Hispanic ground swell the DNC predicted never coalesced around Clinton. The obvious answer as to why is because most Hispanics who vote tend to be ones who have been here for multiple generations. There is also a large minority of hispanics who do not have a high opinion of illegal immigration. Black Americans didn't come out in the numbers they were "supposed" to either. I'm not sure why the DNC thought they would, other than the fact they screamed "racist" at Trump a few times.

The DNC thinks they have a stranglehold on the "POC" vote. The facts are that the DNC strategy for getting out the "POC" vote is dated and slightly racist. It's not enough to say "they are racist, we are your party". The socially liberal wing of the party also turns off a lot of potential voters. No one ever addresses that. The most socially regressive attitudes towards gays are faraway found in the minority community. En vogue things like "safe spaces" are alien to these people other than those who attend university (who in turn are used as Proof of some broad coalition).

The malaise that surronded this election was not exclusive only to white voters. I can garuntee most of the people protesting right now didn't vote.

[Pannonian]

I know this is only a small point from your post, but I felt the need to point out Obama almost single-handedly killed the coal industry in the US by regulating coal powered electric plants out of existence. I lived in coal country for a couple years and it was sad to see all the workers incrementally getting laid off, knowing that their livelihoods weren't coming back.

I think this probably fed somewhat into Hillary's defeat too. Dems long took union support for granted. These were life-long union workers that were losing their jobs because of Democrat policies. Their anger and frustration is understandable.

Over here in the UK, Thatcher killed the British coal mining industry because its workers voted Labour and were inclined to strike. Industries like that were closed and replaced by service industries whose workers tend to vote Conservative.

[Greyblades]

Good to see the deomcrat voters are taking the defeat well.

https://streamable.com/6nwo

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I've been reading/listening to a good bit of discussion about this election and one thing that jumped out at me was the case the Obama completely gutted the Democratic party.

He was a personally likable/popular president that kept shoving unpopular policies. He didn't feel much pain from it due to his personal popularity, but his party suffered significant damage. I forget the exact numbers, but over 1000 local, state and federal Democrat office-holders have lost their seats since Obama came into office. He had a majority in both houses of Congress and lost both. The majority of state legislatures and overwhelming majority of state governors are GOP controlled. It was an interesting angle I hadn't really thought much about.

The tragedy for Republicans was that the worst candidate won. The tragedy for Democrats was that they had no one better to run.

I have heard folks comment that the Dems have no "bench" to go to with Clinton and Obama functionally at the end of their office-holding careers. No "rising stars" who are of an age and pedigree to take a shot at national office (at least not yet)

So we have a GOP with a split personality and the duty to govern and a Dem party with a power vacuum. Oddly enough, that's an exact recipe for a powerful presidency. I hope he uses the opportunity well.

[Pannonian]

I think you are hinting at the SNP there. Almost included them in the list I gave, but it would muddy my point a little too much. Socialists also increased in popularity too post Great Depression.

I was thinking of those strange people who support Corbyn whilst spouting UKIP arguments, and are ardent supporters of both Corbyn (far left) and Trump (far right).

[a completely inoffensive name]

It makes it a very difficult question to answer with regards to workers in industries who will eventually shut down completely.

What do you do with them? You need to get them jobs so they can work, survive and then thrive as individuals, families and societies. But what do you do when you're going to have to close for example all of those coal factories - climate change is real, it's a disaster and coal factories heavily contribute to this. We need to save both our planet (our home) and the workers who are displaced by the sudden shift in policy and essentially... life.

Retraining them is one thing, and it's not a joke. You need to ensure they are retrained so you can give them a fair, solid chance in this new environment.

But what else can you do, that's the important question, apart from just retraining them.

There is no way you can sufficiently train millions of people in a short period of time for labor markets that do not have the demand for such an expansion.

The only way to maintain the illusion is for a massive government employment program. Kill two birds with the lacking infrastructure, but this is not 1933 and we do not have FDR but the followers of Rand in Congress.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Actually, it is a good point that Clinton's selection more closely cleaves to the old manner of selection, except the local party machines are just replaced by a direct Clinton campaign machine. Still poorly executed; untold millions wasted on what? Might as well spend no money and tell people to read her extended platform on her web zone or off.

The popular vote difference is not much to speak of on its own terms. Original projections were a 3-4% over Trump, then when she was well enough defeated and all that was left was to count votes, it was to be ~1%. It has settled around 0.2%. No one should take away that this was a narrow defeat or blame it on the electoral college (anyway the behavior of voters would change without EC considerations). You can't shift the numbers around in a flattering way.

But you may see a change coming regardless with the expansion of the National Interstate Popular Vote Compact. Perhaps this isn't what reformists typically advocate, a total shift to raw popular vote count.

The math simply does not work out for ever getting that compact passed by enough states. Big blue states will only carry it so far, the bottom half of states will never give away their power in the EC. The key states to win over are the swing states that enjoy the election money flooding in to ever think of changing the current system.

[a completely inoffensive name]

I know this is only a small point from your post, but I felt the need to point out Obama almost single-handedly killed the coal industry in the US by regulating coal powered electric plants out of existence. I lived in coal country for a couple years and it was sad to see all the workers incrementally getting laid off, knowing that their livelihoods weren't coming back.

I think this probably fed somewhat into Hillary's defeat too. Dems long took union support for granted. These were life-long union workers that were losing their jobs because of Democrat policies. Their anger and frustration is understandable.

You are 100% correct. But Obama only sped up what was inevitable for these people. Natural gas is just as plentiful, just as cheap, burns cleaner, allows for greater efficiency turbines and is not as carbon intensive. It is a losing battle that Obama should have left alone, he pounced because it was an easy target.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I was thinking of those strange people who support Corbyn whilst spouting UKIP arguments, and are ardent supporters of both Corbyn (far left) and Trump (far right).

While Trump will prove himself to be far less "hard right" than his campaign rhetoric might indicate (it helped him close that deal Wednesday morning, so now it is on to the next), I should note that the USA had a notable slice of the electorate whose first and second preferences were Trump or Sanders -- anybody but the "in crowd" in other words.

[Pannonian]

While Trump will prove himself to be far less "hard right" than his campaign rhetoric might indicate (it helped him close that deal Wednesday morning, so now it is on to the next), I should note that the USA had a notable slice of the electorate whose first and second preferences were Trump or Sanders -- anybody but the "in crowd" in other words.

Aye, but is Sanders a bona fides hate everything to do with Anglo-America Communist though? I'm thinking of people who support both "Deport the foreigners" UKIP and "Remove all immigration restrictions" Corbyn, with Trump of the former material.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Aye, but is Sanders a bona fides hate everything to do with Anglo-America Communist though? I'm thinking of people who support both "Deport the foreigners" UKIP and "Remove all immigration restrictions" Corbyn, with Trump of the former material.

Sanders was amnesty and reduce immigration restrictions...and then pay for their college.

[Gilrandir]

So we have a GOP with a split personality and the duty to govern and a Dem party with a power vacuum. Oddly enough, that's an exact recipe for a powerful presidency. I hope he uses the opportunity well.

There are only two things I like about Trump:
1. His first lady.
2. His hairdo.
Still can't figure out which I like more.

[Husar]

Good to see the deomcrat voters are taking the defeat well.

https://streamable.com/6nwo

Just like the GOP voters:




As for the coal industry, noone seems to think outside the box, i.e. basic income guaranteed for everyone. Decouple work and income and don't hang on to the old tripe of "noone will work anymore" that was proven false already.
Could go a step further and limit wealth somehow. The idea that only billionaires can be job creators was proven false by crowdfunding, where a lot of people pool their money to employ others. For our resident market capitalists the appeal could be that in the case of crowdfunding, the market literally decides, whereas with billionaire investors, "the market" for investments is often literally one guy who has all the money and all the decision in his hands.

[Beskar]

[InsaneApache]

I was just going to post that video.

[Husar]

The one thing that is weird about the video, although I agree in general, is that the right is not always better at debating things than the left is IMO. Whether you talk to a libraul vegan or a die-hard Trump supporter seems to make little difference in terms of the wall you are often about to hit in terms of ability to convince them of anything. Or maybe it's just that I'm a terrible debater.

[Beskar]

The one thing that is weird about the video, although I agree in general, is that the right is not always better at debating things than the left is IMO. Whether you talk to a libraul vegan or a die-hard Trump supporter seems to make little difference in terms of the wall you are often about to hit in terms of ability to convince them of anything. Or maybe it's just that I'm a terrible debater.

It is more about engaging those in the middle. It is nothing to do with debating skill or finesse in the bigger picture, it is more about enticing their imagination. overly simplistic, but the phrase "Make America Great Again" is more appealing than "I am better than the other guy". Then when you look at engagement, "Corporate interests and corruption is polluting this country, lets shake it up" has more appeal than "at least I am not racist.". Then lets look at Brexit, it is similar, "EU is responsible for everything wrong, get rid of Brussels, lets put the Great back into Great Britain", versus "those guys hate polish people, leaving EU will court disastrous consequences". The first one speaks of change and optimistic outlooks to a beleaguered demographic.

The idea you could debate someone on the fringe to adopt your viewpoint is a loss in itself. But by engaging those in the middle, those who can be swayed, then you will get them to support your cause. Remain should have extolled the virtues of what it is like to be European, more than simply say Brexit campaign is hogwash (it was hogwash, but that is a different matter entirely).

[Hooahguy]

Oh the double standard is real: