I voted for a white candidate for president this year after voting for a different white candidate in the primary.
I agree with Heebie, that the article isn't always clear. It reads like she wrote it as a way to process her own reactions, rather than writing to an audience.
But, perhaps because of that, it got under my skin differently than most articles about racism and the election.
I think the four bullet points provide a great summary.
Obviously I come from a very different place than she does, but I thought the dog analogy was very good and fit with my experience of angry white men.
Still reading, but this:
I do not view them as demons; more as lost, confused, and sometimes dangerous cousins
seems to me badly limited: lost/confused/dangerous/demon leaves out the most important fraction, the ones that are simply enemies: they disagree with progressive premises about the world, and rationally pursue the implications of the premises they hold instead.
was Ted Cruz simply not Anglo enough to be a viable candidate for president? Was Jeb Bush's marriage to a Mexican woman part of the reason he was viewed so tepidly by Republican voters?
Good questions.
With easy answers: no and no. If Melania was some hotstuff from Latin America, it would not have affected anything. Trump is a much more effective conman than those other too.
If Melania tried to kill JFK, it would have mattered.
7 doesn't answer those questions. The questions are why Cruz and Bush lost, not why Trump won. I think 7.2 is right, but the questions are still separate.
Well, maybe. But the nuances of the Republican base's racism are just completely swamped by their susceptibility to being suckered. They hold so many inconsistencies simultaneously in their hijacked brains that it seems like a fool's errand to wonder about anything except the big, broad strokes.
So: yes, I'm sure those things did hurt Bush and Cruz, but not as much as their clunky attempts at being a snakeoil peddler did.
Is no one going to complain about the eye-hurting "2016" in the headline?
Depending on font size, "2011" could hurt your eyes worse if you ran into it.
I should add, to the OP, another link that I was reminded of. An article by Ezra Klein immediately after the election which seems related:
Racial priming, and whites as an interest group
One question I've heard people ask since Clinton's loss is how it can be about race if she lost states Obama won, and if Obama won more white voters than she did. This is not the puzzle many are making it out to be.
There's a long and deep literature on racial priming that shows that when you make white voters think about their race, their political opinions shift right. As my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote:Research by Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos suggests that when confronted with different racial groups, even liberal white voters turn rightward. In one study, Enos sent pairs of native Spanish-speaking Latino men to ride commuter trains in Boston, surveyed their fellow riders' political views both before and after, and also surveyed riders on trains not used in the experiment as a control.Enos's commuter train experiment is Trump's electoral strategy in a nutshell.
"The results were clear," Enos wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "After coming into contact, for just minutes each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents' home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews, during which they expressed more neutral attitudes."
Obama's campaigns were studiously nonracial. In 2012, he and Mitt Romney both primed the electorate to think about businessmen versus workers, capital versus labor, makers versus takers. Obama won that election in part by making it about economic identity.
...
We have a lot of evidence that reminding white people of rising racial diversity makes them more conservative in the moment. This campaign did that constantly. To the extent that many have observed that white voters showed the voting unity associated with racial minorities, that might be why -- this was an election that continuously activated the racial identities of all voters, and that could well have changed voting patterns.
I've been wondering whether Romney's Mormonism hurt him more in 2012 than people thought.
If so, I think Romney's Mormonism hurt him only indirectly. That is, because he was a member of a religious minority, he couldn't effectively use anti-Islamic rhetoric and the like.
I've been wondering whether Romney's Mormonism hurt him more in 2012 than people thought.
I previously argued that Trump had advantages, compared to a "generic Republican" in the Midwest, and that his victories there could be a reflection of Trump's strength as much (or more than) Clinton's weakness. Recently Yglesias elaborated on that thought.
That regional divide is key to understanding what happened in 2016. A Republican Party that was broadly identified with religious Southerners nominated a secular Northerner who was not identified with the Republican Party leadership. Not surprisingly, that helped him win the votes of secular Northerners who'd traditionally distrusted the Republican Party. Meanwhile, his campaign very much emphasized whiteness as a theme, and in an ultimately failed effort to win the votes of traditionally Republican-leaning white women in the suburbs, his opponent joined with him in dissociating the Trump agenda from the Republican Party we've known for years.
...
In terms of 2016, one identity issue that particularly plagued Clinton is that, in Gest's words, the political culture of the white working-class Midwest is "pervaded by a nostalgia that reveres, and seeks to reinstate, a bygone era."
Trump's campaign theme of making America great again was perfectly tailored to this group. What's more, Clinton's status as a quasi-incumbent running as the heir to Obama's eight years in office would have made it inherently difficult for her to run a restorationist campaign. The fact that Clinton's base among working-class people of color had a decidedly more optimistic view of overall social trends despite similar economic circumstances made it even more difficult to thread the needle.
If you compare that to Romney he would have been able to take advantage of the first trait (being a Northerner who wasn't particularly friendly with the Southern wing of the Republican party) but he was still connected to the mainstream of the Party and didn't make the same appeal to nostalgia that Trump did.
I greatly appreciate 14. In the endless, stupid battles on the left, people are *insisting* that HRC and/or Dems are at fault for losing the white working class. But Trump didn't win the WWC by offering a better set of policies (ha!) or by "caring" about them more; he did it by explicitly appealing to their race & status, and by making facially absurd promises that appealed to their emotions*. What the hell was the Clinton campaign supposed to do against that? I mean, for decades the left has been arguing that it's foolish to run a Republican-light against a Republican, but in this case we were supposed to run a white nationalist-light campaign against a white nationalist?
Obviously there are ways that the Dem Party could have maintained a stronger relationship with the WWC over the past 20-40 years (things from less neoliberalism to more 50-state strategy), but as the research cited in 14 shows, it's not even clear that that would have mattered. It's sort of like asking why John McCain didn't do better among black veterans.
*that is, I really don't think that anyone in PA believed that he could bring steel back, but hearing someone say it felt good. There was that post-election interview with a bunch of downstate Illinoisians (?) who said, "Oh no, we don't think he'll make anything better for us. We're just glad our guy won." There's a difference between appealing and pandering.
19: thanks. I should add that I think 18 is a complementary explanation -- both of those go together.
"There has been a concerted effort -- covert, overt, or both -- to keep the narrative of white nationalism, including its violence and extralegal workings -- out of the American eye"
Which is why people like David Duke have problems getting their message out - the media simply refused to cover him or his latest vanity senate campaign, even at the minimal level that would be justified by his 3% vote share.
Yes, 18 is good as well. And the nostalgia part makes a TON of sense. Indeed, it pretty well explains the fundamental difference--racial attitudes aside--between white and non-white working classes (which is something that was noted in polling preëlection as well). Conventional wisdom has long been that one should run as an optimist, and HRC basically ran on continuity and the future. Which was, indeed, the majority preference. But not in the rust belt.
Trump's victory was all about hate. Some commenters have been thrown off by the fact that some of that hate was directed at people other than minorities -- "It wasn't all racism," they say. But it was all hate. Lots of free-floating rage out there that he was able to capitalize on.
Which is the difficult part. Trump doesn't have to produce any material improvement in the condition of those he voted for. He just has to make things worse for those the people he voted for hate.
Not that people shouldn't run on "Trump said he'd rebuild America and hasn't accomplished anything." It's just that it won't be sufficient to do that.
23: It was successful, insofar as I've been feeling lots and lots of hate since the election.
Enough to have made your quality of life worse?
he did it by explicitly appealing to their race & status, and by making facially absurd promises that appealed to their emotions*. What the hell was the Clinton campaign supposed to do against that?
She could have run on economic populism, which resonated with that demographic when Bernie used it. But that's not the candidate she was.
Instead, she somehow managed to concede that ground to a "billionaire."
26 It was actually pretty close in the places that mattered -- a different Dem candidate, some decreased enthusiasm for Trump (including 4 more years of racist Fox news geezers aging out), and increased minority turn-out may well turn out to be enough to get there.
Also add four more years of central PA kids leaving their Trump-voting towns and moving to ends of the states with jobs.
25: He doesn't even really have to do that. He just has to give voice to the hate. If he's unable to accomplish anything at all, well, that will be because of the People We Hate. Trump's strength is that hate doesn't require facts - and indeed, often the facts work directly against hate.
That said, 26 is right. Hate is exhausting (per 27, I'm already emotionally spent after just a few weeks), and I'm hoping the Trump people will be worn out in four years.
My current plan (for the sake of my own sanity, and not because it will do any good) is to be as tiresome as possible with Trump voters. Fuck 'em.
She could have run on economic populism
This. Clinton refused to touch populism with a 20 foot pole, despite the clear message from the primaries that populist appeals (left and right both) had an especially powerful appeal this election.
She could not have run on economic populism. No one would have believed a word of it. She ran as who she is.
One minor, but pleasant, aspect of the end of election season is that I can without guilt close any tab that includes the words "An article by Ezra Klein...."
That said, she certainly did as much as she could get away with to distance herself from neo-liberalism.
29, 34 -- And to echo yesterday's Saheli-Emerson thing from the other place, just what, exactly, economic populist policy ideas do you think she should have run on that she didn't actually run on? Can you name 5 positions she should have taken?
36, 38: Right. Look how much good disavowing TPP did her.
In the endless, stupid battles on the left, people are *insisting* that HRC and/or Dems are at fault for losing the white working class. But Trump didn't win the WWC by offering a better set of policies (ha!) or by "caring" about them more; he did it by explicitly appealing to their race & status, and by making facially absurd promises that appealed to their emotions*. What the hell was the Clinton campaign supposed to do against that? I mean, for decades the left has been arguing that it's foolish to run a Republican-light against a Republican, but in this case we were supposed to run a white nationalist-light campaign against a white nationalist?
It's almost as if this election was unwinnable.
40 $15 an hour for one. Hell, I think she should have said no to that, instead let's go for $18.
40 And that free college for entrepreneurs was exactly not the kind of policy to float.
In short, I'm with Spike in 29. Well said too.
40: "Populism" in the context of a political campaign is more about narrative than specific policy proposals.
"Those bastards on Wall Street blew up the economy and gave themselves massive bonuses and ordinary Americans are still footing the bill 8 years later" is a populist narrative.
Clinton couldn't have run on that obviously,, nor would any other Dem have really been able to thread that needle with Obama in office.
He just has to give voice to the hate. If he's unable to accomplish anything at all, well, that will be because of the People We Hate. Trump's strength is that hate doesn't require facts - and indeed, often the facts work directly against hate.
And indeed, by winning he has already accomplished what his most hateful supporters wanted most: he validated their hate, and demonstrated that they can say the hateful things they think out loud. Even if he accomplishes nothing else and breaks all of his campaign promises (which he's already started doing), that validation is enough for that segment of his coalition.
She could not have run on economic populism. No one would have believed a word of it. She ran as who she is.
This is true, but it's SO FUCKING IRONIC that somehow it was believable coming out of Trump's mouth. (Largely possible because of the point made in 46.)
She could not have run on economic populism. No one would have believed a word of it. She ran as who she is.
Certainly she has problems delivering that message. She could have picked a running mate that would deliver it, though. Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown.
There were options on the table. She chose not to go with them because she really is a creature of the neoliberal establishment. Which was unfortunate, because it turns out folks in rust-belt states hate the neoliberal establishment.
It's almost as if this election was unwinnable.
Well, no, she should have set foot in Wisconsin and the FBI should have forcefully said that the Russians were trying to influence the election.
I'll go one step further: I don't think Trump wins without substantial meddling from the Russians.
the FBI should have forcefully said that the Russians were trying to influence the election.
Except the FBI was trying to influence the election in the same direction the Russians were.
So is Obama not going to do anything about the whole FBI-influencing-the-election thing? Its sure looking that way. Classic Obama.
53: Right, but that can't possible be in the column of things that Clinton should have done better.
she should have set foot in Wisconsin
Would that have been enough? She spent lots of time in Pennsylvania.
I've been wondering about 56, too. Also if he'll have the guts to do a Garland recess appointment.
Is a Garland recess appointment still on the table? When is there a recess? Can he do it at midnight on December 31?
56: No, he's not going to do anything.
59: No, he won't.
Obama is determined to preserve American democracy by sticking to our norms even if he's the last one to do it.
Obama is pissing me off. (I should allow for the possibility that he is holding his fire until the right moment.) I see him as having a choice between two Constitutional crises, and want him to choose the right crisis, despite it also serving his interests.
I think Obama has been a good President. But he has not actually been good at being President.
National leadership, he can do. Political maneuvering, its been one long shit-show. Getting outplayed on the Supreme Court pick is just a recent example.
Aren't there a shit-ton of federal judge appointments he can make? What's up with that?
He should do a lot of recess appointments, although it's kind of tough to get someone actually qualified for a federal judgeship to take a 2 year appointment.
Garland would do it, though, I bet.
He just needs to make sure he fills Garland's circuit seat while he's at it.
If we must have a Constitutional crisis, I think Obama should just go all-out and refuse to leave office in January. Dictator-for-lifethe duration of the emergency. You know it's what Trump would do.
(I should allow for the possibility that he is holding his fire until the right moment.)
I would not be holding your breath for this one.
53: Right, but that can't possible be in the column of things that Clinton should have done better.
Well this is the point. I assume 42 was facetious, but most of the decisive factors* were literally out of her control: Putin, Comey, the FBI (those are actually separate, given that the NY office was leaking on its own), the press's insane coverage of the emails and the CGF, and the unforeseen fact that you can run as the candidate of the KKK and not really be harmed by it. She wasn't 100% innocent on all those things, and that the press would treat her shiftily was foreseeable, but IMO if you tally up what she could have done better/differently vs. what outside, malign forces did, it's not even close.
Put it this way: would you rather have 43 + 44, or have Comey do his fucking job?
*obviously in an election this close--3 close state races deciding things--practically anything is decisive. But I'm talking about things that represented a good solid million votes each
Here's an interesting piece on appointments that doesn't seem ideologically deranged.
Speaking of constitutional crises, what a goddamn pussy the Trump elector who resigned is. Boo hoo, Trump isn't qualified so I'll resign in favor of someone who will give the same result of putting the unqualified guy in office, but at least my hands won't be directly covered in blood.
Also, do Barry and Spike not get that, to Trump voters, raising the minimum wage just means more money going from hard-working Americans to lazy single mothers and immigrants?
Or is the argument that the Bernie left stayed home? In which case, fuck them.
The number of people who seem to think that gender played no meaningful role in this election, nor will it ever play a meaningful role in any presidential election again, has genuinely shocked me. Did someone really scientifically determine that Clinton didn't lose any votes because of her gender, but it's just that these dudes hate neoliberalism? This election?
For any Democrat to run against the establishment would be to run against the most popular politician in America, one who has enormous loyalty from the Democratic base. You're supposed to trade that for the votes of a bunch of people who, per 73.2, are so lefty that they can't bother to vote against actual fascism?
I would not be holding your breath for this one.
Remember when Give-No-Fucks Obama was all fun? I hate to believe it topped out at renaming Mount Denali.
There is a portion of the Bernie-left* that is dedicated to being ineffectual, and once again: mission accomplished.
*Of course, Bernie himself is not a member of that group, whose membership wildly over-represents leftist intellectual types. And yeah, fuck 'em.
72: From HuffPo: "I will sleep well at night knowing I neither gave in to their demands nor caved to my convictions." I cannot comprehend the belief system where "caving to your convictions" is a bad thing. Neil Peart gets that "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice" and so should this guy. And everyone who didn't vote, or voted third party.
Are recess appointments valid until the next session or the next reconvening (i.e. after the next recess, whether intersession or not)? If the latter then Obama's appointments would last about 30 seconds.
Also it would be awesome to see if the Republicans try to reconvene the 114th within a microsecond of the end of the 113th to prevent a workable "recess". It will be like a game of spit where Obama tries to slap down the appointment paperwork under the gavel of the Senate president. Which, on Jan 3, is still Joe, so maybe not an issue?
There is a portion of the Bernie-left* that is dedicated to being ineffectual, and once again: mission accomplished.
I was told that the most important reason to support Hillary in the primary was that only she could beat Trump. So: fuck off.
Are recess appointments valid until the next session or the next reconvening
No, its like 18 months. Almost long enough to get us to the Midterms.
82- I'm sure all the Bernie supporters who refused to support Clinton are proud to have been proved fucking right.
Seriously, given how unstable I expect the Trump presidency to be, 18 months could well cover the implosion and impeachment. If 18 months of stability and advancement for my team are offered, they should be immediately grabbed.
I assume 42 was facetious
Maybe semi-facetious. As in previous threads, I'm arguing for the "unwinnable" theory not because I necessarily think it's true, or even likely, but because I do think it's a possibility we can't rule out at this point and it should be part of the discussion of what happened in the election and why.
It wasn't unwinnable. There were a lot of stars that had to align to get Trump into office. But, align they did.
"Unwinnable" is a tough sell when your candidate did, in fact, end up with more votes. Pretty much every other losing campaign has to be less winnable than this one.
82: I'm missing your point. If you chose to support Hillary in the primary, that's on you. I didn't myself, but I understand why people did.
If you chose to support Hillary in the general election, then 78 is unrelated to you: Like Bernie, you made a commitment to being part of an anti-fascist coalition. That's a good thing.
Changing the alignments of stars: totally a thing that is possible for people to do.
"Unwinnable" is a tough sell when your candidate did, in fact, end up with more votes.
I dunno. Usually the candidate who gets more votes wins.
I'm missing your point.
My point is that people who pushed Hillary are in no position to call Bernie people ineffectual. She had one job, and she blew it.
To give a concrete example of how this election could have been unwinnable: Maybe voter-suppression efforts in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Ohio were effective enough that there was no realistic chance that a Democratic candidate could have won those states this year. It may have been theoretically possible for a Democrat to win without those states, but it sure would have made it a lot harder.
(Again, I'm not saying I think this is what actually happened. But I don't think we have enough information yet to rule it out.)
Is there a good source for numbers on 'Bernie supporters who deliberately stayed home or voted third party because they were too lefty for Clinton'? I sort of think that's probably a really, really small category -- my guess would be that Stein voters mostly weren't registered Democrats.
The Stein voters pissed me off because the left their signs up right where I had to go by them twice a day for like a week after the election.
Wisconsin was too close for any impossibility claims. It's inside the range where weather alone could have swung it. NC and OH are irrelevant. WI, MI, PA, FL are where the action is. The first two are way too close for any impossibility claims. So any argument has to center on PA and FL.
95 -- It's not just about voting. A year of going on in public about how awful corrupt etc HRC, from all sides but especially the side aligned with her, made things like the FBI and Wikileaks that much more effective.
A CNN headline on the fucking emails is worth about 5 Fox headlines, when we're talking about the impact on people who voted for Obama and then stayed home, because Hillary is a corrupt warmonger.
I'm hoping the recount effort can somehow take a look at voter suppression as well. Especially now that the Short-Fingered Vulgarian is claiming that there wasn't enough voter suppression.
Has that man gotten around to using the TOSU attack to support his odious policies?
I don't know. As soon as I heard it wasn't a shooting, I knew it was somebody who immigrated. There's no other reason for somebody in Ohio to try to kill somebody and not use a gun.
I agree with 97.
That loathsome Maryland irredentist, Spike, should take some pleasure out of the fact that if the area fought over in Cresap's War had gone to Maryland, both PA & MD would have been blue.
I've never seen it referred to as TOSU before, but now that I know such a thing is done, I am prepared to be more sympathetic to the attacker.
He was probably trying to make a point about gun control by failing to kill anywhere as many people as he could have if he'd acted like a real American.
THE Ohio State University is a thing. An annoying thing. So TOSU seems only right.
I hope he didn't hurt anybody I know.
Ah, I didn't mean to be flippant about a situation that might be personally relevant to anyone here.
The Professor Watchlist thing lists OSU in "T" section. I thought it was a joke until I noticed "The City University of New York" was right above.
Ezra was the answer to a question about Klein of Vox in the NY Times crossword puzzle this morning.
if the area fought over in Cresap's War had gone to Maryland, both PA & MD would have been blue.
Maryland's rightful claim actually extends to the 40th parallel, encompassing a good chunk of Philadelphia. So maybe PA would have stayed red after all.
Re:winnability:
If things weren't the same they would've been different. For instance, at the NYT right now, you can read the headline, "Trump Claims 'Millions' Voted Illegally, Citing No Evidence"
During the campaign*, that would have been "Trump Says Millions Voted Illegally," How much does that matter, over the course of a thousand headlines? Who the hell knows? The only thing I'm confident about changing the outcome is the Comey thing, and that only because of its proximity and isolation.
*Actually, I think it was the Birther announcement/hotel infomercial that tipped the scales, but who knows.
98: That, I'm not putting on Sanders voters at all, considering what the NYT was doing. (A) I didn't see an unreasonable amount of it, and (B) if every Sanders voter had kept their mouth shut other than to say "I'm voting for Bernie, but Hillary is an excellent alternative", it wouldn't have made any difference in light of the media blitz.
I recognize the locales in the pictures although it's been many years. I like "TOSU" too. That "The" stuff has been around for a long time.
112: I acknowledge that some on your side made that claim, but in no universe would Parliament have given away Philadelphia. But your perfidious forefathers feasibly could have, had they had any military skill, secured some portion of the Transsusquehannic lands.
I don't think you can separate the media blitz from the constant refrain that she's not good enough, from lots of people for lots of reasons. Shit attracts flies.
Wisconsin was too close for any impossibility claims. It's inside the range where weather alone could have swung it. NC and OH are irrelevant. WI, MI, PA, FL are where the action is. The first two are way too close for any impossibility claims. So any argument has to center on PA and FL.
See, this is the kind of discussion that I think we need more of (though I'm still not sure we have enough information yet to come to firm conclusions). Aren't PA and FL the two states where, unlike the others, GOP turnout was up compared to 2012 while Dem turnout was not? That seems important.
In recount news, Wisconsin Elections commission notes in which they approved going forward if campaigns agree to cover costs which are not yet know (being estimated by local elections folks). Rejected Stein request for all done by hand, and this little item strikes me as potentially a bit of a "fuck you."
Finally, the Commission directed staff to notify municipal clerks who have been selected to conduct an audit of their electronic voting equipment to delay completion of that audit until after completion of the recount.
Wisconsin is a state that does do a sample audit of machines--in the very unlikely event that there was something odd afoot of the scale that could turn the state this is where it would be likely to turn up, not in a machine-based recount. This moves that audit out until after the State needs to have appointed its Electors...)
I will let Carp speak for me re: 117.
I think that means you owe him a retainer.
from the constant refrain that she's not good enough, from lots of people for lots of reasons. Shit attracts flies.
She had political opponents inside of her party. Trump had opponents inside of his. That's how these things work.
The difference is, Trump actually went out of his way to bring doubters into the fold. He nominated Pence. He touted a list of conservative judges. He said nasty, unfair things about late-term abortions.
Hillary didn't do anything like that. She campaigned on not being Trump, while projecting an air of inevitability. And that brought enough people on board win her the popular vote. The vast majority of Bernie people went to Hillary.
But, yeah, there were probably some who stayed home. She hadn't really done anything to address their priorities, and she was supposed to win anyway. Also, supporters disdainfully talking shit about "Bernie Bros" didn't help. Nobody likes a sore winner.
Taken together, is that a great way to get people motivated to haul their butts down to the polling place and wait in line for a couple hours to cast a ballot? Perhaps not.
Clinton's campaign was certainly a lot different watching it from the ground than watching it as reported. She was very much doing more than being not-Trump or inevitable when you watched the campaign as a voter in a swing state.
56: I think Obama has (correctly IMHO) calculated that if Trump does indeed turn out to have the dictatorial tendencies we fear, it's far better for the country to have Comey heading the FBI than whichever lackey Trump would appoint to the position. Comey did the wrong thing, and may well have cost Clinton the election, but he did have the backbone to stand up to both the Bush and Obama administrations on principle, and one can hope he will do the same to Trump.
OT Bleg: So, I need to get into a .msn email account, and the account-holder has died, taking the password with him. Is this actually impossible?
Microsoft has a policy where they will provide the data from an email account to next-of-kin on DVD, if that's sufficient.
4 more years of racist Fox news geezers aging out
Assumes that racists cannot reproduce themselves at replacement levels. With Trump essentially re-admitting racism to polite society that becomes questionable. His success makes one wonder how true it was to begin with.
I feel like there's a whole new generation of fresh-minted alt-racists coming up these days.
Wait...does the article linked in the OP identify Charlie Pierce as a white nationalist?
130: I think the author, and maybe the Senator, misinterpreted Pierce's tweet. I interpret it as "limited government (i.e., a weak federal government) is what allowed slavery and/or white supremacy to continue to exist. That's why we needed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, to empower the federal government to stand up for the former slaves."
It doesn't matter if there are some new racists. What matters is if they're reproducing at a greater rate than they are dying off. We'll see.
132: From studying the Lotka-Volterra equations, I think that means we just need more wolves. Or bears. Whatever eats racists.
131: That was how I also interpreted it, but I assumed I was just giving it a white guy charitable reading.
118
Correct. Trump received 10% more votes than Romney in PA and FL. Clinton's total was down 3% in PA and up 5% in FL relative to Obama in 2012.
The story is simple in WI, MI, OH, IA. Not so simple in FL, PA.
50: She could have picked a running mate that would deliver it, though. Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown.
Two of those picks would have flipped a Senate seat from blue to red if Hillary won, and Bernie would have had to time his resignation from the Senate carefully to avoid doing the same. Only Brown was from anything resembling a swing state, and he had little chance to flip Ohio.
In contrast, Kaine would have left his seat in Democratic hands, and he took Virginia from being a potential swing state to solidly in Hillary's column. It's hard to argue that Hillary didn't need to worry about Virginia or having control of the Senate if she won. You would have to argue that the hypothetical rhetorical advantage of choosing one of those three was clearly more important to the campaign than the obvious practical advantages Kaine brought to the table.
Hillary didn't do anything like that. She campaigned on not being Trump, while projecting an air of inevitability. And that brought enough people on board win her the popular vote
This is true. So much of the campaign was sitting tight and waiting for Trump to screw up/make an ass of himself in the debates/the victims to come forward. What nobody anticipated was that Trump would screw up, make an ass of himself in the debates, and the victims would come forward....and he'd pretty much score as a generic-R. As Noel Maurer said on his blog, it shouldn't have been a normal election but it was.
Wisconsin is a state that does do a sample audit of machines--in the very unlikely event that there was something odd afoot of the scale that could turn the state this is where it would be likely to turn up, not in a machine-based recount. This moves that audit out until after the State needs to have appointed its Electors...)
I don't really understand the point of a machine-based recount if that's what it sounds like, ie running the ballots through the machines again. How is that result supposed to be any more valid than the original one? What is the point of a recount if it's not an audit, in other words?
Not sure. And based on other reporting describing the amount of extra effort needed for the recount it sounds like there might be more to it that I know. (And that may in practice accomplish what an audit does.) IIRC from Florida the local boards interpreted "recount" in very different ways.
74: The number of people who seem to think that gender played no meaningful role in this election, nor will it ever play a meaningful role in any presidential election again, has genuinely shocked me
I think it's too big, too distressing, and too early to rationally talk about.
How many women have ever been elected head of state in a presidential system? Everyone I can think of offhand came up through party machinery in parliamentary systems.
I read a great deep dive about Florida arguing that it came down to Trump doing very very well in suburban and exurban Tampa and Orlando. I haven't read anything in comparable detail about what happened in Pennsylvania.
142: Ok, South Korea, once; Taiwan once (kinda-sorta presidential). Others?
I just fell in love with Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. My whole life from here on out will a slow whimper unrequited longing.
I feel like I can come up with strategies that would have seen Clinton do better in the Rust Belt. But I got nothing for winning over more white people in exurban Central Florida. Its the racism, stupid.
How many women have ever been elected head of state in a presidential system?
Full list of elected and appointed female heads of state here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_and_appointed_female_heads_of_state
But a lot of those were not elected. Soong Ching-ling and Isabel Peron, for example. After Ms Finnbogadottir, the next woman to be freely and directly elected as president of a reasonable-sized country was Cory Aquino.
137 doesn't strike me as what Clinton was doing so much as what the mainstream media was doing.
San Marino, incidentally, is the winner here in two ways, first because it's had eleven female Captains Regent (though it has a bit of an advantage in that each one only serves for six months, so they can fit more in) including two called "Fausta Morganti" and "Assunta Meloni" which is pretty much right up there with Her Excellency the President of Costa Rica, Ms. Laura Chinchilla.
Seconding 124. And reminding everybody that, when HRC had disinter mediated access to the voting public, her support spiked every time. Why, it's almost as if, rather than people hating her, people hated the version of her that was peddled by her opponents (very much including the press).
Which we knew was a risk going in. But what we couldn't anticipate going in was that the press would literally treat a corrupt, KKK-endorsed clown with more respect, and that the FBI would go rogue.
Aren't PA and FL the two states where, unlike the others, GOP turnout was up compared to 2012 while Dem turnout was not? That seems important.
A friend of mine emailed me last night (so quaint!) with a list of local towns, consistently around 57/41 D/R registration, in which HRC's vote total was within a percent of Obama's, but Trump's was literally double Romney's. These are local precincts, not a few cherry-inked from the whole state. Oh, and the net effect is a 40-50% increase in overall turnout.
It's awfully suspicious. I'd add that Trump & Pence were here (specifically in the county) less often than Clinton--Trump mostly campaigned in Pennsyltucky.
I feel like I can come up with strategies that would have seen Clinton do better in the Rust Belt. But I got nothing for winning over more white people in exurban Central Florida. Its the racism, stupid.
Trump very much won suburban and exurban SW PA (don't know about SE PA). The towns mentioned in 153 are, with few exceptions, solidly suburban, not Rust Belty at all. One of them is an urbane streetcar suburb that I've always described as "white flight without the guilt": the schools are excellent, the lifestyle is urbanesque, and it's just accepted that no one would refuse to live there (that is, it doesn't have the snob appeal of some otherwise comparable 'burbs).
Also, to be super-clear: SW PA is pretty damned racist. It's very white-dominated, culturally (and in every other way, I guess), but there's a big enough black population that whites can point to scary inner city neighborhoods.
I don't know if it was suspicious or not, but on election morning when I read the Trib talking about massive lines of voters stuck out the door in the sorts of suburbs and small towns where the Trib editors like to do human interest stories, my heart fell and stayed low all day.
Trump seems to be coming down hard on the epidemic of flag burning that has gripped our nation.
Let's be honest, it hasn't happened but who WOULDN'T elect Chantal Biya for anything where you'd get to see her in the news a lot?
The link in 143 is good, and encouraging toward the end.
155: Mount Cedarland? Its existence is annoying, since its schools are so darned good. That's painful increases the opportunity cost of staying in the city.
The link in 143 is good, and encouraging toward the end.
Seconded.