The 2016 US Election (Part IV)

[Thanas]

You keep missing the concept, it is almost hysterical now.

[The Romulan Republic]

Looks like NH just edged over to Clinton. If PA and MI flip to Clinton and everything else stays as is, then if I'm reading the map right ... the best Clinton can hope for is an electoral college tie, which might as well be a Trump win.

Yeah, barring disloyal electors.

You know, I honestly can't decide which would be the lesser evil: a Trump Presidency, or an election result overturned by faithless electors.

We probably can't say without the benefit of hindsight.

[The Romulan Republic]

Now the question is: Will the Democratic establishment eat crow and own up to the fact that their candidate got what should have been a cakewalk of a race and managed to lose it, or will they still try to blame Bernie for her not doing better?

[Highlord Laan]

Now the question is: Will the Democratic establishment eat crow and own up to the fact that their candidate got what should have been a cakewalk of a race and managed to lose it, or will they still try to blame Bernie for her not doing better?

The establishment will circle the wagons and blame everyone but themselves.

[Lonestar]

Man Trump was coked out of his mind just then

[Thanas]

Man Trump was coked out of his mind just then

And now he has nukes.

[Lone Browncoat]

Skynet just looks better and better...Terminator machine overlords would be better than Donald fucking Trump.

You root for Skynet, but I find me wishing for dominance by the duo of Colossus and Guardian {Much older movie, D.L., look it up}
because under Colossus, I'd at least wouldn't have to worry about nuclear armageddon, and the fact that Humans have proved to be real douches since that movie came out so long ago. It wouldn't have been such a bad life, as opposed to Skynet's wanting to wipe out Humanity.

In fact, hearing pumpkin head's victory speech on the TV right now, I think I'll replay the movie in my PVR and worry about the future in the morning, after I get up.
Don't blame the boomers, as one poster would have, many still hold to their hippie ideals, and going against the grain, the older I get, the more socialist I become, rather than conservative. As others here have said, I see, he of the orange face will roll back all the progress since The Forbin Project came out including Roe v. Wade, hope it doesn't happen though.


Post by Thanas » 8 minutes ago
Both CNN and NBC have reported that Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump to concede the race.

[The Romulan Republic]

Now the question is: Will the Democratic establishment eat crow and own up to the fact that their candidate got what should have been a cakewalk of a race and managed to lose it, or will they still try to blame Bernie for her not doing better?

The establishment will circle the wagons and blame everyone but themselves.

The Democratic establishment has a choice to make.

Either they can own up to their failure, and choose a different course.

Or they can try to blame others and stay the course.

In the end, I will back whoever has the best chance of stopping the far Right in future elections, no matter how small it may be.

But if the Democratic establishment will not change course, I think a serious argument can be made for progressive Democrats to defect and attempt to form a new party.

Because if you can't beat a fucking admitted rapist, you don't deserve to be in politics.

[cosmicalstorm]

By the way, kudos to Mr Bean for being one of the few on this board who called it.

[The Romulan Republic]

Oh, and one more thing:

Nate Silver can suck my dick.

[Gandalf]

Oh, and one more thing:

Nate Silver can suck my dick.

Why?

[K. A. Pital]

I will admit that I was wrong to think it was what it was. I don't think I thought it was okay, but it is significantly worse than I had believed.

It is significantly worse because the establishment politicians had totally forgotten the need to appeal to the people who elect them. You can't do banker buddy parties with Goldman Sachs and push for bullshit deals like TTIP and TTP and still get elected by a huge majority of people who suffer as a result of this poisonous free market cool aid, on which Hillary was sitting big time.

I will further note that "the US workers voted Trump" is true only if you are careful about how you define "worker." Precisely how do you go about doing that?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/blue-collar ... for-trump/
This defining moment when Trump crushingly wins Pennsylvania with the aid of the miners. Remember him being ridiculed for this just a while ago in this thread?

"i don't think the Us has many miners left" was the saying, or something. i just want to see those idiots who left these comments back then in this thread, right now.

I honestly doubt that Sanders would have done a better job. Sanders never succeeded in mobilizing, say, a groundswell of the lower and lower-middle classes to support him.

Your view of the worker class, lower class, blinds you. Sanders was extremely good at mobilizing the worker class. In fact, so good he was that he could mount a challenge to Big Money candidate, Clinton.

And guess what? Middle class fucking yuppie don't decide elections. All that hipster crap, all that celeb bullshit and Beyonce and Jay fucking Z rapping for Hillary meant nothing.

Hope the "globalized" yuppies learned their fucking lesson.

In a country that actually had a real, labor-embracing, mid-left to far-left political movement, Sanders or someone like him might have been a better choice. But the United States has not been such a country since, oh, the 1930s.

Sanders might not have been a better choice outright, but he had potential to appeal to the working class. Hillary? Fuck no. Not after her private talks xwith the ultra rich.

And Trump made every possible effort to capitalize on this and steal the worker vote, appealing to the rust belt, the miners, those affected badly by shit like NAFtA which we had assholes defending even in this thread.

Fuck the freetraders. And fuck the yuppies. They had their candidate - Hillary. And she lost. To a monster. Hope they all go fucking die in hell.

[The Romulan Republic]

Oh, and one more thing:

Nate Silver can suck my dick.

Why?

Well, him and all the pollsters who fell flat on their collective faces.

[The Romulan Republic]

Their's a church I walk by often.

The sign out front this last week said "The end is nigh", or something to that effect.

It feels disturbingly precognitive at the moment.

[Gandalf]

Oh, and one more thing:

Nate Silver can suck my dick.

Why?

Well, him and all the pollsters who fell flat on their collective faces.

This does not answer "why?"

[The Romulan Republic]

Because they gave the electorate misleading data, and it may have lead to lower turnout because people believed Clinton had it in the bag.

[Mlenk]

Obama won two terms inspite of significant demonization by the Right against him. So my question is what demographic that showed up for Obama in two elections failed to show up for Hillary?

[The Romulan Republic]

Well, their were reports during early voting of lower black and youth turnout.

Its also possible that Trump managed to mobilize a higher percentage of the working class white racist vote in key states.

[Gandalf]

Pretty much. Trump mobilised a lot of people who tend to be left out of national political discourse, and tend not to vote. As a result, polls of "likely voters" tended to miss them, and people took the polls and subsequent prognostication as gospel for some reason.

Evidently Trump is really good at participatory democracy.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Wonder if the Democrats will do some serious soul-searching on what went wrong instead of trotting out excuses.

I'm reminded of Kerry's campaign against Bush. Ok, you've established that you're not your opponent. But what exactly do you stand for?

No fucking way they're gonna do soul-searching. They haven't learned before, they won't learn now. The voters registered Democrat won't have the self-awareness to see that Hillary Clinton's shitty popularity among unaffiliated voters was troublesome, because as we all know about two thirds of unaffiliated voters are Democrat or Republican in all but name. All it takes to win is to tell the youths that voting is important and hip and cool. The party leadership was terrified of trying to convince someone more electable to run.

Real and manufactured controversy follows the Clintons wherever they go, and has done so for about three decades. Public perception is that where there is smoke, there must be fire. The Clintons have a public perception of being duplicitous, power-hungry, and completely out of touch. Toss in a heaping helping of sexism, and Hillary had an enormous number of marks against her in the public eye.

Al Gore had the Clinton Stigma. Also, he was perceived as being boring as fuck and not much different from Dubya.

John Kerry protested Vietnam and got sold as being anti-soldier/anti-America/whatever spin you want to call it. There was video of him apparently throwing his war medals over a fence, though IIRC it turned out he did NOT actually throw them. Also, he was perceived as boring.

Obama took the DNC by surprise, he was not intended to be The Anointed One. The guy who came out of left-field and basically stole The Chosen One's thunder ended up being a smash hit. He had charisma. He didn't have twenty years of baggage.

And in 2016, failing to learn the lessons of 2000 and 2004, they nominated someone whose numbers among unaffiliated voters were fucking terrible.

Until the DNC, and registered Democrats, figure out that they need to be a lot smarter about candidate selection, making sure they don't have decades of baggage, paying heed to public opinion... They won't be winning many presidential elections. I'm not going to claim Bernie would have been able to beat Trump because socialism is still a dirty word in this country. He was less unpopular when polling on hypothetical presidential votes took place, but that was so far back that it's impossible to say how accurate the information could have been.

What I do know, however, is that Hillary Clinton is the most hated female politician in the US, that a smear campaign had been running against her since she came into the public eye, and that basically all of this was known to the electorate when she first announced her intent to run. Her foreign policy record is mediocre at absolute best. She had no credentials for claiming she'd rein in Wall Street, instead having been pretty cozy with them. She was roughly as transparent as the event horizon of a black hole. She had issues. And got nominated nonetheless. She was notorious as a flip-flopper, changing her opinions to match the dominant opinions of the public. It's not "evolving" when you suddenly support gay marriage shortly after national polling shows it's the popular opinion. There is a perception of her being insincere, and it's really not hard to see evidence that she plays to her audience to an immense degree. From accounts I have read, she's very charming in-person and it "somehow" doesn't translate over TV... That somehow being, she is able to adapt her mannerisms to the people immediately before her. And when you're tailoring your speech to a specific group, it leaves many other groups feeling left out.

Their's a church I walk by often.

The sign out front this last week said "The end is nigh", or something to that effect.

It feels disturbingly precognitive at the moment.

I would have said it was prescient, but that may be because the word flows more smoothly.

[The Romulan Republic]

At the end of the day, I'll back whoever currently has the best chance of beating the far Right.

But make no mistake: if a viable progressive party can be put together, I'll abandon the Democrats in a heartbeat. Their incompetence tonight has earned them no loyalty.

[Starglider]

As I remember someone saying before the election, the Democratic loss of the presidential race will really lay bare just how bad foundations the party rests on. In the past years they have lost control of both of the chambers in the congress and a majority of states (governorships, state upper and lower houses). Basically the only thing that they were succesful at were presidential elections, and now they failed even at that.

The disconnect between the majority of the media and the outcome is extreme. For the last six months there have been a constant stream of 'Republican party is finnished, Democrats are the future' opinion pieces in most major newspapers/politics blogs. Yet reality stubbornly refuses to conform to that perception. We shall now see if said pundits double down and claim that reality must be wrong, not them.

[Highlord Laan]

I find it darkly amusing, really. Il Duce managed to get whole swaths of the blue-collar world to vote for him with the belief that he's on their side, and they bought it hook, line and sinker. I'm going to get caught in the same shit landslide the nazi-lite party is going to kick off, but at least i'll be able to look at those idiots that enabled it and laugh.

[Darth Nostril]

I will admit that I was wrong to think it was what it was. I don't think I thought it was okay, but it is significantly worse than I had believed.

It is significantly worse because the establishment politicians had totally forgotten the need to appeal to the people who elect them. You can't do banker buddy parties with Goldman Sachs and push for bullshit deals like TTIP and TTP and still get elected by a huge majority of people who suffer as a result of this poisonous free market cool aid, on which Hillary was sitting big time.

I will further note that "the US workers voted Trump" is true only if you are careful about how you define "worker." Precisely how do you go about doing that?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/blue-collar ... for-trump/
This defining moment when Trump crushingly wins Pennsylvania with the aid of the miners. Remember him being ridiculed for this just a while ago in this thread?

"i don't think the Us has many miners left" was the saying, or something. i just want to see those idiots who left these comments back then in this thread, right now.

I honestly doubt that Sanders would have done a better job. Sanders never succeeded in mobilizing, say, a groundswell of the lower and lower-middle classes to support him.

Your view of the worker class, lower class, blinds you. Sanders was extremely good at mobilizing the worker class. In fact, so good he was that he could mount a challenge to Big Money candidate, Clinton.

And guess what? Middle class fucking yuppie don't decide elections. All that hipster crap, all that celeb bullshit and Beyonce and Jay fucking Z rapping for Hillary meant nothing.

Hope the "globalized" yuppies learned their fucking lesson.

In a country that actually had a real, labor-embracing, mid-left to far-left political movement, Sanders or someone like him might have been a better choice. But the United States has not been such a country since, oh, the 1930s.

Sanders might not have been a better choice outright, but he had potential to appeal to the working class. Hillary? Fuck no. Not after her private talks xwith the ultra rich.

And Trump made every possible effort to capitalize on this and steal the worker vote, appealing to the rust belt, the miners, those affected badly by shit like NAFtA which we had assholes defending even in this thread.

Fuck the freetraders. And fuck the yuppies. They had their candidate - Hillary. And she lost. To a monster. Hope they all go fucking die in hell.

Well fucknuggets, Stas said something I actually agree with 100%.

Flagg and the other right wing deep throating corporate whores - your candidate was on the ticket and lost badly to an orange man-baby.
You had a chance to change the political landscape but you pissed it up the wall doing what you were programmed to do, wasting your support on yet another empty suit.
I hope you're proud of yourselves.

[Starglider]

Trump's approval numbers are awful. All the right-wing sites that I've visited were full of 'he is a means to an end', 'better anyone than Clinton' and 'he's hideous, but he won't veto our Senate/House legislation'. Those are just the politically engaged voters, for the rest of the country it was either overwhelming dislike for Clinton, who is let's face it a dynastic successor in addition to all her publicised flaws, or a straight protest vote against a candidate that was literally the centerist establishment concentrated and solidified into one champion. It was Clinton's election to lose, the number of people outright charmed by Trump seems to be negligible.

P.S.


We are now officially living in the 20XX CYBERPUNK DYSTOPIA from a low-budget 90s sci-fi movie.