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True, but also don't forget that democrats do seem to take Global Warming seriously and to set up policies for it, then when a Republican gets elected they roll those back.
So Biden-Haters: why Trump over Biden?
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Yes, that's exactly the point. You labor under the assumption this is a zero-sum game, not a prisoner's dilemma. Let me make the contrast as clear as possible.
This is Dianne Feinstein on gun control, an issue dealing with an enumerated Constitutional right she and every other Democratic politician is well aware is polarized beyond reconciliation, flies largely in the face of court precedent in a post-Heller landscape, upon which any forthcoming legislative proposal is dead-on-arrival:
Strong words for an issue she knows won't go anywhere, but will keep people voting for her.
Meanwhile, this is Dianne Feinstein on climate change and renewable energy, an issue upon which regardless of talking heads' points there is broad bipartisan support despite divides on how a renewable energy plan might be implemented, to the point even a plurality of Republicans support the provisions of the Green New Deal but only so long as pollsters don't actually refer to it as the Green New Deal (a similar circumstance as how Republican voters like the Affordable Care Act and its provisions, but hate Obamacare):
Can you spot the difference? How quickly does the need for care, negotiation, incremental progress, and ensuring passage manifest when it comes to legislation that could actually pass.
A strong position on gun control costs her nothing politically, because she and her caucus know they cannot pass anything, and they will never be held to account for inaction because they can always shift the blame, despite that her constituency expects action. A strong position on climate change would cost her politically, because she and her caucus know they could well pass legislation but they would need to expend capital to do so, but at the same time they will not be held to account for inaction because they can always shift the blame, despite that her constituency expects action.
One thing I will always say, her failure as a candidate is self-evident since she ran on being the most electable candidate. If your platform is "Pick me because I'm going to win" and then you lose, well it shows you were wrong.
This I feel can be seen as technically correct. Biden and Clinton have more friends on capitol hill and in the media, because she's made friends with them and supports them back. This is all correct and true. Bernie is not friends with these people in general and does not support them back, which is also correct and true.
But that's because Bernie didn't run on a platform of making friends with ghouls, con artists, and pedophiles. He ran on a platform of reform that would threaten the aforementioned groups and their money, so beyond not getting their endorsements, he starts off the race being called a Nazi on major news networks. He could tone down and try to make friends with these people, but then why would anyone pick him over any other centrist candidate?
No-one will ever know if there was a more electable candidate.
She beat Trump by 2%, or ~3 million votes. It is however unfortunate she did not win enough of them in a handful of the right places. And given that it's estimated Comey wiped 3% (~4 million votes) off her support with that late investigation reopening, really, bar that freakishly cack-handed intervention she had done enough to win.
Democracy is about bringing different people together with compromise and shared vision. If Bernie won't offer titbits to or glad-hand half the people he needs in order to win power, what use is he? It means he is and always was a dead end. Even the average dictator has to work at controlling his own party.
As always, and like she's still doing to this day, she's blaming her image problem on other people. The fact of the matter is she consolidated support in places that were already safe at the expense of the rest of the country. Additionally, you can have all the elite support you want, but it won't help you if you don't have popular support. And it's hard to get popular support when you're an obvious criminal. It was an election between two obvious criminals, one just bled support across the country.
So no, she didn't do enough to win. If she did, she would have won. It's not like Trump was some Republican godsend, Hillary just had to do something to win, and she didn't.
The same can be turned around on the establishment candidates who are begging the left for votes.
Simply put, while what you said is technically correct, the phrasing of it is the crux of the issue. The base matter is is that Hillary and Biden have the support of the party insiders, but not the common people. Bernie has the support of common people, but not party insiders.
But it's always constantly framed by the friends of the party insiders that all a candidate needs is the support of insiders, and the common people just need to shut up and vote. While a candidate who doesn't have insider support is obviously an abject failure and just needs to leave the arena.
This of course, worsens the image of the party in general, it makes it look like they're pandering to a base they don't actually plan to support. And the party now needs to work to show they are the party their base wants them to be. Which makes it baffling that they go out of their way to play into the stereotypes that have formed of the leadership being out of touch turncoats. They lost voters in the presidential election 2 elections in a row and it looks like Biden will only win if even fewer people vote for Trump, and he wasn't that strong to begin with. If Biden wins, it won't be because of anything he did, it'll be because 2020 has been an unmitigated disaster that Trump happened to be in charge of. He handled poorly for sure, but twice now the Democrat strategy has been to hope your opponent fucks up more than you, which is famously a bad strategy.
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The problem is that this is kind of a zero sum game. With the way our voting system works either democrats win or republicans do, there is no third party big enough to change that. So it really does come down to if you want 4 more years of trump or not, there isn't another choice.
I can certainly see how that would seem to be the case.
You know, as long as you ignore the year's worth of polling data consistently showing her one of the weaker candidates against generic Republican candidates, specific candidates, and Trump himself of the entire 2016 field. And the decades' worth of polling data consistently showing her as one of the most disliked and most distrusted national Democratic politicians. And the legacy of her husband's administration, the policies she endorsed and advocated during it, her time as Senator, her Senate record, and her time as Secretary of State under Obama. And lingering resentment towards her after her shenanigans during the 2008 race. And that Republicans had been planning for her candidacy for a decade even prior to 2008.
But yes, I can certainly see how so long as one uses a narrative entirely divorced from fact, one might come to a conclusion Hillary was indeed the strongest candidate in 2016. Any narrative of the 2016 election not centered on the names "Hillary Clinton", "Robby Mook", and "John Podesta" is counter-factual, let alone those which put names like "James Comey" or "Vladimir Putin" before them.
Of course, she did not merely lose in "a handful of the right places". Trump swept the swing states, and he did so because his campaign outspent and had superior ground games in them, while Clinton was jetsetting across safe blue states insulting voters. It's rather convenient the votes Comey supposedly "wiped off her support" so neatly match polls' margins of error, or at least the margin of error typically considered acceptable for polling results to be considered valid, does it not? Or, that somehow lost in the shuffle, the "Comey letter's" impact at best was to negate the polling swing enjoyed by Clinton after the release of the Access Hollywood tapes?
It rather strikes me the real question, and the one Democrats have fought to the eyeteeth to avoid for the past four years, is why was Clinton so vulnerable in them to begin with. The truth of the matter is Trump's margin of victory in several swing states was so small, the outcome might otherwise have been decided by the weather. At least the impact on inclement weather on election turnout is actually a well-studied phenomenon, and is backed more strongly by evidence than Comey in any way influenced the 2016 election's outcome. It's no small surprise Clinton and her former campaign "staffers" have yet to actually latch onto that as another link in a chain of excuses for their own stark raving incompetence, save for that weather on election day across the country was favorable to Democrats.
One wonders why I might have said it's a prisoner's dilemma, not a zero-sum game. One wonders indeed...
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Well... yes and no.
Elections are not straightforward contests in which the person with the best offering will win. They're mad, fluctuating, insanely complex and interwoven things with a hundred thousand unforeseeable confounding variables flying about.
In the most obvious sense, yes, somebody who lost didn't do enough to win. It sounds like a self-evident statement. But "enough to win" in this case would have involved extensive planning to account for the FBI's intervention, which no candidate could reasonably have expected to happen.
She did enough to win barring extreme, unforeseen circumstances-- which came about. This is not to say she was a good candidate: that's a different argument.
Normally you'd be right. If it had been Sanders in her place and he lost, there could be an in depth analysis of all the factors leading to it.
But the narrative here is that she was electable. That was her platform, just like it's Biden's platform. "Look at the opponent, he can't win, I have to win, I am the most broadly appealing candidate in the field. I should be voted for because I can get the most votes".
They run on tautologies, so her failure to win also rests on a tautology. She lost because she didn't do enough to win. The problem was was that she was running on "I will win", which makes her an abject failure from top to bottom.
Juries still out on Biden, but this shitshow of a year does favor him. He definitely won't be winning on his own merits.
Isn't every candidate's platform implicitly that they can win in a general election? Clinton might have been more explicit, but that's by definition part of the pitch for any candidate.
What'll be the excuse if Biden loses in a year with a pandemic and the largest, most widespread riots in a generation?
Well yes, but it was because it was so explicit, and the bludgeon with which the establishment used to silence Sanders' supporters who were still upset about the fuckery that went on in the primary. That combined with the fact that she did little campaigning and spoke only briefly about her own platform, instead making the election a referendum on her opponent that this criticism makes sense.
You can't say she lost because of her platform, it was barely there and conservative anyway. You definitely can't say she lost because she didn't have enough allies, that's the only reason she won the primary. She lost because she didn't make the effort to win, after basing her campaign around winning. Not helping people or passing good legislation, simply on winning.
So this criticism is like levying criticism against Trump for not building the wall. It was a campaign promise he failed to deliver on. HIllary's big campaign promise was to win, and she didn't. Without that campaign promise, what else does she have?
Doesn't really matter who she blames - although to be fair, she may downplay and blame others, but she doesn't deny having shortcomings either.
Sanders does no better in the national polls than Biden. There's no particular reason to think he does better with the "common people" (whoever they are). Never mind that a lot of "common people" are influenced by community leaders: community leaders who tend to be "insiders" that you're deriding. I think Sanders actually draws his support from youth-heavy, affluent-leaning, middle class liberals. I'm not sure they're really the demographic that "common people" usually implies.
No-one can possibly know who the "strongest" candidate for 2016 would have been - such things are literally impossible to know. But Clinton was by any reasonable margin a good candidate to pick, with great experience, a reputation for competence and diligence, and known to campaign effectively.
The simple fact is that a vast amount of the hostility and criticism directed at her is because she lost. The attempt to assess her and her campaign is one seen through a distorted lens of hindsight that is inherently biased because it's emphasising and focusing on potential errors. For Sanders supporters, there is virtually no hope of getting a reasonable assessment, because they have an axe to grind.
At the same time, Sanders supporters are hiding behind a vast unknown: Sanders was never tested. There is simply the assumption that Sanders would have been fine. Assumptions that he would have come across well in debates, appeared likeable and relatable, campaigned well, wouldn't have unsettled moderates and those skeptical of the left, or been buried under a ton of funding from terrified rich people and businesses pouring into the Trump campaign and PACs.
Could have fooled me.
You would also be extremely wrong. I would say astonishingly wrong, but the media has built the myth of the "Berniebro" for exactly this reason.
What Defines The Sanders Coalition?
Graphics by Yutong Yuan Sen. Bernie Sanders’s coalition isn’t that big, at least not right now — he won about a quarter of Democratic primary voters in Iowa an…
fivethirtyeight.com
Sanders supports do tend to be young. They also tend to be diverse, with a very high strength in latinos, and poor. It's harder to be rich and support Sanders. The people you're thinking of supported Warren and Biden. With of course the conservatives going to Biden.
And certainly, there's real advantage to courting insiders, but insiders don't want Bernie unless he gives up on his key positions, like all of them. So again, there's no reason for Sanders to do so, you don't win if you lose.
Demonstrably false with 2016 as the counterexample to those claims. She showed she was incompetent, indolent, and that she can't campaign to save her life.
It is however really hard to tell if Sanders was unliked by moderates because he was unlikable or because news anchors on national television were calling him a Nazi who would execute people in the street. That happened. While you're right that a candidate has to deal with attacks to be effective and it can be seen as a failure on Sanders' part. It really comes across as petty when Hillary can complain about an investigation that was clearly softballed in her favor for 4 years and people on Twitter not liking her against being hamstrung by your own side out of the gate.
Or putting it another way, no Dem candidate gets any sympathy for the slings and arrows of public opinion when the Democrat machine has put so much effort into manufacturing public opinion that it's become glaringly obvious that they manufacture public opinion and lose support because of it.
How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately "elevated" Donald Trump with its "pied piper" strategy
An email released by WikiLeaks shows how the Democratic Party purposefully "elevated" Trump to "leader of the pack"
www.salon.com
It doesn't help that Trump is the DNC's fault. Quite literally, they gave us Trump.
Sanders looked to build a progressive - working class coalition path. He failed. In 2016, Sanders beat Clinton with white, less educated voters. In 2020, Biden beat Sanders with that demographic, because I don't think the Sanders campaign understood why they backed him in 2016. Sanders failed to win over the important African American demographic. And finally, Sanders pushed hard on youth, and as is depressingly predictable but somehow overlooked by the Sanders campaign, the young didn't bother going out and voting. Finally, remember that lots of Democratic members actually like and believe in their party. When Sanders attacks the party, it offends their loyalties.
Just so we can establish some ideas about campaigning skills here: the Sanders campaign majorly flubbed stuff too.
I think campaigning is actually incredibly hard. Professionals with years of experience spend ages trying to get it right, and they often get a lot wrong, no matter who the candidate or party. Then everyone pores over the defeat to explain why and everything seems incredibly obvious with hindsight... and then stuff goes wrong next time anyway.
When I say "affluent", I include the scions of the affluent: people who are technically low income and low wealth, but mostly because they only just got their degree and haven't yet climbed up the career ladder and stashed a load of money in the bank.
"Insiders" are to some extent a force unto themselves, but they also to some extent represent voters. There's no magical dividing line in the way you want to pretend, as if the two are totally unconnected.
See above.
Realistically, there are going to be a lot of voters - probably most white, middle-class suburbanites - that think life's okay and nothing big needs to be done. There are plenty of working class Americans deeply suspicious of what they may perceive as outright socialism. Give them a leftist firebrand, they may well run happily into the arms of the Republicans. We don't know until it's put to the test, but we can hardly pretend it isn't a very significant risk. And finally, the media say some horrible and absurd things: if a campaign hasn't planned for that inevitavility and developed a strategy against it, it's a campaign failure.
The fact that polling places at universities sometimes had waits exceeding 7 hours suggests that youth turnout was deliberately suppressed by under-service.
Possibly. There are certainly anecdotes. But given that the USA is far from the only country where the young are less likely to vote and this has been the case for many years, I suspect there's no need to reach so hard for foul play.
You seem to be under the impression that I'm writing off the failure as a sole result of factors outside Clinton's control. I'm not. The failure (as with any electoral failure) owes itself to myriad factors.
Many of them were under her control; some of them weren't. The FBI intervention was largely not, and potentially had an enormous impact. This doesn't make her a good candidate; I don't believe she was. But it greatly impacts the context of the statement, "she didn't do enough".
People are hostile towards Hillary Clinton because she spent eight years as First Lady stumping for her husband's toxic policies, up to and including dog whistle politics straight out of the Nixon playbook, and playing attack dog against her husband's sexual harassment and abuse accusers. Then did she carpet bag her way into a gimme Senate seat, and spent six years being a key linchpin for the Bush administration's agenda on the Democratic side of the aisle. Only at that point did she triangulate and offer only the most token and rhetorical opposition to the Bush administration, in order to appease her constituency and shore up 2008 election odds.
And during the 2008 election she went dirty, and her and her campaign unleashed allegations and scandals that would follow the Obama candidacy and administration until its bitter end. Then a quarter of her supporters, many of whom now spewing "vote blue no matter who", turned tail and voted for McCain. Once SecState, she was chief advocate of the Obama administration's most toxic and self-destructive policies, especially on matters of foreign policy, particularly relevant in Latin-America and the Middle East.
Throughout it all, she and her chief allies dating as far back as Clinton's gubernatorial run, would go on to be the most strategically and organizationally incompetent, and outright cancerous, figures the Democratic party has known since before the days of FDR. All the way from Hillbilly Nosferatu to Dollar Store Frank Luntz (James Carville and David Brock).
2016 was an effect, not a cause. The cause being a quarter century embodying everything wrong with the Democratic party.
Going to echo Sean here in saying that it's difficult to tell if youth turnout was low because it usually is or because there was active voter suppression methods instituted by both parties that disproportionately effect demographics that tend to vote more progressive.
Stop Blaming Young Voters for Not Turning Out for Sanders
Sanders is losing to Biden because America is excluding young voters, persistently and systemically.
www.theatlantic.com
It didn't help that Biden told people to come out and vote during a pandemic while Sanders was asking for votes to be delayed until mail in voting could be fully implemented. We'll see how many of those Biden voters are going to make it to November.
Alright, so how many ways am I going to have to show you that Sanders did well with the non college educated both times, the poor both times, and with a more diverse coalition both times.
Or do you have your own bias and like hell are you going to drop it?
That extent is small. The Democrat party insiders are no better than Republican party insiders when it comes to putting self interests over the people.
See what above? It's not like this is completely a dissection in hindsight, people were saying months in advance that Hillary was not a strong pick vs Trump. People were saying months in advance that her campaign decisions were terrible. People were asking why she didn't set foot in Wisconsin. 2016 isn't a post-mortem, it's an "I told you so".
This is the problem, the Democrats can be told when they're fucking up and ignore it, then act surprised when things blow up in their face. And people will still believe them that it all out of their control. It's never that far out of their control.
Like I said, I agree that you need to plan against anything, including the media arm of your own party turning you into a cartoon villain for the aged who still take them seriously, but I don't want to hear from the privileged class of candidates a single peep about how unfair things are when they get softballed so hard it's not even funny. Could Sanders have done something about being called a Nazi on national television? Probably. But what's the excuse for running Hillary and Biden, two candidates with extensive baggage and who play into every stereotype Trump sets up?