honorentheos wrote:I'm sure you remember the discussions from the primary period when Sanders supporters complained of the media describing Clinton as winning due to the addition of the super delegates committed to her being added to the totals in reporting while arguing he was a much less controversial candidate to have in the general election as evidenced by how little was said about him negatively in the media. The argument being that the inclusion of super delegates in the reporting made it look like she had clinched the nomination. He wasn't really out of the race until early summer and the role of super delegates in both the reporting and the ultimate totals can't be discounted, given the importance of turn out in primary elections.
Point being, this isn't just an issue with the Republican voters but rather voters of all stripes. The malaise around the election was palpable if we want to look at the broader goal of sowing distrust in the system. The Russian message that the system is broken, the candidates suck, and our vote doesn't matter in the big picture was widely successful if one anecdotally looks at the messaging on this board alone.
Sanders refused to drop out of the race until the early Summer, but he was mathematically knocked out of it by super-Tuesday. The only chance he of winning at that point was soul-destroying scandal or death that would force Clinton out of the race anyway. He never was as close as Clinton was to Obama in 2008 when the calls for her to drop out were at a fever pitch.
True, but the narrative in Spring '16 was such that after voters became more familiar with him, he was basically trading blows with Clinton up through at least May. California took the wind out the Bernie supporter's sails but the trend lines were moving in his favor. I think we run the risk of making a Trump-like argument ("She lost the old fashioned way - by being a bad candidate") when we ignore that Bernie support was trending up as Clinton support was showing signs of weakening over time. It became a much more competitive race even as the total counts moved towards inevitability and beyond.
If we are to be concerned about Russian meddling in the US election process, one shouldn't be narrowly focused only on how it benefited Trump. Even if his support seems the have a much more ominous potential for actual manipulation by Russian interests, we the voting public should be a bit more sheepish at being so easily led about by the nose.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
honorentheos wrote:True, but the narrative in Spring '16 was such that after voters became more familiar with him, he was basically trading blows with Clinton up through at least May. California took the wind out the Bernie supporter's sails but the trend lines were moving in his favor. I think we run the risk of making a Trump-like argument ("She lost the old fashioned way - by being a bad candidate") when we ignore that Bernie support was trending up as Clinton support was showing signs of weakening over time. It became a much more competitive race even as the total counts moved towards inevitability and beyond.
If we are to be concerned about Russian meddling in the US election process, one shouldn't be narrowly focused only on how it benefited Trump. Even if his support seems the have a much more ominous potential for actual manipulation by Russian interests, we the voting public should be a bit more sheepish at being so easily led about by the nose.
The trend lines were in Sanders favor, but it was too late by then. There's a similar phenomenon that occurred in 2008, where the trend-lines switched back to Clinton's favor in the spring, but the math rendered that pointless. Obama had enough to hang on and almost nothing could change that. I think it is incorrect to say that what prevented Sanders from winning was the super-delegate system. What prevented Sanders from winning was the fact that Clinton won more elections at the right time to win them. The overall election wasn't even close.
The Russian pro-Bernie campaign, which mirrors the Republican pro-Bernie campaign mind you, should be looked at as part of the effort to help Trump and hurt Clinton, not distinct from it.
That would be discriminatory to low income and illegal alien voters.
Illegals don't vote. There is not any evidence of massive voter fraud from Democrats within California despite Trump claiming so. House Republicans did not end up losing a seat from California during the 2016 election.
EAllusion wrote:The Russian pro-Bernie campaign, which mirrors the Republican pro-Bernie campaign mind you, should be looked at as part of the effort to help Trump and hurt Clinton, not distinct from it.
I don't recall there being a Republican pro-Bernie campaign so much as general quiet about Bernie until the DNC email scandal. Would you mind refreshing my memory of what typical Republican outlets were saying?
Anyway, I'd encourage anyone to jump back to around page 42-45 of the Spirit Paradise forum and take a trip down memory lane. Voter disenchantment with the election process? Double check plus.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
EAllusion wrote:The Russian pro-Bernie campaign, which mirrors the Republican pro-Bernie campaign mind you, should be looked at as part of the effort to help Trump and hurt Clinton, not distinct from it.
I don't recall there being a Republican pro-Bernie campaign so much as general quiet about Bernie until the DNC email scandal. Would you mind refreshing my memory of what typical Republican outlets were saying?
Anyway, I'd encourage anyone to jump back to around page 42-45 of the Spirit Paradise forum and take a trip down memory lane. Voter disenchantment with the election process? Double check plus.
Republican sources deliberately peppered Sanders with praise, were relatively mute on his faults, and attempted to reinforce a narrative of Clinton illegitimately taking the primary from him. Subgenius's posting here even in recent times is an artifact of that messaging. This more or less aligns with what Russia did.
The Republican / Russia attack machine is actually pretty stupid and transparent, but it works to an extent because so are the American people.
Democrats, for their part, sought to actively bolster the campaigns of the the battier Republican primary candidates like Ben Carson and Donald Trump in order to generate a weaker candidate to run against in the general. It's hard to know if that had any impact, but they certainly wanted to have impact.
That worked out nicely for them and the country. Maybe they've learned their lesson.
Likewise, there's a plausible universe in which the US falls into recession at just the right time to allow for a Bernie Sanders / Progressive landslide in 2020. That will result in a decimation of Republican legislative priorities if it comes to fruition. If so, good job Republicans who tried to raise Sanders profile for slight electoral gamesmanship in one election.
I have to say that this quote from one of the links is...well, it's something:
And during the debate, Republican groups were blasting out rapid emails defending Mr. Sanders’s positions, including his universal health care plan, an issue many Republicans would embrace as warmly as they would higher taxes.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
I really dislike Clinton as a politician. She's no where in the ballpark as bad as Donald Trump, but for normal American politics I find her quite disagreeable in terms of policy preferences and rhetorical style. That being said, now that we have the benefit of hindsight, it's hard not to be frustrated with just how stacked the deck was against her. The media's treatment of the Clinton campaign, more than Russia, was the most scandalous thing about the 2016 election. I'm confident history won't be kind to it. I know there are die-hard Clinton fans who see her as this hard working, hard as steel bitch who has to fight twice as hard as men in her position and does so gladly. When you really take in just how much nonsense she had to put up with, I get where they are coming from.
Rush Limbaugh gives a good explanation for Flynn lying but sadly I can't get the link to work and my memory from my drive home isn't as good as it once was.
Flynn was broke. He was worried about the effect this was having on his family. But we've got on the Congressional Record that James Comey of the FBI told members of Congress on a committee that Flynn had not lied to anybody. It takes us back to the actual FBI interview of Flynn anyway. It was not set ...
I'm sure you guys could find it as well but I doubt it's what you want to hear.
“There were mothers who took this [Rodney King LA riots] as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes ... They are not crooks.”
This liberal would be about socializing … uh, umm. … Would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies.