One more quote from the article linked in the previous post:
By the spring of 2016, one top Clinton adviser explained to me, the campaign’s own polling showed that white voters without a college degree despised Clinton. The extent of their loathing was surprising—she polled far worse with them than Obama ever had, especially in states like Ohio and Iowa.
It’s because they are horrible racists, of course.
Political blogger Jon Schwartz came up with this idea of the Iron Law of Institutions. Which is this:
“The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”
So yeah, the same people whose boneheaded strategies and ideas lost us the election are still in power. The only Resistance I see from them is their unified resistance to change. Instead of motivating their base with issues they care about (which poll well too!) they’re still whining about Russia. Russia may have interfered in the presidential elections, but they weren’t the reason democrats have lost more than 1000 state and local elections in the past 4 years. There’s no self-reflection, no reckoning. It’s everybody’s fault but theirs.
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Exactly! Years of losses, years of getting trounced – and Putin is to blame? How very convenient.
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I know several people (on the left and on the right) who have an irrationally intense hatred of Hillary Clinton. I was always lukewarm on her as a candidate, but the people who hate her REALLY hate her.
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I do know some racist Trump supporters. I’m thinking specifically of the guy who complains about “ragheads” who I used to be facebook friends with. But the majority of Trump voters here, whether or not they were racist, were not motivated by racism. I certainly don’t think that’s the case with almost any Obama-Trump voter (the really racist people I can think of have always been Republicans.) There’s a ton of Ohio voters that do not give a shit about racial issues one way or another, they just want good jobs. They’ll vote for a civil rights hero or a racist, they just don’t care. If we can put out someone who they trust in 2020, they’ll vote for them, just like they overwhelmingly voted for Obama twice.
Also, cynically, I don’t really think white liberals are necessarily less racist than white conservatives (with the exception of the “alt-right,” obviously.) They’re mostly just better at hiding it.
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But the majority of Trump voters here, whether or not they were racist, were not motivated by racism
Whatever. This is a distinction without difference.
they just want good jobs.
Please.
How many of these Trump voters who care about good jobs and the like are calling into the Senate to yell at them about healthcare? Specifically the part in which they want to bring back lifetime caps for insurance and preexisting conditions? That’ll fuck up employer insurance, which was (still is) one of the things people think of when they they think of “good jobs?”
“I want a ‘good job’ so I’m going to vote for the guy who stiffs small businesses and slaps non competes and nondisclosures on volunteers, (people offering their labor for free) and avoids unions and says things like ‘the minimum wage is too high’!” I’m pretty sure “good jobs” mean you get paid a decent wage, have health insurance and you have the freedom to leave the job if it sucks– as a floor.
They don’t care about jobs.
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Do you really know a single Trump supporter who doesn’t care about having a job? I don’t.
As for healthcare, this is not an issue that animates anybody, irrespective of their party affiliation. I don’t know why it is so but it is. I’ve tried and tried and tried but it’s useless. People’s eyes glaze over. I find it insane, just insane that the same people who went to freeze their asses protesting against some travel ban at the airport can’t be bothered to their own health insurance is being taken away and not in 2 or 6 years but yesterday.
By the way, I’m talking about specific people, all older than me, all with health issues way more serious than mine.
If anybody has an explanation, please share.
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Do you really know a single Trump supporter who doesn’t care about having a job? I don’t.
Having a job is not the same as having a “good job.” Also, if you say you care about “good jobs” and you vote for the person who doesn’t give a shit about everything that makes a “good job” a good job then I look at your actions, not what comes out of your mouth. ”
As for healthcare, this is not an issue that animates anybody, irrespective of their party affiliation. I don’t know why it is so but it is. I’ve tried and tried and tried but it’s useless. People’s eyes glaze over. I find it insane, just insane that the same people who went to freeze their asses protesting against some travel ban at the airport can’t be bothered to their own health insurance is being taken away and not in 2 or 6 years but yesterday.
By the way, I’m talking about specific people, all older than me, all with health issues way more serious than mine.
If anybody has an explanation, please share.
Who knows? When you’re sick maybe you don’t have the energy to yell at Congress by making more phone calls. Healthcare is mostly bureaucratic and I suspect the people you’re talking to either have health insurance through their spouses, employers or are on Medicare which is, as far as they know, not affected by this debacle. As for your situation, they probably see it as some unfortunate bureaucratic mess rather than a political problem to be solved. Or maybe they think it’s going to hurt people who they don’t like and they’re fine with it.
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I’m not saying someone who’s racist but who votes based on other things is morally better than someone who’s racist and votes for whoever’s more racist. But it means their votes can be won without resorting to racist pandering. It’s relevant in a political context.
Healthcare=/=jobs. I personally care a great deal about healthcare, but for some reason many don’t. Maybe they assume if they have a good job, they’ll get health insurance through it and don’t need to worry about medicaid expansion. For the record, I know someone who’s kinda racist and cares a great deal about the ACA and she was strongly for Hillary. If more people cared about the ACA in the Midwest things would’ve gone differently. Many people didn’t realize until after the election that the Medicaid expansion they loved so much was a result of the ACA. Oops.
Of course, I think Hillary would’ve been better on jobs, but many people believed Trump’s lies. Hopefully they wake up to reality when he fails to deliver (and hopefully this happens before November 2020.)
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But it means their votes can be won without resorting to racist pandering. It’s relevant in a political context.
One hopes! But racist fucking pandering is extremely appealing. Otherwise we’d have a different president. Bernie would be more popular and visible than he is right now, because he has a populist message and there is a real vaccuum of an affirmative program. Everyone is just in a orgy of responsiveness and reactiveness.
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He may have been a populist, but he’s a populist who’s very unappealing to many midwesterners, which is impressive because Democrats here love populists. In Ohio we all really like Sherrod Brown, who’s a populist and very politically similar to Bernie (but much smarter), but we don’t like Bernie. A lot of it is just cultural. He’s a New Yorker who calls himself a socialist and clearly cares more about college students than he does about any of the rest of us. He may have had a chance if he would’ve just not called himself a socialist, but for some reason he refused to do that… Him doing that shows that he’s really not in touch with our values and has been stuck in his liberal bubble. Just my opinion, as someone who is often a fan of populists but not of Bernie.
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Students on my campus never got into Bernie at all. Democrats won’t have much success with the young people like my students until they stop pandering to what I call the Middlebury crowd and ditch the narrative of victimhood Olympics. People who work two jobs to put themselves through school recoil when they hear about privilege and see these spoiled losers condescend to them. They need a narrative of winning, not of permanent victimhood that you carry as a badge of honor.
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I agree! Me and my dad are both really sick of whiners, although we’re both lifelong Democrats. It’s important to remember that Trump won white millennials, young people aren’t a monolithic Democratic bloc.
Oddly enough, I’ve seen college students from normal/difficult backgrounds in my area who have gone all in on the social justice wagon. The most annoying person I know grew up in the hood (although nowadays he’s busy teaching “queer yoga.”) And the social justice crowd went all in on Bernie, although I honestly don’t know why. I feel like Hillary is better on all those issues, although both are basically okay. Young non-social justice people I know went for Bernie too, and college student and non-college student alike seemed to be fans. Really it was a Bernie-bonanza over here and I was pretty much alone. But apparently none of these people voted because he did bad in our primary. Thanks, older black voters! There’s also a chance young Hillary supporters just kept quiet to avoid being screamed at about how we were racist (I know I did, and I’m definitely not shy about my opinions normally.)
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Big surprise, Ossoff lost. 
Eh.
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Yes, to repeat a bad pun, he was HANDELy defeated, bringing the Democratic comeback in the state elections since Trump became President to 0-5! No wonder that Michael Bloomberg is currently predicting that Trump has a 55% chance of re-election in 2020.
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