I think a more likely scenario would for the next frame to showcase trump attempting to gaslight a debate question on his “alleged” baby-eating. The same way he did about his call for Japan and South Korea to obtain nuclear arsenals, and his call for people to watch the Alicia Machado “sex tape.”
davidnanglesays
“I both always do that and never do that! And every last one of my supporters will believe that shit!”
This cartoon has a point, but it misses a broader point: the Democrats just lost, to a ridiculous buffoon, in such a way that nearly all the down-ticket races were thrown, too — which means that there is at least one major problem with the Democratic Party’s appeal to voters. If you seriously believe that the Democratic Party is the only real opposition to the Republicans*, then it is absolutely vital that the problems be found and corrected, or they will continue to lose. There are 2 years before the midterm elections; if the problem isn’t gone by at most a year from now, then the Republicans won’t even have to worry about the whole question of filibusters in the Senate.
Of course, if you seriously believe, as the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s loyalists want you to believe, that the problem is not the party but the voters, then there’s nothing to be done and you can just give up all hope now. If it’s just “all the voters are racists” then forget it, there’s no real solution to that — but on the other hand the actual evidence, which the Democratic Party has been ignoring for decades now, is that otherwise Democratic-voting people have been dropping out because they are disgusted at the (originally only semi-) official policy of holding social issues for ransom: “if you want to keep abortion legal, then you have to vote for our pro-war, pro-Wall Street, technocrats, no matter how much you may disagree with everything else they do”. Every election we find that Democratic turnout is down, again, and every time we’re supposed to be surprised, even though polls keep showing people aren’t interested in voting for that, while the Democrats keep doubling down on it (with Hillary Clinton being the most extreme — though by no means the only — example of the idea).
*I personally disagree both with the idea that the Democrats are the only possible resort, and with the idea that the Democrats are actually in opposition to the Republicans, what with the way we’ve had 8 years of Democrat-backed war and normalization of NSA spying and bank bailouts and austerity and unwillingness to embrace Black Lives Matter and so on and so on and so on, and also with the way that the Democrats are rolling over to show Trump their bellies right now. But a lot of people disagree with me, so take those points as given.
Vicar, I see the Democrats lost because they keep talking about helping all the poor and downtrodden, as “the people we must help”. While many voters feel frustrated that their government is ignoring them. Trump was seen as someone who didn’t care about other people and would make “self” the most important. This gave most the the feeling that their own problems are important and will be addresses while the Dems will only work on everybody else’s problems.
Shit I’m a downer. Sorry to buzzkill I need some coffee.☕️
jefrirsays
Vicar
Every election we find that Democratic turnout is down, again,
This is not consistent with the facts. Obama had an unusually high turnout in 2008, and the 2012 turnout was lower than that by some 3.5 million, but was still higher than the number of voters who elected either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton – more than 20 million higher than in 1992. Clinton has now pretty much equalled Obama’s 2012 vote.
antigone10says
@thevicar
Yes, there is a major problem with Democrat voters- voter suppression.
Voter ID laws, blocking early voting, closing polling sites: all of these factors keep Democrats from voting. Also, the electoral college is set up to favor rural states over urban ones.
None of that has to do with messaging, and all of it has to do with infrastructure.
Vicar, I see the Democrats lost because they keep talking about helping all the poor and downtrodden, as “the people we must help”.
If the Democrats consistently actually helped the poor and downtrodden, they wouldn’t have to talk about anything in particular. Do you know anybody who really believed Clinton was going to take the post-primaries/Sanders-influenced version of the platform seriously? Everyone I know, including the two I talk to regularly about politics who were genuinely 100% pro-Clinton, admitted that she didn’t want and wasn’t going to work towards any of that. (And certainly after the contents of her infamous private speeches to banks started leaking out, it was very difficult to take the platform seriously. How can you believe anything populist in the platform of someone who has been telling rich people “I’m going to have to tell a lot of popular lies to get elected, but what will really count will be the backroom deals I make with people like you”?)
Everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 expected him to go after the banks and wind down the wars in 2009. (If he had done the former, the Republicans would have been reduced in 2010 to the position the Democrats now hold, vis-a-vis number of offices held.) Instead, he blew all his political capital on putting through a health insurance reform act which he insisted on watering down to chase bipartisan support which never materialized. That betrayal, and yes, it was a betrayal, is why the 2010 midterms turned out the way they did. If you spent much time around young left-leaning people, you could see, as those two years went by, the realization dawning that they had been sold a bill of goods, and that the Baby Boomers were once again giving younger people the shaft.
And then, after the Democrats basically cemented the idea that they didn’t mind betrayal, you had Clinton, the epitome of inside politics, with a message of “let’s keep doing what we’ve been doing, and not make any changes”, running a whole campaign by chasing Republican voters — who were never, under any circumstances, going to vote for her, let’s be real, here — while her campaign said things like “for every liberal vote we lose, we’ll get two Republicans”. How’d that work out for everyone?
I have some news for you: a party’s base is worth currying favor with, because they aren’t fickle. If Clinton had had strong support from the base — which she did not have and apparently did not really want — then none of the manufactured scandals would have made much difference. Instead, she was constantly chasing votes of people who might just possibly have been convinced to vote for her, if everything went perfectly, and kicking her base in the teeth in order to do it, and a last-minute revival of the e-mail server thing which everyone had already heard about sent her plummeting.
Rahm Emmanuel, who is a Clintonite through and through (and also a jerk), once said “these people who want to primary Obama [from the left], who do they think they’re going to vote for?” Well, we now have an answer to that: nobody. The Democrats have been working as hard as possible to convince as many of their voters as possible to stay home, and it has worked! All that hippie-punching they’ve been working on has definitely convinced the public that the Democrats hate their base! Unfortunately, now nobody wants to be their base.
@#14, jefrir
This is not consistent with the facts. Obama had an unusually high turnout in 2008, and the 2012 turnout was lower than that by some 3.5 million, but was still higher than the number of voters who elected either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton – more than 20 million higher than in 1992.
Obama ran on not being a technocratic insider in 2008. By 2012, that was no longer a plausible view of him, in light of how he governed, and he lost votes.
Funnily enough, the previous Democratic president also ran for his first term on not being a technocratic insider. And so did the one before that. All the Democratic presidential candidates since, oh, about 1970 or so, who have not run a outsider campaign, have lost. It’s almost as though people who might vote Democratic don’t like the status quo and aren’t inspired by technocratic insiders with lots of connections. Of course, that can’t possibly be true because it would mean that Hillary Clinton was a terrible choice, and Democrats won’t admit that. (Yet.)
Clinton has now pretty much equalled Obama’s 2012 vote.
Not by percentage of registered voters, or percentage of population. The American population is growing — there are 14 and a half million people more here, now, than there were in 2008. To get the same level of support Obama had, Clinton would need to noticeably exceed his vote count — by several million votes. (The same way that if a few thousand FTE jobs aren’t being created every single day, far more than Trump’s much-ballyhooed one-shot Carrier deal, then unemployment is growing.)
(It also doesn’t mean much when a fairly large chunk of those votes she received were actually votes against Trump, rather than votes endorsing Clinton. I don’t even remember hearing anyone say, in November 2008, “well, I hate Obama, but I’m going to hold my nose and vote for him anyway because McCain is unthinkable”, whereas the phrase “hold my nose” was the major refrain of the runup to election day among Democrats, and the horrible-ness of Trump was the major point of the Clinton campaign for months.)
@#15, antigone10
Yes, there is a major problem with Democrat voters- voter suppression.
Voter ID laws, blocking early voting, closing polling sites: all of these factors keep Democrats from voting.
In most of the states Clinton lost, that isn’t even a plausible argument, because there simply weren’t that many people complaining about it. The few states where it can be plausibly suggested are ones where Democrats lost by very small amounts — which means that at best, you can say “voter suppression was one way Democrats lost this state, but there are very likely others.”
Also, the electoral college is set up to favor rural states over urban ones.
And? Was this somehow kept secret from the Clinton campaign? Did she not know in advance that she would have to win more than just the largest population centers? I seem to recall that the winner of the popular vote has lost the election multiple times before 2016, so suddenly pretending this is a revelation is disingenuous.
None of that has to do with messaging, and all of it has to do with infrastructure.
Infrastructure. Right. Is that what was preventing Clinton from even visiting the state of Michigan once after the primaries? She couldn’t get there because the roads collapsed? Or why she only went to Wisconsin to address fundraisers with rich people while avoiding holding any rallies? Let me guess: her private jet could only get clearance to land near the rich people, and there’s no transport available to anywhere else from there in Wisconsin. It’s not possible at all that voters took that to mean that she didn’t care about them, and was only in it to chase money. Nope. That couldn’t possibly be the case, because that would be a messaging problem.
To blatantly steal a phrase from an excellent comment I saw at Salon.com: the next Democratic candidate for president needs to spend less time in small rooms talking to rich people and more time in big rooms talking to poor people.
(Oh, and incidentally: registered Democrats may outnumber registered Republicans by a percentage or two of the voting population, or at least they did — there are many reasons to believe that Clinton’s campaign will cause a lot of Democrats to change registration over the next year or so — but either group is outnumbered severely by Independents. Next time you have an Independent who wants to run for President with the Democratic Party, saying “oh, but this person isn’t really a Democrat”, as so many Democratic apologists said about Bernie Sanders, is an unbelievably foolish remark.)
Preocupación fija y obsesiva por algo determinado…
Odio, aversión, ojeriza…
jefrirsays
If the Democrats consistently actually helped the poor and downtrodden, they wouldn’t have to talk about anything in particular.
Are you actually this fucking stupid about how politics works? No, people don’t just magically recognize the programs that help them and the sources of those programs – that’s how you end up with signs saying “keep the government out of my medicare”
Plus, a whole lot of America is less bothered about helping the poor and downtrodden, and more bothered about making sure the section of the poor and downtrodden that gets helped isn’t the wrong one, like POC
unclefrogysays
when looking at humans and human behavior I have not noticed that there is any one simple answer that fits for all hell I don’t think you can find one complicated answer.
I do not see the point of arguing over which answer is the most correct one for why HR lost the election there were many she did not win because she did not get enough votes in the right places and the reasons were as varied as the places.
The chief sales man and promoter is busy already as the cartoon clearly indicates while the opposition party is busy fighting each other
the question is barring any result changes from any re-count is what to do now.
uncle frogy
I wouldn’t put it past him.
Didn’t he say he could walk down 5th Avenue eating a baby and wouldn’t lose voters ??
Nahhhh, he’s just tryin’ to show how manly he is, eating raw meat, from one of the 99%ers.
Next frame, trump surrogate says that only looked like a baby. It was just a hamburger.
Frame after that, trump goes on twitter and says, “I eat all the babies. I would never not eat all the babies.”
Next frame, trump surrogate says, “Of course he eats babies! Think of how many jobs he saved!”
@4:
I think a more likely scenario would for the next frame to showcase trump attempting to gaslight a debate question on his “alleged” baby-eating. The same way he did about his call for Japan and South Korea to obtain nuclear arsenals, and his call for people to watch the Alicia Machado “sex tape.”
“I both always do that and never do that! And every last one of my supporters will believe that shit!”
It’s funny, Trump “believes in” sea level rising when it suits him- like when his golf course is washing away: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38228037
It probably helped that the pain recognising global warming was tempered by the prospect of destroying the cosatline.
Oh f’r Pete’s sake, the baby was already dead – it had turned blue.
Buster, like he’s gonna eat a live one, eh? He must’ve dashed it’s head against rocks first, eh.
This cartoon has a point, but it misses a broader point: the Democrats just lost, to a ridiculous buffoon, in such a way that nearly all the down-ticket races were thrown, too — which means that there is at least one major problem with the Democratic Party’s appeal to voters. If you seriously believe that the Democratic Party is the only real opposition to the Republicans*, then it is absolutely vital that the problems be found and corrected, or they will continue to lose. There are 2 years before the midterm elections; if the problem isn’t gone by at most a year from now, then the Republicans won’t even have to worry about the whole question of filibusters in the Senate.
Of course, if you seriously believe, as the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s loyalists want you to believe, that the problem is not the party but the voters, then there’s nothing to be done and you can just give up all hope now. If it’s just “all the voters are racists” then forget it, there’s no real solution to that — but on the other hand the actual evidence, which the Democratic Party has been ignoring for decades now, is that otherwise Democratic-voting people have been dropping out because they are disgusted at the (originally only semi-) official policy of holding social issues for ransom: “if you want to keep abortion legal, then you have to vote for our pro-war, pro-Wall Street, technocrats, no matter how much you may disagree with everything else they do”. Every election we find that Democratic turnout is down, again, and every time we’re supposed to be surprised, even though polls keep showing people aren’t interested in voting for that, while the Democrats keep doubling down on it (with Hillary Clinton being the most extreme — though by no means the only — example of the idea).
*I personally disagree both with the idea that the Democrats are the only possible resort, and with the idea that the Democrats are actually in opposition to the Republicans, what with the way we’ve had 8 years of Democrat-backed war and normalization of NSA spying and bank bailouts and austerity and unwillingness to embrace Black Lives Matter and so on and so on and so on, and also with the way that the Democrats are rolling over to show Trump their bellies right now. But a lot of people disagree with me, so take those points as given.
Vicar et al, you may find this article useful:
“Did Trump Win Blue Collar White Voters or Did Clinton Lose Them?” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2016/12/05/trump-win-blue-collar-white-voters-clinton-lose/
Of course, the emerging narrative of the defeat ignores the facts presente here.
Ha! “A Utah Republican Is Challenging Trump More Effectively Than 99 Percent of Democrats” http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/12/05/evan_mcmullin_a_better_trump_critic_than_most_democrats.html
Surprise!! “Trump is still hiring cheap foreign workers at his Palm Beach resort….”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/12/06/trump_still_hiring_cheap_foreign_workers_at_mar_a_lago_when_american_workers.html
-It is useless to wait for ordinary media to do their job. but why aren’t Democrats buying ad time on TV and showing the public this?
Vicar, I see the Democrats lost because they keep talking about helping all the poor and downtrodden, as “the people we must help”. While many voters feel frustrated that their government is ignoring them. Trump was seen as someone who didn’t care about other people and would make “self” the most important. This gave most the the feeling that their own problems are important and will be addresses while the Dems will only work on everybody else’s problems.
Shit I’m a downer. Sorry to buzzkill I need some coffee.☕️
Vicar
This is not consistent with the facts. Obama had an unusually high turnout in 2008, and the 2012 turnout was lower than that by some 3.5 million, but was still higher than the number of voters who elected either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton – more than 20 million higher than in 1992. Clinton has now pretty much equalled Obama’s 2012 vote.
@thevicar
Yes, there is a major problem with Democrat voters- voter suppression.
Voter ID laws, blocking early voting, closing polling sites: all of these factors keep Democrats from voting. Also, the electoral college is set up to favor rural states over urban ones.
None of that has to do with messaging, and all of it has to do with infrastructure.
@#13, slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))
If the Democrats consistently actually helped the poor and downtrodden, they wouldn’t have to talk about anything in particular. Do you know anybody who really believed Clinton was going to take the post-primaries/Sanders-influenced version of the platform seriously? Everyone I know, including the two I talk to regularly about politics who were genuinely 100% pro-Clinton, admitted that she didn’t want and wasn’t going to work towards any of that. (And certainly after the contents of her infamous private speeches to banks started leaking out, it was very difficult to take the platform seriously. How can you believe anything populist in the platform of someone who has been telling rich people “I’m going to have to tell a lot of popular lies to get elected, but what will really count will be the backroom deals I make with people like you”?)
Everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 expected him to go after the banks and wind down the wars in 2009. (If he had done the former, the Republicans would have been reduced in 2010 to the position the Democrats now hold, vis-a-vis number of offices held.) Instead, he blew all his political capital on putting through a health insurance reform act which he insisted on watering down to chase bipartisan support which never materialized. That betrayal, and yes, it was a betrayal, is why the 2010 midterms turned out the way they did. If you spent much time around young left-leaning people, you could see, as those two years went by, the realization dawning that they had been sold a bill of goods, and that the Baby Boomers were once again giving younger people the shaft.
And then, after the Democrats basically cemented the idea that they didn’t mind betrayal, you had Clinton, the epitome of inside politics, with a message of “let’s keep doing what we’ve been doing, and not make any changes”, running a whole campaign by chasing Republican voters — who were never, under any circumstances, going to vote for her, let’s be real, here — while her campaign said things like “for every liberal vote we lose, we’ll get two Republicans”. How’d that work out for everyone?
I have some news for you: a party’s base is worth currying favor with, because they aren’t fickle. If Clinton had had strong support from the base — which she did not have and apparently did not really want — then none of the manufactured scandals would have made much difference. Instead, she was constantly chasing votes of people who might just possibly have been convinced to vote for her, if everything went perfectly, and kicking her base in the teeth in order to do it, and a last-minute revival of the e-mail server thing which everyone had already heard about sent her plummeting.
Rahm Emmanuel, who is a Clintonite through and through (and also a jerk), once said “these people who want to primary Obama [from the left], who do they think they’re going to vote for?” Well, we now have an answer to that: nobody. The Democrats have been working as hard as possible to convince as many of their voters as possible to stay home, and it has worked! All that hippie-punching they’ve been working on has definitely convinced the public that the Democrats hate their base! Unfortunately, now nobody wants to be their base.
@#14, jefrir
Obama ran on not being a technocratic insider in 2008. By 2012, that was no longer a plausible view of him, in light of how he governed, and he lost votes.
Funnily enough, the previous Democratic president also ran for his first term on not being a technocratic insider. And so did the one before that. All the Democratic presidential candidates since, oh, about 1970 or so, who have not run a outsider campaign, have lost. It’s almost as though people who might vote Democratic don’t like the status quo and aren’t inspired by technocratic insiders with lots of connections. Of course, that can’t possibly be true because it would mean that Hillary Clinton was a terrible choice, and Democrats won’t admit that. (Yet.)
Not by percentage of registered voters, or percentage of population. The American population is growing — there are 14 and a half million people more here, now, than there were in 2008. To get the same level of support Obama had, Clinton would need to noticeably exceed his vote count — by several million votes. (The same way that if a few thousand FTE jobs aren’t being created every single day, far more than Trump’s much-ballyhooed one-shot Carrier deal, then unemployment is growing.)
(It also doesn’t mean much when a fairly large chunk of those votes she received were actually votes against Trump, rather than votes endorsing Clinton. I don’t even remember hearing anyone say, in November 2008, “well, I hate Obama, but I’m going to hold my nose and vote for him anyway because McCain is unthinkable”, whereas the phrase “hold my nose” was the major refrain of the runup to election day among Democrats, and the horrible-ness of Trump was the major point of the Clinton campaign for months.)
@#15, antigone10
In most of the states Clinton lost, that isn’t even a plausible argument, because there simply weren’t that many people complaining about it. The few states where it can be plausibly suggested are ones where Democrats lost by very small amounts — which means that at best, you can say “voter suppression was one way Democrats lost this state, but there are very likely others.”
And? Was this somehow kept secret from the Clinton campaign? Did she not know in advance that she would have to win more than just the largest population centers? I seem to recall that the winner of the popular vote has lost the election multiple times before 2016, so suddenly pretending this is a revelation is disingenuous.
Infrastructure. Right. Is that what was preventing Clinton from even visiting the state of Michigan once after the primaries? She couldn’t get there because the roads collapsed? Or why she only went to Wisconsin to address fundraisers with rich people while avoiding holding any rallies? Let me guess: her private jet could only get clearance to land near the rich people, and there’s no transport available to anywhere else from there in Wisconsin. It’s not possible at all that voters took that to mean that she didn’t care about them, and was only in it to chase money. Nope. That couldn’t possibly be the case, because that would be a messaging problem.
To blatantly steal a phrase from an excellent comment I saw at Salon.com: the next Democratic candidate for president needs to spend less time in small rooms talking to rich people and more time in big rooms talking to poor people.
(Oh, and incidentally: registered Democrats may outnumber registered Republicans by a percentage or two of the voting population, or at least they did — there are many reasons to believe that Clinton’s campaign will cause a lot of Democrats to change registration over the next year or so — but either group is outnumbered severely by Independents. Next time you have an Independent who wants to run for President with the Democratic Party, saying “oh, but this person isn’t really a Democrat”, as so many Democratic apologists said about Bernie Sanders, is an unbelievably foolish remark.)
Apropos of nothing in particular…
Are you actually this fucking stupid about how politics works? No, people don’t just magically recognize the programs that help them and the sources of those programs – that’s how you end up with signs saying “keep the government out of my medicare”
Plus, a whole lot of America is less bothered about helping the poor and downtrodden, and more bothered about making sure the section of the poor and downtrodden that gets helped isn’t the wrong one, like POC
when looking at humans and human behavior I have not noticed that there is any one simple answer that fits for all hell I don’t think you can find one complicated answer.
I do not see the point of arguing over which answer is the most correct one for why HR lost the election there were many she did not win because she did not get enough votes in the right places and the reasons were as varied as the places.
The chief sales man and promoter is busy already as the cartoon clearly indicates while the opposition party is busy fighting each other
the question is barring any result changes from any re-count is what to do now.
uncle frogy