The General Election

knapplc said:
If she runs again in 2020 you may as well just pack up the Democrat party and throw them in the trash heap. That would be a huge, huge mistake.

Biden shouldn't run, either. It's time to move on from the Democrats' Old Guard. They need fresh blood. The Republicans have capitalized on that in the past few elections, winning congressional seats and, shockingly, the presidency.
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agreed. Time for new faces from that side. Maybe they can start changing the tone. It would nice to see both parties find consensus makers instead of dividers. Willing to work wt the other side for once.

It seem that the only non-partisan time during the last 17 years was shortly after 911. Since then, the extremes have taken over - maybe not in actual policy in many cases but in action & words.

 
BigRedBuster said:
I must say.....

I do find it funny that she is throwing the Democratic Party under the bus.

This is the party that basically hand picked her years before hand, supported her and worked behind the scenes to make sure she got the nomination.

She loses (in large part to her own pathetic campaign) and she sacrifices them to the wolves.

Her true personality is coming out in this.
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Maybe Hillary being critical of/attacking the DNC is what the Dems need to finally force her out. Biden has already been outspoken against her campaign.

 
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/19/republican-data-mining-firm-exposed-personal-information-for-virtually-every-american-voter/

There are two stories here:

* The massive data exposure. Yikes!

* How that data was used.

The GOP hasn’t been given a lot of credit for its data game but that seems to have improved in this past election:

Two of the firms linked to the database, Deep Root Analytics and Target Point, were among three firms hired by the RNC to do most of its data modeling and voter scoring in 2016, according to a December Ad Age story, with a mandate to shore up unconvinced Trump-leaning voters, sway weak Hillary Clinton supporters, and capture undecided voters.
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It’s worth thinking about how they did this, as we consider where both parties (and maybe new ones!) go from here. I think they painted a compelling threat to shore up the GOP base. This is always effective, if insidious — especially given the nature of the trumped-up ‘threats’. And regarding the Democrats, I think there were two huge pitches they were able to make stick to a depressing degree: 1) “Crooked” Hillary, and 2) the “rigged” party.

I’d have to go back and look at some of the after-action reports, but if I recall, Trump captured a saddening number of voters in the middle; people who in other years supported Obama or considered themselves Democrats. I also don’t think the Sanders and Stein wings came home to the left as much as they were needed to.

I do wonder if a party named "The Democratic Party" can recover from this brand damage, however unfair it was. Granted France is very different from us, but the sudden success of En Marche, which prior to April 2016 did not even exist, should make us take notice.

 
I don't know about the mis-information campaign, but my opinion about the Democratic Party's caucus being "rigged" has more to do with how the super-delegates voted. At some point the party decided to back Clinton rather than Sanders, and at that point all of the super-delegates were voting for Clinton, regardless to how close the actual popular votes were. This effectively renders party-members' votes useless.

I don't know how Sanders would have fared in the general election, but it would have been nice to give him a fair shot at it, IMO.

 
Right. I think that gets back to the question of whether parties choose their own candidates, or function as public utilities holding open elections.

We have a pretty weird system. Personally, I think parties should choose their own guys and do away with the pretense of primary season if that's how we want to do it. Or, we should just have a national runoff where the top few advance instead of this weird mishmash of open primaries, closed primaries, and caucuses -- one set from each party. What "the public will" really means gets lost somewhere in there in a way that wouldn't if everyone in the country got to vote on it at the same time.

 
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zoogs said:
Right. I think that gets back to the question of whether parties choose their own candidates, or function as public utilities holding open elections.

We have a pretty weird system. Personally, I think parties should choose their own guys and do away with the pretense of primary season if that's how we want to do it. Or, we should just have a national runoff where the top few advance instead of this weird mishmash of open primaries, closed primaries, and caucuses -- one set from each party. What "the public will" really means gets lost somewhere in there in a way that wouldn't if everyone in the country got to vote on it at the same time.
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Fair points. It's easy to forget that the primaries are NOT a national election that everyone gets to participate in. Each party has the ability to select their candidate however they choose.

What really sucks about that, is the fact that although it appears on the surface that we have many choices, we actually have very few choices because of the two-party system. The Democratic Party certainly had the right to choose Clinton, for whatever justification they wanted to use. For many of us that didn't like either candidate for president, a vote for the green party, or Libertarian, or Tea was virtually the same as not voting at all. A wasted vote.

I'm sure the "appearance" of choice is by design. Let everyone think they had a say.

 
zoogs said:
Right. I think that gets back to the question of whether parties choose their own candidates, or function as public utilities holding open elections.

We have a pretty weird system. Personally, I think parties should choose their own guys and do away with the pretense of primary season if that's how we want to do it. Or, we should just have a national runoff where the top few advance instead of this weird mishmash of open primaries, closed primaries, and caucuses -- one set from each party. What "the public will" really means gets lost somewhere in there in a way that wouldn't if everyone in the country got to vote on it at the same time.
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Here's a TED talk by Larry Lessig where he shows how the party candidate selection process matters (he's specifically talking about money in politics but the principle applies to non-democratic primaries just as well):


 
Exactly. I don't think there's anything wrong with field testing your party's candidate pool -- probably the right way to go about it. But then to affect that this is a democratic process? It sets the wrong expectation.

Similarly, with a run-off I think people tend to get more aware that they need to be strategic. You still have to fall in line at some point between limited choices none of which may have been your own preference -- but there'll be a legitimacy about that, because it'd be the results of a national election. Thus, in the final vote you're no longer choosing from an infinite pool but given the constraints of previous results.

We have the same thing; it's just harder to see it that way. And much easier to quibble about the fairness of the prior results.

I think in an ideal world a party is free to choose whomever they like, and the wrong choices will simply result in splintering or new parties. We'd need a totally different system for this to be reality in the U.S, though.

@RD -- thanks for posting the Lessig link! I'll give it a watch.

 
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This is why Trump has at least a 50/50 shot at winning again. A fair portion of the electorate are brainwashed.


 
Yeah...the House and Senate voted overwhelmingly (while Republican controlled) to put new sanctions on Russia just because they thought it would be fun.

Our country is full of mind numbed sheep being led to slaughter.

 
Yeah....CIA, FBI, NSA all other intelligence agencies along with the House and Senate claim Russia tried interfering with the election.....

But.....Fox, Beitbart and Infowars all claim they didn't so.....who are you going to trust?

 
31% is astounding. What more do those people need? I feel like a conviction or revelation of collusion (since "there's no evidence of collusion" seems to be the rhetorical game this administration is playing lately) would be the only things to bring down that number. That number could be somewhat reflective of his base, which is shrinking.

On the other hand, in the same poll, 72% approval amongst Republicans is... not good. If it remained there and his Dem/Ind #s stay where they are in 2020, he's going to have a very rough time against Generic Dem. But of course, he'll have an incumbent advantage, too. Maybe? Who knows at this point...


 
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