Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 508569)

When you can't find data, let anecdote suffice.

Three of the people I was hanging out with over the long weekend were Johnson people. All three were traditional Republican voters, I suspect only one of them has ever cast a democratic ballot in a state or national race. Two lived in upstate NY, one in Massachusetts.

I have no doubt one of them would have voted Trump if he had to choose, and probably would have moved to Trump if he were in a swing state instead of NY. I have no doubt one of them would have voted Hillary. The third hated them both with enough ferocity that I'm not sure which he would have chosen.

Originally Posted by Not Bob (Post 508570)

Yup. And it's a point that Ty has notably Not Addressed (like your mention of Jill Stein's vote in MI). And, IIRC, turnout of registered Democrats dropped from 2012.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508572)

?

Believe I have agreed fourteen million times in various threads that it is one of many, many things that was material, given the small size of Trump's margin of victory.



No one really cares that it was Goldman per se. The point is that she was being attacked as an establishment insider. The attack was effective for the same reason that Trump was effective in calling her Crooked Hillary, and for that matter with the email. Hillary's weakness in defending herself against Bernie illustrates her fecklessness in countering predictable attacks on her general, rather than any particular skill or negativity on Bernie's part. Hillary's people sometimes seemed to think that it was incumbent on other Democrats to get out of her way, like the Red Sea parting itself for Moses, but that's not how politics works. If Hillary had been more talented as a retail politician, she would have found a way to make the attacks work for her, or least have gotten better at defending herself from them before facing Trump.

Jill Stein had 51,000 votes in Michigan in 2016, significantly more than Trump's margin of victory. But Nader had 84,000 in 2000. Third party lefty candidates had low tens of thousands of votes in other years in between. How much difference did what Bernie said really make?

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 508573)

Huh? Nader was the main third party guy. Compare his totals to Johnson's, plus Stein's.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508572)

?

Jill Stein had 51,000 votes in Michigan in 2016, significantly more than Trump's margin of victory. But Nader had 84,000 in 2000. Third party lefty candidates had low tens of thousands of votes in other years in between. How much difference did what Bernie said really make?

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508574)

I think people vote for third parties in large part for ideological reasons, not simply out of a desire to vote against the two large parties. I don't think Johnson and Stein/Nader are close substitutes for most people who voted for any of them.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508575)

Now WTF.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 508576)

I think it is just a fact that third party voting was disproportionately high in 2016, and finding another year 16 years earlier when the Green Party did well (even though the Libertarians did not that year) doesn't change that. The third party voting pattern was unusual. If you want to plot a bunch of years and try to argue that it wasn't, have fun, but that would be a fool's errand.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508568)

Such a close election means all sorts of things had a material effect.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508568)

Bernie's attacks on Hillary were used to good effect by Trump not because of anything particularly that Bernie did, but because they resonated with the voters.

Originally Posted by Not Bob (Post 508570)

There are a million things one can point to as a reason why Secretary Clinton lost the Electoral College, but the impact of Senator Sanders' attacks - more third party votes and lower turnout - can't be ignored. (Nor can sexism, Putin, and what with the benefit of hindsight are being called strategic and tactical blunders.)

But to pretend that because any GOP nominee would have attacked her on the Goldman speaking fees would have had the same impact as the Wall Street attacks on her by Saint Bernie, the socialist icon for the Democratic left, is just silly.

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall (Post 508580)

This is almost word-for-word what I said. Although, Bernie's outsider status made it stick. All other candidates would have been mostly ignored.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508582)

I don't think Bernie's outsider status made it stick. It stuck because it captured something about Hillary that mattered to voters. It worked with Democrats and it worked in the general with independents and obviously with Republicans, who would be all in if you accused Hillary of the Arian Heresy. I disagree with you and everyone else who says that the attack had particularly traction coming from Bernie. I'm not sure how one could prove this right or wrong, since you have to argue unprovable hypotheticals.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508582)

But Trump didn't need that license. He has been successful making hypocritical and logically nonsensical attacks on all sorts of people, even when some people are laughing in his face.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508582)

Look at the email issue -- Bernie didn't want to touch it and said it was a stupid issue, and Trump nonetheless used it very successfully on her. On the merits it was such a non-issue, but I submit now that it resonated with people because of the idea that she got to play by a different set of rules than everyone else (who has their own email server? for government email?).

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall (Post 508583)

I guess we will continue to disagree since absolutely no one labeled Hillary as a bank-bought candidate until Bernie did so. In fact Bernie, at first really just focused on the fact that she wasn't progressive enough. He succeeded in pushing her left and then when he started feeling himself and had a crowd (and a bunch of dipshit celebrities to carry his water) went after her banking "connections."

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 508584)

I know what he said. We obviously disagree on its impact.



I'm not sure what you think I said or what your point is here. Trump was actually very good at articulating the grievances of working class whites. I don't think he needed Bernie's help or got much of it. (You can disagree.). I completely agree that voters who switched were susceptible to the message that Hillary worked for investment banks. She did in fact take a lot of money from Wall Street banks and -- just like any other NY Senator would -- carried their water in Congress. So the vulnerability here is not one that Bernie invented or discovered. Yes, he hit it first. I think that's because the Democrats didn't have the same incentive to go after each other until it was a two-person race, just as a number of Republicans didn't go after Trump, hoping someone else would take him out. When it was down to Bernie and Hillary, he did, just as any other Democrat would have in that situation. He did go more negative than he needed to or should have, but in the big scheme of things, well, I've said it before and I'm just repeating myself.



Because she was, to a real degree.

And look, I am hardly the first person to point out that Trump's attacks on other people have a strong element of projection. He makes it work.



Yes. My point is not that the Wall Street attack worked. My point is that it worked because it was a vulnerability for her, not because of anything particularly that Bernie did. Like the email attack, which hurt her even though he didn't try to exploit it.

The argument I'm hearing is: If Bernie hadn't attacked Hillary as a tool of Wall Street, Trump wouldn't have been able to do it as successfully, and Hillary would have won. Even with the election as close as it was, I don't think that's right. I think the Wall St attacks on her worked because of her vulnerabilities as a candidate, and that those chickens would have come home to roost in a similar way even if Bernie had picked something else to talk about.

But we'll never know.