Re: Bernie 2020
 

In Michigan Trump got slightly more votes that did Romney, so I don't think too many traditional Rs drifted.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

?

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?

Re: Bernie 2020
 

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

Re: Bernie 2020
 

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.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Now WTF.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

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.

Then you have to say, well, why were more people voting third parties than in other years? Usually, the easiest reason is that they are dissatisfied with the parties selected by the Dems and Rs. I think it is very hard to talk about reasons traditional dem voters might have been dissatisfied with Clinton without talking about Bernie.

I mean, his people are still attacking her.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Wait a minute. You think there are people who actually got excited about Jill Stein (other than anti-vaxers) and Gary Johnson (stoned Republicans?). Bill Weld couldn't get excited about voting for Gary Johnson.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I think they meant to say it would be "Bro-Economy" not "Pro-Economy". Who did the copy editing?

Re: Bernie 2020
 

The usual pattern is tens of thousands of votes for third-party candidates. How many varies. Last year was higher than the mean, no doubt. But I would suggest that the reason it's getting so much attention is not that it was so much higher, but because it was material in a very close election. Jill Stein got tens of thousands of votes in 2012 without Bernie Sanders attacking Obama.

I think it's very easy, and I say that as someone who not only voted for Clinton but gave her a lot of money.

For one, not necessarily the most important factor, it makes sense that you see a lot of leftie votes for third-parties in 2000 and 2016, after eight years of Democratic administrations. Lefties are more inclined to vote for an establishment Democrat when the GOP is in office. After a long time with a Democratic in office, the left will see his flaws, and be more open to a Nader/Stein type.

For two, not necessarily the most important factor, Hillary had some real strengths but also some real flaws, all of which existed before Bernie tried to leverage them.

Piers Morgan says stupid stuff on the internet that gets attention too. It's a mystery. I believe there is more Republican dissatisfaction with Trump right now than Bernie dissatisfaction with Clinton, but that's not the story the media is telling. There are definitely minorities in Red states who feel disenfranchised, but the rural white Republicans in California are the ones who dissatisfaction makes it to the front page of the New York Times.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Yes. We're discussing this one.

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.

I also added that it gave a corrupt billionaire license to latch on and call someone else corrupt without people laughing in his face. Maybe you'll post that later tomorrow?

TM

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Should have just waited for your response, which is better.

TM

Re: Bernie 2020
 

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.

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. 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?).

Re: Bernie 2020
 

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."

And your attempt at painting everyone who voted for Hillary as a block who would vote for Trump no matter what he said is ridiculous. In the 3 states that ended up being so important, many counties flipped from Obama to Trump. And they were working class folk who were susceptible to the message that Hillary worked for investment banks (among other things).

I disagree. With his core, you're absolutely right. With independents and people who flipped, the issue of Hillary being a bank shill had already been settled during the Dem primary. Trump just hammered away at it.

The email issue had been an issue (illegitimate as it was) way before Trump jumped on it. Come on. This argument is ridiculous. Bernie didn't jump on it because he didn't need to. She was asked about it at the fucking Democratic debate for Christ sakes. You act like Trump was innovating. He's an idiot who seized on what was already working. And one of those things was Bernie's defining Hillary as a Wall Street shill.

TM

Re: Bernie 2020
 

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.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Obviously, you bought some of his attacks.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

I think you're mishearing. Bernie attacked Hillary as a tool of Wall Street and the result was a loss of many on the left who she probably could have counted on voting for her in the general. And because he stayed in the race way too long, the number of those people increased and dragged in independents. Once they all thought he got screwed, she lost tons of votes. A lot of people sat out once he lost, some who voted for Obama flipped for Trump, and a lot of idiots voted for Stein or Johnson.

I don't think Trump running with what Bernie started mattered much after Bernie fucked it up for Hillary with voters who would have voted Dem if he hadn't run during the primary (or stopped way back when he knew he wouldn't win and had achieved his objective of moving her to the left). And yes, she should have been a better candidate and handled his attacks better. But what Bernie did most definitely affected the number of votes she got in key states.

I'll end with that.*

TM

*And yes, I realize I'm horrible at this.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

I hear. I disagree. I don't think Hillary was always going to lose votes on the left (tens of thousands in MI, e.g.) from people who were willing to vote for a leftie in the Democratic primary and a third-party candidate in the general but not for her. Just as Bill Bradley ran against Gore in 2000, and tens of thousands of people then voted for Nader. I don't think Bernie's attacks on her for being a Wall Street stooge materially changed the numbers.

You have a different view. We'll never know who's right.

eta: Let me say something a little different. I had a bit of a problem with Bernie. I have much more of a problem with the lefties in the Democratic Party who have more passion for attacking the center-left than for organizing to win elections from Republicans. And also a problem with the enthusiasm that the Jonathan Chaits of the world show for hippie-bashing. Sometimes the priorities get seriously out of whack. I think contested primaries are good and make the party better, but there also is a point whether disagreement becomes discord and counterproductive.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Nah. I know I'm right. ;-)

TM

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Can't someone just ask Sebastian? Did Thurgreed drive him into retirement again?

James Brown Thursday on the Daily Dose. Hot day here in the upper Midwest, so here is a slow groovy extended version of "Blind Man Can See It."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJzZ6zIJZzo

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Let's vote.

I vote you're right.

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

I have a problem with the damn Berniacs who play lefter-than-thou with me. Screw them. They're a bunch of 1950s labor protectionists that my ole Trotskyte buddies would have said were under the spell of bourgeois nationalism and that my old black power friends would have called a bunch of Miss Ophelias.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Nice if true.

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

True dat. My old Situationist crew would have called them boring anti-revolutionaries, while my friends that ran with the pro-Khmer Rouge set would have sent them all to a collective farm.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Voting is officially closed. Thank you for your participation.

TM

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

The great apes I taught to talk would call them filthy stinking humans, then send them to a zoo.While my physicist professor crush would call them strings that propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string.

http://superstringtheory.com/people/gifs/evas.jpg

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

Who gives a crap about young GGG's wannabe Sandinista fantasies. The real issue is whether Not Bob have been able to snag any slumming Tri-Delts at his land-grant football factory undergrad school by running with your Situationist crew. (I suspect any Tri-Delts would have been liquidated by your Khmer Rouge set, but hey, if any survived, he'd have been happy to be reeducated with the good-haired ones.)

He certainly tried hard with the herstory/womyn set. I swear to God, he's spent today reading countless articles about the 20th anniversary of the Lilith Fair. When he's not weeping while watching the YouTube of that Sarah McLaughlin commercial for the SPCA on repeat, that is.

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

The important thing now is that all of us, Flower's Collectivists, my Trotskytes, Hank's Apes, your Tri-Delts, and each of you, Hank, and Flower, are all part of the Establishment. The Berners disdain us all as filthy globalists, regardless of how good our hair may be.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

I generally vote third party, but I'll make an exception here. I vote TM.

If you can seriously argue that Bernie did not cost Hillary significant Democratic and Independent votes, I have to wonder what history of the race you've been reading.

The whole crux of the Russia argument is that while Putin's scheme to hack voting systems directly may have failed, he nevertheless altered sentiment regarding Hillary with his relentless DNC leaks. Almost all of the resonant leaks were aimed at one issue: Hillary and the DNC screwing over Bernie.

To his credit, Bernie didn't run with that stuff. But he didn't have to. That, plus his relentless attacks on Wall Street and her Goldman speeches (recall his demanding transcripts?) peeled off a ton of otherwise Hillary voters. It also cost her a ton of Bernie voters who otherwise would've grudgingly voted for her when he left the race.

Decades from now, history will write Trump a lucky fool, and Bernie a Hillary killer.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Obviously, you think I slept through the election and simply didn't read all of the other posts in which people have pointed out that Bernie attacked Hillary in various ways, that not all of the lefties who might have voted for Hillary did vote for Hillary, that people voted for third-party candidates, that Trump used lines of attack first exploited by Bernie, and that Trump won very narrowly. Actually, I caught all of that.

The argument I have been making is that if Bernie had not done what he did, nonetheless those lefties wouldn't have voted for Hillary anyway (just like they voted for Nader in 2000), and that Trump would have been just as successful in exploiting the attacks first used by Bernie. I recognize that I am making an argument that rests on unprovable assertions about what would otherwise have happened. So for your part, recognize that I am making an argument about what would otherwise have happened, and don't simply tell me that Bernie cost Hillary a ton of voters. My argument is, he didn't. A significant number of those voters were disaffected with Hillary and the Democratic Party and were not going to vote for her. My cousin, for example, is one. Hillary excited a lot of people, like my daughter, people who wanted to see a woman President, but she also left an awful lot of lefties unenthused, because they felt that she was old news and too incrementalist. Sanders' attacks on her for being close to Wall St resonated because they expressed what people already thought about her, not because they changed minds.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

We know. We all know. We've read it several times. Phrased and rephrased.

We disagree. We don't buy it. You're wrong. You've convinced no one.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

My cousin is a huge Bernie fan who refused to vote for Hillary. She does not particularly identify with the Democratic Party but tends to vote in D primaries. You know there are people out there like her. Jill Stein got 50K+ votes in MI last year, but she got 20K+ votes four years earlier. Why do you think that Bernie's decision to stay in the race and attack Hillary more changed any minds? How do you tell which way cause and effect run? I see Bernie sticking in the race and attacking because Hillary was unpopular on the left, not vice versa. How, objectively, could you convince an undecided observer that you're right.

Or, if you're sick of this one, let's argue about something else.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

I don't think there's any question that there are lefties that would not have voted for Hillary under any circumstances.

But I think it's strange to say that there were no (or so few as to not matter) marginal left-leaning people who were convinced of their dislike of Hillary in part because of Bernie's attacks.

I also think it's strange to think that had Bernie accepted the inevitable after Super Tuesday instead of ramping up his negative attacks that Bernie personally couldn't have brought some of those people back into the fold.

No of us can prove anything, but I think the set of people who (1) were convinced they couldn't vote for Hillary by Bernie personally and (2) could have been convinced to vote for Hillary by Bernie in the general election but for his prior attacks is not particularly close to zero.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

I do think Bernie could have done a lot more to mobilize his supporters for Hillary. That was a lost opportunity that would have made a difference, whether or not he was responsible for turning them off in the first place. That part of the left needs to see that there can be long-term clout in supporting moderates in the short-term.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

I get that. It's just not terribly persuasive. Bernie's refusal to concede for an extended period of time despite the math rendering his nomination impossible forced Hillary to fight him long after she should have turned toward the general.

Bernie held on long, and the more the DNC leaks came out, the more resonance his attacks acquired. The guy was holding one arm behind Hillary's back while Trump was using a very similar attack to pummel the shit out of her. Recall how often Trump invoked Bernie later in the race? Every GOP operative I knew was rooting for Bernie. He was clearly articulating a lot of Trump's populist arguments which Trump, ever incoherent, would often mangle into terrible word salads. Bernie was in many regards Trump's proxy candidate.

He did. It may surprise you to know I've many liberal friends. The older ones like us stuck with Hillary (lesser of two evils). The younger ones were disgusted by a DNC they saw as hobbling their guy, while delivering the nomination to someone they saw as a moderate Republican corporate candidate.

The kids loved Bernie. And the more he fought in what increasingly appeared a very rigged game, the angrier they became. That wasn't something that happened from the start of the campaign, after Bernie's initial pitch. That took time. It was a long process of seeing Bernie stand up to the "establishment" while also watching a drip, drip, drip of leaks about how that establishment was working against the old man.

I disagree. I saw a process taking place. Bernie was relentless. A lot of people were still ready to vote for her because, well... Trump. Bernie enthused so many people, and looked such a martyr in the end, that many chose to stay home, or vote for the third party, or Trump.

As the DNC leaks came out and Bernie kept fighting, I even heard liberal friends say they detested Hillary more than Trump. The logic was, "He's a lying idiot. But that's what he is. And he isn't cheating. He's going up against the GOP, which is trying to tear him down. Hillary is part of a corrupt game in which Bernie isn't being given a fair chance."

Re: Bernie 2020
 

If there were a single Bernie supporter on this board, I would find the explanations about how effective he was more convincing.

Your younger friends are morons.

OK, whatever.

Sure, that makes sense. Or not. I would just point out that the story about how Bernie hurt Hillary keeps changing. By the account of Sebby and his friends, it's the martyrdom of St Bernie and the colossal unfairness of the establishment DNC backing an establishment candidate over someone who isn't a Democrat. Somehow Democrats who were really Democratic got upset that they couldn't vote for a non-Democrat over the Democrat in the Democratic primary, and so they decided not to vote for a Democrat against another non-Democrat. But the Wall St stuff that was so essential to why I was wrong yesterday is not part of the story.

Yes, I have no doubt that people thought and said this. I just see it as the sort of reaction Hillary Clinton has been inspiring among many people for many years, rather than something that Bernie wrought. YMMV.

St Bernie in happier days, before the dogs licked him to death:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...d5e900ae5d.jpg

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Counter-hypothesis: Hillary's campaign totally failed to propose an agenda that excited anyone, and relied on people being horrified by Trump. Faced with choices that did not excite them, many people decided not to vote, and she lost. Bernie's continuing appeal to his supporters reflected Hillary's failure to give them a reason to support her, not anything he said.

If you think that Hillary's problem was a stab in the back from Bernie, then the lesson is that Trump is the fault of the left, and what we need is continued civil war among Democrats. If you think that Hillary's problem was a lack of an agenda that made people want to vote, then what we need is proposals that will make a difference in people's lives, and a focus on getting people to vote.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Good column on North Korea.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Dude. We're the establishment. We're not really Greedy Associates anymore. And they were already filthy globalist would-be establishmentarians.

The moron vote is critical to elections everywhere.

sure.

You do realize that the word "establishment", "Wall Street" and "DNC" are all synonyms in the Bernie thesaurus, don't you? Same story.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Yeah, that was a regular Bernie theme. I'd respond to my Berner relatives, "But I'm excited, I love her." And they'd all look at me and say, Establishment flunky, you don't count. We only care if Bernie supporters are excited by her.

There is only one way to get to the "not excite anyone" message from what I can see, and that is to scrupulously avoid listening to an awful lot of women and not a few minorities. It's the old "she needs to excite white guys..." schtick that so united Bernie.... and Trump.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Speak for yourself, law firm dude. I'm over here disrupting shit.