I posted a rant on Facebook earlier today. I don’t have a lot of Facebook friends and tend to use Twitter much more for social media. I have well over 5,000 Twitter followers but the disadvantage of Twitter is that you cannot post long form thoughts like this on that platform, though for most things it remains far more useful than Facebook for me. That is why I Tweet probably twenty times as much as I post on Facebook.
For Democrats in denial a few things.
1- Not all Trump voters are racists. In fact most probably aren’t. They vote their fears which are mostly economic. We didn’t speak to them effectively enough instead choosing to play identity politics and scream in our liberal echo chambers. In fact, some of the white voters some of you LOVE TO DEMONIZE in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan who swung those states backed Barack Obama in 2008 and many stuck with him in 2012.
(not on Facebook but I will add it here – Some probably even voted for Bernie Sanders in the Primary and I have spoken to three different Floridians outside politics since the election who told me they voted Trump or Johnson but would have voted Sanders if he had been nominated. It’s easy to say after-the-fact but I believe some truth exists in that. Hillary Clinton’s track record and the perception of her as a politician that only cared about herself stuck with many.)
2- If these voters were racists why were they more motivated to defeat Hillary Clinton than President Obama? They weren’t. It’s lazy analysis from Democratic insiders trying to spread fear in our ranks to maintain some sort of control over the party and YOU the people on the grassroots level that make up this party and support our candidates. Cause driven people are problems so let’s demonize the other side, have the media which relies on Democratic insiders for info spew these lies and maintain control.
3- The idea that Trump is somehow illegitimate because he lost the popular vote is madness. He didn’t steal a state election like George W. Bush did to get his electoral college majority. He won the places that matter in our system fair and square. What he and the RNC did is sweep the large states where both campaigns competed heavily which indicates to me if the election were a national referendum, where state boundaries did not matter, he would have likely out organized the HRC DNC folks and won the popular vote. But that’s not how we select President’s in this country so under the rules he not only won but basically crushed us in the states that matter.
(not on Facebook but I will add it here – I support the electoral college as a way of preventing candidates from just flocking to large coastal cities or deep red areas to seek votes. I like the balance it brings. Should it be reformed into some other metric or unit rather than winner-take-all from 48 of the 50 states? Maybe, but the idea it should be eliminated is something I am likely to NEVER support.)
4- It’s worth noting the number of places in the state’s that mattered Tuesday where Hillary Clinton ran worse than Michael Dukakis or John Kerry who have been tarred by many in our party with labels such as “losers” and “terrible candidates.” That includes many places here in Florida.
5- We can take comfort in the growing advantage Democrats have in big cities. We cannot take comfort in that suburbs which favored Dems heavily from 1992 to 2012 in Presidential campaigns are beginning to shift again towards the GOP. Maybe Trump is a one-off and an establishment Republican would have fallen flat in the burbs the way Romney and McCain did? Who knows, but this is a worrying potential start of a trend.
The Florida Squeeze 
87,000 Michigan voters left the top of the ticket BLANK. the spread in Michigan is hovering around 11,000.
these voters showed up to vote downticket, and skipped the presidential race.
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Actually, I am planning on collecting data on this in Florida and doing an analysis in the next few days. I had a feeling this would happen.
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was that not also the case here in 2014 in the Governor’s race — people chose neither Crist nor Rick Scott.
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I don’t know. I would have to collect the data. Today is my “data collection day”.
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MI’still ground game was poorly executed. I had interviews on 3 seperate occasions, over the summer, 2 for organizers and once to be a tracker. Each time the called and said the campaign decided it wasn’t building out. I told them it was a mistake to ignore MI…I could hear the talk in the grocery stores, bars and restaurants…seems the same occurred in OH and Wisconsin…now look where we are!
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The arrogance of the Clinton team and the Democrats towards the industrial and agricultural midwest was startling in this campaign.
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By the way, Florida’s under voter were at 160.601. 251% higher than 2012.
https://electionsflorida.com/2016/11/11/floridas-presidential-under-votes-251-higher-than-2012-would-it-have-helped-clinton/
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Let’s go ahead and acknowledge something else: Hillary was unelectable. Sanders was just one candidate who would likely have crushed Trump (as I recall he typically polled 10 points higher than Trump to Hillary’s 3-4 pint advantage) Trump got fewer votes than McCain or Romney.
It was Hillary voters could not stomach, and her image as an entrenched, entitled, self-interested insider who spent years enriching herself peddling influence, not her gender, that destroyed her.
And it was the Democratic leadership, as much as the Trump campaign, that played identity politics — a game they mistakenly thought they could win. Hillary’s people simply miscalculated in thinking she would inherit Obama’s coalition and that Trump’s personal repulsiveness would be the determining factor.
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See, this is what upsets me…this trend isn’t new and we should have seen in coming. Case study? West Virginia. People forget that this socially conservative state voted for Michael Dukakis. We let West Virginia slip, and haven’t realized why. We should have been observing that trend.
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The bottom line is that we Democrats don’t talk lunch bucket. We need to learn. Flint Michigan still has poisoned water and how long has Congress set on the issue. We Democrats should have marched on Washington over that issue alone. We let the Republicans block everything without a whimper. Our elected Democrats, like the elected Republicans are only concerned about financing the next race. The money for the campaigns this year could have paid to clean the water in Flint. I am hopeful that the newly elected Democrats go to Congress and do something.
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Yep we tend to organize around personalities and not issues. This is a legacy of the Clintonian stamp on our party since 1992 IMO. And yes it needs to stop. You are spot on with this analysis of Flint.
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I want our party to win the working class, and in fact, they are reporting that Hillary won with voters making under $50,000, and Trump won with voters making over $50,000. As far as the point go,
1. Nobody said all Trump voters were racist. Some African American commentators say Trump voters were comfortable enough with racism to vote the way they did. And some Trump voters were proudly racist.
2. Yes, right, except the tone. Isn’t the author also part of the grassroots?
3. We don’t really know yet if he won fair and square, but the point is, modern democracies elect their leaders directly. The electoral college is an offensive anachronism that works against us now. I totally disagree with the idea that no one would campaign for votes across the country if they could raise money on the coasts. Bernie raised tons of money from small donors everywhere. I find that almost all “states rights” arguments give more power to rural right-wing america than their numbers deserve. The two senators per state, for example, gives people in rural states way more clout than people in states with big populations. Also, the number of votes each state is awarded in the electoral college is way way off, in that same direction.
Trump is illegitimate, not necessarily because he stole the election, but because it is just deeply wrong to elect a racist sexist homophobic xenophobic sexual predator to the White House.
4.Yes, Hillary ran very poorly in a lot of important places, and nobody was talking about it. The polling and reporting I saw was (apparently) amazingly wrong and misleading. We all should expect the Hillary campaign to have accurate data and respond to it constructively.
5. This low-turnout election between two deeply flawed candidates doesn’t teach us as much as we’d like about the future. We are in the wilderness, and that is a creative place to be. It requires self-reliance and adherence to our core Democratic values.
6. None of this will matter if we don’t slow global warming. Trump’s election may have ended all hope of controlling climate change or preserving even the current levels of polluted water and air.
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Have you seen all the acts of racism around this country today, High school students walking around carrying Trump signs chanting white power, students chanting build the wall at hispanic students, and writing on wall that black lives do not matter. This is the wound Trump has opened up and made fashionable.
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To me, THIS is the news! These racist attacks should be the TOP story on EVERY news channel! I don’t care right now about “transition”, I don’t care about the race for DNC chair. What Trump did to society should be the news we are covering. However, it seems like many whites in the media are afraid to talk about the racial tension that is in the country. I don’t know if they are in their elitist bubbles, but they are certainly out of touch.
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