@killerrabbit@semiticgod As far as I can tell, what Hillary did was a lot of little misdeeds, none of which amount to "rigging the election", though they may be significant in the aggregate.
In fact, that is probably true for most of her wrongdoing.
Bernie Sanders was not the people's choice. He lost, decisively and absolutely, to Hillary Clinton. He lost in every way you can measure losing - not just in delegates, but also in the numbers of people who voted. The only reason he was competitive at all was because of caucus states, which are decided by undemocratic tiny slices of population even by primary standards.
Nothing at all about the DNC's bias for Clinton (and if people seriously think party insiders are not going to favor one of their own over someone who only joined the party to win the leadership, they might as well advocate for the abolition of parties altogether) changes this. He would have lost no matter how scrupulously neutral they were. He was never close to winning. Hillary Clinton came a lot closer to beating Barack Obama in 2008, and everyone was giving her grief for not conceding early then.
If the "people's choice" isn't the one that got the most votes or the most delegates (by a wide margin), then the term has no meaning. As for who the polls said would beat Trump a year ago, the polls said Hillary Clinton was going to beat him right up until the election. Sanders himself had the good sense to dismiss this talk when it was brought up to him in an interview - it would behoove his fans to follow his example.
It is both impossible to know, and meaningless to speculate for reasons other than theorycrafting, what the outcome of a Bernie Sanders candidacy would have been. Not least of which because Bernie Sanders winning the nomination would have required a significantly different Democratic constituency.
(This isn't limited to Bernie fans, of course. Some Democrats are bitching about Johnson/Stein this time, and even more did about Ralph Nader in 2000. Pointless then, pointless now. Democrats should be focusing on trying to win the next war, and not wasting time trying to refight the last one.)
Bernie Sanders was not the people's choice. He lost, decisively and absolutely, to Hillary Clinton. He lost in every way you can measure losing - not just in delegates, but also in the numbers of people who voted. The only reason he was competitive at all was because of caucus states, which are decided by undemocratic tiny slices of population even by primary standards.
Nothing at all about the DNC's bias for Clinton (and if people seriously think party insiders are not going to favor one of their own over someone who only joined the party to win the leadership, they might as well advocate for the abolition of parties altogether) changes this. He would have lost no matter how scrupulously neutral they were. He was never close to winning. Hillary Clinton came a lot closer to beating Barack Obama in 2008, and everyone was giving her grief for not conceding early then.
If the "people's choice" isn't the one that got the most votes or the most delegates (by a wide margin), then the term has no meaning. As for who the polls said would beat Trump a year ago, the polls said Hillary Clinton was going to beat him right up until the election. Sanders himself had the good sense to dismiss this talk when it was brought up to him in an interview - it would behoove his fans to follow his example.
It is both impossible to know, and meaningless to speculate for reasons other than theorycrafting, what the outcome of a Bernie Sanders candidacy would have been. Not least of which because Bernie Sanders winning the nomination would have required a significantly different Democratic constituency.
(This isn't limited to Bernie fans, of course. Some Democrats are bitching about Johnson/Stein this time, and even more did about Ralph Nader in 2000. Pointless then, pointless now. Democrats should be focusing on trying to win the next war, and not wasting time trying to refight the last one.)
I agree with almost all of this. In regards to the polls, the NATIONAL aggregates are going to end up being right on the money. She is going to win the popular vote by 2%, which is where the polls were. Florida and Ohio were a 50/50 toss-up the entire time. Where things don't make any sense is in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and especially Wisconsin. Either there were severe polling errors in those 3 states specifically, or something else was going on. It's no coincidence that these are the 3 states being looked at for a recount (for all the good it will do, which is likely none). These places are where the numbers didn't turn out like they should have. As it happens, Michigan and Wisconsin have become even more razor-thin as the days have gone by. I will reiterate that I don't think this is even going to happen or do a lick of good, but there is more than enough reason to at least be somewhat suspicious of what happened in these states.
WI: Clinton down 22,177 PA: Clinton down 70,638 MI: Clinton down 10,704
Or, to paraphrase: 100,000 votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan supersedes (by 20x) the 2 million vote (and climbing) national total. This system is utterly and completely ridiculous. It always has been, but the shear magnitude of the actual Clinton lead juxtaposed to Trump taking the office is just really hard to swallow. The rest of the world has to be looking at the American electoral system and thinking we're utter fools.
Bernie Sanders was not the people's choice. He lost, decisively and absolutely, to Hillary Clinton. Etc
Nothing at all about the DNC's bias for Clinton changes this. Party insiders are going to favor one of their own.
The "people's choice" (Clinton) got the most delegates. You might as well get rid of parties if you don't like this. Polls said Sanders would beat Trump a year ago and polls said Hillary Clinton was going to beat him up until the election.
It is both impossible to know what the outcome of a Bernie Sanders candidacy would have been.
Some good points here I'd like to continue discussing. First of all yes a Bernie Sanders candidacy didn't happen so it's impossible to know what would have happened. Looking back at the process though can be useful to learn from what happened in the general election and on the Republican side.
Its clear that Hillary was the presumptive nominee as described above. Super delegates, party leadership bias, donor bias and other things led to Clinton being the presumptive nominee. Basically the Democrats put her forward because it was her turn this year. Bernie Sanders had momentum but the deck was stacked against him and that was too much to overcome.
What the DNC needs to take out of this is to open things up more. This year in particular the general public (including Democrats) were open to a candidate who was more grassroots. People were fed up with the status quo. People especially in the rust belt states apparently really wanted change and Hillary Clintons establishment campaign did not play to them. They wanted an outsider. Like Trump.
Let's compare what the Democrats did against how the Republican primaries went. The Republicans fielded a bunch of novelty candidates that no party leadership seriously expected to win along with their usual party favorites. They certainly had their preferred candidates but let their primaries play out a lot more fairly - no super delegates for example. Republican leaders railed against and undermined Trump just like the Democratic establishment did to Bernie Sanders. Did Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan want Trump? He'll no they didn't but they were able to contain their disdain and let their populist candidate go forward.
I think it was 26% (albeit with the usual lacklustre voter turnout). I believe there is much to be said for a) compulsory voting (with a clear "none of the above" option on the ballot paper) and b) proportional representation (although I'm not sure that a succession of coalition governments would be a good thing).
Bernie Sanders was not the people's choice. He lost, decisively and absolutely, to Hillary Clinton. He lost in every way you can measure losing - not just in delegates, but also in the numbers of people who voted.
. . .
It is both impossible to know, and meaningless to speculate for reasons other than theorycrafting, what the outcome of a Bernie Sanders candidacy would have been. Not least of which because Bernie Sanders winning the nomination would have required a significantly different Democratic constituency. . . .
Democrats should be focusing on trying to win the next war, and not wasting time trying to refight the last one.)
When charname goes down you reload and change tactics. Changing tactics requires an analysis of what went wrong in the last fight. That's why this discussion is worth more than theorybuilding.
Now we can focus on the unchangable: we would have won if it was one dragon instead of two / would have won if the electoral college didn't exist. Or we focus on the changeable: we would have won if we enlisted their help of the mercenaries against the red wizards / would have won if Democratic leaning independents had be able to chose a candidate they would support in the general.
Poll after poll said that Sanders did much better with independents -- as @smeagolheart says this was an outsider election -- and the primary rules in CA and NY were stacked against independents. NY being the worst.
Take a look the independent support in MI -- a state Sanders won in the primary:
Yes, we can never know if a counterfactual is true but the polls in the primaries predicted this outcome pretty well. Polls show Sanders beating Trump by more than 10 points and Clinton is in the margin of error.
The polls say that Sanders was the more popular candidate -- he only lost in the south and in states that had highly restrictive voting rules. (And, again, the EC is real Clinton never had a chance of taking AL or MS in the general. None.) Democrats correctly say that voting should be easy -- why did they make it so very difficult to vote in NY and CA? My answer: hypocrisy. Easy voting in the general favors Democrats, easy voting in the primaries works in favor of party insiders. Time to change that.
Also, in the same article above, take a look at the growing number of people who decline to identify with any party -- independents are now the largest voting block in the U.S. Preserving a system that favors party insiders over independent challengers is a recipe for failure.
And again, she lost to Trump. To Trump! That's like being crited by Biff the Understudy.
We have seen this same battle in the UK -- Tony Blair, a Clinton like politician, can no longer show his face in public without being booed. The party insiders used every trick in the book to keep the left candidate from leading the Labour party -- including making it difficult for newly registered members to vote -- but were defeated by the rank and file. We need to do the same.
Eliminate the superdelegates. Open the primaries. Reform the DNC. Send the Clinton Democrats packing.
@killerrabbit: Thank you! It's very important that we stay focused on specifics, and I appreciate the help.
Argument in spoilers because it's so long. [spoiler] 1. This doesn't seem like the DNC fabricating a story. This is Ralston expressing an opinion and the DNC saying to post it without attribution--that is, without saying it's Ralston's opinion. That's not announcing a hit job; it's saying Ralston's name shouldn't be attached to it. Whether the allegations are true is a different story, which is not addressed in the line "Let's get this around without attribution"
2. This seems legit. The DNC gave the Clinton campaign early access to a debate question, which would have given her a slight advantage during the debate.
3. I think you posted the wrong link. The link you gave (https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/5423) doesn't relate to the claim that "They pitched stories to reporters about how to portray Sanders in way that would do the most damage." It was Sanders' and Reid's comments on the Nevada convention.
4. The first one, 7713, doesn't say DNC leaders were manipulating headlines to hurt Sanders. It says they wanted to argue about a headline on the grounds that it falsely painted the DNC in a bad light, not that they wanted the headline changed to paint Sanders in a bad light.
It does contain a non-specific reference to pro-Sanders delegates being disqualified for administrative reasons. Hillary didn't win because of superdelegates in the end, but if minor administrative rules were twisted to benefit Hillary at Sanders' expense, that would be an example of corruption. But this email doesn't describe them; we'd need another source.
The second one, 2699, doesn't seem related to anything. Most of the text in that email is formatting. The remainder is "Great - we were never going to list since the lawyers told us we cannot do it. We are waiting Jordan Kaplan National Finance Director Democratic National Committee Rangappa, Anu wrote: 'They aren’t going to give us a price per ticket and do not want their party to be listed in any package we are selling to donors. If we let them know we have donors in town who will be at the debate, we can add them to the list for the party.'" I don't know what this email is supposed to prove. I think you have the wrong link again.
5. Wasserman Schultz didn't behave as she should, no. She didn't break any rules, exactly, and I don't know of anything she did to rig the election, and her preferences were expressed privately rather than publicly, but her position should have involved more neutrality.
6. This isn't an example of punishing women for supporting Sanders. It's Hillary supporters harshly disagreeing with Sanders supporters. This article doesn't even mention anything the DNC did.
7. Seems accurate. That's $60 million extra for Clinton because of that process.
8. True. It is worth pointing out that Hillary's victory did not in the end rely upon superdelegates; Hillary still won the overall vote in the primaries.
9. Shadowproof doesn't much specify unfair actions; it just complains about pro-Hillary people not being pro-Sanders. This is the only paragraph about unfair actions: "there are several examples of how the Democratic presidential primary is and has been rigged: [1] hundreds of superdelegates pledged their allegiance to Clinton before votes were cast in Iowa, [2] a limited number of debates were scheduled to ensure voters had the least amount of exposure to Clinton opponents, [3] the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign falsely accused the Sanders campaign of “stealing” voter file data, [4] the Hillary Victory Fund has funneled millions of dollars through state parties to the DNC, and [5] Democratic women supporting Sanders have faced forms of retaliation." [1] Pre-pledged superdelegates were unfair but turned out to be irrelevant in the end, as I mentioned above. [2] I don't know why a lower number of debates is good for Clinton or bad for Sanders. As long as both were permitted to participate, it was even. You can say Clinton had better name recognition, but that advantage long predates the primaries. Clinton gathered that without the aid of a rigged primary. [3] Shadowproof doesn't elaborate, but I think I remember this. I recall that Sanders apologized on the behalf of his supporters, even though it wasn't his fault (and it wasn't that scandalous to begin with). Very gracious move on Sanders' part. [4] Covered above, in number 7. [5] Covered above, in number 6.
Remembering that the DNC emails only cover a few months -- we don't have the full story.
The primaries only lasted a few months, so a duration of a few months would cover the whole story. And intuitively, if you were going to leak bad information about somebody, you would either leak all of it, or just focus on the most damning evidence--you wouldn't just leak the most innocent parts. We can't just assume there's more dirt; we need proof of any extra claims.
And again, she lost to Trump. To Trump! That's like being crited by Biff the Understudy.
This. Lol.
My belief, contrary to what the media is trying to portray, is not that Trump won because he appealed to white alpha males and women who like white alpha males.
Trump won only because his opponent was Hillary Clinton.
Some good points here I'd like to continue discussing. First of all yes a Bernie Sanders candidacy didn't happen so it's impossible to know what would have happened. Looking back at the process though can be useful to learn from what happened in the general election and on the Republican side.
Its clear that Hillary was the presumptive nominee as described above. Super delegates, party leadership bias, donor bias and other things led to Clinton being the presumptive nominee. Basically the Democrats put her forward because it was her turn this year. Bernie Sanders had momentum but the deck was stacked against him and that was too much to overcome.
Balogna. It was Hillary Clinton's "turn" in 2008. What happened then? Oh yes, she lost - despite the fact the establishment was on her side then, too. She learned her lessons, secured more support, ran a stronger campaign, and easily handled the (still stronger than expected) challenge from Bernie Sanders.
Beating Clinton wasn't impossible. Beating the establishment favourite wasn't impossible. Bernie Sanders did neither. But then, he had such huge strikes against him it was actually impressive he did as well as he did, and accordingly he has far more influence in the party going into the convention and forward after the election than he would have otherwise.
Yet people can't be happy with "He had a great run, and because of it he's in a position to influence the party". They have to make things into a conspiracy and talk about how Democratic party insiders shot themselves in the foot. If they did, so did Democratic party MEMBERS, who very decisively indicated their preference for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. He was not their choice. He was never close to being their choice. You can argue the theoreticals of a Sanders candidacy, but you cannot argue with math, and math says Hillary Clinton was a lot more popular with the Democratic base. They chose her too.
What the DNC needs to take out of this is to open things up more. This year in particular the general public (including Democrats) were open to a candidate who was more grassroots. People were fed up with the status quo. People especially in the rust belt states apparently really wanted change and Hillary Clintons establishment campaign did not play to them. They wanted an outsider. Like Trump.
538 made an excellent point: If 1 out of 100 people switched their votes from Trump to Clinton, then she wins a decisive victory in the Electoral College (bigger than his in reality), the polls call every state but one properly, and absolutely nobody is having these sorts of discussions, despite the fact the weakness of the Democratic hold on those states would still be a reality. Nobody would be arguing this was a "change" election, and instead would be smugly asserting that Republicans were punished for nominating someone so outside the norm.
The narratives people derive - because people love narratives - are based on very, very little. Clinton narrowly lost states that she was "supposed" to narrowly win. That's meaningful, but it's meaningful only in regards to a tiny slice of the population.
Let's compare what the Democrats did against how the Republican primaries went. The Republicans fielded a bunch of novelty candidates that no party leadership seriously expected to win along with their usual party favorites. They certainly had their preferred candidates but let their primaries play out a lot more fairly - no super delegates for example. Republican leaders railed against and undermined Trump just like the Democratic establishment did to Bernie Sanders. Did Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan want Trump? He'll no they didn't but they were able to contain their disdain and let their populist candidate go forward.
Really, with all due respect, is that a good thing? That the Republican party was subjected to a hostile takeover by a reality TV star who shares few of their values and it turns out that the party was helpless to stop it?
As for superdelegates - I wish people arguing about them would acknowledge that Sanders lost outright before the convention, even if every superdelegate had voted for him. I also wish media had acknowledged during the primaries that superdelegates can and do change their votes (this was, in fact, Sanders' strategy) and could not thus be fairly counted as "Hillary votes". Lots of them were "Hillary votes" in 2008 and ended up voting for Obama.
Beyond that, though, why precisely is it a bad thing that the party can put their thumb on the scale to help ensure a candidate that they feel represents them is nominated? A primary is not an election. It is a nomination of a candidate for the election. Why is it somehow better that the Republican primary system has less protections to prevent an unrepresentative candidate who does not share the party's beliefs and values from being nominated?
And why, if Bernie Sanders voters are so concerned about the undemocratic aspects of the primary system, do they never seem to find any outrage to spare for caucuses, which are also undemocratic and distorting to the process? Is it because, as a voting mechanism that privileges motivated partisans over rank and file members, they were won disproportionately by Sanders (and without which he would have been mathematically eliminated much earlier than he was)? In which case, isn't the only really "fair" system the one where "my preferred choice wins"?
When charname goes down you reload and change tactics. Changing tactics requires an analysis of what went wrong in the last fight. That's why this discussion is worth more than theorybuilding.
Now we can focus on the unchangable: we would have won if it was one dragon instead of two / would have won if the electoral college didn't exist. Or we focus on the changeable: we would have won if we enlisted their help of the mercenaries against the red wizards / would have won if Democratic leaning independents had be able to chose a candidate they would support in the general.
Poll after poll said that Sanders did much better with independents -- as @smeagolheart says this was an outsider election -- and the primary rules in CA and NY were stacked against independents. NY being the worst.
Take a look the independent support in MI -- a state Sanders won in the primary:
I guess you missed all the times they also made the point that Sanders did catastrophically badly compared to Clinton with minorities. This in fact is one of the primary reasons she won the nomination instead of him.
So, I guess, as long as we're speculating, we could also speculate what happens to a Democratic candidate in the election who does much worse than Hillary Clinton did among minorities.
(The answer is: they lose. They lose way worse than Clinton did, in fact.)
Yes, we can never know if a counterfactual is true but the polls in the primaries predicted this outcome pretty well. Polls show Sanders beating Trump by more than 10 points and Clinton is in the margin of error.
Since you read 538, I shouldn't need to lecture you on a) polls taken in the primaries about the general election doesn't historically indicate much of anything ("Hi, President Giuliani!"), and b) the dangers of cherry-picking a single poll whose results you like.
The polls say that Sanders was the more popular candidate -- he only lost in the south and in states that had highly restrictive voting rules.
Since you read 538, I shouldn't need to lecture you that Sanders benefitted from states that had the most highly restrictive voting rules, nor should I need to lecture you about the terrible optics of saying "southern states don't count", when the major reason Clinton won them so easily is that the Democratic vote there is predominantly minority voters. "Black votes don't matter - they voted overwhelmingly for Hillary."
You also declined to mention that Clinton won most of the states with higher population.
(And, again, the EC is real Clinton never had a chance of taking AL or MS in the general. None.)
But she did have a chance to take Arizona, and she only lost Texas by single digits. She even had a chance in Utah, albeit for unusual reasons.
Besides, the primary system by design gives a voice to the party members in states the party doesn't generally win in the presidential election. That is true for both parties.
Democrats correctly say that voting should be easy -- why did they make it so very difficult to vote in NY and CA? My answer: hypocrisy. Easy voting in the general favors Democrats, easy voting in the primaries works in favor of party insiders. Time to change that.
So you want to get rid of all those caucuses, right? The ones that made it look like Bernie Sanders had a chance even though massively more actual people were voting for Hillary Clinton? You acknowledge that without undemocratic caucus states, it would be clear that he was thoroughly rejected by the party membership?
Also, in the same article above, take a look at the growing number of people who decline to identify with any party -- independents are now the largest voting block in the U.S. Preserving a system that favors party insiders over independent challengers is a recipe for failure.
Such a recipe for failure that Democrats won the last two elections, and won the popular vote in four of the last five.
And again, she lost to Trump. To Trump! That's like being crited by Biff the Understudy.
Trump beat 15 people in the primaries and then won the US election. He actually delivered on his promise, which his own party scoffed at, to deliver more of the working class white vote in places Republicans had not traditionally won. Aside from winning the election, he also trounced Mitt Romney in a large amount of counties.
Are you still underestimating him?
I think the single biggest factor that can lead Democrats to defeat two and four years from now will be to continue thinking that beating Donald Trump in elections will be easy.
We have seen this same battle in the UK -- Tony Blair, a Clinton like politician, can no longer show his face in public without being booed.
Bill Clinton, an even more Clinton-like politician, can in fact show his face in public without being booed. He also left office with a huge approval rating.
Blair's problems have more to do with Iraq than with his Clinton-esque triangulating and centrism.
The party insiders used every trick in the book to keep the left candidate from leading the Labour party -- including making it difficult for newly registered members to vote -- but were defeated by the rank and file. We need to do the same.
TBH, I like Jeremy Corbyn well enough, but his polls and electoral success thus far do not suggest that emulating British Labour is an path to winning.
(Not least of which because, just like Labour, your proposed hostile takeover of the Democratic Party would end up with a civil war going on between the party rank and file and the partisan insurgents. Fear & Loathing '72 is, once again, highly worth reading.)
I think it was 26% (albeit with the usual lacklustre voter turnout). I believe there is much to be said for a) compulsory voting (with a clear "none of the above" option on the ballot paper) and b) proportional representation (although I'm not sure that a succession of coalition governments would be a good thing).
As I'm currently living in a country with compulsory voting (Australia), my observations about it are this:
1) It does not make the electorate any better-informed.
2) It replaces "get out the vote" efforts with "hang around the polls with signs and cards to get people to vote for your party" efforts. And yes, statistically, this does actually work - some people just end up voting for the first party that gives them a "vote for us like this!" card.
3) When your wife has multiple sclerosis and forgets shit all the time, it's really irksome to suddenly get a fine in the mail because she forgot about the state election.
So I'm not a fan, overall (I'm also iffy about the government forcing people to vote, ethically). Proportional rep is more arguable, but I had a couple of long posts already so I'll keep this one short.
I think it was 26% (albeit with the usual lacklustre voter turnout). I believe there is much to be said for a) compulsory voting (with a clear "none of the above" option on the ballot paper) and b) proportional representation (although I'm not sure that a succession of coalition governments would be a good thing).
As I'm currently living in a country with compulsory voting (Australia), my observations about it are this:
1) It does not make the electorate any better-informed.
2) It replaces "get out the vote" efforts with "hang around the polls with signs and cards to get people to vote for your party" efforts. And yes, statistically, this does actually work - some people just end up voting for the first party that gives them a "vote for us like this!" card.
3) When your wife has multiple sclerosis and forgets shit all the time, it's really irksome to suddenly get a fine in the mail because she forgot about the state election.
So I'm not a fan, overall (I'm also iffy about the government forcing people to vote, ethically). Proportional rep is more arguable, but I had a couple of long posts already so I'll keep this one short.
2 is actually illegal in Canada, and I think in the states as well.
Fidel Castro died. Maybe now we can finish normalizing relations with Cuba--one of the things Mr. Obama did which I supported completely--and they can get back on track to where they were in the 1950s before the revolution hit. Yes, things were terrible under Batista--he worked with the Mafia (having been mostly driven out of the United States) and wealthy landowners to enrich himself and his friends--before Castro but life under Castro's regime was no picnic, either.
edit/update: Ignore me--I didn't see the other thread on this topic.
@Ayiekie you seem to be a staunch hillary supporter. I and many others would have preferred Sanders. There's a big faction of progressive democrats who are fed up with the perception of the party being for the donors and not the working class anymore. I hope we both factions in the democratic party can unite and work more for main street than wall street. At the end of the day though I agree with this guy as I wrote on previous page except I didn't actively dislike Clinton as much as he did.
“I didn’t like Clinton at all, but her positions are much better than Trump’s on every issue I can think of,” said Economist Noam Chomsky.
“Every Republican candidate is either a climate change denier or a skeptic who says we can’t do it,” Noam Chomsky said. “What they are saying is, ‘Let’s destroy the world.’ Is that worth voting against? Yeah.”
I think she would have be a fine status quo leader. The red house and Senate would not do a damn thing for her but at least gridlock is preferable to Donny Tinyhands and his Cabinet of Deplorables.
I think it was 26% (albeit with the usual lacklustre voter turnout). I believe there is much to be said for a) compulsory voting (with a clear "none of the above" option on the ballot paper) and b) proportional representation (although I'm not sure that a succession of coalition governments would be a good thing).
Well, there is this thing called the House of Lords, that has become even less democratic than it was when it was hereditary. You could elect that House by PR, whilst retaining he Commons for local representatives. Although I would also change the Commons to Single Transferable Vote, since it is better to have the most broadly acceptable person as a local representative than someone who might be popular with one group but hostile to another.
But yes, "None of the Above" would solve a lot of problems worldwide (on the grounds that if all the candidates are rejected the election is rerun with completely new candidates).
It seems everyone is forgetting how much both candidates were so universally despised this election. I remember people talking about the "lesser of two evils" in previous elections, and tactics have been similar between two candidates, but none that I can remember has been this emotionally charged with absolute detestation, both for and against Hillary and Trump. I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say that most people voting for their candidate was actually voting against the other candidate. Bernie may have been a socialist and distasteful to the Democratic Party, but he is not as universally hated as Hillary Clinton. Even democrats hate her. I know a lot of democrats that voted for Trump because Hillary was their candidate. (I also know some republicans that voted for Hillary because Trump was their candidate.) I have absolutely no doubt that if Bernie had run against Trump he would have won. He would have got all or most of the "hatred votes" that Hillary could never have gotten. I do not believe the "Jew Card" and "Socialist Card" would have been even close in equivalence to Hillary's perceived repeated abysmal failures and horrible track record.
As I'm currently living in a country with compulsory voting (Australia), my observations about it are this:
1) It does not make the electorate any better-informed.
2) It replaces "get out the vote" efforts with "hang around the polls with signs and cards to get people to vote for your party" efforts. And yes, statistically, this does actually work - some people just end up voting for the first party that gives them a "vote for us like this!" card.
3) When your wife has multiple sclerosis and forgets shit all the time, it's really irksome to suddenly get a fine in the mail because she forgot about the state election.
So I'm not a fan, overall (I'm also iffy about the government forcing people to vote, ethically). Proportional rep is more arguable, but I had a couple of long posts already so I'll keep this one short.
I am in Australia also, and I don't mind compulsory voting so much if the thing was faster. The problem with compulsory voting is that if you are not interested in politics, having to waste an afternoon going to the booth, waiting in line and then voting, irks. That means people who are disinterested are completely apathetic by the time they get to vote, and therefore just vote whichever comes first. Being first on the ballot paper is a very big advantage, as some minor party found out (albeit part of the problem was also they had a name VERY similar to another larger party) a couple of federal elections ago.
Point 2 should be illegal, or at least the police needs to act more than they have been doing. Voter intimidation is a very real thing at the voting booths, particularly when the SJWs and the unions are there in force. Either empower the police to throw those pukes in jail for a few days or ban the so-called volunteers altogether.
I hate the preferrence thing, though. I hate it because it is completely undemocratic. Democracy is "1 man, 1 vote", not "1 man, as many votes as you want until one of the guys you are voting for is top 2". It is complete bullhokey.
As for the Hillary/Trump thing, the only reason why I applauded the Trump win was to see the likes of Lene Dunham, Robert de Niro, Lady Gaga and all the various hate-filled whacko celebrities get their panties in a knot and their heads explode. Other than that, what do I care? I am not American and I don't get a vote. All the bloody morons rioting in Melbourne and Sydney over the Trump win... The Australian education system has a lot to answer for.
As I'm currently living in a country with compulsory voting (Australia), my observations about it are this:
1) It does not make the electorate any better-informed.
2) It replaces "get out the vote" efforts with "hang around the polls with signs and cards to get people to vote for your party" efforts. And yes, statistically, this does actually work - some people just end up voting for the first party that gives them a "vote for us like this!" card.
3) When your wife has multiple sclerosis and forgets shit all the time, it's really irksome to suddenly get a fine in the mail because she forgot about the state election.
So I'm not a fan, overall (I'm also iffy about the government forcing people to vote, ethically). Proportional rep is more arguable, but I had a couple of long posts already so I'll keep this one short.
I am in Australia also, and I don't mind compulsory voting so much if the thing was faster. The problem with compulsory voting is that if you are not interested in politics, having to waste an afternoon going to the booth, waiting in line and then voting, irks. That means people who are disinterested are completely apathetic by the time they get to vote, and therefore just vote whichever comes first. Being first on the ballot paper is a very big advantage, as some minor party found out (albeit part of the problem was also they had a name VERY similar to another larger party) a couple of federal elections ago.
Point 2 should be illegal, or at least the police needs to act more than they have been doing. Voter intimidation is a very real thing at the voting booths, particularly when the SJWs and the unions are there in force. Either empower the police to throw those pukes in jail for a few days or ban the so-called volunteers altogether.
I hate the preferrence thing, though. I hate it because it is completely undemocratic. Democracy is "1 man, 1 vote", not "1 man, as many votes as you want until one of the guys you are voting for is top 2". It is complete bullhokey.
As for the Hillary/Trump thing, the only reason why I applauded the Trump win was to see the likes of Lene Dunham, Robert de Niro, Lady Gaga and all the various hate-filled whacko celebrities get their panties in a knot and their heads explode. Other than that, what do I care? I am not American and I don't get a vote. All the bloody morons rioting in Melbourne and Sydney over the Trump win... The Australian education system has a lot to answer for.
Huh. It seems the general major consensus among non-European foreigners is yay for a trump win.
Nah. I have no problems with Americans. It is the celebrities that I can't stand, and they can come in any nationality (I dislike the lying hypocritical Cate Blanchett intensely, for example). They act as if they know everything, when in truth, they are paid to pretend to be someone else, even the singers. Basically, they are nothing but professional liars.
Somehow, in their minds, lies became reality and they think they are supermen saving the world. Some sort of Professor X crossed with Batman and Wolverine. And man, do they get nasty when reality mugs them hard. Not that they are all that nice people to begin with, but after the Trump win, if they were part of the silent majority, they'd be arrested for a variety of criminal behaviour and thrown into the loony bin for life without parole.
If those yuppers were on Trump's side, I'd be hoping for a Clinton win.
On the other hand, it is possible that a celebrity that has a staff and free time to research issues and to actually go to the places might know a bit more about issues than some random person on the internet.
I know a guy who hoped Ben Carson would become the GOP nominee because he felt that it would confuse and frustrate liberals to have a black person as an opponent.
Spite for other people seems a very odd reason to support a political candidate. I'd prefer people focus on helping our allies rather than hurting our enemies--especially when those "enemies" are people we aren't even at war with and aren't actually killing anybody.
The President-Elect went on another Twitter rant today, again claiming, like an insane lunatic, that we would have also won the popular vote going away if not for the millions of illegal votes. Again, I reiterate, this man is a joke, but more importantly, his ego is a stark danger to the world. He is not emotionally stable:
The President-Elect went on another Twitter rant today, again claiming, like an insane lunatic, that we would have also won the popular vote going away if not for the millions of illegal votes. Again, I reiterate, this man is a joke, but more importantly, his ego is a stark danger to the world. He is not emotionally stable:
Since when is emotional stability a prerequisite for running the most powerful nation on earth? Can't think of too many leaders in history that have been.
Julius Trump? Trump Napolean? King Trump the 3rd?
Same old same old. Nothing new to see here, folks. Move along.
@Ayiekie you seem to be a staunch hillary supporter. I and many others would have preferred Sanders.
I am, and I am not. I am a fan of Hillary the person- but politically, she's to the right of me on a lot of issues. I am deeply against the US bombing other countries (including and especially countries it is not at war with) and the worldwide spying network led by the US, and on those issues Hillary is very far indeed from my positions. On the other hand, I also care a lot about climate change, racism and sexism, and on those issues Hillary's voting record (which is, incidentally, near-identical to Sanders') and public record are pretty satisfactory to me.
Were I an American citizen voting in the primary, I'd have voted for Hillary, but that's because there's only a few policy differences between her and Sanders, the ones there are aren't generally things I cared about, and I would have wanted to see a woman become president (particularly against Donald Trump).
But don't mistake it for more than that. Her and Obama both should be in the Hague alongside Bush, Cheney and others facing trial for war crimes, amongst other things. I don't think that is something a staunch Hillary supporter would generally say.
I think she would have be a fine status quo leader. The red house and Senate would not do a damn thing for her but at least gridlock is preferable to Donny Tinyhands and his Cabinet of Deplorables.
Judging from her senate record (and also taking the example of Australia's Julia Gillard, another policy wonk dealmaker in a hostile political situation), I think she'd actually have gotten a fair amount of things done, especially in her consistent interests, like childcare. It would have been incremental change, not revolutionary, probably more appreciated in hindsight than in her own time. Alas, we'll never know.
The President-Elect went on another Twitter rant today, again claiming, like an insane lunatic, that we would have also won the popular vote going away if not for the millions of illegal votes. Again, I reiterate, this man is a joke, but more importantly, his ego is a stark danger to the world. He is not emotionally stable:
Since when is emotional stability a prerequisite for running the most powerful nation on earth? Can't think of too many leaders in history that have been.
Julius Trump? Trump Napolean? King Trump the 3rd?
Same old same old. Nothing new to see here, folks. Move along.
I think we'd all agree that most of us are lucky to have lived in a post-WW2 period where there has been relative peace in Western Countries, which certainly hasn't been true for all of history up to 1944. I'm not particularly interested in going back.
We will never know because Gillard decided to play the sexist card instead of actually trying to get judged on her merits. Bad move and alienated a lot of the voting public. And then she decided to play the race card as well. Even worse move.
Gillard got what she deserved, probably less, to be honest.
Oh, by the way, voting for someone because you want to see a woman president? That is an even WORSE reason than voting against someone because of retarded celebrities.
Comments
As far as I can tell, what Hillary did was a lot of little misdeeds, none of which amount to "rigging the election", though they may be significant in the aggregate.
In fact, that is probably true for most of her wrongdoing.
Nothing at all about the DNC's bias for Clinton (and if people seriously think party insiders are not going to favor one of their own over someone who only joined the party to win the leadership, they might as well advocate for the abolition of parties altogether) changes this. He would have lost no matter how scrupulously neutral they were. He was never close to winning. Hillary Clinton came a lot closer to beating Barack Obama in 2008, and everyone was giving her grief for not conceding early then.
If the "people's choice" isn't the one that got the most votes or the most delegates (by a wide margin), then the term has no meaning. As for who the polls said would beat Trump a year ago, the polls said Hillary Clinton was going to beat him right up until the election. Sanders himself had the good sense to dismiss this talk when it was brought up to him in an interview - it would behoove his fans to follow his example.
It is both impossible to know, and meaningless to speculate for reasons other than theorycrafting, what the outcome of a Bernie Sanders candidacy would have been. Not least of which because Bernie Sanders winning the nomination would have required a significantly different Democratic constituency.
(This isn't limited to Bernie fans, of course. Some Democrats are bitching about Johnson/Stein this time, and even more did about Ralph Nader in 2000. Pointless then, pointless now. Democrats should be focusing on trying to win the next war, and not wasting time trying to refight the last one.)
WI: Clinton down 22,177
PA: Clinton down 70,638
MI: Clinton down 10,704
Or, to paraphrase: 100,000 votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan supersedes (by 20x) the 2 million vote (and climbing) national total. This system is utterly and completely ridiculous. It always has been, but the shear magnitude of the actual Clinton lead juxtaposed to Trump taking the office is just really hard to swallow. The rest of the world has to be looking at the American electoral system and thinking we're utter fools.
Its clear that Hillary was the presumptive nominee as described above. Super delegates, party leadership bias, donor bias and other things led to Clinton being the presumptive nominee. Basically the Democrats put her forward because it was her turn this year. Bernie Sanders had momentum but the deck was stacked against him and that was too much to overcome.
What the DNC needs to take out of this is to open things up more. This year in particular the general public (including Democrats) were open to a candidate who was more grassroots. People were fed up with the status quo. People especially in the rust belt states apparently really wanted change and Hillary Clintons establishment campaign did not play to them. They wanted an outsider. Like Trump.
Let's compare what the Democrats did against how the Republican primaries went. The Republicans fielded a bunch of novelty candidates that no party leadership seriously expected to win along with their usual party favorites. They certainly had their preferred candidates but let their primaries play out a lot more fairly - no super delegates for example. Republican leaders railed against and undermined Trump just like the Democratic establishment did to Bernie Sanders. Did Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan want Trump? He'll no they didn't but they were able to contain their disdain and let their populist candidate go forward.
Current government got around 30% of the popular vote.
Now we can focus on the unchangable: we would have won if it was one dragon instead of two / would have won if the electoral college didn't exist. Or we focus on the changeable: we would have won if we enlisted their help of the mercenaries against the red wizards / would have won if Democratic leaning independents had be able to chose a candidate they would support in the general.
Poll after poll said that Sanders did much better with independents -- as @smeagolheart says this was an outsider election -- and the primary rules in CA and NY were stacked against independents. NY being the worst.
Take a look the independent support in MI -- a state Sanders won in the primary:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-sanders-does-better-with-independents/
Yes, we can never know if a counterfactual is true but the polls in the primaries predicted this outcome pretty well. Polls show Sanders beating Trump by more than 10 points and Clinton is in the margin of error.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton-5491.html
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-5565.html#!
The polls say that Sanders was the more popular candidate -- he only lost in the south and in states that had highly restrictive voting rules. (And, again, the EC is real Clinton never had a chance of taking AL or MS in the general. None.) Democrats correctly say that voting should be easy -- why did they make it so very difficult to vote in NY and CA? My answer: hypocrisy. Easy voting in the general favors Democrats, easy voting in the primaries works in favor of party insiders. Time to change that.
Also, in the same article above, take a look at the growing number of people who decline to identify with any party -- independents are now the largest voting block in the U.S. Preserving a system that favors party insiders over independent challengers is a recipe for failure.
And again, she lost to Trump. To Trump! That's like being crited by Biff the Understudy.
We have seen this same battle in the UK -- Tony Blair, a Clinton like politician, can no longer show his face in public without being booed. The party insiders used every trick in the book to keep the left candidate from leading the Labour party -- including making it difficult for newly registered members to vote -- but were defeated by the rank and file. We need to do the same.
Eliminate the superdelegates. Open the primaries. Reform the DNC. Send the Clinton Democrats packing.
Argument in spoilers because it's so long.
[spoiler]
1. This doesn't seem like the DNC fabricating a story. This is Ralston expressing an opinion and the DNC saying to post it without attribution--that is, without saying it's Ralston's opinion. That's not announcing a hit job; it's saying Ralston's name shouldn't be attached to it. Whether the allegations are true is a different story, which is not addressed in the line "Let's get this around without attribution"
2. This seems legit. The DNC gave the Clinton campaign early access to a debate question, which would have given her a slight advantage during the debate.
3. I think you posted the wrong link. The link you gave (https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/5423) doesn't relate to the claim that "They pitched stories to reporters about how to portray Sanders in way that would do the most damage." It was Sanders' and Reid's comments on the Nevada convention.
4. The first one, 7713, doesn't say DNC leaders were manipulating headlines to hurt Sanders. It says they wanted to argue about a headline on the grounds that it falsely painted the DNC in a bad light, not that they wanted the headline changed to paint Sanders in a bad light.
It does contain a non-specific reference to pro-Sanders delegates being disqualified for administrative reasons. Hillary didn't win because of superdelegates in the end, but if minor administrative rules were twisted to benefit Hillary at Sanders' expense, that would be an example of corruption. But this email doesn't describe them; we'd need another source.
The second one, 2699, doesn't seem related to anything. Most of the text in that email is formatting. The remainder is
"Great - we were never going to list since the lawyers told us we cannot do it.
We are waiting
Jordan Kaplan
National Finance Director
Democratic National Committee
Rangappa, Anu wrote:
'They aren’t going to give us a price per ticket and do not want their party to be listed in any package we are selling to donors. If we let them know we have donors in town who will be at the debate, we can add them to the list for the party.'"
I don't know what this email is supposed to prove. I think you have the wrong link again.
5. Wasserman Schultz didn't behave as she should, no. She didn't break any rules, exactly, and I don't know of anything she did to rig the election, and her preferences were expressed privately rather than publicly, but her position should have involved more neutrality.
6. This isn't an example of punishing women for supporting Sanders. It's Hillary supporters harshly disagreeing with Sanders supporters. This article doesn't even mention anything the DNC did.
7. Seems accurate. That's $60 million extra for Clinton because of that process.
8. True. It is worth pointing out that Hillary's victory did not in the end rely upon superdelegates; Hillary still won the overall vote in the primaries.
9. Shadowproof doesn't much specify unfair actions; it just complains about pro-Hillary people not being pro-Sanders. This is the only paragraph about unfair actions:
"there are several examples of how the Democratic presidential primary is and has been rigged: [1] hundreds of superdelegates pledged their allegiance to Clinton before votes were cast in Iowa, [2] a limited number of debates were scheduled to ensure voters had the least amount of exposure to Clinton opponents, [3] the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign falsely accused the Sanders campaign of “stealing” voter file data, [4] the Hillary Victory Fund has funneled millions of dollars through state parties to the DNC, and [5] Democratic women supporting Sanders have faced forms of retaliation."
[1] Pre-pledged superdelegates were unfair but turned out to be irrelevant in the end, as I mentioned above.
[2] I don't know why a lower number of debates is good for Clinton or bad for Sanders. As long as both were permitted to participate, it was even. You can say Clinton had better name recognition, but that advantage long predates the primaries. Clinton gathered that without the aid of a rigged primary.
[3] Shadowproof doesn't elaborate, but I think I remember this. I recall that Sanders apologized on the behalf of his supporters, even though it wasn't his fault (and it wasn't that scandalous to begin with). Very gracious move on Sanders' part.
[4] Covered above, in number 7.
[5] Covered above, in number 6. The primaries only lasted a few months, so a duration of a few months would cover the whole story. And intuitively, if you were going to leak bad information about somebody, you would either leak all of it, or just focus on the most damning evidence--you wouldn't just leak the most innocent parts. We can't just assume there's more dirt; we need proof of any extra claims.
EDIT: typo.
[/spoiler]
My belief, contrary to what the media is trying to portray, is not that Trump won because he appealed to white alpha males and women who like white alpha males.
Trump won only because his opponent was Hillary Clinton.
Beating Clinton wasn't impossible. Beating the establishment favourite wasn't impossible. Bernie Sanders did neither. But then, he had such huge strikes against him it was actually impressive he did as well as he did, and accordingly he has far more influence in the party going into the convention and forward after the election than he would have otherwise.
Yet people can't be happy with "He had a great run, and because of it he's in a position to influence the party". They have to make things into a conspiracy and talk about how Democratic party insiders shot themselves in the foot. If they did, so did Democratic party MEMBERS, who very decisively indicated their preference for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. He was not their choice. He was never close to being their choice. You can argue the theoreticals of a Sanders candidacy, but you cannot argue with math, and math says Hillary Clinton was a lot more popular with the Democratic base. They chose her too. 538 made an excellent point: If 1 out of 100 people switched their votes from Trump to Clinton, then she wins a decisive victory in the Electoral College (bigger than his in reality), the polls call every state but one properly, and absolutely nobody is having these sorts of discussions, despite the fact the weakness of the Democratic hold on those states would still be a reality. Nobody would be arguing this was a "change" election, and instead would be smugly asserting that Republicans were punished for nominating someone so outside the norm.
The narratives people derive - because people love narratives - are based on very, very little. Clinton narrowly lost states that she was "supposed" to narrowly win. That's meaningful, but it's meaningful only in regards to a tiny slice of the population. Really, with all due respect, is that a good thing? That the Republican party was subjected to a hostile takeover by a reality TV star who shares few of their values and it turns out that the party was helpless to stop it?
As for superdelegates - I wish people arguing about them would acknowledge that Sanders lost outright before the convention, even if every superdelegate had voted for him. I also wish media had acknowledged during the primaries that superdelegates can and do change their votes (this was, in fact, Sanders' strategy) and could not thus be fairly counted as "Hillary votes". Lots of them were "Hillary votes" in 2008 and ended up voting for Obama.
Beyond that, though, why precisely is it a bad thing that the party can put their thumb on the scale to help ensure a candidate that they feel represents them is nominated? A primary is not an election. It is a nomination of a candidate for the election. Why is it somehow better that the Republican primary system has less protections to prevent an unrepresentative candidate who does not share the party's beliefs and values from being nominated?
And why, if Bernie Sanders voters are so concerned about the undemocratic aspects of the primary system, do they never seem to find any outrage to spare for caucuses, which are also undemocratic and distorting to the process? Is it because, as a voting mechanism that privileges motivated partisans over rank and file members, they were won disproportionately by Sanders (and without which he would have been mathematically eliminated much earlier than he was)? In which case, isn't the only really "fair" system the one where "my preferred choice wins"?
So, I guess, as long as we're speculating, we could also speculate what happens to a Democratic candidate in the election who does much worse than Hillary Clinton did among minorities.
(The answer is: they lose. They lose way worse than Clinton did, in fact.) Since you read 538, I shouldn't need to lecture you on a) polls taken in the primaries about the general election doesn't historically indicate much of anything ("Hi, President Giuliani!"), and b) the dangers of cherry-picking a single poll whose results you like. Since you read 538, I shouldn't need to lecture you that Sanders benefitted from states that had the most highly restrictive voting rules, nor should I need to lecture you about the terrible optics of saying "southern states don't count", when the major reason Clinton won them so easily is that the Democratic vote there is predominantly minority voters. "Black votes don't matter - they voted overwhelmingly for Hillary."
You also declined to mention that Clinton won most of the states with higher population. But she did have a chance to take Arizona, and she only lost Texas by single digits. She even had a chance in Utah, albeit for unusual reasons.
Besides, the primary system by design gives a voice to the party members in states the party doesn't generally win in the presidential election. That is true for both parties. So you want to get rid of all those caucuses, right? The ones that made it look like Bernie Sanders had a chance even though massively more actual people were voting for Hillary Clinton? You acknowledge that without undemocratic caucus states, it would be clear that he was thoroughly rejected by the party membership? Such a recipe for failure that Democrats won the last two elections, and won the popular vote in four of the last five. Trump beat 15 people in the primaries and then won the US election. He actually delivered on his promise, which his own party scoffed at, to deliver more of the working class white vote in places Republicans had not traditionally won. Aside from winning the election, he also trounced Mitt Romney in a large amount of counties.
Are you still underestimating him?
I think the single biggest factor that can lead Democrats to defeat two and four years from now will be to continue thinking that beating Donald Trump in elections will be easy. Bill Clinton, an even more Clinton-like politician, can in fact show his face in public without being booed. He also left office with a huge approval rating.
Blair's problems have more to do with Iraq than with his Clinton-esque triangulating and centrism. TBH, I like Jeremy Corbyn well enough, but his polls and electoral success thus far do not suggest that emulating British Labour is an path to winning.
(Not least of which because, just like Labour, your proposed hostile takeover of the Democratic Party would end up with a civil war going on between the party rank and file and the partisan insurgents. Fear & Loathing '72 is, once again, highly worth reading.) Bernie Sanders could see the value of working with the "Clinton Democrats". Why do you think he was wrong?
1) It does not make the electorate any better-informed.
2) It replaces "get out the vote" efforts with "hang around the polls with signs and cards to get people to vote for your party" efforts. And yes, statistically, this does actually work - some people just end up voting for the first party that gives them a "vote for us like this!" card.
3) When your wife has multiple sclerosis and forgets shit all the time, it's really irksome to suddenly get a fine in the mail because she forgot about the state election.
So I'm not a fan, overall (I'm also iffy about the government forcing people to vote, ethically). Proportional rep is more arguable, but I had a couple of long posts already so I'll keep this one short.
edit/update: Ignore me--I didn't see the other thread on this topic.
“I didn’t like Clinton at all, but her positions are much better than Trump’s on every issue I can think of,” said Economist Noam Chomsky.
“Every Republican candidate is either a climate change denier or a skeptic who says we can’t do it,” Noam Chomsky said. “What they are saying is, ‘Let’s destroy the world.’ Is that worth voting against? Yeah.”
I think she would have be a fine status quo leader. The red house and Senate would not do a damn thing for her but at least gridlock is preferable to Donny Tinyhands and his Cabinet of Deplorables.
But yes, "None of the Above" would solve a lot of problems worldwide (on the grounds that if all the candidates are rejected the election is rerun with completely new candidates).
I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say that most people voting for their candidate was actually voting against the other candidate.
Bernie may have been a socialist and distasteful to the Democratic Party, but he is not as universally hated as Hillary Clinton. Even democrats hate her. I know a lot of democrats that voted for Trump because Hillary was their candidate.
(I also know some republicans that voted for Hillary because Trump was their candidate.)
I have absolutely no doubt that if Bernie had run against Trump he would have won. He would have got all or most of the "hatred votes" that Hillary could never have gotten. I do not believe the "Jew Card" and "Socialist Card" would have been even close in equivalence to Hillary's perceived repeated abysmal failures and horrible track record.
Point 2 should be illegal, or at least the police needs to act more than they have been doing. Voter intimidation is a very real thing at the voting booths, particularly when the SJWs and the unions are there in force. Either empower the police to throw those pukes in jail for a few days or ban the so-called volunteers altogether.
I hate the preferrence thing, though. I hate it because it is completely undemocratic. Democracy is "1 man, 1 vote", not "1 man, as many votes as you want until one of the guys you are voting for is top 2". It is complete bullhokey.
As for the Hillary/Trump thing, the only reason why I applauded the Trump win was to see the likes of Lene Dunham, Robert de Niro, Lady Gaga and all the various hate-filled whacko celebrities get their panties in a knot and their heads explode. Other than that, what do I care? I am not American and I don't get a vote. All the bloody morons rioting in Melbourne and Sydney over the Trump win... The Australian education system has a lot to answer for.
Perhaps if only to laugh at us dumb 'Mericans.
Somehow, in their minds, lies became reality and they think they are supermen saving the world. Some sort of Professor X crossed with Batman and Wolverine. And man, do they get nasty when reality mugs them hard. Not that they are all that nice people to begin with, but after the Trump win, if they were part of the silent majority, they'd be arrested for a variety of criminal behaviour and thrown into the loony bin for life without parole.
If those yuppers were on Trump's side, I'd be hoping for a Clinton win.
Spite for other people seems a very odd reason to support a political candidate. I'd prefer people focus on helping our allies rather than hurting our enemies--especially when those "enemies" are people we aren't even at war with and aren't actually killing anybody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malignant_narcissism
Julius Trump? Trump Napolean? King Trump the 3rd?
Same old same old. Nothing new to see here, folks. Move along.
Were I an American citizen voting in the primary, I'd have voted for Hillary, but that's because there's only a few policy differences between her and Sanders, the ones there are aren't generally things I cared about, and I would have wanted to see a woman become president (particularly against Donald Trump).
But don't mistake it for more than that. Her and Obama both should be in the Hague alongside Bush, Cheney and others facing trial for war crimes, amongst other things. I don't think that is something a staunch Hillary supporter would generally say.
Gillard got what she deserved, probably less, to be honest.
Oh, by the way, voting for someone because you want to see a woman president? That is an even WORSE reason than voting against someone because of retarded celebrities.