False dichotomy.

Both are herrings

Sorry for the red herring

(November 12, 2016 at 9:37 am)Chad32 Wrote: I agree with the guy, but it's not so much the left, as it is the DNC. In the primary, Bernie was incredibly popular. The DNC stacked the deck against him as much as possible, and he still almost won. Hillary is a joke, and we really shouldn't be surprised that Trump won, because the DNC are morons.

Also if I had the choice of forgoing a shit or a shave, I'd skip the shave.

As I recall, before even a single vote was cast in any Democrat primary, Hillary had over 400 delegates. 

Probably should have appreciated the significance of that more at the time . . .

The way I would apportion blame (in order):

1) The republitraitor party. They were the ones who decided to go full nazi this election. They were the ones who decided to strip 7 million US citizens of their fundamental right to vote. They were the ones who decided to close polling stations, use deliberately unsafe voting machines, not have an audit trail of votes and use illegal Jim Crow laws targeted to further disenfranchise Democrat leaning demographics. Frankly the biggest reason the obersturmbanngroppenfuhrer is in is because the republican party decided that this was the year they could safely drop the pretence of being a pro-United States entity.
2) The media, they hit Hillary hard all throughout the campaign, yet gave the obersturmbanngroppenfuhrer a free ride essentially until October when the Washington Post finally found their collective balls down the back of the sofa and pushed through the sexual assault confession. Now, I agree that Hillary Clinton should have been raked over the coals for anything she did wrong, but, frankly, if they hit Drumpfuck as hard as they hit her, there's no way they should have won. But because he was easy ratings and newspaper sales to them, they held off until the very last minute before revealing what he was a tax evading, misogynist, racist, America hating sexual pervert. And that played into the message that he was peddling all along, that there was this giant conspiracy (lead by the jews, natch) to do him down.
3) Racist and misogynist evangelical and catholic voters (why yes Drich, Catholic Lady, Pete Rose and Chad Wooters, I am looking at all of you), who decided that the false promise of a theocratic dictatorship was enough reason to vote the nazi candidate.
4) And four the DNC themselves, for two reasons, a) they didn't do anything to challenge the vote stealing detailed in 1) above. When laws were struck down it was charitable and civil rights groups which fought them, when polling booths were closed Democrats quietly assented and so on. The Democrat party would rather be (as I've said before) the second party of big business than the first party of the American people. B) Hillary Clinton was the wrong candidate. Granted if the the above actually went the right way (i.e. if the election were free and fair, and if more people were willing to vote in the best interests of the nation as a whole rather than on racism and misogyny) she'd have won 538 to 0. But against any competent and mainstreamish republican she'd have lost the fair fight, because what the people want is a different way of working, plain and simple.

Yeah, I think that there are multiple reasons for it, not just one single thing that led to a Trump victory. But people prefer simple problems with simple solutions, and the pundits have been pointing this way and that at what they insist is the one single reason. Maybe this is why history repeats itself. I think that there were several things that led to the result we got:

1- Hillary was a poor candidate because she was seen as an establishment crony who could be easily attacked by the GOP and who had the e-mail server issue hanging over her head.

2- Bernie Sanders further weakened her by running a tough campaign that lasted almost to the end and pushed her further left on some positions. Time she could have spent attacking Trump was instead spent trying to find a way to defend herself without hitting back too hard at Sanders.

3- The superdelegates became an issue that was used to reinforce the notion of Clinton as an insider and power-broker benefitting from a rigged system.

4- The GOP decided to invite Trump to run as a Republican to avoid a third party candidacy, expecting that he would fizzle out quickly, but instead he benefitted as several GOP candidates imploded. The candidates they probably had the most hope for flamed out shockingly early (Bush, Rubio).

5- Everyone underestimated the effect that Trump's devil-may-care populism would have. Reagan wasn't as brash or obnoxious as Trump, but he tapped into the same feeling in the electorate that they were being taken for granted when they were the real heroes of the nation. Trump's "make America great again" resonated in the same way that Reagan's promise to get government out of the way of the people did.

6- The DNC could not rally Obama/Sanders voters to the polls, but Trump voters showed up. Updated totals indicate that Clinton got almost as many votes as Obama in 2012, but still around 5-6 million fewer than in 2008. Trump got about 1.5 million more than Romney and 2.5 million more than McCain. It wasn't just that Trump did better among minorities-- it's not difficult to do better than the low percentages that previous Republican candidates got. Many more Americans came out to vote for Trump, and a massive number of 2008 Obama voters stayed home for the second straight election.

7- The media was more interested in poking fun at Trump instead of demanding clarity on his positions and deconstructing them. They went so overboard on racism and sexism coverage that he was able to use it to paint them as being part of the 'rigged system' that was trying to get Clinton elected. Since no one thought he had a chance, there was no desire to take him seriously, and the coverage remained a circus of allegations and denigrations that hid the lack of any political experience or know-how on his part.

I would say that the flood of fake news(I saw one report that claimed that 38% of Republican news pieces were fake) and Russia's meddling fit somewhere in the blame department, too.

Quote:The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/...story.html

Russia should know, that if we play that game too, it will go badly for them. No one has better trolls than us.

Well, not AF if that's what you mean.

We've perma-banned all the ones that were good at it.

[snicker]

(November 28, 2016 at 1:01 am)vorlon13 Wrote:

(November 12, 2016 at 9:37 am)Chad32 Wrote: I agree with the guy, but it's not so much the left, as it is the DNC. In the primary, Bernie was incredibly popular. The DNC stacked the deck against him as much as possible, and he still almost won. Hillary is a joke, and we really shouldn't be surprised that Trump won, because the DNC are morons.

Also if I had the choice of forgoing a shit or a shave, I'd skip the shave.

As I recall, before even a single vote was cast in any Democrat primary, Hillary had over 400 delegates. 

Probably should have appreciated the significance of that more at the time . . .

Sure. She had giant name recognition. Yet somehow, with all of her advantages, she was unable to mathematically eliminate her opponent. I have heard that she won the popular vote against Trump by millions, but somehow the electoral college went to him anyway.

How many opponents did Trump clobber in the 'pub primary ? 17 ??

And did it occur to Hillary she needed to up her game to avoid being #18 ??

Sometimes there are these things called 'clues', and the savvy candidate should feel some motivation to pick up on them and (re)act accordingly.

(November 17, 2016 at 10:09 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:

(November 17, 2016 at 8:09 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Trump, otoh, was explicitly and openly racist in his campaign promises.

That is a lie. He did no such thing.

As a citizen of an outsider looking at his campaign from afar I can say that it looked racist from here in the UK. Maybe you have a different level of tolerance for bigotry over there

http://theweek.com/articles/590711/donal...since-1968