US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1927

On December 05 2019 03:44 Wombat_NI wrote:
What’s so bad with Bernie or bust though? Depends how it manifests I suppose.

‘Not quite as bad as the other person’ is the sluice valve to placate people who want change, whatever that change may be.

Some people will drop their ostensible preferences to find a partner as they find that preferable to being lonely, others prefer being lonely to being with someone that doesn’t tick their boxes. Both are reasonable and logical choices depending on the persons involved IMO. A crude analogy yes but I like my crude and barely applicable analogies.

On December 05 2019 03:55 JimmiC wrote:


The issue with it is that some people apparently voted for Trump just to "get back at Hillary supporters". So I guess no problem with it unless you think that Hillary would be less bad than Trump. My take is all you have to do is look at the USCJ appointments and it is clear that Hillary would have been less bad.

Sadly in politics (much like the rest of life) you can't get exactly what you want, so the best strategy is to get the best of the options that you can get. Especially in the case of the American Presidency where that position holds so much power.

On December 05 2019 04:00 Wombat_NI wrote:

Not sure how big a factor it was electorally but my impression was people did the ‘fuck the DNC’ vote because of the (reasonable) perception that the DNC apparatus were heavily biased and moving in ways that aided Clinton.

In a primary affair that was more ‘clean’ that Sanders lost I don’t think you see quite as much of that.

On December 04 2019 21:29 GreenHorizons wrote:


Sorta but not quite imo. Biden was predicted to collapse sooner (and he sorta has without much attention payed to it) but Kamala was supposed to take Bernie's/consolidate with Booker Black under 40 support right away and they both failed miserably.

When younger Black voters completely shut her down it was a dead campaign walking. Without young Black voters the older voters weren't going to support Kamala over Joe or Pete.

EDIT: A critical reason Obama and Sanders were able to mount remarkable underdog campaigns was massive youth support. None of these other candidates (the billionaires could buy establishment support) have a chance to overwhelm Biden's establishment support without it.

On December 05 2019 04:06 GreenHorizons wrote:

It was less than the Hillary supporters that voted for McCain. So not a new phenomena, or one limited to or more prevalent in Bernie supporters than typical Democrats.

On December 05 2019 04:10 JimmiC wrote:

I understand the motivation, it just does not get the desired result and gives you a worse at least 4 years. But like you said it might not have been a big factor, just saying why people don't like the attitude. The same way if Bernie had won his supporters would not be happy if a bunch of dems said they were going to vote trump.

On December 05 2019 04:08 iamthedave wrote:


Interesting. I've never heard that before. Do older black voters tend to follow youth voting trends? That doesn't seem to be the case in other demographics (where older skews right wing and younger skews left).

On December 05 2019 04:27 GreenHorizons wrote:


It's not so much that they follow youth voter trends, it's that to counter a media/establishment that doesn't heavily favor you (as Obama and Sanders faced, though Obama eventually got their support) you need a youth movement to hit the streets and do the leg work for free. As well as a grassroots fundraising operation that provides sustainable income for your staff/money for ads. They'll also keep supporting you despite a bleak outlook. Clinton still had nearly 2x as much support nationally as Obama at this point in 2007 and a 25% lead on Bernie in 2015.

On December 05 2019 04:13 Wombat_NI wrote:

I think people forget about the positives of candidate Trump too.

I was never a fan for various obvious reasons but candidate Trump, while warning signs were there as to what a Presidency looked like did have some appeal. I actually agreed with him on quite a bit, candidate Trump said that Saudi Arabia have to get with the program if they want the US to be their foreign policy fist, which I 100% agreed with. That Trump did a complete 180 as President to the extent that murdering journalists employed by US newspapers is on record and obviously bad.

On December 05 2019 04:28 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I'd be entirely sympathetic to a bernie or bust attitude if it was a question of bush senior romney mccain type republican vs center right type democrat (so say, the bush vs clinton 2015 pundits expected 2016 to be), but not in the scenario where it's a president trump's possible reelection and where the other democrat candidates are at worst obama-like on policy.

incremental improvement, or even strict adherence to 2015 status quo, isn't sufficient to bring about the society we want when we need it, but it's so, so much better than empowering fascist leaders around the world while not believing in climate change.

Fight as hard as you can for bernie in the primary. Still vote for fucking biden if he wins it. I'd do that even if it was not just proven that dnc rigged the primaries but if it was also proven that biden orchestrated it. All democratic candidates are significantly closer to Bernie than they are to Trump, this time around. (Which would not be the case in a bush vs clinton election).

On December 05 2019 04:28 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I'd be entirely sympathetic to a bernie or bust attitude if it was a question of bush senior romney mccain type republican vs center right type democrat (so say, the bush vs clinton 2015 pundits expected 2016 to be), but not in the scenario where it's a president trump's possible reelection and where the other democrat candidates are at worst obama-like on policy.

incremental improvement, or even strict adherence to 2015 status quo, isn't sufficient to bring about the society we want when we need it, but it's so, so much better than empowering fascist leaders around the world while not believing in climate change.

Fight as hard as you can for bernie in the primary. Still vote for fucking biden if he wins it. I'd do that even if it was not just proven that dnc rigged the primaries but if it was also proven that biden orchestrated it. All democratic candidates are significantly closer to Bernie than they are to Trump, this time around. (Which would not be the case in a bush vs clinton election).

On December 05 2019 04:39 Nebuchad wrote:


Trump had some amount of leftism in his campaign. The reason why it was always going to be a mistake to support him as a leftist was that he obviously didn't mean it, and it was also obvious back then.

On December 05 2019 04:46 Biff The Understudy wrote:

That should have been the line of reasoning last time, but it seems some Sanders supporters kept thinking that yelling how corrupt Hillary was during the whole campaign after she beat Biden was the best thing to do. If you want a definition of the political scorched earth policy just look at some of the Berniebros. I fully expect them to do the exact same thing with Biden if he wins.

On December 05 2019 04:49 Wombat_NI wrote:

Some of it was absolutely, some of it really wasn’t.

Trump has a very transactional ‘what have you done for me lately’ worldview that if nothing else is a consistent thing with him. So as per the Saudi example, candidate Trump’s position made a lot of sense given what we know about him.

That you can’t predict even the stuff that he’s generally consistent on attests to the volatility of the man.

On December 05 2019 04:54 Wombat_NI wrote:

But she/the DNC absolutely were corrupt by many people’s measure thoroughout said campaign.

If they don’t want such a backlash, scorched earth or not just don’t do the thing in the first place.

As an amusing aside I’m willing to bet I’m the only frequenter of this thread who has met and conversed with Hillary Clinton.

...this level of "defection" isn't all that out of the ordinary. Believing that all those Sanders voters somehow should have been expected to not vote for Trump may be to misunderstand how primary voters behave.

...according to one 2008 study, around 25 percent of Clinton primary voters in that election ended up voting for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the general.