Yes, and I complained here bitterly about the super-delegates. But African-American voters got Hillary off to a nice lead. She even won in California. Think about that one for a bit, we're pretty darn liberal out here. And, as I noted, she tried to do the same thing against Obama and was trounced. She had a huge lead early super-delegate lead against Obama but it evaporated.

If Sanders was that good of a candidate he would have overcome the obstacles.

Now you're just having a laugh and attempting to wind me up. But I'll play along.

Sometime let's get together to play monopoly Freeman. But let's call it monopoly with a twist.

In this game there will be a game master. The GM will stack the community chest and chance cards to favor me each time I get the opportunity to choose from those piles. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you of course, the GM will grant me access to unlimited funds so that I can buy up as much property as possible before you can. Don't worry, we'll both be expected to continue rolling the dice which will give us (or at least you) the impression that we are both on equal footing.

In some point in our game, toward the end, you will be allowed to discover the fact that the GM has been assisting me all along, but by the time you do, it will most likely be too late for you to do anything about it.

Should be a tun and fair game right Freeman?

"If you were that good of [a monopoly player] you would have overcome the obstacles."

freeman3 wrote:Yes, and I complained here bitterly about the super-delegates. But African-American voters got Hillary off to a nice lead. She even won in California. Think about that one for a bit, we're pretty darn liberal out here. And, as I noted, she tried to do the same thing against Obama and was trounced. She had a huge lead early super-delegate lead against Obama but it evaporated.

If Sanders was that good of a candidate he would have overcome the obstacles.

Wait. How about the DNC shenanigans?

Donna Brazile getting the questions to Hillary?

So I don't think elitism is the problem or that liberals or out of touch with people. It is a problem of ideology.

The way I see it, 'liberals', which is a term I normally prefer to avoid since it means different things on either side of the pond, but in this case works well for either, have entered into an ideological cul-de-sac of their own making which has caused them to lose touch with a substantial portion of their own base. Anti-racism has been elevated to the supreme virtue, over-riding all other concerns. There's nothing wrong with being anti-racist of course (quite the opposite), but the result for the mainstream left has been that this obsession with race has resulted in some disastrous policies which hang like an albatross around their neck. In particular, the left is now completely discredited on the subject of immigration. Immigration controls are opposed in opinion-forming circles on the mainstream left because they're perceived to be racist. For many years it was considered taboo to even discuss the issue of immigration, to do so marked you out as a ghastly racist who should be vilified or ignored, and the only times left-leaning parties would ever broach the subject was if they wanted to use it as a stick to beat their opponents with by portraying them as racist.

It's very much a cultural thing. The affluent types who now dominate academia and who control the mainstream left have come to believe as an article of faith that there's no problem with our current rates of immigration and that greater diversity is an a priori good thing. The problem is that this sets them in direct opposition to their traditional working class base. For those at the bottom, high rates of immigration sustained over several years have been a disaster for their living standards, increasing competition for jobs and housing and driving down their standard of living. The liberals have been deaf to these concerns. Worse, in many cases they've come to despise those who hold these concerns because they perceive them to be racists (a veritable 'basket of deplorables'). Those voters are left with nowhere to turn. They're growing increasingly strident in their demands for action to be taken in immigration but their traditional champions in the political arena have absolutely nothing to say on the subject, would much rather not even talk about it in the first place and make it quite clear that in fact they don't want to even associate with those who do. Well if liberals don't want their votes then somebody will eventually come along who does. In this case it was Trump.

In my opinion the much derided wall was what won this election for Trump. This is not because anybody actually believes that he's going to build it, but in making the pledge he sent a clear signal that he was serious about tackling illegal immigration. Likewise his crass comments about banning all Muslim immigrants. I doubt that many of the deplorables actually think he's going to come through on these policies, but the message is "this guy gets it".

Until liberals have anything meaningful to say on the subject of controlling immigration they're going to continue losing elections across the western world. They won't lose all the time of course, but there will be more Donald Trumps, more shock results that nobody in the self-righteous liberal bubble can comprehend or see coming. This is because they're so far removed from their base that they simply don't understand what motivates them anymore.

freeman3 wrote:If Sanders was that good of a candidate he would have overcome the obstacles.

Such complete bull. He wasn't a Democrat and there are people in the party who worked all their lives to build up the Democratic party who resented him for being a carpet-bagger, and who actively worked against him in the primaries. A socialist made the Democratic primaries competitive, even when the Democrats in power were working against him. He was a great candidate! And frankly his behavior since the primaries tell us he is an amazing statesman. And by observation, he certainly couldn't have performed worse than Clinton.

Hey, at least Debbie Wasserman-Shultz won her race.

I said from the beginning that this was going to be a race to the bottom because both sides knew that was the only way they would win. I also said it would depress turnout.

4 million fewer voters than in 2012 (I think that's what I heard).

In any event, in terms of percentages: Trump did worse than Romney with whites (1%) and better with blacks and Hispanics.

So, spin that.

Sanders lost 55% to 43% to Clinton in the popular vote in the Democratic primaries. He could not connect to African-American, an essential component of the Democratic vote. He's 74 years old, he's a socialist, he has not done anything of significance outside of politics. His base of support was basically young people and liberal Democrats.

You cannot confuse economic/class with identity issues. Republicans have won the white vote in every presidential election since 1964. Let that sink it in a bit. Trump could win as an outsider because identity politics is very sticky. And his play to that helped him win. Sanders on the other hand was going to succeed in bringing left-wing politics to places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohip and Pennsylvania, to practical people very skeptical about socialism, where all but Pennsylvania have Republican Governors?

Just because people want change...does not mean they want that much change. Sanders would have been crushed so bad we would probably have to wait another generation to run a liberal candidate. And yes that's just my opinion but I think it is based on a rational view of our political history, whereas projecting a Sanders win would requiring turning it on its head. Trump was a much more predictable vote--all things being equal did middle America white working-class voters want a female president after two terms of a black president? Well, not unless she was clearly better for them and they didn't trust her to help them, so she wasn't clearly better. But it would have been a far, far bigger leap to embrace the left-wing.

Better to wait until we get a viable liberal candidate, not quite as far out there, with the demographics even more in our favor.

Sass, that post you made yesterday was VERY good ad very insightful. I don't know if I really thought of things that way but you were very astute in your views. Thank you!

Freeman, this last post is mostly true however, the way it could be read and the way this is played in the media...
Republicans have the white vote, Trump got the white vote, etc.
That sure seems to be a racist statement (the Republican party is full of racists) yet Trump got a slight majority of white male votes, it's not like whites feel we need to embrace only the Republican party. Democrats have a whole slew of whites as well. We are talking about a few percentage points difference. Compare that to the black vote where most polling data had them voting over 90% for Clinton! If any party is "racist" it's the Democrats who fuel this thinking.

We were discussing this very issue today in the office. If you segment the different portions of American society by race, it is a rational assumption that the remainder would be a higher percentage of Whites.

Personally, I find that the segmenting of society by race to be repugnant at a base level. We are Americans. I am sick of the type of American being the focus.

Who played to the (Pardon me for the usage of the hyphen, but I don't know how else to explain) "African-America vote? Who played to the Hispanic vote? It was not the Republican presidential candidate. Yet the angst is coming from the left, when the division was preyed upon from the very left that is stressed about it now!

Perhaps the platform should have been a bit more inclusive, and not divisive.

Sass, that post you made yesterday was VERY good ad very insightful. I don't know if I really thought of things that way but you were very astute in your views. Thank you!

Cheers.

For once this is an area where the UK is ahead of you guys in the curve somewhat, so I've had longer to think about it. There's also the fact that I work in the field and I live in a very working class city, so I'm exposed to the mindset every time I tell somebody what I do for a living.

In my opinion immigration is the dominant issue of our times. It manifests itself in different ways, but generally when you see complaints from working class people about 'elitism' and the fact that they're being ignored it usually boils down to the fact that their views on mass immigration are ignored and vilified by mainstream politicians and the media. Most (not all, but most) of the people making these complaints are not racists, they're just frustrated at the pace of social change that's happening around them and the effect on their standard of living. More than any other factor I think this accounts for Brexit, it accounts for Trump and it explains why, even after 8 years of capitalism in crisis, there are still almost no left-wing governments in the western world.

Oh please, Brad. Trump's first statement announcing entry in the race was that Mexico is sending criminals and rapists to the US and he assumed that some of them were good people. What should have happened if were a genuinely post-racist society was the immediate end of his candidacy. But instead that was used as a springboard.

Race and gender are still very significant components of how political power and wealth is distributed in our society but whites keep wanting to call it a post-racist society. We just elected a person who cynically and opportunistically exploited identity politics--enough so that white supremacists started to crawl out in the open--and you want to blame liberals for complaining about it.

The reason blacks vote Democratic is because Republican tenets are antithetical to their interests. It's not because they don't like whites. They vote for white Democratic candidates just fine, though to be sure they were a bit more enthusiatic about Obama.

Sass, please read this article and get back to me.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.vox.com/ ... ent=safari

Romney got 35% of the vote from those with a family income under $30000. Trump got 47%. Pause and consider that fact for a moment. We're talking here about a very substantial proportion of voters who 4 years ago were quite willing to vote for a black man but who now voted for Trump, and yet apparently this is still just all because they're nasty racists ?

That article is delusional, and so are you.

Just like Republicans vote for black conservatives.

I do not think Trump's comments were focused on Hispanics, but ILLEGAL immigrants. That was the main "springboard" of his candidacy.

In a post-racist society, there would be no racial profiling, affirmative action, Title IX, or Rooney rule in the NFL.

Are you saying that the Democratic party does not try to segment and divide American society into class, race and gender identities? If not, why the comment by Madeline Albright?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQx79MNHhMA

The reason blacks vote Democratic is because Republican tenets are antithetical to their interests.

Sorry Freeman, I am not calling you a racist but that statement most assuredly IS.
You just lumped all blacks together as if they were all the same. You seem to say whites can have different reasons to vote this way or that but not blacks, no they all have the same interests?

The Democrats attempted to lump all Hispanics together as well. Trump wanted to curtail illegal immigration and guess what, while they did not like his statements, many agree with him. I am of German origin, does that mean I must vote with every white German issue? Must I drive a BMW or Volkeswagen as well? To assume any one group (other than a group called "American") needs to vote as a block is a racist one.

maybe the Democrats should wake up and realize this? Ben Carson was vilified by Democrats because as a black man he should not identify with Republicans. They accept blacks when they are part of their party. The Republican party on the other hand accepts all, I rather like it that way.