It's kind of funny in my house. My wife is not political in the least, I do not mean to make her sound stupid (she's not) but when it comes to politics, uhhhhhhhh, yeah that S word fit's pretty well.

Anyways
Any time Hillary Clinton comes on the TV screen (especially during the NY primaries) she was quick to turn the channel no matter what she was watching, she despises her like I have never seen. And every time it's the same thing "Liar!, I can't stand you" ...click, new channel!

Because of this is why I asked so many other women and while not all are as bad as my wife, believe it or not, quite a few think pretty much exactly the same. I really don't think "women" as a whole will embrace her as so many seem to think.

If the election were this month, I think Trump may actually win. But the problem for him is it's not for a long while and he WILL say/do something incredibly stupid (and will likely do so more than once)

GMTom wrote:If the election were this month, I think Trump may actually win. But the problem for him is it's not for a long while and he WILL say/do something incredibly stupid (and will likely do so more than once)

He did! And the hot mike Access Hollywood stuff! None of it mattered!

Reading through this thread, when Trump was just the R nominee, made me nostalgic. Good times, good times.

A buddy and I compared predictions prior to the election, and he, like Tom above, predicted Trump's win. He put his money on his prediction on these betting sites and won a bundle. Glad he didn't take it from me, 'cause he could have!

I was putting my faith in values voters, people for whom faith and integrity are important. I saw that early voting was up with white voters, but I thought that "sure some of those are the 'rednecks' (as Dr. Fate said earlier in this thread,) but some are the moral majority types" who should be rejecting the amoral actual criminal. I was so wrong. I guess everything is up for compromise?

geojanes wrote:A buddy and I compared predictions prior to the election, and he, like Tom above, predicted Trump's win. He put his money on his prediction on these betting sites and won a bundle. Glad he didn't take it from me, 'cause he could have!

I was putting my faith in values voters, people for whom faith and integrity are important. I saw that early voting was up with white voters, but I thought that "sure some of those are the 'rednecks' (as Dr. Fate said earlier in this thread,) but some are the moral majority types" who should be rejecting the amoral actual criminal. I was so wrong. I guess everything is up for compromise?

I know many "moral majority types" who did not vote for Trump. Some did out of sheer hatred of Hillary.

Did you know Trump, late last night, had won 50% of the union vote? That's the story.

Why did this election surprise? Because not many in the elite class know people in the working class who have been kicked in the face by the system.

This election is a full-on rejection of the status quo and of the system that has helped the poor and the rich, but only hollowed out the middle.

Yeah, all those people in the Rust Belt who voted for Trump will get nothing from Trump's election. He said what they wanted to hear regarding penalizing companies who left the US for cheaper labor and bring tougher in trade deals. But he has almost zero support in his own party for this. We don't even know whether he really believes in this issue but even if he does...it ain't happening. Unless he can do it by executive order, no way can he get the votes. There is a bi-partisan consensus on trade. So what's Trump really going to do for the middle-class? Nothing.

I hope to be proven wrong but I think the middle of the country was sold a bill of goods by Trump. Sort of like Trump University or Atlantic City casinos. The past is prelude.

My other take from the election is that us Democrats must always remember that charisma wins elections.

I think this article in (of all places) The Guardian goes a long way to explaining what happened. It also says a lot about the Brexit vote, even though it doesn't actually cover that:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... n-liberals

The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?

Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

Take a look at the reaction following the Brexit referendum (and before it for that matter) and 'shrill self-righteousness shouted from a position of high social status' is a very good description. The traditional parties of the left have abandoned their base in favour triangulation designed to attract affluent professionals and cynical identity politics. The result is that their base is increasingly abandoning them.

Doctor Fate wrote:
Why did this election surprise? Because not many in the elite class know people in the working class who have been kicked in the face by the system.

True dat!

Freeman wrote:I hope to be proven wrong but I think the middle of the country was sold a bill of goods by Trump. Sort of like Trump University or Atlantic City casinos. The past is prelude.

Also true!

freeman3 wrote:Yeah, all those people in the Rust Belt who voted for Trump will get nothing from Trump's election. He said what they wanted to hear regarding penalizing companies who left the US for cheaper labor and bring tougher in trade deals. But he has almost zero support in his own party for this. We don't even know whether he really believes in this issue but even if he does...it ain't happening. Unless he can do it by executive order, no way can he get the votes. There is a bi-partisan consensus on trade. So what's Trump really going to do for the middle-class? Nothing.

I really doubt you are right. I think he's going to do something. I don't know if it will work, but he's going to throw Michigan et al some kind of sop. He has to.

Yeah, all those people in the Rust Belt who voted for Trump will get nothing from Trump's election. He said what they wanted to hear....

and what did Clinton offer these people? What have the Democrats done for them the past eight years? Yes, this may very well be a bunch of lies but they want change and Clinton offered no such change, she also told them things they wanted to hear but after 8 years of those empty promises they decided to see what the alternate had to offer.

Liberal elites talking down to the working-class is such a cliche. The Democratic Party went left in 1972, 1984, and 1988 and got crushed. That's where Bill Clinton and his New Democrats came in. The Democratic Party has been effective in national elections with candidates that are centrists on financial, law and order, and foreign policy issues while being liberal on social issues. So, yeah, the Democrats have probably gotten complacent about the working-class vote, figuring where else they gonna go...to a billionaire who has no prior history of fighting for the working-class? And of course the recent history has been when Democratic candidates go left and have positions that are beneficial to the working-class...they lose.

Trump pulled together a hodgepodge of people upset over economic and social issues and his supporters were fired up and Hillary's support was weaker. He won because of turn-out. The only thing we could have done is run Sanders but remember he was beat by Hillary and had trouble connecting with non-white voters (yeah the odds were stacked against Sanders but remember Hillary tried to do the same thing to Obama and failed. And I still think we need to stay close to the center; we just need a candidate with more charisma.)

People who voted for Trump need to own it. No one forced them to.

There's a bigger picture Freeman. Across the western world we've been seeing that the traditional working class voters (I'd say the white working classes but that's not wholly true) have grown increasingly frustrated by the fact that they've been the principal losers from globalisation. The parties that used to act in their interests (the Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, various Social Democrats in continental Europe) have in the meantime found it increasingly difficult to speak for them because they've come to be dominated by affluent professional types who a) don't really understand their concerns, b) don't speak their language and c) tend to view them as ghastly racists because they're concerned about unprecedented levels of immigration and the effect this is having on their living standards. The end result is that politicians of the mainstream left have come to a point where they don't actually like their own base, and so they try to compensate for that by whipping up divisive identity politics in order to try and benefit from minority concerns. It worked for a while but now the traditional base is finding that actually they do have somewhere else to go, while ethnic minorities, gay people and other minority groups are starting to rebel against the idea that this one aspect of their identity should determine their vote.

Trump is just the latest beneficiary of the hollowing out of the left. He won't be the last.

Sassenach wrote:There's a bigger picture Freeman. Across the western world we've been seeing that the traditional working class voters (I'd say the white working classes but that's not wholly true) have grown increasingly frustrated by the fact that they've been the principal losers from globalisation. The parties that used to act in their interests (the Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, various Social Democrats in continental Europe) have in the meantime found it increasingly difficult to speak for them because they've come to be dominated by affluent professional types who a) don't really understand their concerns, b) don't speak their language and c) tend to view them as ghastly racists because they're concerned about unprecedented levels of immigration and the effect this is having on their living standards. The end result is that politicians of the mainstream left have come to a point where they don't actually like their own base, and so they try to compensate for that by whipping up divisive identity politics in order to try and benefit from minority concerns. It worked for a while but now the traditional base is finding that actually they do have somewhere else to go, while ethnic minorities, gay people and other minority groups are starting to rebel against the idea that this one aspect of their identity should determine their vote.

Trump is just the latest beneficiary of the hollowing out of the left. He won't be the last.

That is a perfect summary.

We have the elites vs. the rest of us. The elites claim to look out for the poor and working class, but consider what Hillary was proposing.

1. Shutting down coal mines. She said it and tried to back off. No one believes her.
2. Focusing on renewable energy. Sounds great, but where do the working class who can barely afford healthcare get the money for green energy?
3. Tweaking Obamacare. It was never popular and the prices just spiked.
4. Continuing and furthering Obama's DACA program, which essentially lets some illegal aliens become legal. That can't be good for wages.

On and on it goes. Where is the relief for the working class? Her tax plan? Maybe.

She was aiming at minority votes and the votes of people like her. It turned out that wasn't enough.

On the topic of elites, there is a wonderful debate about the elites and Trump. My buddy who nailed the election sent it to me about a month or two ago and it's long but worthwhile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvPUQ2L1-bU

Some interesting thoughts, Sass. A couple of points. A parliamentary system is much different than our own because it should be easier in a parliamentary system for a smaller party to cater to a niche group of voters, whereas that can't be done in our system. Secondly, why have liberals acquiesced in a system where the wealth is going too much to the top? Well, for one thing a lot of them are benefitting financially, so the system seems pretty swell to them.

What are the options for liberals? We could make a push towards to a more socialistic country so that wealth stratification is reduced but I am going to say our history, culture. and values goes against that and I am going to hypothesize that socialism works better in countries that are mostly homogenous (racially, culturally, religiously, etc.). People are more comfortable sharing wealth when the rest of the country is pretty similar to them. The United States with a large, diverse populations is not built that way.

When Obama was going to reform health care he did not include a public option. He did not do so probably because he faced the opposition of the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. This is one example of the push-back liberals get when they want to improve the lives of average workers.

So what are liberals to do? Many of them are doing well financially under the current system. Yes, they would like it to fairer and have wealth be more evenly distributed but any attempt to do so faces strong opposition from business and financial interests who could use their power to defeat liberal candidates. Moreover, , ever since the 1970s liberalism has been on the defensive. The high inflation, high interest days of the 1970s put liberals on the defensive and then there was the demise of Communism in the 1980s. Free trade became an article of faith among a lot of liberals. Opposition to lowering taxes was tepid.

So I don't think elitism is the problem or that liberals or out of touch with people. It is a problem of ideology. When blue-collar workers declined to less than 10% of the population there went the huge base of support for policies favoring workers. Raising taxes, promoting unions, opposing US companies from moving overseas and fighting for fairer trade deals causes opposition from powerful groups. Liberals know that the existing system where much of the wealth goes to the top is wrong; what they cannot seem to do in the US is come up with an ideology that will convince people to accept changes that will reduce that wealth stratification. Mostly, liberals just opt for policies on making sure there is a decent safety net for people displaced by globalization and support liberal social policies. Of course that really does not help workers that much, but doing anything more causes the loss of elections.

We need better ideas--I don't think on policy, I mean big ideas of how society should be set up-- if we want to significantly change things. Right now, we have a form of capitalism that favors capital too much over labor. Wages are flat for most workers, managerial compensation is excessive at large corporations, financial services are taking much more of the profits made in the country. The fact that working-class voters would hope for change from Donald Trump is a sign of complete desperation.

Liberal elites being out of touch with the average person is a platitude but the real problem is deeper and is it is ideological. We need an effective counter-argument to the current form of capitalism in place.

Freeman,

The only thing we could have done is run Sanders but remember he was beat by Hillary and had trouble connecting with non-white voters (yeah the odds were stacked against Sanders

I expect more from you Freeman. "He was beat by Hilary?" "(yeah the odds were stacked against Sanders?" Are you serious? He was cheated by Hilary. We will never know if she would have beat him in a square fight. And what's worse is that we will never know if Bernie could have beat Trump and prevented this mess.

I cannot believe that you of all people here continue to buy into the shite narrative pushed by the DNC and and the New York Times et al about Bernie.

People lost their jobs over this Freeman. Please recognize this.