As one of the hundreds of folks banned from DailyKos for being too liberal, I've been spending some time reading the Trump subreddit, and I have to say that Hillary has run perhaps the worst campaign in memory:
- Rigged the primaries against Bernie, disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters, and cheated during the debates.
- Spent 5x more on paid media advertising, and got all the social media sites to censor pro-Trump messages.
- Paid shills to attack anyone who disagrees with her policies on social media.
- It looks like there is a good chance her campaign was behind the attempt to frame Assange for pedophilia.
- Made gender her primary selling point with her #imwithher slogan. (Imagine if she had gone with something like #TheNextAmerica instead, to contrast with MAGA.)
- Accusing Trump of saying and doing tons of things he didn’t actually say or do.
- Characterizing Trump supporters as racists, bigots, deplorables, etc.
- Paying people to incite violence at Trump rallies
- Accusing Russia of hacking her campaign’s emails when in fact it was oedesta who gave out his password to a phishing site… twice… without two-factor enabled.
- Having Bill meet with Loretta Lynch during the email investigation. Then appointing Podesta's close friend to run the email investigation which resulted in a last minute FBI coup forcing Comey to make a statement.
I didn't vote for Trump, I don't support Trump, and I'm as horrified that he's going to be President as anyone else. But I have to say the actions of the DNC, Hillary, her campaign, and many of her supporters have been egregiously bad.
And now everything is super fucked.
edit: For everyone downvoting me, go turn on The Young Turks livestream and hear it from Cenk.
And remember! The blame for a Trump presidency lies with none other than Hillary Clinton. She's the one that cheated a popular opponent in the primaries, that strategized to promote Trump during the Republican debates, that infiltrated the media and turned journalists into self-admitted "hacks", and she's the one that interjected herself into the presidential race despite knowing that her "scandals" -- electoral corruption, mishandling of classified information, pay-for-play at the Clinton foundation, Bill's history of child rape, etc. -- all disqualify her as a viable opponent to Trump.
If she really believed in her causes and not her career, she could have decided not to run and backed a promising successor a long time ago.
Operationalizing the Strategy Pied Piper Candidates
There are two ways to approach the strategies mentioned above. The first is to use the field as a whole to inflict damage on itself similar to what happened to Mitt Romney in 2012. The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more “Pied Piper” candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
• Ted Cruz
• Donald Trump
• Ben Carson
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120 (Read the PDF attached)
Furthermore, who else could have rallied the masses to vote so thoroughly? A Jeb vs Hillary election would have been very dull, almost depressingly so, meanwhile a Cruz vs Hillary election would have bordered on hopelessly disinteresting.
My hopes are that 1) the media will keep a better eye on Trump (going off the last 8 years, they'll ignore any atrocity as long as it's committed by the blue team), 2) that Trump is not as smart as Clinton, and therefore less able to deceptively achieve his goals and 3) that 4 years of Trump will mobilize Americans to fix their electoral system and seek out real alternatives to the Democrat / Republican duopoly.
I personally would have liked to see Jill Stein hit 5%, but that looks unlikely.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who are not white, male, Christian, heterosexual, natural-born. And it's gonna get difficult for all those people. Clinton would've left them alone, Trump is fanning the flames of xenophobia.
The American left took its eyes off of what's important, namely the working class, and instead spent its time and political capital on frivolous[0] causes. This is a wake-up call to refocus.
[0] Lots of things some might consider important are frivolous when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Trump is, perhaps, not going to help "those people" but neither, in their minds, was Clinton. They are simply going with the "perhaps" rather than (again, in their mind) certain no.
[0] For example, suburbanites support Trump in about equal numbers and about 1/3 of college graduates and postgraduates support Trump. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
I also am not sure what you mean by 'fellow citizens' or 'the left'. I'm not American. And Hillary Clinton is not a left candidate, she's centre-right.
The people your criticizing want job security, not lynchings.
Calling somebody out as racist is not name-calling if it's true.
I feel like the US has become this bizarre place where it's okay to be racist and sexist, but if you call people out for it you're the bad guy.
http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/27/berkeley-activists-block...
And as I said elsewhere, many of Trumps votes are coming from people that voted for Obama last time. Do you really think they are racist?
The first and second hit are from you, humorously enough.
> (, racist) working class folks
You didn't say Trump was, you tried to smear the whole working class or at least the ones that voted for Trump.
I don't like Trump, I just personally refuse to think that 50% of Americans are stupid racists.
Racism has been shamed for many decades, and Trump made it 'in' again.
Racism was a major issue in this election. The SNL's 'black jeopardy' skit was surprisingly observant in this respect [1]. I didn't expect people on HN to just dismiss it like that. Or completely ignoring an argument about how people cutting their nose to spite their face, because it included the word 'racist'.
It's kind of ironic, like I tickled somebody's PC funny bone, when Trump's campagin was all about the freedom to say whatever you want.
Since this is a thread on an American presidential election, on the American political spectrum, Mrs. Clinton would be considered to be on the left or center-left.
I'm not a Trump supporter, but I do live in coastal California, and the absolute derision with which I see relatively privileged, affluent, college educated people treat or talk about the working/rural poor in "flyover" country makes me question whether, despite my current views, I too wouldn't vote Trump if I found myself on the receiving end of such hostility.
As long as you're white, male, hetero, anti-intelectual, Christian, and not born in another country.
EDIT: it seems that people are really sensitive about being called out for all the hate Trump spews in their name.
Bernie and Trump are touching into the same underlying problem that a lot of people have been left behind. They have felt screwed by the system for awhile and this is what we get. Heck, Bernie supporters got screwed again during the primary.
This is also only the start. Wait until we automate all fast food and driving jobs to see what a angry, jobless populace looks like.
I mean as far as name-calling goes, I got the impression Hillary is doing almost none of that; whereas Trump was vicious.
“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.
“Some of those folks,” she added, “they are irredeemable.”
Beyond that it's difficult to say, Trump has promised little but hinted at a lot.
I'm especially worried because the developer job market is a lot worse outside the US than inside it. I genuinely don't know where to go (recession seems inevitable).
Yeeeaaaaah...
Trump is likely going to be very business friendly, and after the initial shock wears off the markets will recover and move on.
If not for nuclear detente, I'd be pretty concerned about WWIII right about now.
Yeeeaaaaah...
It won't happen, but it'd be hilarious if the Democrats planned to rig future elections by importing millions of immigrants to vote for them, and they instead end up emigrating by the millions to Canada thus swinging it in the opposite direction.
Perhaps rather than hoping for assassinations or voter fraud, those of us who identify as "progressive" could instead channel that mental energy into finding ways to better appeal to large groups of working class people who are imo justifiably angry at the state of things in this country.
Basically, for most of us here, the rest of our lives will have this election hanging over us, for the implications on the SCOTUS alone. As I said, people who can afford it are going to leave in droves.
Do you want President Trump? Because this is how you get President Trump.
If you think that your "I'd almost welcome" weasel wording makes what you're implying acceptable, you need to reconsider the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy.
I can think of a few other more local (to Australia) events that seem to make sense when you factor in this bubbling discontentment.
>Our final map has Clinton winning with 352 electoral votes. Compare your picks with ours.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trai...