I remember the moderator during one of the 2012 debates reframing a question several times to see if it would change Ron Paul's mind.

Ron Paul just kept repeating his position, regardless of how many puppy orphanages were on fire.

I am convinced that he did not possess the duplicity of most politicians.

This! As an example, she had her staff draft a tweet, and it goes through a chain of 12 people to approve before it goes live, I am not sure she knew how to connect with real people.

She doesn't.

She fought a near perfect 1970s campaign. She got every Columbia school of journalism grad eating out of her hand, total control and ally to the legacy main stream media. Newspapers. Radio. Every academic in the country shilling for her or they lose their position. She had nothing fundamentally new that a 60s radical wouldn't have recognized. There's simply no way she could have lost in 1976.

Of course its 2016 so Trump has approx 5 million NEETs on /POL/ shitposting insane memes about nazi frogs into every normies facebook feed on the planet while epic trolling social and legacy media and releasing all the proof of her corruption via email thru hacked servers on wikileaks. He was the only candidate talking about 2010s issues like the result of 1960s immigration reform or the marginalization and hatred of the white working class. He fought a pretty good 2016 campaign.

This being 2016 and not 1976 its no great surprise which strategy won.

The "R" side needs to take notes that the "D" are likely to make this mistake precisely once. The battles in 2020 and 2024 are not going to be baby boomers still stuck in the '70s losing to '10s millennials again.

Also she hates half the country and calls them deplorables. Somehow, oddly, her despising them didn't magically translate into votes. The sense of entitlement is strong with that one...

What did she say about "deplorables"? What was the actual quote? You know you are misrepresenting her

People remember! The 47% comment did not do well for Romney neither did the basket of deplorables comment from Hillary. Note to future candidates, don't make these comments. Please run for office only if you are genuinely passionate about serving people.

She doesn't. Her mistake, and the mistake of everyone around her, including the media which defended and parroted everything she said was to believe they would fool people into thinking she is genuine.

A lot of people who voted for her are Democrats -- people she thought she had already in her pockets.

Trump wasn't a top candidate, he wasn't the popular one, has said stupid stuff, and yet people disliked Hillary so much, they still voted for him.

I looked through some emails, it was entertaining (even though CNN said it is illegal to look through them and only media was special and had to interpret them for us). There was very little in those emails of "Hey how does this help ordinary people, let's do something for them" or "You know, we should just tell the truth, let's not really spin this at all".

It is all about how do fool this block "Women, ok, she is a woman, that's easy". Black voters, those are easy... what should we do for them? Organized a rap concert, of course. Because that's not condescending... Let's call Jay-z so he can drop a few N-bombs at them, I hear they like that. She is like the awkward rich person trying to find common ground with peasant that she usually would never associates with and it just looks so fake and stupid... and now more people can see that.

Yes, and the same thing happened to Ron Paul. The RNC colluded to ensure he didn't get the nomination. They actually changed rules during the convention to make sure that couldn't happen.

I'm sure if we had wikileaks of the RNC during that time, it would have revealed much of the same type of insider corruption.

> They actually changed rules during the convention to make sure that couldn't happen.

Those knife fights over party rules (especially 40 (b)) made it possible for Trump to get into the running for the nomination, according to many GOP observers. See [1] for an explanation of how.

These election results are a political pressure relief valve: significant swathes of the electorate have been systematically excluded and ignored, then they tried to organize in different ways. First culminating in Ron Paul's bid, then a different wave in Bernie Sanders' bid, and enough formed coalitions behind Trump this time around to cost both parties' establishments their desired outcomes. Ignoring such large groups of the electorate for much longer would have cost us much more in the future. There are very big chunks of the population in a lot of pain for going on decades now, and effectively ignoring that is no longer much of an option going forward.

I see China possibly facing a similar issue with their rural population at some point in the far future.

[1] https://alibertarianfuture.com/2016-election/2016-republican...

In response to clifanatic:

I believe the Ron Paul rule was seen to block Ted Cruz rather than help Trump (semantics, I suppose).

In fact, I seem to recall that the Ron Paul rule itself helped Trump win the nomination this time around.

Ron Paul and Sanders should create a 3rd party. they have way more in common than anyone acknowledge.

They have the identification of a common problem in common, but their solutions are the complete opposites ends of the spectrum and mutually exclusive. I don't think a 3rd party could exist that met both their goals.

It would match up quite well with a party platform based on decentralization of power. Libertarian at the federal level, Republican for large states, Democrat for small states and big cities / metro areas, and liberal for small cities or towns.

This would allow for a lot of social services, but keep them more localized, so they can serve the population better and be held more accountable.

And it would avoid a lot of the problems with big government at the federal level.

this is actually really good proposal, and it works for everyone.

They agree fully on criminal justice reform and the removal of money from politics, at the very least. If I recall correctly, their stances on government surveillance are similar as well.

> This was this the exact same case with Ron Paul 4 years ago but it seemed to hardly matter

Did it though? Did it? [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/zaD84DTGULo?t=29s