2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumSo how did Thanksgiving discussions about politics go?
My family runs from far-left to center, maybe even center-right. Interestingly, nobody was for Bernie Sanders, even the people who I thought would be. In fact, Bernie was mostly ignored, and in order to solicit opinions about him, I had to bring up his name. The responses were, basically, he can't win so there's no point in talking about him, and he's bad on gun control.
Everyone was for Hillary. Some more enthusiastically than others, and some just to keep that crazy Republicans out of office. It was either, Hillary is great and I'm voting for her, or else, I don't really like Hillary that much, don't trust her especially, but I'm still voting for her because the alternatives are disastrous. But it was 100% Hillary.
All anecdotal of course. Still, it's interesting to see how a bunch of people not as obsessed with politics as me think about things. How did everyone else's political discussions with relatives go?
vadermike
(1,415 posts)My house was all Dems and we are all voting for the nominee ! Sounds good , was anyone in that group that is voting for Hillary ,GOPers? Out of curiosity ?
DanTex
(20,709 posts)centrists. Personally, I dislike the "listen to both sides" argument because it assumes that simply because there are two things called "sides", that the truth must be somewhere in "between," regardless of the fact that the GOP "side" is totally insane.
But, realistically, there are a lot of these kinds of centrists out there, and it was interesting and heartening that in this particular group, all of them were in favor of Hillary.
vadermike
(1,415 posts)That's good to hear. No matter what we hear sometimes on DU. Centrists still make up one of the largest shares of voters nowadays. IMO
firebrand80
(2,760 posts)was the general consensus
And of course now I have an ear worm...
bvf
(6,604 posts)And there you have it.
elleng
(130,156 posts)We're in basic agreement about policies (and furious about trends,) and concerned about success of repug propaganda. I'm very glad my daughter found him! (That occurred during their first week of college!)
seabeyond
(110,159 posts)pablo_marmol
(2,375 posts)Luckily I had a convenient excuse --- I had to work. I would have been the only leftie in attendance.
They're the most mild-mannered Republicans you'll ever meet, and make it a point not to bring up controversial topics at family get-togethers. My cuz's daughter put off marrying her hubby until he could break his habit of getting into verbal battles over politics, in fact.
All this said.......I think I would still have been a bit ill at ease.
Edited to add: Holidays have been sad the last couple of years since my Mom passed -- made tougher since both of my parents are gone now. Saw a BERNIE sticker on a car on the freeway and despite somewhat heavy traffic I was able to position myself to the left of the driver, honk, and give the gal and her husband/boyfriend a fervent 'thumbs up'. They smiled so big I thought their faces would break!
treestar
(82,383 posts)tried to get people to avoid politics. In fact, we made a rule against it, because there are both conservatives and liberals. A couple of the right wingers of course cannot help themselves and they end up bringing up something. They just have no self control. We usually don't take the bait and change the subject or comment that's politics and we don't want to discuss that.