The Daily 202: DNC chair candidates say Clinton lost because she talked too much about Trump

[andym]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by NancyBlueINOklahoma (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: Washington Post

With Breanne Deppisch

THE BIG IDEA:
BALTIMORE Every leading contender to take over the Democratic National Committee believes Hillary Clinton focused too much on attacking Donald Trump at the expense of articulating an affirmative case for holding the White House. During their final showdown before the chairmans election in Atlanta on Feb. 25, there was consensus that the partys problems derive mainly from subpar organization and communication not anything fundamental.

We forgot to talk to people, said Tom Perez, who was secretary of labor until last month and a finalist to be Clintons running mate last summer. Im a big believer in data analytics, but data analytics cannot supplant good old fashioned door knocking. We didnt communicate our values to people. When Donald Trump says, Im going to bring the coal jobs back, we know thats a lie. But people understand that he feels their pain. And our response was: Vote for us because hes crazy. Ill stipulate to that, but thats not a message.
.....
Buttigiegs goal is to be the second choice for as many Perez and Ellison supporters as possible. But his diagnosis of what went wrong in 2016 sounds a lot like Perezs. We spent so much time talking about the politicians, like thats what really matters, he said. I was guilty of it. I had a button when we were campaigning for Hillary that said Im with her. It was all about her. Then when we realized who the opponent was going to be, it was all about him. We said, Im against him because he is terrible. He is terrible. But the people at home were saying, Who is talking to me? Who is talking about me? Everything we talk about has to be explained in terms of how it directly touches peoples actual lives.
..........
While many of you know that Im openly gay, many of you dont know that I come from the lowest of the white working class, he[Ray Buckley] added later. We ran hundreds of millions of dollars of commercials telling the voters that, Oh, our opponent if offensive. When youre worried about your damn paycheck, about your job, about where youre going to live and if your kids are going to go to school, you dont really give a crap if the president is insulting. The reality is we didnt have a positive message for anyone Im related to. We didnt offer a message to my neighbors. We didnt offer a message to the people in Indiana or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Kentucky.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/02/13/daily-202-dnc-chair-candidates-say-clinton-lost-because-she-talked-too-much-about-trump/58a1023ee9b69b1406c75cac/?utm_term=.37f0144bb3d4

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This is an expansion of the story in
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?comview_post&forum1014&pid1699043
which only discusses one DNC candidate, Buckley. They probably should be merged.

The author in this article discusses how all the DNC chair candidates have made the same point about the last election and how the Democrats need to take back power by promoting traditional Democratic values over everything else.

[get the red out]

1. And none of it matters

Russia, that matters.

[Zoonart]

3. THIS

X10000
Can the Democrats please get out of circular firing squad mode?
Every single one of them should be at a microphone screaming about this administration and their connection to RUSSIA
and the subversion of our democratic process!

[Ken Burch]

4. We don't have to pretend our campaign was flawless to acknowledge that Russia messed with things.

n/t.

[get the red out]

19. We sure don't

I was seriously angry about a lot of the flaws in the campaign, but some of those are a given. I wanted Sanders to be the nominee, and I still think Russia caused Hillary to lose, so it's hard to quantify to what degree the democratic campaign went wrong? Democrats are battling conspiracy-theory central out here in red state land! I am now wondering how much of that has been generated over time by trolls working for Putin! The last few weeks have been a tremendous education for me. I will say this, it is damned hard to reach people who have been subverted by conspiracy theories. So I am hoping Trump will go down as the traitor he is, then maybe a few more people will be open to reality.

[Ken Burch]

21. That's something to hope for.

n/t.

[bettyellen]

20. It's a matter of timing, as well as priorities. Russia and the assist they got from

Our media and assorted HRC haters is a part of it that is more crucial now. When we still see Dems still pushing crap that's on RT, and threatening to leave the party over it... it needs to be adressed for what it is.

[Ken Burch]

22. And I join you in calling for the Russian role to be addressed.

Why can't we do that AND learn from our mistakes at the same time, though?

[bettyellen]

26. It's a mistake to say middle America was ignored- the policies were there and she spoke to them

Often- despite the crap some are pushing. The problem is the media made it about personalities- not that Hillary did. To this day I see "lefties" pushing nonsense about her elevating DT when he was mentioned as one of three who could be spoilers for more popular candidates. SOP campaign stuff is routinely demonized and made into character assasination and some of us helped this effort to discredit a good nominee. and they are doing the same to other decent Dems by continuing to equate them with the GOP.

[tenorly]

2. That may have contributed; but she "lost" thanks primarily to Putin's vote hackers.

[brooklynite]

7. Provide any evidence of vote "hacking"

"We all know" is not evidence.

[tenorly]

15. Absence of evidence, lest we forget, isn't evidence of absence.

Least of all where Putin is concerned.

[brooklynite]

23. Stephen Miller would be proud...

As for me, I stand by the evidence provided to me by State Party Chairs as to what happened in November. It's their job to win elections, and to know why when they don't.

[tenorly]

27. He'd be proud of someone who likes to shoot down allegations of pro-Trump Russian vote tampering.

When every week that goes by, more proof surfaces that this in fact is what happened.

As in most espionage cases, the details made public so far are incomplete, and some rumors in Moscow suggest that those arrested may be scapegoats in an internal power struggle over the hacking. Russian media reports link the charges to the disclosure of the Russian role in attacking state election boards, including the scanning of voter rolls in Arizona and Illinois, and do not mention the parallel attacks on the D.N.C. and the email of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/world/europe/russia-hacking-us-election.html?_r=0

Again, this was the disclosure that bothered them most - and this is Putin we're talking about. To dismiss the chance that he tried - and succeeded - in altering vote counts in our laughable, read-and-write software-equipped tabulation machines should be far too much benefit of the doubt for anyone to give. Especially from a good Democrat such as yourself.

[Ken Burch]

5. So can people finally say that here without being accused of ignoring Putin and racism

and "tearing down Hillary"?

[elmac]

6. No, wrong, she lost because

the corporate networks only covered ear candy, tRump BS, no news, she lost because the russians,the FBI helped sniffles committed treason, along with sniffles, against the USA, she lost because of GOP voter suppression, she lost because big money owns our elections.

[unblock]

8. idiots don't understand media editing.

the media was clearly incredibly obsessed with donnie.

hillary could have announced a cure for cancer, a solution for world hunger, and a way to bring about world peace; they would have covered donnie's latest insult and hillary's response.

and then faulted her for talking too much about donnie.

oh look, it's all hillary's fault. most qualified, experienced candidate ever; historic candidacy; running against the worst candidate ever, literally zero experience, huge negatives. but the media gave virtually all its time to donnie, and virtually all the hillary time was about made-up scandals. but somehow it's all hillary's fault.

[Initech]

9. I'm still convinced Obama could save a baby from a burning building...

And they'd find a way to blame Obama for starting the fire.

[Ford_Prefect]

11. This subject has been approached before but you don't hear it.

It was not about whether she was the best candidate. It was about an effective and engaged ground game to make contact with voters on THEIR level. That is what the post election analysis showed. Analytics have their place but they are not a viable substitute for shaking hands and face to face contact along with other traditional methods of Getting Out the Vote. If you want people to vote for you then you have to connect with them on the ground along with having the policies and rest of it.

And yes , the Russians, and the voter disenfranchisement, and bent voting machines, and biased press too. The differences on the ground were in states that mattered to the electoral college count.

[unblock]

13. yes, hillary could have run an even better campaign.

had the fix not been in in other ways, it wouldn't much have mattered.

with any reasonable campaign coverage, hillary would have won in a landslide. as it was she was ahead every day of the entire campaign except election day.

i'm all for introspection and self-improvement, but it's a waste of time to try to tinker with mild improvements in campaign technique when the playing field is so tilted against us.

how the hell are we supposed to even come close to winning with more comparable candidates if we get beat when the margin by any objective measure is so "yuuge"?

answer -- *we can't*, and we won't.

it's a waste of time making small improvements when the other side cheats. they'll just cheat more.

[Phoenix61]

16. Yes!!!

I acknowledge all the other stuff but....she lost for the same reason we have lost so many seats in state elections. No ground game. There was nothing already in place to counter those things. Hard to do damage control when there's no one there to do it. I'm in Florida. We have a county dem party that has an office. They have not had a general meeting this year. Nothing! Absolutely nothing. And we wonder why we lost.

[FigTree]

10. She lost for 1 and only 1 reason. And that is just undeniable.

The popular vote, the rule pretty much everywhere else, does not apply here. I've seen many elections in France, for example, where the results were 49.7 to 50.3 or less.

[Sunlei]

12. we all did. That helped him to connect even more.

[pnwmom]

14. OF COURSE every person running for the job of chief organizer will UNANIMOUSLY

say that something was wrong with the campaign that they can fix. Duh.

However, no organizational or communication changes would have kept Russia out of the election, forced the media to cover her in a fair way, prevented the situation with the emails, prevented the voter suppression, or stopped Comey from dropping his letter bombs.

[videohead5]

17. Hillary's Campaign Attacked The Wrong Way

Instead of focusing on Trump's insults they should have attacked him on cheating people out of money that did work for him and Trump U. especially in the those rust belt states.I still think Comey is the one that caused her to lose in the end.I believe it switched some votes and less than 40,000 in those 3 states is what did it.

[StevieM]

31. I think the FBI intervention cost her a lot of votes, not just enough to enable her to narrowly win.

I think it totally transformed the race.

I agree she should have hit him harder on screwing his laborers out of money.

[randome]

18. He sounds like Dolt45: "Only I know what went wrong and how to fix it!"

If that were the case, why wasn't he running last time around?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen, Anthem (1992)[/center][/font][hr]

[Wibly]

24. wrong

Sorry, this is just an excuse. Clinton lost because she did not listen to the youth and disenfranchised within her own party, and instead chose to rely on her campaign machine. She did what her hard core campaign execs told her to do. She also allowed for Sanders to be excluded and worked to shut him down at the convention. On top of that she failed to adequately acknowledge the criticisms of her ties to Wall Street, and did not bring enough outsiders into her fold. With regard to Trump, if anything, she did not challenge him enough.
In the end a large segment of the voting public became disengaged and stayed home.
Her defeat rests with her, the Clinton political machine and the Democratic Party establishment.
The Dems really need to own this or they will find themselves unable to climb back up out of the hole.

[TexasBushwhacker]

28. She didn't listen to the DNC and state parties

http://www.usnews.com/news/the-run-2016/articles/2016-11-11/dnc-staff-arrogance-cost-hillary-clinton-the-election-vs-donald-trump

"There were the numerous pleas from state party leaders to get Clinton to specific states – like Michigan – earlier, and to devote more resources to state party operations, which provide the oil and expertise to get out the vote.

"But it was all about analytics with them," the DNC source says. "They were too reliant on analytics and not enough on instinct and human intel from the ground."

[pnwmom]

30. Hillary lost because when she was 9 points ahead in the polls

Comey dropped the first of his two letter bombs -- and his helpers suggested there would be criminal charges.

Even so, she won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.

The idea that in our highly partisan political climate, Republicans would have flocked to her, if only she'd have a better message, is nonsense.

[delisen]

25. Hardcore Denial: over 1000 Dem seats lost in 8 years. They all talked too much about Trump.

Wisconsin went red in 2010. All those Democratic party losers lacked a message, I guess.

Must be an eight year message-destroying virus running through the Democratic Party

The question the DNC candidates are asking is this: how can we get more white people to vote for us? like the good old days when the union were growing and life was good and we were on a roll.

Like W Virginians waiting for the coal mining jobs to come back, some DNC candidates are waiting for the halcyon day of yore.


I would suggest an answer they don't wan to hear: stand up for your candidates and principles. If a your opponent colluded with Russia to install himself in the White House, don't roll over the day after the election and pretend there is nothing you can do about it.

Start screaming, back your voters. It's a two-way street.

[pnwmom]

32. If Hillary was running against Hitler, should she have done nothing

but promote positive messages?

She WAS running against Hitler. And she did have a strong platform which she promoted all along. But they didn't make fun, exciting sound bites for TV -- so she had much less coverage and very little attention to her policies.

[StevieM]

33. She lost because the FBI (and State Dept. Inspector General's Office) repeatedly lied to

the American people about the fake email scandal. They abused the power of their offices to assist their fellow Republicans.