What I Find Amazing Is How Smart The Dems Are A Week After Trump Won The Presidency......

[global1]

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

We're hearing all the things that the Dems could have done to win. All of a sudden - everyone is an expert on how to win the election. I'm not talking about the DU'ers here that are partaking in this Postmortem - I'm talking about the talking heads and so-called experts on the cable news shows.

We had the best opportunity in my lifetime to win this and pick up the Senate and make a dent in the House - but we blew it. Squandered this opportunity. Why now - does everyone know what we should have done? Where were all these experts on how to win - before we got beat?

Now all I hear is we're going to have to look to the future - but we'll rise from the ashes.

This is what we heard:

Hillary was going to win by a landslide. Hillary was pegged to get between 320 and 370 EV's. We're going to take back the Senate. We might even get lucky and take back the House.

The Repugs are over. They will implode and not be a factor in the future. Too much fighting in the different factions in their Party.

Funny how things turned out so different. The Repugs are now stronger than ever. What a difference a day makes - 24 little hours.

[Vogon_Glory]

1. The Basis Of The Republican Victory Is That The Base Felt No Pain

The basis of the Republican victory is that the Republican base felt relatively little pain. Many of the Trump voters of today will be hurting little puppies in 2020 when they find that not only is their Obamacare missing, but their Medicare is missing, too. And my prediction doesn't even include the effects of Trumpnomics mixed with the hemlock tea that the Tea Party will throw in.

Numerous people have compared Trump to Hitler and Mussolini. These comparisons are only partly apt. Authoritarianism arose because the citizens/voters were in economic pain. Regimes like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy continued in power in part because the regimes had enough good sense at the time to remember to grow the economy.

You want to know something? I don't think that the Republicans are that smart. I suspect that some of the better-off people who voted for Donnie are already feeling butterflies in their tummies (Serves them right!).

I hope we're organized and ready to start moving forward again in three years. Club Pachyderm may come to be in charge, but they can't govern competently.

[DirkGently]

5. The rust belt is in pain. And used to vote Democratic.

I think the upper-middle, educated-but-uninformed Republicans, and the truly ignorant, bigoted, etc, reacted to social change -- and the assumption the culture wars have been decided in favor of liberals.

But working class people in the rust belt have been liking Democrats. A lot of them voted for Obama. Many liked Sanders.

Clinton did not speak to them; did not in many cases bother to visit them. Those few people, in those critical states, decided a lot.

[Vogon_Glory]

6. They may have been part of OUR base once

The Rust Belt Democrats who voted Republican to punish Hillary may have been part of OUR base sometime back when the Big Dog was in the White House (That was 16 years ago!), but they are not part of the base that voted for guys like Scott Walker, Ron Johnson, Mike Pence, and other prizes of the Tea-publicans since they put Dubya in the White House in 2000.

The sorts of fools that would vote for Dubya during the Clinton boom years are not people we seem to be able to reach.

[DirkGently]

7. The rust belt voted for Obama and Sanders. Clinton assumed she had them as well.

Those states were part of the vaunted "Blue wall." Yet Sanders, not Clinton, carried them in the primary. That should have been a sign to everyone that Clinton could lose in the Electoral College.

According to the data, Donald Trump would have been soundly defeated by Bernie Sanders last night had the Vermont senator been the one to face him.

When examining the 13 states Hillary Clinton lost twice — the states Trump won side-by-side with the states Bernie Sanders won during the Democratic primary — the similarities are striking. The GOP nominee likely saw this, and tweeted in May that he was relieved to not have to face Sanders in the general election:

In five states Sanders won where exit polling data is available — Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wisconsin — the demographics that helped Trump hit 270 electoral college votes were also Sen. Sanders’ key demographics that helped him defeat the former Secretary of State in multiple primaries in different regions of the country.

http://usuncut.com/politics/bernie-sanders-would-have-crushed-trump/

[Vogon_Glory]

8. So. Why are Scotty and Ro Jo still in office?

Sorry, but just voting for Hillary wasn't enough. Such "missing" Dems gave Republicans like Grassley, Walker, and Johnson free passes back to office.

[DirkGently]

9. Are we not discussing Hillary Clinton's failure?

Florida voted for Obama as well, despite electing a horrible Tea Party governor twice.

The Presidential race is a thing unto itself.

Democrats can succeed where she did not.

[geek tragedy]

2. people trusted too much in the reliability of data.

Data without insight is useless.

Now that reality has hit us square in the jaw, our eyes are opened to the America we actually live in.

[DirkGently]

3. The institutions carried her water hard and now look silly.

I do NOT see media bias everywhere. But when WaPO went nuts with the anti-Sanders smears, and then MSNBC started pretending there was only one "serious" candidate, it was impossible not to see things that way. Joy Reid actually got on Twitter and started calling everyone a communist -- like SOVIET communist -- because apparently she thinks that's still a thing. Like a crazy person with no connection to actual facts or history. Sanders, the Green Party, Edward Snowden, Putin and Trump. All the same somehow, and all Commieeees aaaaaghh!!

They lost their collective minds for a while there. I remember Rachel Maddow, one of the smartest people I have seen doing political commentary on television, making a childish frowny face when Sanders won some surprise state -- one of the ones Clinton later lost.

"Doesn't matter ... she'll still split the state and blah and blah and blah." This while even other members of the MSNBC panel were remarking on how interesting Sanders' success in the lately-Democratic rust-belt states was ...

When they weren't slagging down or ignoring Sanders, they were running Trump's full speeches, commercial free, in a freaking WINDOW while the rest of the shows went on.

Then they talked themselves into the election being a foregone conclusion. They suffered from the same disease Clinton and her people did -- the idea that important people in New York and on television decide way ahead of time how things are going to be, then let us all in on it eventually.

They fooled themselves. Fooled us. Fooled the country. Now they're trying to explain why that happened, without admitting they just hopped in the tank and faked it.

The Masters of the Universe are full of shit.

[SammyWinstonJack]

4. 1000000!