A Response: My Election Blame List

[portlander23]

A Response: My Election Blame List
Chris Weigant
Huffington Post

(3)... Clinton’s entire message could really be boiled down to a rather non-inspirational slogan: “Dream small!” Don’t even dream of a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and maybe I’ll be able to get something like $12 an hour. Maybe. Free college tuition for some ― not for all. Marijuana legalization needs more “study” before I can even make up my mind on whether I support it or not. Don’t break up the big banks, I’ll slap them on the wrist and they’ll fall into line, trust me. Clinton reinforced this message of cautious baby steps every time she debated Bernie Sanders, even ridiculing Sanders for being too wildly unrealistic. Unfortunately for Clinton, this wasn’t what the public was looking for this time around.

(5) Clinton’s hesitancy was most notable in her economic message. Blue-collar voters just didn’t believe her when she promised to “fight every day” for their issues. Her campaign’s choice to not visit states like Wisconsin over attempting to flip states like Arizona just reinforced this problem. They would have done a lot better to have adopted the Bill Clinton slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid” as their central identity, but they didn’t.

(6) The Clinton campaign made a big strategic choice, and it didn’t work. They chose to primarily attempt to scare suburban Republican voters into switching their votes from Trump to Clinton. This is the same sort of triangulation that worked well for her husband back in the 1990s, but no matter how many tens of millions of dollars of Trump fearmongering ads they ran, it had a very limited amount of success. The Clinton campaign came off looking angry and trying to fear-monger, instead of positive and hopeful for the future.

18. THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE

That really should read “...and the entire concept of superdelegates.” Debbie Wasserman Schultz was obviously in the tank for Hillary from the get-go, and the machinations that happened to cut Bernie’s campaign off at the knees got so bad that Debbie had to resign her position the day the Democratic National Convention kicked off. That’s a stunning amount of party disunity to put on display, right at the start of the convention. Plus, Clinton locking up the lion’s share of superdelegates early on just contributed to her air of inevitability, which highlighted their anti-democratic (but apparently not anti-Democratic) nature. It’s time to rethink the whole superdelegate idea, folks.