If you're OK with Booker 2020(and not in the "well, anyone is better than Trump" sense) it's unclear why you supported Bernie over Clinton

All you need to do to understand how bad Dems are at the messaging aspect of politics is ask yourself how Republicans would be behaving if they were the minority party right now with a Dem president and Congress that were as unpopular as the Republicans currently are.

They can't get out of their own way trying to prove that they are American and patriotic and **** to the same non existent centrist coalition that HRC tried to use to win the election. It's honestly embarrassing to watch.

The flip side is that there is real leftist energy out there right now and hopefully these clown incumbents will realize one way or another which way the wind is blowing.

Dems have John Lewis on the bench and we decided to field Hillary Clinton. WAAF.

So single payer is more like legalized marijuana?

Fly, you waffle between blaming the "willfully naive gormless "kumbaya" crowd" and the Triangulating Trilateral Commission crowd every other day. You're in a very small tent.

i think the Obama years moved the us both in getting more people covered and in making people think of healthcare as a right. and i think you should push further because decent healthcare, without going bankrupt if you get sick, should be something everyone has.

what im saying is i dont believe that the centre-left is losing elections that the left would win once people discover their secret yearning for the pure stuff. likewise i think carbon taxes are essential to saving the planet, but im not pretending it'll be popular if only people just hear about it clearly.

I don't see it as waffling so much as he believes there's plenty of blame to go around.

The messaging is not complicated whatsoever.

"The 1% have rigged the tax system. As Buffet has said, he pays less in tax than his secretary. Do you see this colt 45? This is my daddy's gun. This gun is for Goldman Sachs. For the people who caused the housing crisis and made hundreds of millions destroying middle America. We can't have a democracy if 1% of the country owns 55% of the wealth. We can't have a democracy if our politicians work only for the 1%.

People on medicaid don't have to worry about health insurance. The 1% doesn't worry about health insurance, but middle class Americans who are not being represented in Washington have to live in constant fear of what will happen if they get sick. America is the only first world country that does not offer it's middle class, who pays astronomical taxes, who pays more in taxes than the billionaires... it does not offer its middle class guaranteed health insurance.

We need to bring back Reagan tax rates**. Middle Class people need to start paying less and the billionaires who have robbed the middle class and rigged our political system need to start paying more."


**Just call it that, I have no idea what those tax rates were, just call whatever new rates you want the "Reagan Tax Rates".


Just nominate me in 2020.

Yeah I don't see those as mutually exclusive at all. Centrist Democrats failed the country in the worst way on the biggest stage and they all need to spend the rest of their lives in monasteries atoning for that, but Jacobin writers who think that the white working class is just gonna totes forget about their racism phase if we pitch them on price supports for prescription drugs are living in a ****ing dream world.

There is an enemy, and it must be confronted honestly to be defeated.

Still won't work because WE DON'T WANT NO SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!

BTW not to toot my own horn but that thing where centrist Dems fall head over heels in love with every anti-Russian conspiracy theorist crank, no matter if they are left or right wing, credible or not, sane or not,


who could've seen this coming except everyone who knew who Louise Mensch was before November.

Be very sceptical when reading anything from Louise Densch - she's a simplistic fool.

On the one hand we have the leadership of the Democratic Party. On the other hand it's what some BernieBro said on Facebook. Even Noam Chomsky said to vote for Hillary, let alone Bernie. You are castigating the writers of Jacobin Magazine, a media source that less than 1% of America has ever heard of. (I know you didn't literally limit it to that magazine, but all the fellow travelers put together don't amount a voting bloc.)

The gormless kumbayah crowd would have put a Democrat in the White House like they did with Barack "Hope" Obama.

Sorry you got butthurt over me pointing out frothy hyperbole, but the real reason I did it was so I can make food desert jokes and you can't call me a racist. USA #1.

I just explained why this sort of thinking is losing the Democrats elections over and over at every level and yet you repeat it! And you do so without any supporting evidence, like it's some kind of objective observation that "the country" is really against UHC.

I strongly agree with this.

But this seems really speculative to me.

Not that speculative. We have pre and post Comey poll numbers. She was easily dominating and fell off a cliff.

I thought she was comfortably leading in the polls right up until Election Day, despite the Comey nothingburger. Or are you considering the election results the final poll.

I have seen in multiple places that a) polls were all tightening leading into election day and b) there was a significant drop in support post-Comey; I think specifically among moderate suburban women or a similar demographic.

She was leading the whole way in the polls, but they still dipped post Comey. After checking, the dip in the averages was less than I remember it, but still enough to have tipped the election. Trump gained a point nationally and HRC lost one.

Change each state -1 Trump and +1 HRC, and Clinton wins Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and even Florida.

This is horrible logic.

1) Regardless of the swing, she was still leading going into the election. Even assuming polls are good predictors of election day voting behavior (which isn't necessarily a safe assumption), that's actually a fairly minor change.

2) There's no way of knowing what caused the change in the polls. It could have been people reading about the Comey letter; it could have been random noise caused by differences in who got called by pollsters.

3) Why do you think Comey-letter vote-switchers were particularly likely to be concentrated in the swing states you mentioned?

4) Regardless of the cause of the change in polls, why do you think the people responsible for the 1% change in both directions were likely to effect the region you mentioned?

In other words, this seems to be ruling out the possibility that the polls were inaccurate all along as a result of sampling error, outdated methods of data collection, and plain-old faulty model construction on the part of pundits.

Blaming the election on the Comey thing kind of overlooks the fact that the election should never have been close enough in the first place for some fake-newsy scandal to push Trump to victory. I mean, maybe that gave Trump a 1% boost, but how in **** were the Dems within a percentage point running against Donald ****ing Trump?

Holy **** dude, tldr. I didnt say QED Comey did it. I'm not ruling out ****. The election was super close. The polls suggest a small shift in public opinion toward Trump post Comey. Idk for sure if it was Comey that caused the shift, but considering the same kinds of shifts occured against Clinton after RNC, toward Clinton after DNC, against Clinton after illness and "deplorables," toward Clinton after the first debate and Trump's Machado meltdown, toward Clinton again after Access Hollywood, I think it's fair to say that the news cycle has an effect on the polls.

The +1 -1 shift is nationally. I don't have to prove that anything was concentrated in the states I mentioned. If the shift were distributed equally across all states, it would have been enough. In fact less than that would have been enough. But in any case Clinton outperformed her state polls in some places, underperformed in the states I mentioned. So it doesn't seem crazy (again not saying it's proof!) that at least that shift was in place.

Some analysis on the Comey conundrum:

How Much Did Comey Hurt Clinton’s Chances?
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ntons-chances/