I ninja edited because the question didn't make sense in light of what you posted

Could you elaborate on what was so great about Warren's approach and contrast that to Bernie's approach?

I think Warren understood the consequences of a Hillary presidency to advance the progressive agenda and campaigned vigorously and genuinely for her, even after she was not the VP pick.
While Bernie also campaigned, it was harder for him, because of all the months he spent implying Hillary was a corrupt politician unqualified to be president (like Trump) and complaining about a rigged system (like Trump) when he just lost because Hillary got most votes (like with Trump, no EC to save the day for Bernie).
We'll never know the impact of those months after it was clear Bernie had no chance to win the nomination. They (Bernie and his campaign) continued to double down on innuendo about Hillary corruption, and conspiracy theories about the nomination being stolen from Bernie.
The margins on some states were pretty small and I think it was significant for all those non-voters and young people who decided Johnson or Trump aligned more with Bernie than Hillary (sigh).

Really? Because what I remember is Bernie going on stage at the convention, right after the emails came out showing coordination between the DNC and Hillary's campaign, and giving a sincere speech supporting Hillary and telling everyone to vote for her.

Guy lost 1/3 (completely unscientific number) of his own support to say those pro-Hillary things too. "Grow a spine" and all that.

Bernie is a pragmatist.

She was a full professor at Harvard....he ran on stuff that every bipartisan (and many left wing) groups said was nonsense.

I think people were talking about the first group prior to the election because it makes a more compelling narrative. We're talking about the second group post election because they're the ones who bother to vote.

That's the theory behind the Warren and Sanders "willingness" to work with Trump. When he releases his infrastructure bill with all tax breaks then they'll say say it was a betrayal of the American worker, if they pressure him to make it spending then he'll tick off the Conservative wing of the party and liberals will get the infrastructure spending they wanted. On the other hand the danger is either they're really going to work with Donald regardless of the tax cuts and the normalize Trump's white supremacy.

It sucks, but I think the people that decided this election don't give a damn about modern-day white supremacy. It should still obviously be pointed out, but imo it will take some really, really heinous **** that hopefully won't happen to get swing-voters to care enough about that to cut through the Republican/Trump propaganda.

Restricting voting rights; continuing to let police get away with anything other than outright, indisputable murder; deporting more illegals that have established a life here and even harassing those here legally; torturing suspected terrorists and treating their communities/families as guilty by association, etc..... all can be forgiven for security and prosperity.

More along the lines of white supremacy as an epistemological issue as in both Republicans and Democrats agree to tactfully ignore minority issues. You see a bit of this with Conservative intellectuals chiding Democrats over focusing on "identity politics" instead of "universal" ( their code for of primarily white) politics. So not so much that Republicans get away with voter suppression while in power but that Dems quietly drop focusing on black lives matter etc in favor of politics revolving around an implied white working man. That's the fear of course.

Agree one hundred percent with your long post earlier itt. If we're going to worship at the altar of GDP then let's just get on with liquidating what remains of labor in this country and call it a day.

The Warren stuff you highlighted reveals something important. People can argue all they want how much better neoliberal policies have made people's lives, but what has gotten better and what has gotten worse gets glossed over. Having an amazing smart phone in your pocket and a huge 4K tv is definitely fun and for sure cheaper due to trade, but at the end of the day those are merely trinkets that are antithetical to building wealth.

Meanwhile, the actual things that people need to get by in their day to day like food, housing and health care are exploding in cost.

And at the same time that we extoll the virtues of unfettered trade, we ignore the fact that our rules at home greatly value capital at expense of labor. The mortgage expense deduction benefits the wealthy far more than the middle class or poor. Compare the tax treatment of someone who inherits wealth and primarily pays long term capital gains versus someone who is self employed and is reliant upon their labor. Where's their equivalent of the section 1031 exchange or stepped up basis?

Our economy is, without hyperbole, literally rigged to favor existing capital at the expense of labor. It's a command economy in all but name. But dare have the temerity to suggest an alternative and you're basically a troglodyte who doesn't understand how vitally important it is that people be able to spend their vanishing discretionary cash on cheap bull****.

I think it runs way deeper than Occupy Wall Street. It's the graphs of worker productivity and income growth of the 1% vs. the bottom 90% or whatever. It's knowing almost every politician has been getting tons of money from lobbyists and is not acting in the interest of the voters. You don't have to be an activist to see those things and have it impact your support of a candidate.

Time will tell, but I think the political elites are going to have to make some concessions to these voters to keep getting their support going forward.

I mean, Sanders is willing to work with Trump on economic stuff as others have pointed out. The two of them use different rhetoric and have some different ideas, but both speak in whatever terms to the rigged economic system/government systems that are unfair to like 90% of the country.

I agree things are not going to be good. They're terrifying. Globally, we're much less stable now. Domestically, at best, lots of rights will be infringed upon. At worst, I don't want to think about it right now. Also, staples of our democracy could be threatened - free speech, freedom to assemble and freedom of the press chief among them.

I agree there are a lot of people who voted for him that didn't understand what he'd do, and totally misconstrued what it would mean for them. At the end of the day, they exist and they vote, so we can try to pull them toward sanity or we can give up.

You can try to move to Canada, which is pretty damn hard, or you can fight. I called my senators and representatives yesterday, and I'm going to keep doing it. I'm calling out everyone who spouts bull**** whenever I hear it, and I'm going to keep doing it. I'm prepared to step up and fight for someone if their rights are threatened in any way in front of me, and I'm prepared to protest for any group that has its rights infringed upon.

Hopefully, it never comes to any of that, but if it does, I'm prepared and I've thought about how far I'm willing to go. If you're cool with living with all the bad things you're worried about and hoping for the best, then I guess just give up and see what happens. Otherwise, do some thinking and decide what you're prepared to stand for and how.

I know it's hard for you to follow a conversation longer than one sentence, max. Sometimes it's better to just let the grownups talk.

Your chronology is off, Warren didn't back Hil until right before the convention.

My name keeps coming up in a lot of posts that seem to be filled with a bunch of premises about what I'm arguing that aren't accurate. That's probably on me but I'm not sure how to respond to this other than to say "Dem voters are reasonably and predictably" hasn't really been underlying everything I've written over say the past two weeks or so.

Besides, if democratic voters were 'reasonable and predictable' instead of 5 yr olds, we wouldn't be in this mess.

"Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line."

Here again I feel like I've probably been misunderstood:

1) should Democrats do more for the middle class? The ACTUAL middle class? Sure. Should they even like gear some of their rhetoric to specifically appeal or at least not frighten middle class whites? Maybe? I'm skeptical there's much of a path for them there and I've expressed that. I've expressed skepticism the idea of a wide swath of convertible, persuadable middle class whites exist (the Obama --> Trump voters). But I would not argue Democrats should consciously abandon them, just that I suspect they are quite hard to reach.
2) my "**** them, they're fine" attitude is decidedly not like, everyone making 60k and above is totally solid and they have no genuine problems. My point is that the post-hoc rationalization that the majority, maybe the vast majority of Trump voters are truly economically insecure is not reinforced by the data and it's almost entirely contradicted by really listening to them. The point is that vague hand-waving notions to their collective economic insecurity is the most self-serving rationalization available.

Basically, glibly: You've got a base of Trump voters who by and large seem generally well-off, very white, and when you talk to them about politics, it's a bunch of inchoate rage about white cultural grievances, immigration, refugees, whatever. After the election suddenly we seem to be pretending they're all blue collar construction workers anxious about the availability of factory work. It's fundamentally not honest. I do think it could also lead to bad long term strategies but the core point for today is that it seems like a pretty simple fairy tale of flattery to let what is mostly a movement of generally well-off and above white voters who voted for a campaign and a candidate noted almost singularly for white resentment to pretend after the fact that they're all hard-hat wearing racial egalitarians who just needed to hear more empathy from Clinton and they'd have stopped yelling LOCK UP THAT ****, they swear, just one nice word from Clinton in their direction they insist. They didn't get it, so the con man promising the wall got their vote they guess.

Let's not let that lie develop. It's not "**** genuinely economically anxious white voters," it's "**** those white voters and their allies for perpetuating a lie they are actually economically anxious when they are actually just flat out angry deplorables."

I also agree that the idea that the "majority" of Trump voters made their decision based on their own economic security is bull****. But if there's enough of them - and it doesn't have to be a huge number - for which that's true, who really do think the Democrats abandoned them and are happy Trump at least talked like he cares about them and are deplorable enough to vote for Trump despite the racism but not so deplorable that they voted for him because of the racism - those voters, however many of them there are, do seem winnable.

$60k is actually a lot of money for a white family of four in my experience. The problem is they're just bad with money. So yeah, "**** them" is the correct attitude.

I mean we're finding a dead body full of bullets every 30 hours in my city so it's kinda hard to give a **** if people making 60k can afford Christmas decorations.

The right leaning posters have made it clear that we need to coddle these people. This leads me to believe we need to do the opposite. We need to help them understand that they're racist if they don't put the needs of minorities ahead of their own wants.

Yeah, it really seems like people are forcing the facts to fit the narrative: Hillbilly Elegy comes out, the election happens, and then beard-stroking liberals tell ourselves that we really should have paid more attention to that out-of-work poor rural voter. Which is a cool story until the data comes in and it turns out those Trump voters are largely making comfortable middle-class salaries and seem to be actively interested in making life harder for the lucky-ducky unemployed people on the bottom.

Also, as a cautionary tale, let's remember that when the Dem frontrunners were guys with humble rural backgrounds, they were pretty mercilessly mocked for it by Republicans. Like, I'm old enough to remember how Bill Clinton was that no-class Bubba son of a car salesman who ate Big Macs and Carter was derided as a dumbass hillbilly peanut farmer. I agree that connecting with rural areas is a great idea, but let's be prepared because if the Dems find a guy from small-town Wisconsin with real working-class mannerisms the Republican party will do a sharp 180 and tell us he doesn't have the class or gravitas needed for the executive office.

LOL

Enjoy never winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan ever again.

Of course they are winnable. Michigan, Wisconsin, and PA were reliably blue for a long time. And the Dem Ohio vote was 2.8 million in 2012, and 2.3 million in 2016. Their lives did not in fact get better in the last 8 years.

Parading a Wall Street candidate that told them she would put coal miners out of business and "retrain" the rest lost her a million votes in those states.

I was wrong when I said Clinton's deep unfavourableness would be the reason why she gets less votes than 2012 Obama. The answer was she offered nothing to rust belt states message wise.

Bernie would have won those states hands down (but I don't want to say he deserved it over her). But thats where the new battle ground of 2020 will be.

Umm...I'm definitely a lefty, but wtf at thinking 60k is a lot of money for a family of four. It's certainly livable, assuming they have done right financially, but this family is a poor financial decision or serious medical problem away from being ****ed.

- I honestly believe its a losing strategy. Demonizing Trump was a completely failed strategy electorally. Parades of women came out against Trump and he still got 43% of the female vote. Even got 53% of the white female vote. He ranted and raved about a wall with Mexico and still got more % of latino vote than Romney. Calling him a racist for 18 months and he only widened his white voter lead. Double down next 4 years?

- This strategy worked for a popular vote election, but electorally, Michigan, Wisconsin, PA, and Ohio simply don't give a damn about it. If Trump renegotiates trade deals, does his infrastructure spending on the rust belt, and repackages an amended Obamacare, he may lock those states down in 2020.

That white male that voted Obama in those rust belt states simply stayed home in 2016 because their life didn't get better. I'm not saying this trying to blame Obama in any way. I truly believe Obama did try his hardest to help everybody and some of those voters really are too hard to reach. But the difference between Clinton and Obama in the eyes of the rust belt states was just too large, she had 1 million votes less than Obama in the 3 Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan.

Even if those states are beyond "bringing back" due to the nature of the new economic landscape, ignoring them will hand another loss in 2020 to either party. If Stephen Bannon is going to do what he says he will do, meaning throw a trillion dollars in infrastructure and gear it towards those states.... Even if that money doesn't achieve much, that may be the strategy to park their asses on those states and lock it down for 2020.

For starters, isn't that 60k pre-tax? There's ~20k right off the top.