I agree with this totally.

Also, I find it strange that people are mocking her for mentioning a lot of things that combined to help cost her the presidency (a couple of which, sadly, probably should have caused her to reconsider her decision to run in the first place). But hell, it was a close election; of course there were a lot of things that worked against her. She's not different than anyone else for wanting to lay them all out there. It's not passing the buck. And if you're not interested in reading it (I'm certainly not; at least not for a while), then like Fly said, ignore it. But it's weird to have a strong opinion about it, imo.

Even her own voters dislike/distrust her, lol.

This is good

https://www.theringer.com/2017/9/14/...-sanders-trump

Doesn't matter because in order to go against Trump he'd have to win the primary, and he lost to Hillary pretty comprehensively.

This whole notion of 'the Dems should've put up a better primary field' is nonsense by the way. Once HRC announced she was running none of the other people who could've challenged her stepped up, mostly because they didn't think they could win. And if they had challenged her and lost, while she then won the Presidency, they'd have damaged themselves politically going forward.

Trump's victory needed a perfect storm of happenstance, and as it went down that's what happened. From a weak primary field in the GOP, a favorable media, a damaged candidate on the Dem side, Russians all over social media influencing voters, and then culminating in the Comey email story with ten days to go, everything broke perfectly for Trump. Plus throw in a gong show of an electoral system that lets the losing candidate take the office and here we are.

And now with every press conference and interview he's proving again how royally f**ked the country is as a result.

Here’s an analogy you might understand: you could either have an unstable moron who thinks climate change is a hoax in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal or you could have a competent person. Like what about the current situation makes you think you were right? Even a not-very good Hillary would have been light years better than what’s happening now.

At the risk of continuing this never-ending topic (maybe there should be a separate thread for this ), this is the nub of the matter.

The absolute worst version of Hillary would have made a far better president than the "average" version of Trump.

The fact that Actual Trump was in reality also the worst version of Trump (like most of us presumed all along), makes it all the more infuriating.

I don't think any complex analogies are necessary. He claimed HRC was a horrible candidate than Trump, yet she somehow still got 3m more votes than he did.

Which by any reasonable logic makes his horribleness greater than hers, but in D10 land somehow it doesn't work that way. I guess there's like there's an electoral college out there for being vile or something.

Hillary didn't defeat Bernie honestly. Bernie was at a huge disadvantage due to super delegates. Dems should scrap the whole super delegate thing. You get unlikable candidates like Hillary. She almost did the same thing to Obama in 2008

You scrap superdelegates and you get primaries like the gop. No thanks. the reason why superdelegates didn't consider switching to bernie is because he wasn't a democrat until this one moment in time. like, if he wasn't a progressive, it would be like an extinct but moderate republican/independent switching parties to get access to the dnc piggybank for the general. stop pretending that those who worked at the dnc and generally liked Hilary since they worked with her for 30 years should have stopped supporting her.

we also now know that even if bernie was a good progressive candidate, a lot of his mainstream and social media coverage was driven by the same troll farms and fake news but under far-left headlines. we all consumed it for awhile before it was apparent what was going on.

1. Lol, Hillary got more regular delegates than Bernie.

2. Lol, it isn't dishonest to play by the rules as stated at the start of the game.

I'm not hanging my hat on anything. Clarify your position if you want to make a point. You started with an analogy that conveniently eliminated everything that gives value to abstaining from a vote, then acknowledged that yes, if your proposed scenario was more like an actual US election there's a logical connection between abstaining leading to better candidates, then turned back around by asserting your underpants gnome theory again (a South Park reference that ridicules the lack of a connection between initial steps and the desired result), now you're claiming to "concede the concept of a protest vote" again but doubling down on the validity of your nails vs goat meat decision, which again, is a scenario that strips a protest vote of all value. You either don't understand why this is a problem or you're arguing in bad faith, either case makes answering your questions a pointless exercise. Once we're on the same page regarding the theoretical value and mechanics of withholding a vote I'd be happy to discuss where the practical limits of that strategy are.

Also, at a minimum, I've already posted some insight into how I would respond to your questions so it's not like I'm ducking them because I'm afraid to answer.

Yes. I also never advocated voting for an idiotic third party candidate. If we're in agreement here I don't see what there is to lol about.

This is false: "Plenty of posters in here have already identified the key to winning campaigns. Don't waste time trying to flip your opponent's votes, work on getting out your own voters. The more that becomes true, the more candidates we'll see who want to work for the average citizen."

If you'll get out to vote for the least ****ty candidate, nobody is going to put any effort into getting your vote. You are not the key to any election strategy. I am, and people like me. 2p2 knows this, campaign strategists probably know it too.

I don't need to. My personal policy preferences are irrelevant.

Also irrelevant.

You completely miss the point. It's YOU who facilitated the election of Trump.

Do keep trying to convert republicans but don't do it by being centrist. Do it by good radical policies that seriously address the real problems on health, economy, guns etc. Some will vote in their self-interest above partisan lines.

By "convert" I just meant to have them change party affiliation and I meant that more by catering to their conservatism than by convincing them to be more radical.

So who is the intended recipient of your "don't vote" message? Potential candidates? the national parties? Who? And what makes you think that they will interpret your decision not to vote as a demand for a particular type of candidate? And even if they did, how would they know what type of candidate you believe would be "better"? At the very best, the message you send when you don't vote is: "I don't like Candidate X or or Candidate Y". You provide absolutely no information about what sort of candidate you do want.


Why is this irrelevant? If better candidates are out there, shouldn't we discuss who they are, why they are better, and why they didn't run? Because if they aren't out there, or they don't want to run for president for whatever reason, then your attempt to send a message serves no purpose.

If you can't admit that the short term consequence of having Trump as president is a concrete downside of your "don't vote" strategy, then you are hopeless.

I feel a simpler question for the D10's of the world is also the WHY of HRC being this horrible candidate.

Like D10, we get that you didn't really care for her, but can you list the specific policy positions you took issue with? Or failing that can you list the things about her character you didn't care for?

Because I'm willing to wager that you can't, or at least not comprehensively.

Sure ok - the analogy is flawed because there's no mechanism by which abstaining from nails and glass leads to better candidates in the future. So let's change the analogy so that if you abstain, you get a very small chance you get something better than rancid goat vs. nails and glass next time. But you still have to fade a 50/50 shot at nails and glass to get there. Does your choice change?

Now can you answer the question? It's real simple. If Trump was advocating rounding up Muslims into camps, would that be enough to get you to vote HRC?

I've asked the same basic question 3 times and you've ignored it all 3 times.

I'm surprised he hasn't yet. Guess he's waiting for that Muslim terrorist attack to happen so he can use the fear to pass the Muslim ban and start up the internment camps.

It's this:

The Democrats go this centrist route because that's who they are as a party. How long are people in this forum going to wishcast their progressive policy desires on the Democrats before they realize that's not what they're about. Losing the party to progressives is just as bad, if not worse, than losing a few elections to Republicans.

You acknowledge that lack of participation has some kind of political impact. For some of those non-voters that impact is exactly their intent. At the same time you advocate a strategy of casting specific votes in states like NY that were always going to have zero impact on the 2016 election. If you don't believe that's true you either don't understand the political landscape of America or you don't understand the statistics which make that true. As another poster already pointed out there are zero scenarios in which NY is close and Trump hasn't already won in a landslide.

The only argument you have then is that the way a reluctant HRC vote shapes the future political climate is better than the way a non-vote shapes the future political climate. But then it's clearly not about the specific terribleness of Trump anymore. It's about your obsession with forcing everyone to cast a vote no matter what, and even worse, it's about your demands that those votes continue to support the two-party system. Those are political beliefs, not objective facts. It's important for you to understand that you do not have the right to make those demands of anyone, any more than you would have the right to demand someone vote for Democrats over Republicans.

Furthermore, you're wrong. Your belief is exactly what causes what I quoted at the top of this post. As long as the Democrats believe there are enough people like you who will vote for them simply because they're not as bad as Republicans, they're going to keep not giving a **** about what you actually want. The Democratic party doesn't believe the lessons of the 2016 campaign are theirs to learn. They're betting on the voters learning.

Dude, this **** was excised. https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/4...ction-1651612/

Odds Jill Stein is literally a Russian agent instead of just a useful idiot?

You had posts ITT after +rep, Flynn, and others went back and forth on this subject for hours, and you didn't seem to mind. Within 20 minutes of my contribution it needs to be excised. Do you know why that is? It's because you are intellectually dishonest and you struggle with cognitive dissonance. You'll feel better when you accept that I've been right about everything.

What in the living hell are you talking about? The vote abstention stuff was excised by Wookie, to the thread I posted. I posted it so you could just take it there. It will get moved either way.

Lol at any non voters doing it for strategic reasons. The reality is individuals not voting or voting third party while thinking about it is just massive overthinking of the situation and devaluing their actual value in the process.

You are conflating a couple of things here. My issue with third party voting was specifically with this election. It was a unique situation where a third party vote was a huge dereliction of responsibility. Traditionally it is not the same problem. So unless you want to argue Trump was not one of the most abnormal major candidates for President anyone alive has seen i don’t see the problem.

Yes everyone should vote. No not voting is not a strategy. It is just being lazy and irresponsible. Sometimes you have to make decisions in life even when there are not pretty petunia options. If everyone votes than we can really shake things out and see where everyone stands and what direction we really need to go in. This is always the case.

I might overplay third party voting but it was clearly and obviously an awful decision in the 2016 election. It’s not defensible. But it is also not defensible not to vote, and it probably warrants a car battery to the testicles for those who think they are strategically non-voting. People have the freedom to not vote. However that does not not make them unequivocally wrong. It is irresponsible and it is doing a disservice to everyone a person might care about in the country with them.

You can’t avoid responsibility by avoiding making a decision. That is not how the world works.

It's really not that complicated. Everyone I assume has a line where they would abandon their protest vote. I voted Gary Johnson in 2012, Hillary in 2016. Even though my CA vote doesn't really matter except as a protest - for the same reasons batair discussed above - I felt it was important to vote HRC. Trump's open racism and misogyny was enough for me. I was trying to find out where d10's line is, but he refused to answer the question.

There's also a reason to vote 3rd party if you don't think the dems have the right candidate/policies.

It's only because trump is so bad that your strategic reason seems the better one to me. Having a go at people who disagree a bit in the manner rep does is ludicrously bad - people voting for candidates/policies they don't like very much is the reason we get candidates/polices they don't like very much.