Yeah, it's all the fault of the voters and not two of the most abysmal candidates in history running shitty campaigns. It's also not the fault of a system basically designed to disenfranchise voters at every given opportunity.

Yep, totally just the fault of the individual and not the abhorrent system.

Also: what in the hell did the neoliberal Democrats hope to gain from the pressure to encourage Hamilton electors? Open warfare from the crazy militant right?

Whoa, whoa, suggesting Trump was one iota worse than Clinton? That'll get you declared a neoliberal establishment wall street Killary shill, there, buddy.

the individual are at fault. The Dems didn't vote in the states that mattered, if they had, they would have won. Stop deflecting.

Absolutely. Democrats need to be INSPIRED to vote, and that's why they lose. Take it from a Mondale-Dukakis-Kerry voter.

>>>Whoa, whoa, suggesting Trump was one iota worse than Clinton?

I think this was a case where the most qualified candidate of my lifetime was defeated by the least qualified candidate of my lifetime.

Obama, 2012: 65,915,795 (won by 4,982,291 votes)
Clinton, 2016: 65,844,610 (won by 2,864,974 votes)

Clearly the blame for Trump's victory falls entirely, exclusively on the shoulders of Democratic swing state voters. The electoral system itself is working just fine and certainly had nothing to do with it.



Democratic voters were especially lazy and shiftless in North Carolina:

"Election boards in 23 of the state’s 100 counties have now reduced early voting hours, in some cases to a small fraction of what they were in the 2012 presidential election, according to an analysis by The Raleigh News & Observer. Boards in nine counties voted to eliminate Sunday voting. Both early voting and Sunday voting are used disproportionately by black voters.

While boards in 70 counties voted to expand the number of early-voting hours, the counties that moved to cut hours back account for half of the state’s registered voters. In heavily Democratic Mecklenburg County — the state’s largest, with about one million residents — Republican board members voted to eliminate 238 early-voting hours despite near-unanimous appeals from the public to add more. In 2012, African-Americans in Mecklenburg used early voting at a far higher rate than whites."

Source (with citations): http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/opinion/voter-suppression-in-nor th-carolina.html?_r=0



Oh yeah, this is 100% democratic voters' fault to. Big time:

"Instead of expanding the electorate, [campaign chairman Steve] Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans."

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trum p-bunker-with-12-days-to-go




It's also worth nothing that, at least according to the compiled statistics in the spreadsheet below, the margin of victory for Clinton in NON swing states was slightly higher than Obama, it was only in the 13 swing states (where Trump won by 816,128 total across all 13 of them) where the Democratic margin dropped. Surely the massive GOP-entrenchment project in those states, especially the rust belt ones, during the 2012/13 redistricting, and the well documented voter suppression efforts in those states by the GOP this year had nothing to do with that 1.8% dip that lost Clinton victory in the electoral college.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns 073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?sle=true

The above took about 5 minutes to compile from the top half dozen hits on two Google searches. It's not that hard to fact check. Just because cable news doesn't do it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

"Surely the massive GOP-entrenchment project in those states, especially the rust belt ones, during the 2012/13 redistricting"


I meant 2010/11 resdistricting, of course.

Stars for OZ.

It's misleading listing the vote total (more voters in 2016) and not the percentages.

Obama Romney Other/none
51.1% 47.2% 1.7%

Hillary Trump Other/none
48.0% 46.0% 6%


Trump only lost 1% over Romney but Hillary lost 3% and independents gained 4%.

It's pretty obvious what happened. Protest voters, people leaving the president spot blank, libertarians, Jill Stein voters, and Berniebusters absolutely deserve blame.

The people who think paid Goldman Sachs speeches are more corrupt than appointing Goldman Sachs to the cabinet, the people who preached that Hillary would have caused WWIII over Syria, all deserve punches. Actual adults are going to spend the next decade or more fixing the upcoming damage, and a lot of people are going to suffer and die in the meantime.

Nominal gets it.

In other news, Trump just tweeted:

"The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes"

Still, it was totally worth putting this lunatic into power because Hillary didn't promise single payer, amirite?

I repeat, there's a very real chance we're going to be saying: "if only we'd stopped this guy when we had a chance". Except too many of you fuckheads didn't feel it was important to stop Trump before the election. Fucking mongs.

Wisconsin also massively cut early voting and extended voting hours. The GOP *deliberately* did so to curtail the voting rights of minority and poor voters.

>>>Clearly the blame for Trump's victory falls entirely, exclusively on the shoulders of Democratic swing state voters. The electoral system itself is working just fine and certainly had nothing to do with it.

I blame the Trump voters.

What is this ridiculous compulsion people have to isolate the one single factor that led to Trump's victory? There's no such thing.

Is Trump a fascist? The only honest answer is WE DON'T KNOW. He has no track record. This is his first elected office.

He certainly has some fascist impulses. The most terrifying episode was his insistence that it would be perfectly constitutional for him to simply jail Hillary Clinton on assuming power.

One thing is clear. He could be Mussolini , and it wouldn't have cost him all that many votes.

Oh fuck that. Event Horizon has zero interdimensional BSDM.

two words, mister; blood, orgy.

You should stop throwing the word "fascists" around like you know what it means. You're really devaluing the term by doing so.

By his own speech and mannerisms, trump fits the definition of a fascist.

He knows everything (very smart, the smartest)

His opponents know nothing (the dumbest opponents ever)


He has the solutions to your problem. (the best solutions)

Opponents cause the problem


The law doesn't really apply to him because his voters knew he was a rich dick and still elected him.


His many, many, wonderful scapegoats. the best scapegoats.

Trump is a fascist, straight up. His whole campaign was nothing but fascism. The world is dangerous only I can keep you safe. Outsiders are ruining our society, look how big and strong I am. It was fascism. Dairyqueen, it is you who needs to learn the definition of fascism. You devalue that word when you say he isn't one.

There's a lot that goes into fascism: a belief that society has fallen and needs to be returned to an old ideal, devotion to a party and/or leader, militarism, curtailing of civil rights, scapegoating of "impure" elements, corporatism (the real kind not the kind that dumb-dumbs have been talking about in recent years), snazzy uniforms.

Trump's got some of that -- and having the support of Neo-Nazis certainly doesn't hurt the case for fascism -- but for my tastes, he's too much the crony capitalist and too little the militarist to be a fascist. What he will be, almost certainly, is a terrible president who has no perspective or sense of balance, and if the country is still here after he's out of office, whoever succeeds him will have an even bigger mess to clean up than Obama did.

Still, at least we won't have to deal with that shrill off-putting woman: too brainy for her own good and not in a "mousy librarian" way.

look at the military dudes he's putting in his cabinet. Only a militarist would put folks like James Mattis and Mike Flynn up in there.

I could be wrong, but I don't get the feeling Trump aspires to be a war president; he mostly wants to be surrounded by macho men.

There's also his campaign pledges to "rebuild our military". Anyone who thinks our military needs rebuilding is either an idiot or a militarist.

I totally see him as a war president. He's reactionary, his base is reactionary. Just the right provocation and he'd flex our nation's military might. I understand he's also said isolationist things here and there, but there's plenty of stuff out there that he and his base would love to blow up.

It sort of amazes me how anyone could ever think that getting enough faithless electors is something that ever had a chance of happening, or that if it were it would be a good idea or could result in the outcome you wanted.

Any scenario in which Trump would have lost his 270 STILL ENDS with him in office, btw.

Faithless electors in these states can't be counted, by law:

Minnesota
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
North Carolina
Oklahoma

Breaking your pledge in these states is crime that comes with a fine or possible jail time:

New Mexico
South Carolina
Washington

Breaking your pledge in these states counts, but is against the law with no prescribed penalty (it's a safe bet at least some would think up a penalty if there were mass defections):

Maine
Vermont
Massachusetts
Connecticut
Delaware
Maryland
DC
Virginia
Alabama
Mississippi
Florida
Ohio
Michigan
Wisconsin
Wyoming
Colorado
Utah
Oregon
California
Alaska
Hawaii


I have found myself increasingly irritated at the behavior of democrats since the election.

We lost. Breaking the law is NOT how you want to win. California and New York don't get to team up and decide who governs the rest of the country, NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU WANT THEM TO, and that's how it should be. The college only coincidentally protects the interests of racists while serving the useful function of protecting farmers and what little production force is left from trust fund babies and twenty-somethings who do graphic design and acting on the side. And stop responding to this by claiming the college was devised to protect slave owners. It was a good idea implemented for bad reasons that we eventually grew out of anyway... just like planned parenthood and the democratic party.

Curing a headache by blowing your head off technically works, I suppose, but it's hard to appreciate being headache-free when your head is missing.

Speaking for myself, I hoped for some Faithless Electing (as unlikely as it was) not because I am a Hillary supporter, but because I am an American citizen. In Trump I see real potential to cause harm that this country, species, and world cannot recover from. With Trump I see people saying in a few years, "if only we'd stopped him before it was too late".

I would not have made that argument for Romney or McCain, nor did I make the argument for Dubya. Yeah their politics are terrible, but even Dubya observed some few norms of behavior. After 9/11, Bush didn't immediately start issuing commands to attack the parties he was angry at. I see Trump doing exactly that, and over a lot less.

"Electoral College, staffed with true patriots, overcomes popular opposition and performs it's duty to ensure rural, landowning racists are disproportionately represented in the election process."

Fixed that for you.

Bort, you know crony capitalism is absolutely at the core of fascism (which is at its base the merging of government and corporations). If anything, neoliberal economics are closer to fascism than the GOP's brand of crony capitalism, since they are bigger on things like corporate bailouts. The GOP, on the other hand, tend to just straight up privatize and sell off entire chunks of government infrastructure, which is undoubtedly worse but also almost 180 degrees away from fascist economics.


In terms of militant nationalism the GOP wins, although the Clinton campaign certainly gave them a run for their money on that front this year. The whole week long paean to American Exceptionalism, militarism and expansionist foreign policy that was the DNC convention still makes my skin crawl.


Which again, isn't to say that the Trump white house won't be immeasurably worse than a Clinton white house, just that the Clinton campaign really went out of their way to consistently paint her as the second coming of Reagan, back from the grave to double down on militant expansionism abroad, and that really didn't help them.



In a nutshell:

Clinton presidency = being diagnosed with an incurable degenerative condition and managing the symptoms while you continue living as normal a life as you can and try to hold out in the hope that a cure will be discovered in time, because research is advancing every day and a breakthrough seems imminent.

Trump presidency = getting clipped by a garbage truck while you're riding your bike on a rural stretch of highway, and lying paralyzed under a bush just off of the soft shoulder as you slowly die of dehydration, exposure and internal bleeding over the course of a week, all the while listening to the traffic go by just out of sight and knowing there is virtually no chance anyone will find you in time to even find out if you could have had a chance.

Neither of them is a situation anyone would want to be in but one of them is clearly worse than the other.

"California and New York don't get to team up and decide who governs the rest of the country, NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU WANT THEM TO"

No shit, that's the job of Florida And Texas.

"Bort
Speaking for myself, I hoped for some Faithless Electing (as unlikely as it was).... etc."

100% with you on all of this post though.

"Curing a headache by blowing your head off technically works, I suppose, but it's hard to appreciate being headache-free when your head is missing."


Amputating a limb to stop the spread of gangrene is a better metaphor here.

"Bort, you know crony capitalism is absolutely at the core of fascism (which is at its base the merging of government and corporations)."

Merging, yes, but the power relationship is reversed. Fascists and corporatists (by the real definition of the term) put the government at the top, and business obeys the dictates of the government. Crony capitalists and corporatists (by the dumb-dumb definition coined by people who had no idea the word already had a meaning) buy out the government and thus dictate policies favorable to them.

Real world example: on "Hogan's Heroes", in civilian life, Sgt Schultz was the owner of the world-famous Schatzi Toy Company. But when the Nazis took over, they demanded that the toy factory be repurposed to the manufacture of ball bearings. That is fascism, or generally corporatism, where the nation is viewed like a body and the government orchestrates the functioning of its "organs" for the good of the whole. If crony capitalists and dumb-dumb style corporatists had been in charge of Germany, Hans Schultz would have bought out the Reichstag and the Wehrmacht would have blown its budget buying toys.

Wait, what? The electoral college system is great because graphic designers?

bluh?

It's a jab at city folk.

You see, I'm saying city people are dopes with their heads up their asses that know literally nothing about life outside of their carefully curated environments and do makework for more pay than the people with the totally-not-important jobs of feeding everyone, building everything, and getting stuff around.

Protecting the interests of the second group from the interests of the first group isn't some travesty whether they're racists or not racists.

you're so fucking dumb it's amazing.

you really swallow that pig jizz about the coasts not building/growing/making anything while the middle of the country is some budweiser/ford commercial made real?

Implying they started out not embarrassing.

There were only 5 when I posted that!

Overall I like your comment, but I really think Trump may leave a longer mark than Obama, and that his mark may be bloodier.

Oh well, lets go watch some TV!

Trump may be more vulnerable than he seems. Now that Hillary has been defeated, I'm willing to bet that already a large plurality of congressional Republicans would rather see Pence as President. Trump's skeletons haven't been aired the way Clinton's were, because no one took him seriously as a candidate. Expect a whole lot of scandals to be coming out very quickly. Republican leaders are already insisting on an investigation into the election hack, and the base, who were willing to poo-poo the idea that Russia tried to influence the election in Trump's favor might see it differently when Trump is seen to be sucking up to Putin.

Plus, he's incompetent. He's going to screw the pooch. He's already managed to alienate the intelligence community, and he hasn't even taken office.

Pence is already president, Trump is a figurehead. Pence is probably more dangerous in a lot of ways, too, but at least he's comparatively predictable and sane. I would much rather seen him as the actual sitting president than as the behind-the-scenes president. At least he would be a bit accountable.

Does everybody know the story of when Trump went to DC to reassure republican congressional leaders, and he pledged to defend the 12th article of the constitution (there's no such thing)?

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/07/07/donald-trumps-pledge- to-defend-article-xii-of-constitution-raises-eyebrows/

This.

The house is likely a lost cause unless the redistricting in 2020 undoes some of the damage of the 2010 one, but it's the best chance right now.

I still say a 41% turnout rate (2010) or a 37% turnout rate (2014) has no business complaining. Gripe about the Democrats' imperfect politicking all you like, but ultimately the people who are in charge of hiring and firing are We The People, and nobody fails at their job worse than we do collectively.

Not to mention that the abysmally low turnout of your typical Bernie supporter for presidential elections is even lower during midterms and local elections, which is how we get the redistricting and Republican election boards in the first place.

I will absolutely never stop mocking Berniebusters. It was idiotic supporting him when it was obvious he was the inverse opposite of pragmatists like Barney Frank who actually got shit done ("Screw who has a record of passing the type of things I want, I only care about a candidate who can have the most satisfying tantrum while espousing the things I want!"), and it was exponentially more retarded to not support the Democratic candidate after he lost the primaries (in every single category of vote).

I just heard on NPR about how there are a couple labor suits that need to be brought before the NLRB, involving Trump labor violations. So Trump will be in a position to appoint the people who adjudicate these suits.

Boy, it sure helps labor a TON that Beelzebitch didn't get into power, doesn't it?

>>>I will absolutely never stop mocking Berniebusters. It was idiotic supporting him when it was obvious he was the inverse opposite of pragmatists like Barney Frank who actually got shit done ("Screw who has a record of passing the type of things I want, I only care about a candidate who can have the most satisfying tantrum while espousing the things I want!"),

I don't blame anyone for supporting Bernie during the primary, but like I always say, if Bernie had won the nomination, I'd have been all in for Bernie. That's what I expected from the Bernie Babies.

And I don't care about the Democratic establishment favoring Hillary. Bernie Sanders was a 74 year old man who became a Democrat at the age of 73. He wasn't entitled to a level playing field.

"I came for the blood orgy and all I got was this lousy spike and maggots through my mouth"