dagblog - Comments for "The silent near-majority: If everyone had voted, Hillary Clinton would probably be president"

More than 60% of conservative

artappraiser — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 03:37:24 +0000

In reply to The silent near-majority: If everyone had voted, Hillary Clinton would probably be president

More than 60% of conservative AND liberal registered voters already say they’ve given a lot of thought about the 2020 presidential election.

All signs point to an all-time-high turnout next year.

https://t.co/oBCidNOMtk pic.twitter.com/4MtmMiKr2o
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) July 18, 2019

Idunno, generally the safe

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 16:56:19 +0000

In reply to appearing to be charismatic

Idunno, generally the safe bet gets you within 1-2% of the target - that's often what investors do - isn't that good enough?

appearing to be charismatic

artappraiser — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 16:26:21 +0000

In reply to Carter was hugely charismatic

appearing to be charismatic enough to bet on: Joe, Mayor Pete and Kamala:

Obama and Clinton’s bundlers are betting on these 3 candidates

The biggest fundraisers in the Democratic Party have identified early favorites as the 2020 candidates jockey for resources. @ Politico.com 07/18/2019 05:01 AM EDT

Could be the kiss of death, tho, you never know. The old tyme Hollywood studio system couldn't always pick the big stars either.

Carter was hugely charismatic

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 06:22:00 +0000

In reply to I think the Dems have only

Carter was hugely charismatic, new & fresh, especially for the South, where his base & 13 of his 23 states were. Of course Southern charisma isn't to everyone's style for sure. And he won by 1.7 million votes, which is almost as good as Hillary's 3 million handicapped by Russian intervention [1976's total vote just under 2/3 of 2016's]

Hillary was "charismatic enough". The people who don't think so largely wouldn't have liked Carter either. But her job was not to please all the people - it was to please enough to get elected. And without the Russians, she did exactly that - despite 10 Benghazi hearings or whatever, media bias, her own screwups, inherent sexism.

While it'd be great to have a great charismatic leader, we don't *need* one. John Kerry was just a smidgin away, and arguably could have campaigned much more effectively to get over Swift Boating and his somewhat Lurch appearance. Al Gore could have navigated his post-Clinton transition better, not simply denied his faith in the Internet prosperity he'd helped create and try to out-liberal Bill Bradley, and avoided the theft in Florida - and weathered all the unfair media criticism.

Yes, in the end the media is the Republicans' friend. Bush got a Hail Mary/crooked relief from abandoning Guard duty (though I must say that the cojones to even learn how to fly a jet shouldn't be understated - beats discussing bone spurs and a fake note from the current President's doctor - though it also took major cojones to sail a Swift Boat up the Mekong in wartime). For all the reporting on Trump, they left the impression that Trump Org was some huge enterprise on par with GM or Chase Manhattan, rather than a family daughter-and-pop pyramid scheme, and ignored tax evasion & decades-old evidence of being largely bankrupt until too late, so Trump's "let a businessman run it" scam survived largely intact.

Obama drove his own coverage through the internet - and mainstream media largely didn't have a sound internet presence, more "let's publish our morning paper on the internet too" PC-as-legacy-typewriter approach. [Twitter was founded in Mar 2006, Facebook in Feb 2004, and Obama's campaign helped establish both platforms more than they determined him, or say symbiotic - but by 2016 both had grown up as behemoths (and MySpace was history).

Trump instead hired on a Russian fixer who'd cut his teeth on painting reformer Yulia Tymoshenko as a criminal and defending Russia's bombastic corrupt Ukrainian puppet, using Russian hackers/bots as background support - rather a perfect mockup & staging for our 2016 election. Of course with the NYTimes giving its imprint just days before the election that there was no Russian influence on the Trump campaign, and Comey's waffling about maybe there's fire in all that laptop smoke after all, the deal was signed-sealed-delivered. [still wondering if Jill Stein's recount effort was a trick to prevent a real recount, but doubting we'll ever know]. Like Florida 2000, there won't be an exact repeat, but as we know of 2004 vote malfeasance in Ohio and 2018 vote funniness in Georgia, the future election hacking *will* occur in various forms & guises, including gerrymandering & vote suppression, and these are factors far more important than candidate "charisma".

I think the Dems have only

artappraiser — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 03:48:58 +0000

In reply to There has to be other keys to

I think the Dems have only won the presidency with charismatics since JFK. Lyndon Johnson was the sole exception, being elected after serving as the replacement for a martyred charismatic.The GOP got two mulligans on that with both Bush's. (Ford was not one but he didn't get elected. And like it or not--I don't, don't get it to this day-many found Ronnie the Gipper charismatic.) Some might argue Jimmy Carter was not; I disagree, I think he was considered real fresh, different and exciting when he was running the first time.

The Republicans have been

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 01:43:17 +0000

In reply to I would personally say that

The Republicans have been kicking our ass except for the midterms, and those *usually* go to the party that don't have the White House anyway. Don't see any kind of eloquent lesson in there about participation.

I can't in any way see how

ocean-kat — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 00:13:13 +0000

In reply to I would personally say that

I can't in any way see how anyone pushed aside Yang, Gabbard, or Sanders or anyone like them. I also don't see how the likes of Webb or O'Malley were pushed aside. They simply didn't get enough support from voters to either continue to campaign or to win.

I would personally say that

Orion — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 22:59:08 +0000

In reply to People want their "Woodstock"

I would personally say that pushing aside the like of Yang or Gabbard, or Sanders back in 2016, doesn't help. Those voters will just go somewhere else. Conservatives had events like CPAC where people who as much as despised one another rubbed shoulders. The party with the narrowest window of acceptance will probably lose the most elections. It's also hard to say you're fighting intolerance when you don't tolerate ideological deviation.

Four more years of Trump,

NCD — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:13:02 +0000

In reply to The silent near-majority: If everyone had voted, Hillary Clinton would probably be president

Four more years of Trump, amidst the ensuing, inevitable GOP "long march of government incompetence, very competent looting of the Treasury" economic crash,..... the 2024 turnout will certainly beat that in 2016.

Whether it will make much difference at that point we cannot know.

People want their "Woodstock"

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 08:36:00 +0000

In reply to There has to be other keys to

People want their "Woodstock". But Woodstocks can only happen oh so often.

I would say much of the Obama factor was the same forces that pushed Bill Bradley and Bernie Sanders early on, but Obama had that Rorschach quality, could represent anything to most anyonr (even some on the right). He was less mesmerizing than remarkably unobjectionable. Pay your nickle, make a wish.

Of course the right just wants someone who'll cut taxes and say obligatory anti-abortion/anti-minorities stuff. Makes it easier to grab that dynamic, with a little help from their Russian friends.