A new Tea Party for the Left

[Spirit]

The passion on the left is clearly coming from the Warren and Sanders wing of the party.  With Clinton's failure on Tuesday, do you think this will embolden that group to rise up and take over?  Basically, become the Tea Party of the left?

 

 

 

[Amazing Larry]

More like the "Iced Skinny Vanilla Latte" party.

[Jay]

Maybe the "Katy Perry Candyland Cupcake" party

 

[Guest]

Their voters are too complacent to start a movement.

[Spirit]

3 minutes ago, Paul said:

Their voters are too complacent to start a movement.

 

Really?  Seems to be a lot of them getting together to march through major cities the last few nights.

 

 

[red321]

Paul is probably right. It would be interesting to see how many folks protesting currently actually organized, donated...hell...voted.

I would like to see the party go back to the 50 state strategy they've abandoned...writing off states and rural areas is self defeating. Howard Dean did a great job focusing on non Democratic strongholds that helped the Democrats take back the house and grow the Senate majority when he was DNC. It's time for the party to take a long look inward and try and understand how they lost voters used to be part of their core constituency.

 

[Thomas]

You mean besides Tumblr?

[Thomas]

The left has to give up this idea that they can name call and shame undecideds. The right is wayyyyyy better at it and will crush them if they try. The right won't back into a proverbial safe space if the other side yells back. They have to separate themselves a little from the media and celebrity culture as it is a detriment.   It's hard to be the party of the little guy if all they are doing is hanging out with Jay-Z and Beyonce and having $100K dinners with George Clooney. I mean yeah fund raising is necessary but keep it on the fucking down low.

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, Geoff said:

 

Really?  Seems to be a lot of them getting together to march through major cities the last few nights.

 

 

I think a lot of that will die down. I was part of that Occupy movement in 2011(look what that got us), and people barely remember it now. Seems like the anti-police brutality movement has slowed down too.

Liberal voters just aren't energized or organized enough when it comes to these things. Also, the protestors are really only united by their disdain for Trump—they might not necessarily like Hillary or Warren. 

The Democrats killed their chances by abandoning working class people in the Great Lakes and Rust Belt. They abandoned rural voters and focused on the most apathetic group. 

[red321]

I think one of the main areas the Clinton campaign failed was they didn't run on what they stood for. They ran on Donald is bad, Donald is evil. Very little focusing on policy differences and what the campaign stood for. There were stark policy differences and very little time was spent trying to highlight what she stood for in those areas.

Yes, people don't have the attention span...but very little effort was made in that regards.=

[Jay]

I think the Clinton campaign was basically Obama III and she couldn't differentiate herself from that. She had no big idea so the message was essentially "more of the same" but with her ethical problems the whole thing just rang hollow.

 

[Thomas]

2 minutes ago, red321 said:

I think one of the main areas the Clinton campaign failed was they didn't run on what they stood for. They ran on Donald is bad, Donald is evil. Very little focusing on policy differences and what the campaign stood for. There were stark policy differences and very little time was spent trying to highlight what she stood for in those areas.

It's kind of hard to do that though when your likability and trustworthy ratings are so terrible that your poll numbers go down whenever you talk about yourself. And if she did try to talk policy it was overshadowed by another scandal.

[red321]

She shouldn't have tried to differentiate. She should have ran on the improvement in the economy and the positives done and then highlighted there were still things that needed to be done. You have to stand for something, not just stand against something. She wasn't afraid to do that during the primaries.

I told the wife the night before the election, she ran a closing commercial I thought was very good...it didn't focus on Donald, but rather her vision. I think she would have benefited from doing more like that.

[Spirit]

I think red is spot on.  One of the things that occurred to me on Wednesday (while having a "how the f**k did this happen" moment), was the campaign theme.  Obama had "Hope & Change."  Trump had "Make America Great Again."  Both of those themes are about others.  They're about the people.   She had "I'm with her."  That's not about the people.  That's about her! 

People want to know what you're going to do for them, what you're going to bring to them.  Her answer was basically, "I'm going to let you support me!"

 

 

 

[Jay]

Well the Dems tried to run on "look how great everything is" while Trump was saying, "look how bad everything is" and really nobody was buying the Democrat message. People were hearing how Obamacare is imploding, sluggish economic recovery, flat wages, shrinking middle class, etc. Basically the stuff Sanders was saying.

 

[Angelsjunky]

I certainly hope so. The Democratic Party is an absolute joke, but the problem is they don't realize it (for the most part). I can't tell you how many of my Facebook friends keep harping on the "Trump won because racism," ignoring the fact that 5+ million more people voted for Obama than Hillary. The reason they lost is that they are dissociated from America - they ran an establishment politician--in fact, the definition of "establishment politician"--against a populist, and ignored the suffering of the white working class.

I have made my own mistakes in the past about liberal/urban/academic elitism and snideness, and to give props mtangelsfan in particular has called me out on it. To be honest, I think we liberals got the president we deserve.

If the Democratic party is to make a comeback, they need to go more progressive, more "real people." Nina Turner and Tulsi Gabbard. Meanwhile, CNN is asking if Tim Kaine is the future of the Democratic party. Tim Kaine!

[Adam]

Lots of good posts in this thread. Both parties would be well served cultivating a message that includes the people who are on the other side. 

[Spirit]

6 minutes ago, Jay said:

Well the Dems tried to run on "look how great everything is" while Trump was saying, "look how bad everything is" and really nobody was buying the Democrat message. People were hearing how Obamacare is imploding, sluggish economic recovery, flat wages, shrinking middle class, etc. Basically the stuff Sanders was saying.

 

 

But she didn't run on "look how great everything is."  She ran on "look at what a horrible human Trump is."  If she ran on "look how great everything is," that would have been a much better play.  Or at a minimum, mix the Trump Sucks and Things Are Great messages together.

But she didn't do that.  And in the end, Dems stay home in states she needed them to show up.

 

 

[Thomas]

5 minutes ago, Jay said:

Well the Dems tried to run on "look how great everything is" while Trump was saying, "look how bad everything is" and really nobody was buying the Democrat message. People were hearing how Obamacare is imploding, sluggish economic recovery, flat wages, shrinking middle class, etc. Basically the stuff Sanders was saying.

 

Beat me to this. At the very least way more effort should have been made by the left pointing at the Republican controlled Congress. They should pointed out "What the fuck was Obama supposed to do to fix all the things Trump points out?" Instead of all the ads pointed at Trump being a bad person, as if I really needed that much convincing of it. 4 or 5 times an hour telling me that on TV was probably a bit overkill don't you think? It should have be pointed at the only two things, besides yeast infections, that are less popular than Trump and Clinton. The House and Senate.

[Jay]

Interesting, in CA we didn't get that barrage of negative ads, because the state was going to go for Clinton by 30 points.

So I've been looking more at just the campaign speeches at her rallies because that's what I got to see.

A good portion of her speeches was anti-Trump, and a good portion was about trying to refute Trump's claims about how bad everything is. She would say Trump's view of America was "dark" and "negative" and the implication was, none of those problems exists.

 

[Angelsjunky]

48 minutes ago, Geoff said:

I think red is spot on.  One of the things that occurred to me on Wednesday (while having a "how the f**k did this happen" moment), was the campaign theme.  Obama had "Hope & Change."  Trump had "Make America Great Again."  Both of those themes are about others.  They're about the people.   She had "I'm with her."  That's not about the people.  That's about her! 

People want to know what you're going to do for them, what you're going to bring to them.  Her answer was basically, "I'm going to let you support me!"

 

 

 

This is a very good point, one I might even steal from you and use to school my liberal friend. Although to be fair she also used the slogan "stronger together" (God damn bunch of feminist lesbians).

I think one of Hillary's flaws as a politician is that she is TOO strong, too guarded. If she had let people in, shown a bit of real, authentic vulnerability, I think she would have won more folks over. As I've said to some of my friends, she is an old school, 20th century style feminist - she tries to be (and is) as strong and macho as a man, yet hasn't learned how to publicly show a more feminine side. This has turned off Millenial and Gen X women, who are the beneficiaries of the old school feminists, but have also moved on. The Albright comment about "there's a special place in hell for women who don't support Hillary Clinton" probably lost her quite a few female votes.

 

[Thomas]

27 minutes ago, Jay said:

Interesting, in CA we didn't get that barrage of negative ads, because the state was going to go for Clinton by 30 points.

We did in my state. It sucked. Apparently because it was so cheap to air them in New Mexico both sides figured why not?

[Thomas]

10 minutes ago, Angelsjunky said:

I think one of Hillary's flaws as a politician is that she is TOO strong, too guarded. If she had let people in, shown a bit of real, authentic vulnerability, I think she would have won more folks over. As I've said to some of my friends, she is an old school, 20th century style feminist - she tries to be (and is) as strong and macho as a man, yet hasn't learned how to publicly show a more feminine side. This has turned off Millenial and Gen X women, who are the beneficiaries of the old school feminists, but have also moved on. The Albright comment about "there's a special place in hell for women who don't support Hillary Clinton" probably lost her quite a few female votes.

Funny I always figured her closest match wasn't a feminist. I always saw feminism as a tool she cynically used. My match for her would be Nixon.  Lust for power and the paranoia that goes with it.

[Angelsjunky]

Well, in the broadest terms a "feminist" is simply someone who supports equal rights for women. In that sense most of the people you and I know are "feminists." But Hillary got politically involved in the 60s and 70s, when politics was still very much a man's game - like many industries and lines of work. this is still true today in many ways. But my point is, she had to swim upstream, she had to armor (or pant-suit) herself.

But yeah, I can agree with you, Thomas, that she used feminism--along with other progressive ideas--as tools to gain power. The big question is to what degree she truly believed in any of it, which is part of why she lost -- many folks just didn't know what to believe about what she believed. That is part of the armoring I mentioned.

[AngelsLakersFan]

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