Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
But... but... but... the Democrats were completely destroyed in the last election. Didn't you hear that?
Politics is all about activation of the base. The Republicans have a much smaller base, but have been extremely effective at driving their conservative base to the polls with their fear based identity politics tactics. The progressives have been very complacent as many of their big issues have been pushed trough in the past 20 years. They didn't think Trump had a chance, and were correct in many ways, but Trump lucked into an electoral path on a measly 107,330 votes. He got crushed in the popular vote, but won the electoral vote by the slimmest of margins. Progressives have no one to blame but themselves for not working hard enough to keep the base engaged in those swing states. Fortunately, Donald Trump is the tonic this nation needed, and he has activated the progressive minority. The challenge for the Democrats is to capitalize on that activation and make sure those voters get to the polls in the mid-terms and in 2020.
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As mentioned before, I stayed out of these threads right after the election half because I was genuinely awe struck by the result and half because I usually prefer to read others opinions instead of injecting mine all the time.
But one of the biggest takeaways I had personally from the campaign was the reminder (as its certainly been true for a while now) that the republican party is streets ahead when it comes to staying on message. Regardless of how absurd most of it was, their ability to stick with crooked Hilary, emails, Benghazi, etc was what really helped them win. Compare that to the Clinton campaign that really had no message aside from just trying to let Trump embarrass himself enough they would win by default. Clinton had better positions, just no slick marketing way of presenting it.
I think it was a poor campaign by Clinton. And considering the razor thin margin of victory, it seems that would have been enough to make a difference. I do think there's lots wrong with things like gerrymandering, making it harder for people to vote, etc, but the campaigning was just so much better on the right. Which is insane considering just how bat-sh%t crazy most of what they said was.