... a candidate can chew gum and walk at the same time. Maybe it is just me but I thought she did a good job of discussing economic and social justice issues.

There is a special place in hell for Comey!

she gave it as much priority as social justice, but her social justice message was covered more (because often it was in response to something trump said) and some people want all attention taken away from civil rights.

they should have been in michigan and some of the rust belt states more, instead of trying to expand the map. but they made decisions based on existing data.

Heartbreaking what the bastards in the media did to Hillary!

They can burn in hell with Comey!

of her campaign stops. She had many programs for different parts of the country but the media would rather cover personalities and outrageous crap.

to destroy Hillary.

For one, a significant number of voters (especially those who were hurt worst or have not seen economic recover) have automatically associated Goldman Sachs with corruption since 2008. Taking money from them opened the door for the corruption meme. It was either a disregard or an oversight. Either way a lot of people felt invisible to her. Let's not forget the low turnout.

... Clinton had years of baggage and conspiracy theory that might've just bogged her down too much. I voted for her in the election and primary, but even then I had that feeling that pretty much any Republican on the other side would beat her ... except for Donald Trump. I was actually relieved when they nominated Trump instead of Cruz because I figured Trump could in no way win ... boy, was I a little off.

Good one.

second guessing what Hillary should or shouldn't have done. When it comes down to it, it was corruption that caused her loss: Russian, Comey, voter suppression, constant harping on emails, etc. Without that, she would have won. Period.

couldn't care less about her message. And I'm not talking about Republicans.

Anyway, that's what they kept telling us right here at DU.

too much time at fundraisers, off the campaign trail, too much in debate prep, didn't campaign in smalltown America the way Trump did. BIG MISTAKES!!

But the bottom line is still the bottom line. And you nailed it. We had a flawed candidate with no real message other than "Trump is bad." That doesn't win elections.

She just didn't think Americans were dumb like Trump and Bernie did. They spoke at 5th grade levels with bullet points.

Hillary explained everything with thought and her message was realistic.

Hillary didn't win because of Hillary, but you can't say she didn't have a message. She may not have conveyed it well but the woman has always had a message of helping the American people.

Americans are dumb, we like being lied to and we like bullet points, Hillary didn't do either very well.

Every ad spot, even at the debates. I have to respectfully disagree with your assessment.

But I have some backup to support my assessment.

plans to help the coal industry. But in places like West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, it was statements like the one below that voters remembered. I still maintain that Hillary was a poor candidate. I voted for her, but only as a lesser of two evils choice.

And if she had dared to talk more positively about coal jobs, there were the Bernie or Busters who would screech like chimps in estrus that she was "selling out to big coal and all fossil fuels." But that was a given, no matter what she said.

But my statement that she did talk plenty about jobs still stands.

that really hurt her. I believe she lost Pennsylvania and Ohio partly on the issue of coal specifically, and job creation in general. Trump just continued to pound the jobs point over and over. When a person has been out of work for a year or two, true or not, it sounds very good.

It just didn't resonate with the rust belt states, especially. That, in the end, seemed to be the difference between a win and a loss.

Clearly, whatever message she was pushing in those states, did not work.

Because she was pushing jobs and the economy.

However, as we have learned, leaks from the emails were timed with any major announcement she had on issues, or any new revelations about Trump, so perhaps people were listening to the din of the news on those.

When she said that coal miners and coal mines would be lost in these states, she blew it. It was a meme that stuck. And, in my opinion, cost her those states. The fact that she lost these states when a Democrat hadn't lost them in years, says quite a bit about her message, or lack thereof.

She won the economic message.

What she couldn't overcome was the people who she could have served - but they hated her too much to listen!

And they still refuse to listen!

were triggered by immigration and terrorism issues.

I think Russia has seized on the fact that America was already a very divided country, and would have intervened regardless of what Hillary said or did. Putin wanted Trump in power because Putin understands Trump and knows he can control him.

Putin already knew from past associations that he could not control Hillary. Therefore, there was nothing she could have said or done that would have kept Putin from tying to help Trump. What she had already done, in Putin's mind, was stand up to him in the past.

As for Comey's motivation, I really don't understand that part of the equation. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it may have to do with the information that is being sought to be declassified. I think we will know more about Comey's intention as time proceeds.

Just look at the pro-Russian people Trump is appointing. I don't think Russia cared about any issue but Putin's wishes.

No I don't think they hacked the actual election results..but this hacking sure as hell didn't help Clinton!!

Trump is a puppet, putty in Putin's paws.

do have...could be just a little and it could be a whole hell of a lot or something in between. This bastard needs to release his taxes at once. It absolutely should be law that if you are in public office.....your damn taxes are public as well. Total Bullshit.

just heard it on the daily show, making sort of the same point.

like emails get covered constantly when big issues get ignored.

had a better plan and he used the good old economy whistle "cut your taxes" ....but I will never be convinced otherwise that his other disgusting dog whistles did the trick. They were not chanting anything about the economy at those foul rallies. The Trashpot Trolls were not hammering away about the economy....such tripe.

"So Hillary would be giving a speech on this topic or that topic, and they knew that by releasing emails that were embarrassing, that would steal the attention from the reporters. And so they released them in small increments. Now they also -- they gave individual reporters from individual news organizations and bloggers who they picked out, Guccifer set up a messaging opportunity where you could write him a private message, him or her, whoever it was, and request specific caches of documents that you wanted and then -- and he sometimes would give the reporters passwords that they could -- had to fill in in order to get access to those documents."

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-12-14/new-details-of-russian-backed-campaign-to-interfere-with-us-elections


Yes, our own media did get drawn in, but they were aided by an ARMY of Bernie or busters ready to slurp it up and spread it around.

We should never REDUCE our commitment to fighting institutional bigotry...a commitment I personally believe all of us share no matter which primary candidate we supported(and that all primary candidates actually shared equally...other than maybe Webb, and I'm not sure he's still in the party). If anything we should STRENGTHEN it.

The idea is to strengthen the social justice commitment, strengthen the emphasis on economic justice alongside it, and focus less on attack politics towards the other side.

To make our fall campaign about getting people to vote FOR us, rather than just AGAINST the other candidate.

Most of the ideas in our platform were and are popular, whether the originated from the Clinton campaign or the Sanders campaign.

A campaign that emphasized those ideas and made a case for why they were actually better(including why they were actually better for voters in the Upper Midwest) could have gained us the votes we needed to carry the Electoral College.

This isn't about attacking our 2016 nominee in any way at all OR about calling for anyone to be "thrown under the bus". Just about finding a better strategy for next time.


What would it take for you to trust the approach I've laid out in this post?

that when she talk about economic justice, her speeches were ignored by the media.

that's what would get me to trust you specifically on anything at all.

I've never made any of this about claiming that Hillary "failed" and I'm talking about the future here, rather than the fall campaign.

It's a question of the strategic choices the campaign made. The campaign...NOT the candidate.

And those choices were grounded in self-defeating attitudes the party establishment has had for decades:

More than anything else, they were grounded in the belief, a belief supported by no historical evidence at all, that we somehow cannot get the electorate to vote FOR us, we can only get the electorate to vote AGAINST the Republicans.

That belief, more than anything else, that informed the decision to focus the ads, over and over again, on Trump's personal ickiness. They knew the whole time that THAT wasn't going to be enough to put us over the top. The voters KNEW Trump was a scumbag, but for some reason, that didn't matter to enough of them.

The economic agenda(which was strong and which was strengthened by the additions of some Sanders positions to the platform) should have been a greater priority in the ads than Trump's p-grabbing, which, while loathesome, should only have been the dominant theme for a day or two. And when the campaign saw that the media was refusing to report her economic message, they should have used the massive war chest they had to buy time for a nationally televised address to voters that would cover all the issues the media was ignoring.

Everything I'm saying here is as a person who thought our message was good and that our candidate was a worthy choice. I wanted Hillary to win in November as much as you did, and she did win in the popular vote, but the campaign strategy failed to get us the votes we needed. As much as you want to pretend that I'm bashing Hillary, I'm actually sympathizing with her, because I feel the choices made by the party insiders running her campaign ended up undermining her chances.

I agree with you that this is a country in which bigotry is a huge problem. We MUST keep fighting it with all our might, as one of the two pillars of our program of change. But if we assume that we fell short in the EC solely because of that(or that and the media and the Russians), that assumption gives us no hope of gaining any ground in future elections.

We have to find things WE, as a party, can do better, and to do those things better-and we have to do that just as much in the name of defeating social injustice as in addressing economic issues.

We're PAST that discussion now. I accepted the results of the primaries a week before the convention.

What the party SHOULD have done was bought time for her to give a nationally televised address, or at least a regionally televised speech in the Upper Midwest, about those issues, in addition to running targeted ads in the Upper Midwest that emphasized the great economic proposals we offered. Neither of those things could have been upstaged by what Comey did. Instead, there was pointless ad after pointless ad showing Trump mouthing off, even though we knew the whole time that THAT focusing on attacking Trump wasn't working for us.

I get it that there was sabotage, and that sexism and racism played a role, but do you really believe we can ONLY call out the sabotage if we pretend that the campaign the party ran in the fall was flawless?

It's not like we're going to run the exact same campaign four years down the road, and it's not like whoever we nominate then is going to have as wide a variety of things she or he could be attacked on. We're going to nominate a different person then, probably from the next generation of Democrats.

was the reason Democrats "failed" and using that as a reason to re-direct the messaging away from "identity politics."


Sort of like "All lives matter" for the left.

Do you think Trump will be more friendly to "Black Lives Matter"?

If I can I would like to rephrase it. Do you think identity politics will be an effective strategy to counter Trump as I assume he will not be sympathetic to BLM. Should BLM reach out to other identity groups for support?

Those groups take their cues from BLM, because it's their movement.

So that you have different groups within the whole working together to achieve common and individual goals. There would have to be identity groups like BLM for the environment, women's issues, working class issues, etc. There would probably be overlap in many cases. I don't think it's possible for one group to stand on its own. How the individual identity groups work together to make the whole stronger is what interests me. And most importantly, how they share power within the group. Thanks.

But not try to trot their leaders out for a photo op. The DNC was advising Hillary on this, and wisely.

The party cannot appropriate their specific movement, because that might be construed as taking over or exploiting. We must work parallel.

For example, we have BLM as one group and labor (working class issues) as another. How does the overall message of the party get crafted? Does BLM and the labor group work together or remain separate, possibly as competitors? Or maybe a combination of both depending on the audience and situation.

Like other progressive groups - they can work together within the party to avoid duplicating efforts.

There is a group called the Alliance of Justice in DC, where the leaders of progressive orgs meet regularly to support each other's messaging and to share ideas and resources. This is the model that the Dems could continue to follow - if they don't get hijacked by the faction that says we need to put all issues but "jobs for the white working class" on the back burner...

The strength of the Democratic party is the alliance of the various groups. It's fluid - and not hierarchical, like the GOP.

One comparison would be that the Dems work like like cel groups, instead of one huge movement with a charismatic leader.

That is what concerned me about certain factions on the left, that there is a rigid manifesto with little to no flexibility. THESE ARE THE ISSUES THAT WE WILL DEAL WITH NOW, and the rest are DISTRACTIONS.

Yes, we do need to prioritize, but again, that has to be fluid. We also need to see the various coalitions represented in the Dem leadership.

I'm sure there will be bumps along the way but if we are to have any hope in the next four years we need to support one another. The devil is in the details but my feeling is that, as Democrats and Progressives we have way more in common than we think. I checked out the Alliance for Justice group and it looks good. I hope you are enjoying this Friday.

And possibly heavily indebted to Russian banks.

Him would have still voted against her if she wrote them 1000.00 from her own account.

When Kerry came out here in 2004, he gave one of the best speeches I've ever heard a candidate give. It was sharp, it was original, he engaged with the audience, and it was very, very specifically designed to Pacific Northwest issues, including logging and salmon and the environment.

What did the media report? That he took his wife to an expensive restaurant for her birthday. Period. That's what they covered.

Same with Hillary in 2008. She came and spoke in a cold warehouse late at night. She stuck around as long as the crowd did. She spoke extensively of issues that mattered in this part of the country, and she especially connected with the little girls and older women in the audience.

The media gave it about two seconds of coverage, if that, because Obama had been here earlier in the day at Key Arena, and he'd actually gone out to acknowledge people who couldn't crowd into the doors. They showed a little of his speech, it was fine, but it was the same speech he gave everywhere. They were just gaga that he'd gone around to say hi to the crowd that couldn't get in, as if that was something super duper special.

I do think the media has fallen down, especially local media. Kerry, of course, won Washington, but wouldn't it have been nice if the local stations had bothered to mention his plans for industries that were important to the region, or where jobs were in flux?

in favor of beating minorities on the head about wanting civil rights prioritized

She focused on a wide range of issues facing this country. The media reported on emails.

Fake news?

NAFTA?

Lots of negatives. Which ones map to the areas she lost?

There is no way of knowing, but whatever got her 12,000 votes in Michigan would have been a step in the right direction.

There are no magic bullets.

Her message was clearly better just not as entertaing

Once the conversation turned to actual policy people tuned out

It is that in our two party system we get to own every last left of center voice that makes the news whether we want them or not.

Whereas in Europe the mainstream left and centrist parties don't get smeared by the fringe left because they affiliate themselves with the some sort of green, socialist or communist party who will have their two or three seats in parliament so their is no similar confusion.

But when someone like this makes the news:



He or she is immediately assumed to be a Democrat which is tremendously to our detriment and why I believe most of these student and other activist movements like Occupy Wall Street are the product of Republican provocateurs who just love to get those "dirty hippies" and "ungrateful students" riled up and in front of the media.

It would have been impossible to sink her

much good it does when you've stirred up the pot of racial resentment

That she won more popular votes (from CA primarily) means squat and repeating that doesn’t help us.

She knew, we knew, that she had to win the EC states. That meant she needed to hammer home her economic proposals

Which overrides a lot else.

Trump country - and I don't think that talking about jobs even more than she did would have moved that needle.

She was character-assassinated by Republicans. The campaign was not about issues. When a late poll came out that showed Hillary's "negative" poll numbers were higher than Trump's, that may have been the tipping point?

(and again, everyone who supports economic justice supports social justice-there's no such thing as a left-segregationist).

The big strategic mistake was in spending too much time attacking Trump rather than arguing in favor of OUR platform.

Trump is a scumbag, but pointing that out was never going to get US an Electoral College majority.

in thread after thread.

It's been repeatedly pointed out to you that that isn't what the vast majority of people who have critiqued the fall campaign have been arguing.

I condemn anyone who does argue that we should talk less about bigotry-as do, I'd say, 95% of the people who supported the candidate I supported in the spring. Yet you continue to treat us, as a group, as though we are committed to making the party officially betray you.

What would it take to convince you that an abandonment of "social justice" by this party is simply not going to happen, and that people who were to your left on some things don't WANT it to happen?

My belief is that there is an overwhelming commitment, among people of the left, to fighting ALL forms of injustice-a belief that is informed by the conclusion, based on the post-1965 history of all the justice struggles in this country that we can't defeat social injustice without making some significant economic changes(and an equally strong conclusion that we can't achieve economic justice WITHOUT also eradicating social injustice in this society-that the justice struggles are distinct, but connected).

What would it take to get you to see that set of priorities as inclusive of you, rather than some sort of a threat?

What, exactly, do you need to hear in order to put the concerns you keep raising to rest? To get you to believe that people who support economic justice(many of whom ARE people of color, women, LGBTQ people and immigrants) are NOT indifferent to the need to fight bigotry?

I would truly like to get to a place of dialog with you, to show you that you have no reason to distrust myself and others who share my views.

We're not talking about the primaries here, or about any particular candidate or candidates...I'm trying to have a discussion about the future. And I mourn what happened on Election Day as deeply as you do.

because you want to believe that no one is saying that we should not downplay social justice, doesn't make you right.

you are not smarter, or wiser, or more aware than me.

you are more verbose. I'll give you that.

But it's not economic justice people saying that. We never saw any conflict between the two justice struggles. They BOTH need to prevail.

The truth is that the prohibitive majority of economic justice supporters are as antiracist as you are.

What would it take to convince you of that?

wrong? that is a much larger faction that you think it is?

is it so inconceivable to you that you are wrong?

other was all about the candidates and what the electorate (and the Russians and the FBI) believed they represented, and not about anything they said or any position they took. In other words, I think just about everyone who voted, hacked, declined to vote, etc, knew what they were going to do as soon as they heard who was running. GOTV efforts may have motivated people to vote who otherwise may have forgotten or not bothered, but GOTV, "messaging", TV ads, Saturday Night Live skits, didn't change anybody's mind about either candidate.

I'm just saying.

Of course it would have dissuaded the Russians and Comey. How can you even ask the question?

These allegations are just silly. Putin and his pals intervened to get their friends/dupes into power. I think they were working on this for years, possibly decades.

Just backing you up. Good post.

...any more or any less than economic issues. I feel like she hit both messages pretty evenly.

Again, I keep saying this but she won the popular vote by a hell of a lot, and the important states she lost were by razor thin margins.

What I think she did wrong (and even this was probably more her campaign staff than her directly) was being a bit more assumptive about winning former swing states that Obama had won both times and as a result maybe not putting enough time and money in those places.

But this whole debate over economic vs. social issues is one we shouldn't be having. We have the right message it's just making sure it gets out there in the right way, to the right people.

which turned out to be less than stellar. less time in AZ and Texas and more time in Michigan would be better.

she had an economic message.

I am not talking about a plan. She had a very detailed plan, but she didn't have a message. A three to five word phrase that summed up her plan in a way that everyone could relate.

Putin didn't want her in, and he found useful idiots in Comrade Trump and his large faction of the GOP. Not sure what Comey and the letters had to do with her focus. I think it was an event separate from anything Putin wanted. That was just a plain ol' republican fuck-over. The republicans and Putin just so happened to have the same goal.

As for why Hillary lost, a lot of that can be laid on Democrats who couldn't be bothered to go out and vote in 2010. It allowed MASSIVE GOP take-overs of state legislatures. That's what allowed the widespread gerrymandering, the voter suppression laws in many states, the voter roll purges, the insistence on paperless voting machines in so many places...

I still can't believe that with all the revelations that have come up, that there are still people obsessing with trying to place this whole debacle on Hillary's shoulders. Useful idiots, all of them.