Rural Americans felt abandoned by Democrats in 2016, so they abandoned them back

[(Still) muted by Kalwejt until March 31]

Again, Rjjr77, you have not shown a single example of a #NeverSanders HRC 2016 voter. I do think such a creature may exist, but only in Appalachia. #NeverHillary was very much a thing! Look at Wyandotte, MI, Sauk County, WI, and Royalston, MA.

There are tons of examples, but they are all anecdotal, which is worthless in this discussion. As for sanders, yes he did better in general election polls, so did Kasich, neither of whom actually ran in a general election. Just assuming these polls carry over after a full campaign is silly.

Yes sanders won counties in the democrat primary, that's a primary campaign with more partisan voters, he did great in Kansas trump didn't, using your logic he would have won there. You can't expect a candidate who didn't face a barrage of attacks to just magically claim points based on no evidence. They could have easily ran ads through the upper Midwest with his far more ideological left stances and communist level affiliations.

-Give me some anecdotal examples; they're better than nothing. Kasich did not win a single state outside his home state; Bernie won lots of states outside Vermont. Very different levels of being untested.

Sanders would have done better in KS than HRC, but not well enough to win.

He won the White vote in the primaries precisely because of his ideological left stances. They didn't hurt him in the polls.

I've seen tons of anecdotal evidence, but it's anecdotal and doesn't matter. You can't say "sanders did better in the primary with whites, he would have done better in the general." We've never seen correlations like that between primary and general, because the electorates are different. Hillary dominated Bernie with rural whites in Ohio in the primary, and got hammered by them in the general, sanders lost white voters in Pennsylvania, so he would have done worse there than in the general? Your argument ignores how elections work as well, you take far too many assumptions.

-Ohio was a special case due to Sanders supporters voting for Kasich.

Yes; Sanders probably would have won PA by doing better in Lancaster County and similar areas. He didn't have toxic foreign policy views, a sense of stagnation, and an email scandal around his neck.

Sanders supporters voting for Kasich? Proof?

Sanders would have won PA? But democrats didn't vote for him... You use election results to prove why he would win Wisconsin and Michigan  but ignore them when they don't back your theory in Ohio and PA...

Sanders had plenty of ammo that an opposition candidate could have used, it just wasn't used in the primary, because Hillary instead co-opted his ideas.

I get why you could argue that sanders would have won, but you can't say with any actual facts that he would have, and it's foolish to assume the campaign's would remain the same.

-Sanders, Trump's, and Clinton's favorability ratings were all fairly constant from May to November. There was never any reason to assume Trump could come up with altogether new, powerful, and damaging attacks against Crazy Bernie, as none of HRC's attacks ended up working in the end against him or visa versa.

[(Still) muted by Kalwejt until March 31]

Again, Rjjr77, you have not shown a single example of a #NeverSanders HRC 2016 voter. I do think such a creature may exist, but only in Appalachia. #NeverHillary was very much a thing! Look at Wyandotte, MI, Sauk County, WI, and Royalston, MA.

There are tons of examples, but they are all anecdotal, which is worthless in this discussion. As for sanders, yes he did better in general election polls, so did Kasich, neither of whom actually ran in a general election. Just assuming these polls carry over after a full campaign is silly.

Yes sanders won counties in the democrat primary, that's a primary campaign with more partisan voters, he did great in Kansas trump didn't, using your logic he would have won there. You can't expect a candidate who didn't face a barrage of attacks to just magically claim points based on no evidence. They could have easily ran ads through the upper Midwest with his far more ideological left stances and communist level affiliations.

-Give me some anecdotal examples; they're better than nothing. Kasich did not win a single state outside his home state; Bernie won lots of states outside Vermont. Very different levels of being untested.

Sanders would have done better in KS than HRC, but not well enough to win.

He won the White vote in the primaries precisely because of his ideological left stances. They didn't hurt him in the polls.

I've seen tons of anecdotal evidence, but it's anecdotal and doesn't matter. You can't say "sanders did better in the primary with whites, he would have done better in the general." We've never seen correlations like that between primary and general, because the electorates are different. Hillary dominated Bernie with rural whites in Ohio in the primary, and got hammered by them in the general, sanders lost white voters in Pennsylvania, so he would have done worse there than in the general? Your argument ignores how elections work as well, you take far too many assumptions.

-Ohio was a special case due to Sanders supporters voting for Kasich.

Yes; Sanders probably would have won PA by doing better in Lancaster County and similar areas. He didn't have toxic foreign policy views, a sense of stagnation, and an email scandal around his neck.

Sanders supporters voting for Kasich? Proof?

Sanders would have won PA? But democrats didn't vote for him... You use election results to prove why he would win Wisconsin and Michigan  but ignore them when they don't back your theory in Ohio and PA...

Sanders had plenty of ammo that an opposition candidate could have used, it just wasn't used in the primary, because Hillary instead co-opted his ideas.

I get why you could argue that sanders would have won, but you can't say with any actual facts that he would have, and it's foolish to assume the campaign's would remain the same.

-Sanders, Trump's, and Clinton's favorability ratings were all fairly constant from May to November. There was never any reason to assume Trump could come up with altogether new, powerful, and damaging attacks against Crazy Bernie, as none of HRC's attacks ended up working in the end against him or visa versa.

Except the simple continuation of the attacks.

As for favorability ratings staying constant? What? Hillary and trump regularly faced pendulum swings throughout the election, but from a political trend line they were predictable, but they also had very high name id, as for Bernie, he easily would have seen his favorable numbers fall, just like almost every presidential candidate before had seen during an election.

But let's claim that it does, so what? That doesn't mean his primary exit poll numbers would have equaled his state results, or in some of your cases the opposite. There's nothing to back your actual claim except you saying so, your prediction is that Bernie would have done better, but there's no way to prove that.

-Again, who were the Hillary voters who wouldn't vote for Bernie?

[(Still) muted by Kalwejt until March 31]

     Indeed, 2016 was a strategic disaster for the Democrats. The big question is whether they can learn from this disaster and fix it.

Democrats need to show up to rural America, talk to people and show them that the Democrats still care about them.

I don't think showing up in town and lecturing these people on how great drone strikes are and the benefits of an earned income tax credit will help very much.

[(Still) muted by Kalwejt until March 31]

You can't be any more unfree than dead.

-Liberty is negative in nature, not positive.

If that's what you need to tell yourself to sleep at night then I suppose it would be unkind of me to stop you.

-That's not "what I need to tell myself to sleep at night"; it's self-evident.

If it were self-evident, wouldn't it be uncontroversial?

If I thought you were a principled classical liberal or a principled early-twentieth-century social Darwinist I'd have a more genuine respect for your honesty on subjects like this, but the fact that you go out of your way to combine the most repulsive aspects of both worldviews into a squamous mass of amorality and cant raises some pretty serious questions.

-The conclusions of these are mutually reaffirming in this instance.

[(Still) muted by Kalwejt until March 31]

They are, but the reason I say "cant" is that you're making what's fundamentally a moral (albeit dramatically incorrect) argument in this thread--that putting systems in place to ensure that poor people don't needlessly die of treatable chronic illness is something that makes other (richer) people "less free"--while trotting out the profoundly anti-moral "conservatism is an ideology of the strong" excuse in another thread.

FYI, I'm not really that much more convinced by the equality argument than by the liberty one--on certain points of theory, I actually prefer Red Toryism to the mainstream left. What I'm concerned about is justice--which entails upholding contextually appropriate degrees of liberty, contextually appropriate degrees of equality, and so forth. To the extent that the terms on which American political debate takes place and the political philosophy on which American institutions were founded deviate from that, it's those terms and that philosophy that are in moral error and ought to be discounted. In that sense I'm actually in agreement with Trump that we should be patriotic because America is the country we have and pointedly not as a form of assent to its ostensible principles or values. If you and I have any common ground at all, it's probably on that.

-I see conservatism as expressly justifying inequality. Thus, it is an ideology of the strong. It's not an excuse; it's a description of conservatism. My brand of conservatism is also rather accepting of liberty. The moral argument here is my actual one.

 

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-Sure.