More Clinton supporters voted for McCain than Bernie supporters voted for Trump (user search)
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  More Clinton supporters voted for McCain than Bernie supporters voted for Trump (search mode)
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Author Topic: More Clinton supporters voted for McCain than Bernie supporters voted for Trump  (Read 12786 times)
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xingkerui
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Posts: 30,303
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Political Matrix
E: -6.52, S: -3.91

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« on: January 13, 2020, 02:36:57 PM »

It's still the case that more than 12% of Clinton voters voted for McCain, and while voting third party hurts the Democratic candidate, voting Republican hurts them more. Also, what more could Sanders have done for Clinton? He campaign many times for her, even though he clearly wasn't offered the same olive branch that Clinton was in 2008, and often even when Sanders tried to convince his supporters to vote for Clinton, those that weren't open to the idea wouldn't have it. I highly doubt that Clinton would've gotten more support if not for Sanders; if anything, she probably would've gotten less.
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Xing
xingkerui
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 30,303
United States


Political Matrix
E: -6.52, S: -3.91

P P P
« Reply #1 on: January 13, 2020, 03:09:35 PM »

It's still the case that more than 12% of Clinton voters voted for McCain, and while voting third party hurts the Democratic candidate, voting Republican hurts them more.

Well yeah I agree, I think it's really bad that 15% of Clinton voters went for McCain in 2008.  And I think it's not just really bad, but even worse, that 26% of Sanders voters refused to vote for Clinton in 2016.

Drawing a line between voting for Trump and voting for Jill Stein is kind of splitting hairs, especially since the entire point of the Stein campaign was to help Trump.

Also, what more could Sanders have done for Clinton? He campaign many times for her, even though he clearly wasn't offered the same olive branch that Clinton was in 2008, and often even when Sanders tried to convince his supporters to vote for Clinton, those that weren't open to the idea wouldn't have it. I highly doubt that Clinton would've gotten more support if not for Sanders; if anything, she probably would've gotten less.

Pretty similar to a post I made about a month ago where someone asked the same question for this campaign cycle, what do I want Sanders to do?

  • Publicly ask his supporters to STOP, and condemn this kind of behavior when it becomes a story.  I don't care how he does it.  Pick out some particularly egregious incident and turn it into a Sister Soulja thing.
  • Replace the belligerent Twitter trolls running his campaign (Sirota, Gray, Turner, etc.) with professional, respectable, well-behaved staff.  They don't have to be suits, they just have to not be assholes.
  • Try to make amends with the other candidates, and the low-paid hard-working staff at the DNC, the WFP, state Democratic parties, and other liberal organizations.  It is mostly low-level people and volunteers who have to deal with abuse from his campaign and supporters.
  • Stop using us-vs-them, everyone-except-me-is-corrupt language about the Democratic party.  This only encourages his supporters to see everyone else in the primary as an enemy and treat them just as badly as the Trump supporters do.
  • When conspiracy theories featuring Sanders or his campaign pop up on the radar, come out publicly and put the kibosh on them.  He's become a useful idiot for the Republicans and the Russians because when they use him to concoct conspiracy theories to divide our party, he plays along.


Okay, but you specifically said that it's a "lie" that more Clinton voters went for McCain than Sanders voters that went for Trump, so you might want to modify that. And sure, Sanders could condemn the behavior of his more rabid supporters more (he's done it to a greater extent this year) and hire better surrogates, but how much of this would really help Clinton/Biden? His us vs. them rhetoric is talking about the most powerful people in the country, not the Democratic Party specifically, and the idea that a small number of people have way too much money and power and that we need structural change to the country is the cornerstone of his campaign and exactly what many Democrats are hungry for. Backing off from that is probably the worst thing he could do.
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Xing
xingkerui
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 30,303
United States


Political Matrix
E: -6.52, S: -3.91

P P P
« Reply #2 on: January 13, 2020, 04:00:27 PM »

It would help plenty.  None of this crap existed in mid-2015, when Clinton's favorables among Democrats and the general electorate were like 90%+.  Sanders was even pushing the Clinton Cash story around the time of the NY primary; that would be the Clinton Cash conspiracy that was investigated by the Trump administration and just closed last week with a "we didn't find anything" whimper.

Sanders openly accused Clinton of being 100% corrupt, bought-and-paid-for by millionaires and billionaires, someone who would change positions if her donors told her to.

Sanders made the claim that the Democratic Party was rigging the election against him via superdelegates and party machinations.  Remember when he said DWS was rigging the election in Clinton's favor by not having enough debates?  And then the DNC gave him his debate and he insisted the DNC not be involved at all, and bragged to his supporters about it.  It's not like the idea that the primary was rigged just popped up out of the blue in July 2016.  Sanders came up with it and was pushing it because it helped him.

He spent the entire campaign creating these narratives, he can't suddenly throw his hands up and say "no foul, no foul" in the general.

Clinton's favorables were never going to remain that high. The polls that showed her crushing all her potential opponents were always going to be wishful thinking. A lot of Clinton's collapse came from "muh emails", which Sanders deliberately avoided talking about.

While I wouldn't have gone as far as Sanders did, and you can argue that he went too far, I think that criticizing Clinton for her speeches, as well as her closeness to Wall Street was fair game. She needed to do a better job of defending her record, just as Sanders had to respond to criticism about how some female staffers were treated in 2016 (and criticizing him for that was also fair game.) When exactly did Sanders say Clinton was "100% corrupt"? I know that he made criticisms of her, but I don't ever recall him going to that point. Clinton definitely did struggle enormously with coming across as authentic, and it's something her campaign really should have done more to address.

The DNC might not have "rigged" the primary, but they very clearly put their thumb (or arm) on the scale, and were not impartial during the primary. Yes, Clinton did win more pledged delegates, but the fact that she "had" 400 delegates before a single vote was cast in the Iowa Caucuses certainly wasn't a good look, and Sanders had every right to criticize it.

In the end, Sanders did expose some of Clinton's weaknesses as a candidate, but instead of getting mad at Sanders for doing that, the Clinton campaign should've done more to address these weaknesses before and during the general election. I wrote a letter to the Clinton campaign in June 2016, suggesting that she talk more about issues such as student loan debt on the campaign trail, to give young Sanders voters more motivation to vote for her. I got a very generic response (in October) talking about her plan (which I already knew and wasn't asking about.) Her campaign really did seem absurdly tone-deaf at times, and Democrats need to learn from it rather than pointing the finger at Sanders for her loss.
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