Attacking people for NOT voting for our ticket achieves nothing.

[Ken Burch]

I agree that the people you're attacking SHOULD have voted for us.

But the tactic most of of the party used was to simply demand that they do. And even when it was obvious that that wasn't working, the party wouldn't let up on it. And now that we are in this situation, there seems to be a total refusal to change.

I hate that we couldn't carry the Upper Midwest. I'm as heartsick and terrified as anyone else that things turned out this way. I WANTED to see Hillary get sworn in on January 20th. Most Sanders activists and supporters did want that and did all that we could to try to make that happen.

But it's as much a fault of our party's communications strategy and its attitude towards people we could have reached as it is of the decisions those people made.

Lashing out, by itself, does nothing to help.

It can't lead us to anything better in the future.

It can't make any of the ones who made that choice change their minds.

It can't lead us to any better strategies in the future.

Our objective should be getting people to join us...and that can only be done by making a positive case for why they should.

Now is the time for creativity and innovation...now is the time to try to find new ways to connect with the people we couldn't connect with...not to lash out at those people themselves.

Votes have to be earned.

Voters, especially young voters, have to be educated. They have to be reached out to and taught about the good things we stand for. They have to be given a chance to try to change the things they disagree with in our message.

Let's move on to listening. Let's move on to brainstorming. Let's move on to solving the problem.

That is our only hope.

Forward, not backward.

Learning, not payback.

[elleng]

1. Thanks. And facts is useful.

Ohioans, Tired of Status Quo, Flipped to Trump for Change.

*The seeds of the biggest upset in American politics in recent memory were sewn here, in the Midwest, where decades of economic decay largely ignored by Democrats came back to haunt Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Trump’s populist economic message electrified blue-collar workers in ways that those of previous Republican candidates had not.'>>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/politics/ohioans-tired-of-status-quo-flipped-to-trump-for-change.html?&_r=0

[TexasTowelie]

2. Ken,

You have posted your opinions about the election which is your right. Let other people post their opinions as they deem fit. It is their right as long as we have freedom of speech--since you say, "Let's move on to listening" it might be helpful if you follow your own advice.

[Ken Burch]

3. Yes, people have a right to express their views.

Responding respectfully to those views doesn't prevent them from expressing them.

[BainsBane]

4. Funny how that didn't apply to the primary

and all the attacks on voters, especially women and people of color, for refusing to vote as their self-proclaimed superiors demanded.

[mcar]

28. Boom!

[boston bean]

5. Sorry dude. I am not unifying or respecting people who voted for

an in your face racist misogynist homophobic xenophobic.

I will continue to hold them responsible for their vote.

[Ken Burch]

6. I'm not talking about Trump voters. n/t.

[boston bean]

7. Aren't trump voters persons who didn't vote for our ticket?

[BainsBane]

9. They certainly are when they made clear their primary goal was defeating the Democratic Party

And electing Trump. They made clear what they wanted, and they go exactly that. Not only that, they celebrate his victory. That makes them I distingushable from the White Supremacists, and some have made those leanings clear for a long time. Fascists are what fascists do.

[Demsrule86]

12. Any vote Hillary didn't get amounted to a vote for Trump.

[Demsrule86]

11. Anyone who stayed home or voted third party is a Trump voter.

[Lil Missy]

10. I have no patience for 3rd Party sympathy threads.

I don't care WTF they do; they can take their precious egos and go away. But I don't have to "listen" to them as you suggest. It's like saying we just need to "listen" to the right wing fucktards and dirtbags to see their point of view. Or worse, "educate" them to our side. GAG!

This is a Democratic website. As Skinner has so diplomatically put into words, each person needs to decide whether they belong here or not.

[Demsrule86]

13. third Party voters are spoilers

They are incapable of winning...they helped elect Trump...who will do evil things. I have not use for them.

[Ken Burch]

14. This isn't a "3rd Party sympathy thread"...it's a "Let's try something else" thread.

If what was done didn't get us what we needed this time, doubling down on the same approach can't get us what we need NEXT time. Or at any future time.

We will need a massive turnout at the midterms...with all due respect, do you think we can get that by staying with what we're doing now?

[Lil Missy]

15. Yes it is a 3rd Party Sympathy thread. We don't need to put anymore effort into them.

It doesn't work. Better to expand in other ways, for example, there are far more votes to gain in the center.

That math didn't work with Nader, (which got us bush the lessor) and it didn't work with Stein, (which got us Trump). I'm not interested in losing more elections by courting the further left. It's a waste of time. (Obviously!!) I'd rather win.

[Ken Burch]

16. Moving further right means not being worth electing, though.

And we can't ever win on the '92 or '96 platforms again.

Nobody wants us to be LESS different than Trump. If that was the case, Gary Johnson would have taken 12% rather than baely 3%.

[Lil Missy]

25. I said there were votes to gain in the center, not the right.

But as I said, this is a waste of time. You can have the last word.

[Ken Burch]

34. Moving to "the center"(a place that doesn't exist anymore)can't gain us votes.

There is no such thing as a "socially progressive, fiscally conservative" person anymore. If there had been, Gary Johnson would have won.

[LP2K12]

33. The further left?

According to political graphs both Clinton and Sanders are further left than say, Tulsi Gabbard. Further left, in Bernie's case, drew crowds and support.

You have to be willing to court the extreme left, moderates and undecided Republicans. We need to be an open and welcoming, grassroots, people-based party.

[DemocraticWing]

17. I don't know what some people would have us do.

We can't go after the votes of 3rd Party voters because...something? I don't know, I want to win those votes but apparently those people are bad and we should win votes "in the center."

So where did those votes go? Well I guess those are "moderate" Republicans who voted for Donald Trump? But wait, we can't go after those people either because they are bad people who voted for Trump.

We're told that people who stayed home are bad too. Lazy, good for nothing, etc. So we can't go after them?

Where the hell do we get the votes to win? Do we just give up?

[pnwmom]

18. Ignoring her sudden drop in poll numbers about a week before the election --

and the reason why -- doesn't do any good.

We should be outraged about what James Comey did, and instead it's the same old, same old . . . the circular firing squad progressives are so good at.

[Ken Burch]

19. Agreed that we should be(and are) outraged by what Comey did.

But making it totally about that and about bigotry means accepting that the situation is hopeless, that any future recovery is impossible.

It can become an excuse for refusing to re-examine or change...and refusing to do those things means losing the only possib;e hope of making anything better. We can't just "stay the course" and expect to simply win by default in four years. They won't put us in just to get rid of Trump(or Pence, if Trump's cheeseburger-narrowed arteries finally clog for good). We will need to be FOR something and we will need a clean break with where we are now...not on social justice issues(we should be even stronger there) but in our presentation of real economic and foreign policy alternatives for voters who will be sick of wage cuts, job losses and bloody and vastly increased military interventions by then.

[pnwmom]

20. We're deluding ourselves if we think that some other candidate

would have won because the GOP wouldn't have attacked him or her.

Hillary had strong progressive policies, but she wasn't willing to lie and pretend she could wave a wand and make all our dreams come true. That's the line too many of the the snake oil salesman's voters bought.

[Ken Burch]

21. We're equally deluding ourselves...

...if we think running the next campaign exactly like this(but ten degrees further right) would succeed where we couldn't succeed this year.

And it's not about pretending ALL our dreams can instantly come true(even Bernie wasn't saying that...he was running for president not chief magician). But we do need to make it clear that we don't think it's silly to keep fighting for dreams and that there is nothing wrong with believing transformative change is possible. We can't win as the party that says "Oh Grow UP!!" to those who haven't given up. And we should use moments of disappointment and times of only partial victory to fire people up to keep trying for more...not tell them to shut up and take what they're given and that's the end of it.

We need to be realistic without being dismissive.

[pnwmom]

22. We have to start right now to build up our registration rolls to make up for the millions lost

due to purging and voter ID.

Hillary had very strong progressive policies -- that wasn't her problem. But she wasn't willing to compete with Trump in selling false promises. And if the voting rights act hadn't been overturned in 2013 she'd have been able to win enough of the swing states.

Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan were all hard hit by voter suppression.

[Ken Burch]

23. I agree that we need to build up the registration rolls. Immediately.

I'm going to take this moment to call on my fellow Sanders supporters to get together and start working on that right now. We have the time and the energy and it's something that would make a difference.

As to the campaign, the policies were often good, but the presentation was often muted(in the long-standing and self-destructive Democratic tradition of muting ourselves and focusing on looking "safe" during the fall campaign) and in the last three weeks there was too much doubling down on the belief that reminding the voters of Trump's rapiness-which was horrific and indefensible-and expecting that that using that to discredit the guy would be enough to beat him.

And yes, Comey did what he did, but he couldn't have done that or anything like it if the private server had never been set up. It's much harder for someone to shoot you if you don't load the gun and hand it to him.

[pnwmom]

24. Why are you blaming Hillary for not knowing that following the practices of her predecessors --

who also rejected the .gov system as both clunky and impossible to use when traveling -- would cause her unending problems?

Powell used a fucking AOL account -- which was proven to have been hacked, unlike Hillary's more secure private server. And he DELETED all his emails when he left office, and no one said a thing.

And 22 million emails went missing during the Bush administration scandal about the US attorneys -- again, no consequences.

But Hillary was supposed to be the only SoS who used the .gov system (which got hacked by China,, by the way), and pilloried if she didn't. And not just by Rethugs, but by Dems like you.

[NurseJackie]

30. Why? Like the Geico commercial says "...it's what you do."

The irrational Hillary Hate™ continues.

[Ken Burch]

35. It's not about "blame" or "hatred". I take your points on the server, BUT...

Last edited Thu Nov 17, 2016, 03:42 PM - Edit history (1)

If she was going to do that, she could have permanently defused it as an issue by telling the admin and Congress that she was going to do so, and by making sure it was secure.

When appealing for people to vote for her, the servers were one of the issues I heard cyber-shouted back at me over and over again. I wasn't personally outraged that she used one-what I'm saying is that the damage was done by her reflexive choice, the choice she always made, to not be transparent. If she had given the Intelligence Committee a confidential briefing saying she was doing this and telling them what steps she would use to protect it, she could have prevented it being an issue.

In every skirmish she ever had with the Right, she'd have ended the threat immediately if she had just been straightforward in explaining what was going on and in revealing the things that exonerated her.

I grieve the Electoral College result. I wanted her to be elected as much as you did.

All that I'm doing now is trying to make a case for some things we can do better in the future.

What's the harm in that?

It's not as though the EC will still put her in the White House if only we don't question anything in the way the campaign was run. And Hillary isn't going to run again. So why SHOULDN'T we have an open conversation?

[pnwmom]

37. She thought it was secure. It was set up originally for President Clinton to be secure.

And no one has ever proven it wasn't. Though the government's own system was found to have evidence of hacking (several hundred thousand emails were hacked by foreign governments); and AOL is known to have been hacked; the FBI investigators, even though they looked, couldn't find any evidence of the Clinton's server having been hacked. Yes, it could have been hacked anyway. But the FBI DID find evidence of the .gov system being hacked, so it is ludicrous to argue that Hillary's was less secure.

She DID notify the government she wanted a secure blackberry like the President had, and what was the response? That there was no room in the budget. They were TOO CHEAP to give her a secure blackberry. Let that sink in. So she took the advice of her predecessor, who has finally acknowledged that (in a conversation during her first month in office) he advised her that he'd been using his own email because the .gov system was so unworkable.

Why should she have been the ONLY SoS to play Mother-May-I with Congress? SHE DID NOT BREAK ANY LAW WHEN SHE USED HER PRIVATE SERVER. THERE WAS NO LAW THAT REQUIRED HER TO DO SO. The only law was passed in 2014 after she left the State department. Till then it was just department policy -- a policy that was broken more often than not.

You want to keep the focus on Hillary and what she did wrong. I'd like to see you write an OP about the witch-hunt that had gone against her for years, a demeaning, humiliating witch-hunt, attempting to expose even all her personal emails (they're still demanding those), holding her to standards that had never been required of a male Secretary of State.

Instead, you're determined to seek out and publish her flaws. You SHOULD be examining our society's flaws. Why a woman so overwhelmingly qualified compared to the man running again her should be mocked as "lacking stamina" and "not looking Presidential" -- and held to higher standards in emails and everything else than any man? And why even many members of her own party blame HER instead of the society that produced the bigoted opponent and the rigged electoral system that beat her?

[Ken Burch]

40. I don't want to "keep the focus on Hillary"

I want us to examine the choices the campaign made.

It's not about pointing out personal flaws.

And yes, she was treated horribly by the right. I've never said otherwise.

We all know about the hostility the right gave her.

A lot of us have called it out for years.

But the right was equally hostile to Barack Obama.

And saying that the media is hostile to her, or pretending that the whole thing was about opposition to a woman being president, doesn't teach us anything or give us anywhere to go for the future.

I don't HATE Hillary. Never did.

It's just about wanting to make sure we as a party do better next time.

[ericson00]

26. this was a binary choice. Trump or Not Trump

those who wasted their votes showed reckless indifference.

[DFW]

27. I don't think the OP disputes that

His point, as I see it, is that continually throwing it back in their faces won't accomplish anything. In that, I concur.

If someone who voted third party, Trump, or not at all, should find themselves suffering as a direct result of their vote,
I will not 1.) gloat, 2.) smirk and say, "I told you so" or 3.) have the slightest bit of sympathy. But attacking them for
their actions accomplishes nothing, and is a waste of our energy. Plenty of them will find out soon enough what they
did to our country and themselves. They won't want or need any of us to remind them.

[blueotter]

29. I'm more angry at the people who didn't bother to vote at all.

If there was an emergency, I get it and those people are not to blame. I only blame people who were lazy, thinking Clinton had it in the bag, and just decided to stay home. Those are the people I'm angry at.

[NurseJackie]

31. And so defending them, coddling them and validating their vanity does what, exactly?

Votes have to be earned.

Oh brother! This again? Still? Seriously?

More vanity from the "I'm a special snowflake" way of thinking. They know the score, they know what's at stake. These aren't UN-educated voters... they're just to self absorbed to care.

You guys are really something else.

[KittyWampus]

32. "Let's Move On To Listening"....

You say "let's move on to listening" and it seems what you really mean is LISTEN TO ME!

I have plenty of mind-space to see the cracks extend to Comey, Republican voter suppression, Clinton, Obama and Bernie freaking Sanders and his ideologue supporters.

[oasis]

36. Pouting knuckleheads knew exactly what was at stake. Screw 'em.

Trump certainly will.

[NCTraveler]

39. "Lashing out, by itself, does nothing to help. "

That one line really destroys the whole context of your op. No one is doing that. No one.

[William769]

41. Well that didn't take long. nt