First, full disclosure: I am not a registered Democrat. Except for during the Primaries leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election when I officially changed parties to vote for Bernie Sanders, I am not now nor have I ever been a Democrat. I am registered as independent. I grant that I lean far more Democrat in general, but that's not the same thing.
And after the way the DNC treated Sanders from the beginning, from trying too keep him from getting any real press coverage even after he was clearly polling higher than she was against Trump to trying to claim he wasn't vetted against Trump even though Sanders withstood more directed attacks than Clinton and still managed to stay on the actual issues while calmly and cogently explaining things like socialism, I never will be a Democrat.
I do not hate Hillary Clinton nor do I think she's an idiot nor some version of the Antichrist. I never have. As noted in a prior posting, I simply cannot vote for her. That doesn't change the number of people that did vote for her. And if you buy into the (erroneous) notion that there's only two viable political parties, then Hillary Clinton makes a FAR saner choice than Trump. And the fact is that nearly 3 Million more people agree that Clinton was the better choice than those who supported Trump.
Now, I don't know if it's the actual upper echelons of the Democratic party or simply the supporting arms like the National Democratic Training Committee and PACs like the Progressive Turnout Project and Democracy for America that honestly believe the entire problem was that not enough Democrats voted in the 2016 election and that was why Clinton lost. What I do know is that if any of them or even any of the common Democrats honestly believe that then they're blind and stupid. Again, the fact is that nearly 3 Million more people agree that Clinton was the better choice than those who supported Trump.
But I keep getting emails with petitions (for causes that I support from things like the environment to getting Representatives and Senators to block Trump's appalling nominations to offices with real political power) that when you sign the petitions you're asked (pestered more like) to fill out a survey. Not only are the surveys realistically useless due to the questions having thoroughly leading answer choices, for example from the Progressive Turnout Project:
Official Research Poll
I did not vote.
They then follow up with another survey that both contains (usually though not always at the beginning) and reinforces the assertion of the erroneous assumption that turnout was the whole problem.
When 2.8 million more people vote for the candidate and that candidate still loses to
Then there's the media, like this article from the National Memo, that also completely misses the problem that allowed Trump to "win."
When you look back at the lead up to the election, the lion's share of the television adverts were for Hillary Clinton. Trump aired almost no adverts until the weekend before election day, just as he had done during the primaries. Considering the relative saturation levels, people would have been jaded on Clinton's adverts (including their overall lack of talk of the issues like the economy and her strengths in relation to those issues and focusing solely on Trump's numerous personal failings while ignoring all of his business failings or demonstrating clearly just how he's a con artist), which only allowed Trump's message of misinformation to resonate even louder. For all the harm the Citizen's United decision caused, it was Hillary's massive fundraising compared to Trump's stingy spending that hurt her. Still, while a facet of the problem, it's not the problem when you remember that Hillary dominated the popular vote by 2.8 Million more votes than
Considering that she got that many more votes overall, getting the people out to vote wasn't quite the problem. Though if you want to get more people out to vote, how about we end gerrymandering entirely as well as things like voter ID laws and other related barriers to voting. It's also rather telling how the GOP relies so much on those barriers instead of actually trying to win elections on the merits of their ideas.
No, there are two basic general reasons Hillary lost. The first is that within the Electoral College, Hillary lacked the votes of the whites in the Rust Belt. She forgot in her wealth that the economy matters, and the con man focused on the economy. That he did so with lies and misinformation is irrelevant when she ignores the economy so thoroughly. That's only if you think the Electoral College does anything remotely useful.
The biggest problem, even if all those other barriers are legally and constitutionally eliminated, is the Electoral College. The Electoral College has allowed the election to be stripped and flipped six times (in 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016) relieving the public will of their choice of leader.
That is the main problem, the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election. Science matters, but so does history. “'History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.'” - Max Beerbohm.
Now if we can just wake the corporate media up to these facts and shine a light on them. Then we need to break the notion that there are only two viable political parties.
First, we need to find a way to get corporate media's collective lips off of and their collective heads out of Trump's ass, though that may prove far more difficult than getting them to wake up and actually do their jobs of keeping the entirety of government honest.
by Rev. J.T. Smith
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