BREAKING: Bernie Sanders Lost

[NanceGreggs]

99. I understand where you're coming from ...

... but I have to respectfully disagree.

HRC was running a presidential campaign, not an apology tour. She focused on her ideas for the future of the country, not on the shit that's been thrown at her for the past thirty years.

Had she persisted in defending herself against those attacks, we'd be hearing about how she was more interested in defending her own past than in what the nation needed to move forward.

I've been reading the postmortem analyses here and elsewhere. Everyone is convinced that they know what she did wrong - and yet they are often completely contradictory, e.g. she was too aggressive - she wasn't aggressive enough. She was too focused on Trump's negatives - she didn't go after Trump's negatives hard enough, etc.

Given that HRC won more votes than Trump, it is apparent that she HAD a message, and it resonated with the majority of voters. Had she lost the popular vote, this would be a completely different conversation.

HRC lost because too many of her voters lived in the "wrong states", which diminished the power of their votes, while giving greater weight to the votes of those who happened to live elsewhere.

My personal take? Far too often, Democrats lose elections because they're honest. They don't tell coal miners that they're going to bring their jobs back - they tell them the truth, that the coal industry is a dying industry. They don't promise factory workers that they can "make" companies who have relocated to low-wage countries reopen their factories in the States, when they know damned well they can't. They don't tell voters not to worry about climate change because it's all a hoax - they remind voters of the "inconvenient truths" about what's happening, instead of telling them to relax and laugh it off. They don't tell voters that if all Muslims are kept out of the country, they'll never have to fear another terrorist attack on US soil.

Trump (as is the wont of Republican politicians) simply said the things that voters desperately want to hear. In the end, whether his statements were based on facts and reality was, for many, completely irrelevant.

Vote in haste, repent in leisure. And over the next four years, there will be a LOT of people repenting the fact that they voted based on the charm of a snake-oil salesman, instead of voting for the people who have told them the unvarnished truth.