2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Clinton's loss in the GE was all her fault [View all]bettyellen
(47,209 posts)Which I think would have taken another form but would have surely been employed against any candidate we ran.
Part of the Hillary hatred that was really sad is that it started out strong in the primary against her and the Dem party.
I do think there was a great deal of very vocal and super nasty voices working against the entire party and they were never with Dems. I was pretty patient and in retrospect, too quiet initially as I thought we overlapped on 90% of the issues. Now I think it was more about emotions and tribalism.
I do think many were planted here and all over the internet to forment discontent and suppress any groundswell of young voters. Some were their useful idiots. Many woke up when they saw people they aligned with spewing RW memes, but a really thoughtless hateful mood had taken over. I know that did it for me, and started calling my friends out after tolerating a lot of the divisive RW crap. I saw a few people so infused with hatred they lost my trust, as they were no more honest than many Trump supporters. The truth is that many Hillary supporters were intimated and beaten down already before the primary was over. many of us discussed how we were already exhausted from criticism
of people "on our side" that overlapped and indeed was leveraged by the GOP piling on.
It left us in a bad position for the general. I think we have some soul searching to do, and part of it is to resist infiltration by those disrupting with RW propaganda.
When I think of friend salivating over Wikileaks and Guccifer when it was obvious how biased they were from the get go, I just shake my head.