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Originally Posted by surviva316
I guess regardless of where you put the blame, the lesson is the same. Don't torpedo your own electorate. Trust them to vote for the person they like and live with the decision, because the party doesn't always know best and they might be blinded by the wrong priorities.
First I'd like to congratulate the Trump supporters on winning the election. But as I've stated before, winning an election is one thing. Governing is a whole different ballpark, and winning doesn't necessarily mean you'll be good for the country and have a great legacy, because we've had Presidents before who got elected, but still have horrible legacies. James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, and Warren G. Harding come to mind.
And with Democrats controlling virtually nothing past the municipal level, there is literally no one to blame or scapegoat on the Democratic side if things in the nation go south, not to mention the failure to win the popular vote doesn't make the country as united behind the fairness of this election as past elections where the winner also won in the now seemingly unimportant popular vote.
My recommendation to fix that problem, would to be to have enough states with enough electoral college votes to add up to 270, to automatically award all their electoral college votes to whoever won the popular vote, and regardless who won their state, it would gut the importance of swing states, and candidates could travel all across the country to campaign instead of just a few key states. I'm not sure if Republicans would sign on to that idea however, considering they've now won 2 elections in the past 16 years without winning the popular vote, but it certainly would make our Presidential elections profoundly more Democratic in nature (Democratic as in how a Democracy-styled government is ideally supposed to work, not the Democratic Party).
Trump is going to get a full 4 years of total control over multiple levels of the Judicial branch, namely because Republicans made sure Obama wasn't capable of filling several judicial positions, and he'll be in position to nominate a 2nd SCOTUS nominee, probably one of the liberals since Breyer is like 78 and RBG is 83, if one of them dies/retires, which will maintain a very Conservative Supreme Court for probably more than 20 years. Roe v. Wade is on life support and about to have the plug pulled as it sits now, as well as Casey v. Planned Parenthood, and Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt.
He'll have total control over the Legislature, and of course the Executive branch for again, at least 4 years. The House, due to very clever gerrymandering, and the Senate are extremely out of reach for Democrats going into 2018.
I find Trump voters who were opposed to Citizens United but gladly want to put Trump in charge, sadly ironic and misinformed considering it was the 4 Liberal Justices who voted against Citizen's United, and the 5 Conservatives who voted in favor of it, and with Trump's election it will essentially be the law of the land now for multiple decades (I'm not saying that Hillary's Super PAC also did not hypocritically take advantage of Citizen's United, but that is officially the way to run a major election and allow limitless campaign donations from here on out going forward so long as it remains the law of the land).
Bernie lost, well he did lose lots of Black voters which potentially sealed his fate, but the nomination process was in fact heavily slanted towards Hillary and left Bernie-supporters feeling burned and cheated going into the General, instead of it being a free and fair primary in a supposed "Democratic Party". It's in our god damn name "Democrat" which is supposed to imply "Democracy", and in it's own way probably increased the number of #Bernieorbust'ers, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, and even Trump votes in the general.
The primary rules were so incredibly fucked up in certain states, here's what needs to die.
#1 Closed Primaries.
When Bernie lost New York by huge margins, I mean it was basically a freebie handed to Hillary. It wasn't because he wasn't popular that he lost so huge, it was because only registered Democrats could vote in the primary. And you had to be registered as a Democrat, under an archaic primary rule, a full 6 months before the election which of course lots of Independents were not fully aware of when it came time to vote for Bernie, and thus banned them from voting for him and left them feeling very burned. Independents, which were the ultimate swing voters in the general, were banned from voting for him. Closed Primaries pissed a lot of people off, not just in New York, but Bernie Sanders voters nation wide, because the Democratic Party's nomination process in New York, practically gifted her the nomination in that state alone.
#2 Super Delegates.
I'd like to give a little historical perspective on Super Delegates first. Between 1968, and 1988, Democrats was one of the most losingest party's ever when it came to winning the Presidency. 6 Elections and all we elected was a mediocre one-term President. I think it was 68, when Robert Kennedy was leading and then was assassinated, the Democratic Party went behind closed doors in one of those now obsolete "smoke-filled rooms" and put a Vietnam supporting Hubert Humphrey on the ticket who hadn't won a single state in the primary to be the nominee. The 1968 Democratic Convention could have been the most chaotic, riotous, divisive, Major Political Party Convention ever.
Of course he got absolutely trounced in 68, since no one really supported him, and no one really voted to nominate him for the general either. So the Democratic Party decided to end the smoke-filled room nomination process, and just hand it entirely over to the will of the people in the primary. And boy did we. We kept electing losers and the one time we won an election, it was a one term President.
By 1980 or so, the Democratic Party decided that letting the Lefties have total control over the nomination process and keep nominating bad candidates for the general was destructive to the parties chances of ever taking back the White House. So they implemented Super-delegates after 1980, which would still be much more democratic than the smoke-filled room way of nominating Presidents, but still maintain some level of party control over who gets the nomination. Originally Superdelegates were supposed to account for 14% of the delegate count, but that number got increased to 20% by 2008.
So when Bernie won Wyoming's primary, but still managed to lose heavily when the superdelegate count was added in, obviously a lot of Bernie supporters felt incredibly burned by this even if the primary was a relatively small portion of the delegate count total.
That was basically a huge nail in the coffin of Hillary losing the General, us Bernie people were pretty livid when we saw that because it really did feel like we were cheated out of our favorite politician of all time, securing the nomination. I was all but a #Bernieorbust'er, but I ultimately decided to vote for Hillary because I thought Trump would weaken the country, even if I had spent my whole life promising myself I'd never vote for Hillary.
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