so we accept that trump won because he pretended to be anti-establishment, fighting for the average american - but hillary lost for reasons totally not related to policy?
im curious, why do YOU think she lost then? and can you demonstrate, or at least explain how those factors were more important than her policies?

oh, and just to inb4 your go-to pivot: the reference to the stair incident, and specifically picking the number four, i have no problem acknowledging as 'hyperbole / joking', but not backpedaling on the core message, that her policies played a minor role compared to other factors.

i mean yeah i was just making a joke, but honestly its very close to how i feel

1. her as a person, it was a dislike for her that drove a lot of voters to initially even consider trump. included here would be the Clinton reputation generally.
2. fuckery in the primary season, drove away bernie voters
3. lack of campaigning in the rust belt, pretty self explanatory, she lost all of them by a very slim margain. .77% in WI for example
4. her policies, or lackthereof, in many key categories such as outsourced jobloss and the mining sector.
5. the stair fall incident, which really just represents a string of events signalling she wasn't in that great of health.

Ok for sheet 1, you have a total of 7 delegates to reward. You round everyone down and keep track of the remainder. Everyone gets 1 except for Pete who gets 2. You have 2 delegates left so the people with the highest remainder get the remaining delegates. Those go to Pete and Biden.

For sheet 2, you have 8 delegates. You round everyone down and you get Pete 3, Warren 2, Amy 1. With 2 left, you reward Amy and Pete since they have the highest remainder after rounding down.

This is clearly outlined here: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P20/D-Math.phtml



The math above applies to ALL caucuses and primaries. You have to do some rounding if you're going to do everything by precinct.

my question was not if you could come up with 5 'different' (although not entirely unrelated) reasons why hillary lost - i specifically asked how you justify your main point, that her policies just played a minor role? i don't think that any of the above is outright untrue, but some of the points simply don't seem very substantial compared to the core issue of any campaign, which is policy.

just as an example, the dislike for her was (justifiably) great, but so was that for trump. i would argue that neither of them would win a popularity contest in an average crowd of people. so if you like neither of them (refering to your example of voters that only considered trump just because they didn't like her), you'd still pick the one with the POLICY platform that more appeals to you.

When did i say the phrase "minor role"? it's possible for someone to have 5+ major things wrong with them you know.

as to 2016, i'd say it was about as not about policy as any potus election ever has been.

Wait, how is Bernie getting screwed by the DNC here? The Iowa caucus is run by the Dems in Iowa which is a different organization. It's very clear that they didn't train people properly which is a big problem. Now, it IS the fault of the DNC for using the app but that shouldn't matter too much since there is a paper trail.

Anyway, most models predicted that Iowa would be one of the most substantial states since it goes first. Given the uncertainty in Iowa, New Hampshire now becomes the state that could dictate momentum and Bernie is WAY ahead there. Given that the results are more uncertain now due to the recanvas, it seems like we won't know the Iowa results until AFTER New Hampshire. Does that make sense?

As for Iowa, Bernie was SUPPOSED to win and Biden was supposed to come in a close 2nd. Bernie appears to have performed relative to expectations but Pete EXCEEDED expectations and there's a strong likelihood that HE was the winner. So, a lot of momentum SHOULD go to Pete but it's likely that he MISSED that momentum due to the uncertainty. Basically, it all boils down to Bernie benefits a lot more from momentum in New Hampshire than Iowa.

you might not have used those exact words, but that's clearly what you suggested when you claimed that policy was probably just the #4 reason she lost. i also inb4'd that whole 'joking / semantics' routine btw, because i very much expected you wouldn't have any objective, coherent, or even quantifiable arguments to back that up.

again, if policy is not that important, and the most promising way is yet another establishment candidate, why has every single person running in this field made a shift to at least pretending to support the 'socialist ideas' that bernie platformed in 2016?
it's almost like polling on those issues suggests otherwise, it's almost like the whole 'that's too radical, what americans REALLY want is marginal, almost meaningless change' approach is not the most promising one.
i mean, of course the DNC itself will do everything in their power to nominate a centrist, who will do nothing for the people, just be a little more sane, civil, presentable, and less transparent about making policies exclusively for the donor class than the current moron in charge, but they still try to at least appear progressive... sorry, 'socialist'.

2020 United States presidential primary election results
Iowa
Updated at 3:52 PM CST

97% reporting
Votes displayed are State Delegate Equivalents, which represent the number of state convention delegates that determine how many pledged delegates each candidate will receive
Votes
Candidate
Delegates
Percent
Count

Pete Buttigieg
11 26.2% 550

Bernie Sanders
11 26.1% 547

Elizabeth Warren
5 18.2% 381

Joe Biden
0 15.8% 331

Amy Klobuchar
0 12.2% 255

You're strawmanning me. I neither thought nor meant to imply that policy wasn't important. I just wasn't at the top of the list of a bunch of important mistakes she made.

An example of a minor mistake would be the deplorables incident. While it gave a rallying cry to trump voters I don't think it moved the needle much.

I do think that the policy platforms played a huge role in the 2016 election. Trump had a clear policy message: build the wall and bring back the jobs. Hillary, by contrast, didnt put any substantial policies at the forefront of her campaign. No bold, sweeping reform, no clever, incremental reform, her entire campaign messaging focused on two things: pandering to leftists on cultural issues ("It's her time" "shatter the class ceiling") and stressing how unfit for office Trump is. Hillary ran the most negative and least policy-focused campaign in recent memory:




I think that a successful campaign needs to offer voters at least something, anything substantial, it needs to have good answers for at least some issues. I'm not in agreement with fender or the Bernie/Warren crowd that those policies necessarily have to be bold, sweeping change, but you still need something.


Some pundit put it best in the aftermath of the 2016 election: "The Clinton campaign and the media tried to make this election a referendum on Trump's character - but in the end, it turned out to be a referendum on Hillary". This hits the nail on the head: had Hillary been able to match Trump's policy proposals with an attractive vision of her own, she'd have crushed him despite all the flaws and weaknesses that were plaguing her campaign. But on the issues, her campaign was a black hole, totally devoid of any substance.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Feb 6 2020 04:13pm