Elections

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They don’t want you to vote

Republicans spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to take away your most basic right in a democracy: The right to vote.i-vote-sticker

They use illegal voter purges. They make registration extremely difficult if not impossible. They move voting precincts around randomly. They block efforts to allow for early voting or mail-in ballots. They try their best to make people ineligible. And, of course, they use gerrymandering and the electoral college.

And you know why. Because they know there are more of us than there are of them, and when we vote in equal numbers, we win.

So the only way they can keep power is to cheat — to do everything they can to keep us from using the power we have.

Don’t let them.

Vote.

 

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The latest anti-Hillary lies about that DNC lawsuit

First, a disclaimer: I supported Bernie in the primaries, and believe that had he won the nomination, he may very well be President today. But that’s an issue for another day.

Some rabid Bernie people (perhaps spurred on by Trump people behind the scenes who troll liberal pages and try to get us fighting each other) are making absurd claims about the recent lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee.

Basically, the lawsuit was filed by some Sanders supporters.  I’ll summarize their argument here:  “Waah! The Democrats were mean to us!”bernie-and-hillary

Okay, it’s a bit more complicated than that. What they said was that the leaders of the Democratic party were biased against Bernie and were doing what they could to make sure he didn’t get the nomination. The lawsuit complained that the DNC worked behind the scenes to schedule debates in a way that helped Clinton; that the people in charge supported her; that they planned events in ways that harmed Sanders. (The lawsuit did not claim — nor could it — that any laws were broken.)

Oh noes! Whoever thought there would be politics in politics!

Setting aside the problem of an outsider suddenly joining a group and demanding to be in charge of it and how that group would react, the lawsuit faced its first challenge that all lawsuits face: A Motion for Summary Judgment.

This is where the defendant in the case (the DNC) tries to get the case thrown out. The law requires the judge to say “assuming the plaintiff’s recitation of the facts is true, is there a claim for action here?” In other words, just because you may claim to be hurt doesn’t mean the law provides a remedy.

The judge rightly concluded that there was no case here and threw it out. Instantly, memes and blog posts started popping claiming that the judge found that everything the plaintiffs claimed was true. That’s not how it works.

The Democratic party is a private organization. They can set whatever rules they want for picking their candidate. The don’t have to have primaries (and in fact, many states have a caucus instead). They don’t have to sponsor debates. They can go back to the old days of choosing candidates in smoke-filled rooms (although being Democrats, it would be in a “smoking not permitted, have some latte and a croissant” room).

Don’t like it? Join the party and work to have the rules changed, instead of, you know, being an independent for your entire political career, joining the party just in time to run for office, and then quitting the party again as soon as you lose.

Did the DNC violate its own internal rules? Very likely. But that’s an internal problem they need to deal with — it’s not subject to a lawsuit.

So if you see someone claiming that the judge found that everything in the plaintiff’s lawsuit was true, they’re either completely unaware of how lawsuits work or else they are aware and are lying to you.

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How Democrats Lose Elections

Despite being in the majority (and technically winning 6 of the last 7 Presidential elections), we Democrats do a good job of losing when we could have won. Some of it is due to the left’s refusal to support a candidate who isn’t liberal enough for them.

This meme brought that to mind recently:

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Ignoring the insult that compares liberals to dogs eating vomit, the underlying point makes sense.

“But no,” some reply, “Even if you add the 3rd party votes to the Democratic side, they still wouldn’t have won in some of these races.”

The problem with that argument is that it ignores how elections really are won.

It ignores the donations given to the other candidates that could have gone to the Democrat. It ignores  the volunteers who worked for the other candidate that could have been working for the Democrat. It ignores the people talking about their candidate instead of the Democrat.

An election is won before election day, by the work and investments made by a campaign. Splitting those resources that could have been used to convince even more people to get out and vote for the Democrat could have made the difference in each of these elections.

At the same time, better candidates would have made a difference. Humphrey, Carter, Mondale and Hillary Clinton just weren’t candidates that inspired people in the way that Obama and Bill Clinton did. But when you don’t have that better candidate, splitting the resources only gets Republicans elected.

Dedication to purity may be noble, but it ain’t politics. Politics is about winning and about getting as much of what you want as possible, as I’ve said quite a bit recently (while making some of my more “pure” liberal friends angry).

 

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How Democrats can lose again: The litmus test

The GOP is doing its damnest to rip itself apart, fighting among themselves, looking like fools, and with the lowest approval rating for a President in his first few months ever.  So Democrats can be optimistic, right?

Nah. This is kind of what we had over the last year and we still lost, didn’t we?  Oh, sure, you can argue that technically we won because we got more votes, but this is America, and we’re still doing things stupidly simply because a bunch of rich white men 225 years ago thought it was a good idea.

We Democrats will screw it up again. We’re already seeing that. Democratic Representative Ben Ray Luján said there will be no litmus tests for candidates as the party looks to get a majority in 2020. Roe-v-Wade-protest

Liberals are already screaming, because we don’t want anti-abortionists taking away our rights. How dare we support a candidate like that!

Well, while in a perfect world, I’d agree with that, the bottom line is that we need to win in places where we usually don’t if we want our majority back (especially given GOP dirty tricks involving gerrymandering and voter suppression — without those two things, we’d probably already have a majority).

So we can be absolute purists and then whine about how perfect we are while the GOP keeps its majority and destroys everything we stand for — or we can face the real world and understand that it’s better to support a candidate you agree with only 70% of the time in order to keep out one you agree with 0% of the time.download (5)

“As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America,” said Luján. Does that mean we may end up with candidates who aren’t perfect?

Well, sure. But it’s better than ending up with elected representatives who are sworn enemies.

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We, the People, rejected you. Stop lying about it.

Look, Trump people. We rejected you. We rejected you by a large amount — almost 3 million votes. On the chart of “winners” of our elections, Trump is the Biggest Loser. The next on the chart is George W. Bush, who lost by half a million.

The people said loudly and clearly that they don’t want you or your policies. loser

You only won because of an ancient loophole we’re stuck with — something that should have been removed long ago.  This is like a baseball team getting the most runs but losing the game because of a 100 year old rule that says that the team who has the best uniform wins, decided after the game by a group of people who are biased in favor of one team.

That is nothing to be proud of, and it is certainly not cause for you to lie and claim that you have a mandate to destroy everything the majority of Americans specifically voted against you not to destroy.

If there is a mandate, it is for the exact opposite of what you claim.

But then again, look at your leader — a lying ass who only cares about himself, who has spent his entire life cheating the system to get what he wants, by declaring bankruptcy as a business strategy and by suing everyone until he gets his way. What did we expect, huh? Of course you have no problem with abusing the system to serve yourself.

And the saddest thing is this:  You don’t give a damn. You’re proud of your dishonesty. You’re more than happy to screw over the majority of Americans as long as you get what you want. Hell, that’s basically the platform you ran on.

So don’t act all surprised that we say “Screw you, we didn’t choose you.” And don’t act all pure and innocent when we point out that America rejected you.

We’re not poor losers — we’re the winners. You got off on a loophole, you weaselly bastards, and there’s no way to spin that into support.

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The Electoral College and the Founder’s Intent

There is a movement now to encourage the electors to choose Clinton over Trump when they meet next week. “It’s what the Founders wanted,” supporters say, with backing to support it. “The whole idea of the Electoral College was to prevent mob democracy, where the people could elect someone completely unqualified.”make-america

While I agree that “completely unqualified” accurately describes our current President-elect, I have to reiterate what I have said here many times:  I don’t care what the Founding Fathers wanted. We shouldn’t be tied to the past simply because of what a bunch of rich white men thought about a world that no longer exists.

My dislike of the Electoral College could not be stronger. My blog post about it a few years ago has generated the largest comment section of anything I’ve posted here, and it still generates lots of hits. And it’s not like the Electoral College hasn’t already changed since its original inception.

If you are in favor of democracy then sure, the electors should choose the person who actually won the popular vote.

But ironically, that’s not what the people calling for the Electoral College to choose Clinton are saying. They want the electors to choose the popular vote winner but that this is the exact opposite of the will of the Founders. The Founders set up the Electoral College to stop the democratically elected winner from becoming President if he was unqualified.

Even if you accept the argument that the electors should choose who they want no matter what the vote was, that’s not the reason the electors should choose Clinton. They should do it to send a message that we’re sick and tired of an anti-democratic provision in our Constitution and that we reject the Founding Father’s idea that the will of the people can be thwarted by an elite group of electors, following an arcane procedure that rewards states over citizens.

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How to Honor the Founding Fathers with the Electoral College

“The Electoral College was set up with a specific purpose in mind and we should do what the Founding Fathers want,” people say to me whenever I argue for getting rid of it.

Well, fine. If your desire is to do what the Founding Fathers wanted, then we’ll need to change a few things.Stock Photo of the Consitution of the United States and Feather Quill

  1. Stop having Presidential elections. There’s nothing in the Constitution about them. The Electors are chosen by the state legislatures in any way they wish. They could choose the lobbyists who give them the most money if they wanted to.
  2. How the state legislatures are chosen is not provided for in the Constitution either. So we should allow states to just appoint these people, too.
  3. The Founding Fathers also intended that whoever came in second place would be Vice President. Nothing wrong with that, right?
  4. Even if the states do decide to have elections, those states should only allow white men who own property to vote. Hey, do you want to honor the Founding Fathers or not here?

Of course, in those days where it could literally take weeks to travel from state to state, each state was much more independent and unique, almost like the way the European Union is now. We were less a country than a collection of independent states (which is why we are called the “United States of America” and not just “America”).

That changed quickly. People started seeing the President as the leader of all the people and not as just some figurehead off there in the distance. (Seriously, does anyone know who the leader of the European Union is?)

And the states started having elections to choose this leader. Congress decided on a date for these elections — because that’s not in the Constitution either — and soon, the popular vote winner in that state decided who the electors were. By 1824, this led to the election of Andrew Jackson, exactly the kind of person the Electoral College was set up to prevent getting into the White House. Thus, within forty years of the writing of the Constitution, while some of the Founding Fathers were alive, we had already moved away from the original intent of the Electoral College.

So for those of you who say we should keep it in order to honor what the Founding Fathers intended:  You’re 200 years too late.

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The Top 10 Reasons Hillary Lost

Clinton’s loss took everyone by surprise. Even Fox News had predicted her win. And did you see Trump’s expression on election night? Even he seemed astonished.

Everyone has a theory why this happened but the real answer is complicated. Anyone who insists there is just one reason is wrong.hillary2

Protest Voters. Many of my liberal friends seem to be only blaming those who voted for 3rd party candidates. There are always 3rd party candidates, and we’ll probably never get rid of them because there is a small percentage of voters who somehow think “This year for sure!” or otherwise delude themselves into believing these votes make a difference. They never do. And this was the year — when you had two candidates whose negatives were higher than their positives — where a 3rd party could have risen and won. None of them came close. If it didn’t happen this year, it never will.

Did this have an impact on the final vote?  Sure, but you always expect there will be a few percentage points going to some minor fringe candidate. Blaming the people who are always there and when you knew they were going to be there solves nothing.

They hate the Clintons. The Democrats just really underestimated how much people really don’t like the Clintons. Her negatives were huge. Most of it was unjustified and based on lies and right-wing propaganda, but justified or not, it was there. Nominating an unpopular candidate and then losing the election? Where is the surprise there?

And there were many Democrats who (like me) did not really like Clinton that much either but voted for her over Cheetoface. But there was no enthusiasm there. The enthusiasm gap really hurt us.

We Want Outsiders. Everyone is sick and tired of politics as usual. We’ve had enough Bushes and Clintons running things. On the GOP side, all the insiders lost their primary runs.

One reason Bernie Sanders had a lot of support is because, even though he had been in politics most of his life, he was the one railing against the insiders and Wall Street and “business as usual” — meanwhile, Hillary was giving speeches to Goldman Sachs. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not the image you wanted this year.

We Democrats didn’t pay attention to this anger. The people on both sides are angry and we ignored them and picked the insider.

This is not to say Bernie would have won. There would have been terrible attacks on him, but I don’t see how it would have been any worse than the ones leveled against Hillary. Had Hillary not run, we would have been in a better position, as there are some very qualified candidates out there who probably could have destroyed Trump.

Now, on the Republican side, the irony is that Trump is not an outsider. The man is a millionaire who knows nothing about what the average man goes through and has never in his life shown the slightest interest in them. But hey, he’s a great con man, and this will go down as one of the greatest cons of all time.

Racists and Bigots. You can’t deny that this was their year — finally, a candidate who stood for hatred! When the KKK and the American Nazi Party endorse someone, that’s a pretty good sign. Their people usually don’t get involved but they saw their orange savior on the hill, and were going to come out and vote for him no matter what.

We’ve already started to see what this means; hate crimes have gone up as these people have become bolder. And it’s just going to get worse — but that’s a topic for another post.

This, in many ways, is what always happens historically. Progress is made and there are those who will constantly fight against it and conserve their precious way of life (that’s why they are “conservatives”). This backlash against progress explains the Civil War, the backlash against the Restoration efforts afterward, the fight against civil rights, the fights over immigrants that is constant in our history, and so on. In the end, progress always wins but there are many battles along the way.

That Woman Thing. Here in Pennsylvania, Democrats swept the state offices that were on the ballot — Attorney General, Auditor, Treasurer. The two that we lost? Senator and President — the only ones with female candidates. And we lost those by slim margins.

It’s not hard to imagine that there may be 2% of the population that is still so neanderthal that they won’t vote for a woman no matter how qualified.

Voter suppression. Republicans have done everything they can to keep Democrats from being able to vote. They’ve even admitted as such when they didn’t think anyone was paying attention. There were lots of stories about how the Republican-run states were closing precincts in minority neighborhoods, removing names from voting lists, and otherwise cheating to help their clown win, and they wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t effective.

Basically, Republicans will do everything they can to win an election except get the most votes.

Dirty tricks. Russia has now admitted it was helping Trump win. The FBI Director had a Trump sign on his lawn and did everything he could to discredit Hillary at a time when her chances were the greatest, and then recanted it all on a slow news day when hardly anyone noticed. Wikileaks posted fake emails. These things may not be the reason Clinton lost, but they certainly were a reason.

The Hubris of the Elite. This is a big one. I could write a book about this.

The real divide in America right now is not blue state versus red state — it’s urban versus rural. And the rural folks are being tired of being made fun of every night on the talk shows, tired of people calling them rubes for clinging to their religion, tired of being told they’re bigots. The “fly over” states are resentful of the “elite” who look down on the uneducated masses.

This is not new; it’s a basic populist message that has gained votes for generations.

I am not saying these people are right. A lot of them really are bigots, and deserve to be called that. They stand in the way of progress, wave their Confederate flags and refuse to serve gay couples. Many of them really are a “basket of deplorables.”

But they’re also not all like that. There are some good rural people who feel left out and who think no one stands up for them. They’ve seen their factories and mines close and take all the jobs in town away, and whatever economic progress is made always goes to the cities. They listen to Fox News and believe all their lies about what Obama is doing, and don’t realize that the programs he pushes helps them too. And they’re resentful and angry.

Many  could not stand Trump but (like many Democrats did with Hillary) they held their nose and voted for him anyway because it was better than the alternative. And that’s not going to change until the media and political elite stop treating them like idiots — even when they are idiots.

We Just Don’t Vote. The Republicans voted in the same basic numbers they always have, and we didn’t this time. Our numbers were down. So of course we lost. It doesn’t matter if there are more of us than them. If we don’t vote, they win.

In fact, a majority of Americans didn’t vote at all. If you insist on placing the blame on one factor, that would be it.

The government isn’t “them.” It’s us. We, the people. And as a society, we can’t bitch about what the government does if we don’t even do the most basic thing and get out and vote. It’s our fault.

That Damned Electoral College. For the fourth time in our history, the person with fewer votes won the election, and that’s twice now in the last 16 years — both times giving us absolutely terrible Presidents. (Hey, at least now George W. Bush can go down in history as the 2nd Worst President.)

Isn’t it ridiculous that the person the majority of Americans voted against gets to be President? (And, of course, Trump being Trump, he’s now claiming he has a “mandate.” What an asshole. And no, I’m not going to suddenly give him respect just because he has that office. I’ll respect the office, not the man.)

I’ve ranted about the Electoral College before, and if you’re interested, check this post and read the very extensive comments.

And finally, a disclaimer: This is a very basic overview and not the treatise that could and will be written about this terrible election.

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Why are people still knocking on my door days before the election?

Someone asked why people were knocking on doors campaigning this late – surely everyone has made their minds up by now.

One of the most important things a campaign can do is go door to door, identify which voters are going to support the candidate, and then make sure they have a ride to the polls. It’s not about convincing people to vote for your candidate at that point.vote-button

On election day, you call them again and remind them to vote and get them to the polls if they haven’t already. You have volunteers with cars (and donuts and coffee) to take them.

This is the Get Out the Vote part of the campaign that wins elections. The GOTV part of every campaign is important.

Trust me; I used to do this for a living. I was a campaign manager for a state rep in Boston way back in the 80s.

Here’s how it worked:

We had a list of registered Democrats. We’d go door to door, talk to them, and then put numbers next to each name. 5 meant they were definitely voting for our candidate, 4 meant maybe, on down to 1 meaning absolutely no way.

When you’ve contacted all the Democrats, then you start knocking on the independents’ doors.  If you get through them (highly unlikely; by this time, that’s a lot of doors), you can try knocking on Republicans, but there’s probably a better use of your time.

Then as the election gets close, you call them to remind them, starting with all the 5s. When you’ve finished the 5s, you go to the 4s, and so on.

And on election day, you do it again, to make sure they have voted and see if they need a ride.

That’s how you win elections.

Hillary has a strong GOTV organization. Trump has none. It will make a difference in close states.

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Why you should always vote

It seems strange to me that I have to defend voting against people who argue with a straight face that you shouldn’t — either because “your vote doesn’t matter” or “no one represents me”.

Trust me — your vote matters. That’s why they spend so much money trying to get it. That’s why Republicans try so hard to keep Democrats from voting.vote-button

And there are good candidates out there. Quite often they don’t make it past the primaries because people don’t vote. People don’t pay attention. They don’t get involved; they don’t read about the elections, and then when the election rolls around, they say “Hey, no one represents me” — which might not have happened had they done something about it.

I am involved in my local party. I go to meetings, I encourage candidates to run, and I’ve even run for a minor office myself (and won). I read about politics, I write about politics, and I contribute to politicians I like. And I vote. And because of this, I have a say in who these candidates are. I can affect the results.

Complaining that no one represents you in an election when you are doing absolutely nothing to change that seems like whining to me. And you know you’re going to end up with one of them, so at least vote for the lesser of the two.  Surely one represents your views better than the other one.

Democracy means we are the government. We, the people. We have a say in what our government does. The candidates answer to us, not the other way around.  They represent us.  They are not the government, we are.

If you don’t participate, then they ignore you. And then you get what you deserve.

The people who do vote (which are pretty much always Republicans) win elections, and then the stupid Democrats think “Guess we should be more like Republicans” and move to the right. Whereas if we voted in the same number as Republicans, we would win many of the elections and no one would be saying that. But because we stay at home, our candidates lose. So what do their campaign managers say then? “We need to appeal to those people who do vote, not those who sit at home and complain without doing anything.”

It’s not going to change from the top. It has to change from us at the bottom. And complaining without action changes nothing.