unless Clinton breaks free from the mold and enacts real progressive and populist policies.

Bernie was this movement's John the Baptist, our "voice crying out in the wilderness" and our Goldwater, our political prophet of change.

The primary is over, but the revolution is just warming up.

Hillary won the primary because more people liked her message. Simple. By Sanders carrying on and on, the revolution is dead.

not supported by facts

Last edited Fri Jul 1, 2016, 07:05 PM - Edit history (1)

A very telling one.

RedGreenandBlue, the folk who mostly hang in the AA forum made a bunch of earnest attempts to explain why they tended to support Hillary over Sanders, and the reasons they explained in detail just don't support fit your narrative. And my motivations certainly do not either.

Suffice it to say that describing a solid majority of Democrats as choosing a "default candidate," under the assumption that we're all too lacking in knowledge, commitment and principle to make a responsible choice insults everyone. This may only be partly intentional as I find your entire post severely lacking in the insight, information, and empathy needed to understand people you disagree with.

...

and what we should be doing at www.hillaryclinton.com

glad that one is over

That's not a slam on her. Reading over her ideas, they seem solid. It's just not enough, because at this point in the game, nothing is going to be enough.

But hey. I'm super-fatalistic on the subject. And if she manages to get everything going (and the administration after hers doesn't tank it all like Reagan did with Carter's efforts) it'll at least have some small effect on the total outcome.

So, kudos, I guess. I hope you don't mind if I hold her to all that stuff.

Hillary = blah blah blah
Bernie = NO !

but I also understand the importance of fracking. Fracking has been around since the 20's. it used to be called "flooding" (just one term of several). Not every location in this country is suitable for solar or wind. Not even remotely. The distribution of generated electricity here in the US is not suited for power production in one part and the end use 1000 miles away. The heavy transportation industries (trucking and rail) are dependent upon fossil fuels. Biodiesel is limited in many parts of the country for much of the year due to issues related to problems with the fuel. So, without a full understanding about what is involved, just shouting "no more fracking" is the same as "I have no idea about the whole scheme of things". Sanders evidently fall into that category. He has no comprehension of the big picture.

....is indeed supported by facts.

I just wonder why people are still "fighting the last Democratic presidential primary".

You can't really divine conclusions about why, because there isn't a ballot questionnaire asking voters to explain their reason for voting the way they did. For all we know, all 3,737,277 of those votes are because their fortune cookies told them to.

The words "Democratic Party" should not have been there. Much of his support was from independents in open primaries or people that registered as Democrats just to vote in closed primaries.

Why did she win? People did not buy into what Sanders was saying. They knew he was making promises that could never be kept.

As far as the perception of a divided Democratic Party, Sanders has done nothing to tamp down that perception. In fact, he continues to project that perception.

Yes, Hillary won and she will win in the general election. Time for an perception of division to end. Bernie who?

We're tired of the Sander's core telling us what we should be thinking and doing when they couldn't be bothered to join the party. Now they want to blow up something they made a choice to not be a part of until they wanted something for nothing from it. Good grief. Go away Bernie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism
Entryism (also referred to as entrism or enterism, or as infiltration) is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organisation in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. In situations where the organization being "entered" is hostile to entrism, the entrists may engage in a degree of subterfuge to hide the fact that they are an organisation in their own right.

Maybe this moves the needle on Green Party membership up by a percentage point or two, but we won't know that for a few years, at least.

Thank you for posting.

excited I am.

Not corporations or just billionaires.

I've been a registered Democrat since I was old enough to vote. And I support Sanders. Who the hell do you think you are to tell me I'm not a Democrat? Is my being a Democrat dependent on agreeing with you? Again, who are you, that you believe I need to answer to you?

Forget doing anything about income inequality or universal health care. Don't even dare aspire.

What a joke.

I don't think there's even a point trying to argue anything here because it's so ridiculous. Quite frankly, this is hateful, destructive thinking and I'm very sad people believe in this narrative.

Last edited Fri Jul 1, 2016, 06:07 PM - Edit history (1)

That's who a good many of us are! I'm Not A Bro and I resent being called one-
Bernie Sanders has been working for "all the people" for 40 years.

"Rep. Bernie Sanders 6/11/1992(I-VT) gives a blistering indictment of Reaganomics, deregulation"

Associated with that friendly moniker that I am unaware of?

but definitely not positive. A mild form of "gang"...in some worlds. That's just my imperfect understanding.

Some of their best friends are black I'm sure, but no....

I took it off. What I really meant was, I'm a woman and not what they always call us. I used the wrong word. How embarrassing!

Come from the lack of diversity that being mostly bros entails- it represents mostly young white male demographic- which makes it bit racist at all.
You understand that talking about demographics is not being racist- right? Lots of people seem to confuse the two, betraying little awareness of what racism actually is. It ain't talking about race.

What I really meant was, I'm a woman and not what they always call us. I used the wrong word. How embarrassing!

College middle class fun person. Cooler than nerds, it's not bad in and of itself at all- it's was just a humorous way to note the lack of diversity in terms of age and color. But it's not like "bros" are subjected to discrimination.

It's a pejorative. Same as when the same people were calling us "Obamabots" back in 2008. Se also "brocialism."

Here to a smaller extent. The lack of diversity was a bit striking to all that didn't fit in, or weren't willing to be lectured for having different priorities.
If you think being called a bro was somehow racist then it basically proves the point how out of touch the bro- group think was.

skeptical when it comes to those unrealistic high numbers hyped by commercial pollsters and M$M. My theory is, they hyped her numbers so that her inevitable fall in those polls would damage her and make her look BAD.

Fact remains, she wasn't coronated or 'chosen'. She had to fight for each and every vote and fight to keep her superdels while warding off unfair and baseless attacks from both flanks, helped in large part by U.S. M$M. Remember...Hillary had more Democrats backing her than Obama had backing him in 2008. But it was up to her rival to win them over. Obama did. Sanders couldn't.

According to Pew, she has received the least amount of favorable coverage, but the most negative coverage of all candidates, and Democrats across the country were tired of it and showed just how much in their votes, just as they had when President Obama was being attacked unfairly during his run for re-election, giving him over 51% of the vote for his re-election and sending Mitt Romney home.

Everyone has their reasons for supporting or not supporting Sanders. In the end, he simply came up short and Hillary Clinton is now the Democratic Party nominee, and we move forward so we can crush tRump in November and hopefully win back the Senate as well as the House. That's all that matters now.

He focused-grouped his appeal to young voters. He heard them say college debt and health care were their most important issues, so he gave them what they wanted. He couldn't do that with every other group, though, since what they wanted would have gone against his 'principles'.

He had a baked-in audience, because plenty of people on both sides of the aisle reflexively hate Hillary. I don't know how much of his support was merely that, but it was certainly there.

That must have been some "focus group" he held 30 years ago planning to seduce the Millennials for a 2016 run for the presidency....
and to never waver from those principles for over 30 years in our service.
Very sneaky indeed.

past 40 years. That was the cornerstone of his platform. I'll wait while you pull that information together.

That's what got the youth excited about voting for him. They didn't stand in long lines so that the Democratic Party would open their primaries to Independents. They didn't stand in long lines so that the Democratic Party would fire DWS. I doubt if half of them knew who DWS was if they ran into her on the street. They stood in line because they wanted the free tuition and health care. Admit it.

Bernie never bothered to become a Democrat before running for President because he's a purist who stands on his morale high ground while achieving very little otherwise. (and spare me the bills he passed which would have done nothing to make a difference in the lives of those students who became his base support.) Those students couldn't take his morale high ground to the bank, or pay their rent with it. The Clinton's tried for single payer in the 90's and it was blocked. Not only was it blocked but we lost the House as a result of it. The same with President Obama. He wanted a single payer system but couldn't get the support of blue dog Democrats and had to settle for a market based health care system because too many people thought it would turn their current health care system, which they liked, into something equivalent to Medical which they were not in favor of. Whether they were justified in feeling that way or not, that was the perception and they weren't buying it. Again we lost the House as a result of passage of the ACA.

Clinton will be the last neoliberal president.

Obviously you can't give everything to everyone, it's impossible. But I suspect you have specific notions as to who and what. Do you mind sharing with us, your take on who Sanders couldn't offer things to without going against his principles?

He couldn't give anything to the huge amount of Democrats who are invested in the gun issue, because he is clearly not someone interested in strong gun control.

And he couldn't give much of anything to any group that is dealing with social issues, because the entire framing of his world-view is that economics is the most important thing. He believes fixing inequality will improve almost everything in society, so he can't then put special focus on racism, etc., without undercutting his own argument.

Issues- both justice issues for POC and what happened in Ferguson as well as reproductive rights hurt him badly. We know he is tagging on to what he thinks the most Liberal position would be, but his lack of knowledge and enthusiasm showed. Always with the pivot to economics. It was insulting.

I personally doubted that Sanders was electable because of his numerous weaknesses that would be exploited in a general election. I found the claims that Sanders was electable due to silly match up general election polls to be laughable because Sanders was never vetted or challenged in the primary process. The Clinton campaign treated Sanders with kid gloves and even then I was amused to see the Sanders supporters whine about attacks.

There are good reasons why the demographics did not work for Sanders and why many voters including some African American voters did not support Sanders. There was a vast difference in how Sanders supporters and Sanders view President Obama and how other Democrats view President Obama. I admit that I am impressed with the amount accomplished by President Obama in face of the stiff GOP opposition to every one of his proposals and I personally believe that President Obama has been a great President. It seems that this view colors who I supported in the primary http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/clinton-sanders-obama_us_56aa378de4b05e4e3703753a?utm_hp_ref=politics

It seems that many of the Sanders supporters hold a different view of President Obama which is also a leading reason why Sanders is not exciting African American voters. Again, it was difficult for Sanders to appeal to African American voters when one of the premises of his campaign was that Sanders does not think that President Obama is a progressive or a good POTUS.

Again, I am not ashamed to admit that I like President Obama and think that he has accomplished a great deal which is why I do not mind Hillary Clinton promising to continue President Obama's legacy. There are valid reasons why many non-African American democrats (myself included) and many African American Democratic voters are not supporting Sanders.

The analysis in the OP as to why Sanders lost is really wrong and ignores a host of very valid reasons that good Democrats had to not support Sanders.

he was never seriously considered for the VP slot. They know more about his past than anyone else but himself at this point.

President Obama also faced a racist element that no previous President had encountered from day one with the Tea Party and Right Wing Talk Radio questioning every motive behind every action he took from day 1. When in this nation's history before Obama, when this country was in an economic crisis, had a major political party in this country met clandestine to orchestrate a plan to gain back the majority by sitting on their hands and watching Rome burn at the expense of their constituents. I consider those actions treasonous and this was the GOP.

Also Obama ran on a platform of ending the war in Iraq and bringing home our troops which was costing our Treasury billions of dollars. GWB failed to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government prior to leaving office and when the agreement in place expired, Obama withdrew our troops. Soon afterwards the GOP want to blame him for everything that goes wrong in the middle east because he refused to leave troops there indefinitely, at an indeterminable cost to lives and treasure.

The GOP made the decision not to work with Obama to establish a jobs program that would get this nation back on its feet after the economic collapse of 2008 and they did it with the blessing of their base. So if their base is angry now because there are not jobs in their communities, and their college graduate children are living in their basements because they have no jobs, than they have no one to blame but themselves.

I as a POC and my relatives many who have college degrees have had many setbacks ourselves. But we have always been the last hired, first fired, so we get it. We've always known the system we were dealing with, and we have always survived because we always knew that those promises spelled out in the Bill of Rights were intended for us. Everything we have, we had to work for. And we've adjusted. I understand that it's a little more difficult when you have an entitlement mentality like Bernie Sanders and his supporters. And I don't mean that as a show of disrespect as I have lot of white friends and co-workers as the saying goes. It means that I know that my blessings come from the grace of God and my own hard work and not from man, so I'm not sitting by waiting for man to solve my problems.

and would make the better President.

I wish you would acknowledge that she won because she got more votes, more delegates.

Last edited Fri Jul 1, 2016, 07:27 PM - Edit history (2)

We want to defeat Trump, this is the most important thing, and we don't see Bernie helping. At best he's treading water, and at worst, he's helping Trump with his non-endorsement and his defiant words. I think he has a responsibility to, as he put it, do everything in his power to stop Trump. And he's not doing that. Instead he's throwing his weight around trying to get things into the party platform, which is a symbolic document that makes no difference to anything. Trump becoming president is not a symbol, it's a real disaster.

In fact, a lot of Hillary supporters (like me), would be thrilled to celebrate how well Bernie has done, if not for the way he's acting right now. I'm happy to see the party turn left (and hopefully the country too). If Bernie's movement is going to move forward, he needs to attract people who are not already part of it. Do you honestly think he's doing that right now?

I think it's quite presumptuous to claim that if only there were a few more months then older voters and PoC would have finally woken up to Bernie. The numbers don't bear that out. The polling gap plateaued a few months before the end of the primaries, and it held at about 10 points since then. Bernie did hit is top number, it's just that it wasn't as high as Hillary's. But beyond being factually incorrect, it's insulting to Hillary voters, suggesting that they are just a little slow on the uptake. It would be like saying that those young Bernie voters would vote Hillary once they get a few years of wisdom and life experience under their belts.

Because there are a lot of good reasons to vote for Hillary. She's the most qualified candidate to run for president in many decades. She's progressive, and she's brilliantly smart, and she's been around to have seen a number of successes and failures and learn from them. There are good reasons to vote for Bernie too. We had two good candidates.

It also helps that she shellacked him at the debates and that she has vast knowledge on a wide range of issues both foreign and domestic. No need to over think it. She has also spent decades building coalitions. Lets be serious: this race wasnt even close.

that one size fits all.

His platform was narrow, shallow and he was never able to articulate solutions.

Getting people angry, is easy. Solving the causes of the anger is more complex than what he offered.

...

... didn't help either.

He needed to start in there years ago, and he just didn't.

And I never saw any projection that said Hillary was going to get 97% of the vote, that's totally absurd and a passive-aggressive way of running down her accomplishment in winning the nomination.

Bernie lost on his own, but everyone involved treated it as a real contest and she won on her merits.

Unlike DU, many Democrats liked Bernie but were turned off by attacks on Hillary.

So in addition to what you said being correct, I think he also halted any momentum he had by attacking Hillary (mostly unfairly too). At that point, he was depending upon changing her voters' minds, but you don't do that by making their choice sound horrible.

Some older voters were tired of it, and have the mistaken belief (not noticing what happened to John Kerry or Barack Obama) that if another Dem runs, that Dem won't face constant and unfair attacks.

Younger voters were too young to have watched the decades-long attacks, and so don't understand how unfair the attacks were. Other young people were attracted by Bernie's free tuition plan.

Hillary and Bill spent decades fighting for Democrats, and have made themselves known by minorities and every other voting bloc due to their hard work. THAT is why she got the minority vote, and nearly every other demographic. They have seen Bill and her speaking to their concerns for decades, and fighting for them and the Democratic Party, and winning when other Democrats were getting clobbered by the GOP. To describe that as being the default candidate is absolutely offensive and ridiculous. That's like saying someone wins an Olympic gold medal because they are more well known. Bullshit. They are well known because they work hard and they win.

You want to know why she won? That is why.

Thank you!

No matter how poorly executed it has been, it is real and it shouldn't be ignored.

Occupy Wall Street, as many of us predicted, amounted to very little of what it aspired to because it was leaderless and disorganized (one follows the other). Sanders' revolution did not succeed as well as it could have because he is a poor messenger and virtually no one in Congress much likes him, as evidenced by the lack of support for his candidacy.

And yet...

I think part of the disconnect between warring factions (at least on DU) is that some of us have done quite well in professional positions (including adapting well to the digital age) and others have not.

That may be something to keep in mind as work proceeds to heal the divisions.

And my advice to the revolutionists is please pick a better leader next time. Please get better organized. If all you're going to do is shout loudly and not vote, then why bother? Keep in mind that trying to 'take over' a party instead of working with people who could be your allies will likely not get you any nearer your goals.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

I was part of it when it was legit, I watched it disintegrate at the end - I am watching the same process again. Of course the economic injustice is a crucial issue that traditionally Ds address - and remedy. Peace and prosperity. Taking us out of crisis. And please don't blow up banks - my savings are in there!

The Revolutionists who couldn't bother to get organized and the Establishment that insisted they do so.

The dearth of charismatic leaders is real. Obama was the real exception. Now we have a 90s era candidate for President and the Revolutionists have once more come up short.

Someone needs to see the processes and all its interlocking pieces and do something to prevent further discontent. The last thing we should want is to tear the Democratic Party apart at the very moment the GOP is at its weakest.

I think Clinton can do some of that but if she has Warren by her side, I will feel even more confident.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

at least the ones who really know her, she is. Bill Clinton talked about the 1%ers in his '92 campaign. They both talked about the need for the younger generation to do better than their parents for decades. And DID STUFF to make it so. I did personally experience Peace and Prosperity - not just a slogan. The world did exist before Bernie, and will continue to do so after him. Many of the Clinton voters in NYC were in Zuccotti Park (I do personally know quite a few). Now we took it to a higher level. The ones who are still trying to sleep there are the ones who never voted. Pretty much a metaphor for the primaries.

The Revolutionists who couldn't bother to get organized

The New Left has more or less forgotten how to make change and figuring out how it happened requires a book all its own. Hint: putting a lot of people into the streets is not a revolution, it's a RP convention. Or rather, it's the tip of an iceberg...with no iceberg.

You had a good thigh-slapping time when we were hosed with pepper spray. You called us deadbeats, you called us lazy, you told us we deserved it because we were "too white." In doing so you of course devalued and dismissed our nonwhite brothers and sisters protesting with us, just as you do with our fellows supporting Bernie. You decry a movement for "not having a leader." Then you decry it for having the wrong leader. You argue that your efforts to smother any and all support and belittle particpants "prove' that there is no cause worth having at the heart of it. Then you urge people to "end the division."

I've seen this before. It's a smothering tactic when used in politics. In interpersonal relationships, it's called emotional abuse.

OWS fell short, plain and simple, as was predicted. Sanders fell short, as was predicted.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

Only you really know what I've seen, heard, and experienced. You are my gatekeeper, who tells me fact from fiction about myself.

Remember what I just said about emotional abuse? you're hitting the high notes.Maybe next you can try to control who I associate with, or make implied threats against me if I don't concede to your argument?

Did OWS fall short of its goals? Yes. Did Sanders? Yes. Where is anyone saying you're lying? I canvassed for Obama in 2008 because I was excited about his nomination. I'd gladly join in protests if there was any sense of organization with which to be allied. OWS wasn't it.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

because we're too stupid/uniform to know what's good for us. In spite CONSTANT media exposure, over 200 million spent - sometimes 2 to 1 over "generic", we were that thick. Nice way of erasing the first woman nominee, I knew coming here will reveal new depths contempt for the democratic process/historical meaning. At least you don't expect the superdelegates to overturn the will of the majority , cuz 🍆! It never stops with you!

...I agree and disagree with have been addressed in the original post and follow-ups... but there was one point I didn't see.

I believe Hillary went in expecting a primary contest. The "coronation" story was a negative way to portray her...she knew this, having seen the play before. Of course, you take an easy win when you get one, but you prepare yourself for a contest. I think this is her approach to the General Election, also.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

Change is stressful; even positive change. I think many people went with Clinton because of the "better to go with the devil you know" theory.

I've been following her career for years. I liked and still like what I see. That's why I voted for her in May, why I voted for her in 2008, and why I'll vote for her in November. She is smart, has a great attention to detail (yes, I know this bores some people, but I really like that), and thinks fast on her feet.

her supporters.

how self-serving.

not to mention a totally losing message considering you were never gonna win without getting her voters.

I suppose it's easier for his supporters to believe that than to accept the common sense reason that the majority of liberals aren't socialists. And socialists seem to um, have a few issues with Hillary, the Democratic Party, and the demographics that favor Clinton.

I'm guessing this has been alerted many times due to breaking the rule of rehashing the primary. But that's how you all roll.

Have a nice day!

the non-white male majority, as though we are somehow less than you? I submit that it is precisely that attitude that ensured he would not win our votes.

What you call a "narrative" was the demographic reality of the vote. Sanders supporters reaction to netroots began a chain of events and revealed an attitude that was present throughout the primary. The notion that Sanders might have to speak to the array of actual voters was seen as unacceptable. We were told we were weak women or "race-baiting" when we asked to know what he would do about abortion rights and racial inequality. As far back as last summer, his supporters insisted we had no right to question him. We learned later in the primary that intolerance for questioning or disagreement came from the top. Organizations whose members but their lives on the line to defend abortion rights were insulted as "establishment" for failing to endorse him. Southern black voters were dismissed as "confederates" and not "smart" enough to vote for him. None of that amounts to a winning campaign strategy.

You seem to imagine that if Sanders only had another 9 months to run, we feeble minded folk would have finally understood how much better he was, as though there was something complicated about his message. With more time, we might have finally caught on to how the good old days he told us we should bring back were really better for us. Only the demographics of the electorate didn't change throughout the primary season, except for an uptick of white and male support for Clinton near the end.

You really don't get it at all. There isn't a racial "divide" within the party. The Democratic party IS based on racial diversity; that diversity is central to its identity and mission. Sanders inability to win is not the Democratic Party's problem. It's him. His message was aimed at the white middle class, partly by design http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2014/11/19/365024592/sen-bernie-sanders-on-how-democrats-lost-white-voters
and partly because it was simply how he viewed the world. For Sanders and his supporters, America's best days were fifty-odd years ago, but for many, many Americans--most in fact--those were not better days. Sanders talked about poverty being at an all time high, but the fact is that's not true. Poverty is now lower than it was in the 1970s. The one demographic that has seen an economic decline since that period is white men. Yet Sanders entire vision of America was based on the experiences of that group, not all Americans, which is why his message didn't resonate. It's not that he intentionally sought to exclude, but rather his worldview is so bound by his own subject position that he never looked outside that, even when fact checkers pointed out his rhetoric about poverty rates was in error. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jan/23/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-says-poverty-us-all-time-high/

Clinton and the rest of the Democratic party don't neglect issues of economic insecurity and poverty. Clinton's has highlighted those issues throughout the campaign and her issues page of her website is filled with policy positions on how to address it. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/plan-raise-american-incomes/ https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/ She, not Sanders, in fact won a majority of the poorest voters (incomes under $30k a year). Just because Bernie believed he should get the votes of the poor didn't make it so.

I can tell you as someone who grew up as a poor white person in America, I found his rhetoric alienating. I don't long to return to the days when my family was terribly poor. Having worked from age 10 and earned W-2 income from age 13 in order to do pay for laundry, school clothes and the occasional movie, I found perplexing his pronouncement that the children of the upper-middle class shouldn't have to work 10 hours a week to contribute to their own higher education. I also could see that his promises of "free" higher ed without any attention to the tremendous inequality in K-12 would only not address inequality and might have possibly worsened it. Sanders focus was very much on the middle class, which is not uncommon for politicians, but when he decided talking about poverty was the way to address African American voters, it started to get strange. I was particularly puzzled when he doubled down on his claims in a debate that white people didn't know what it was like to be poor, and then when a support of his defended that comment to me by saying whites didn't suffer "institutionalized poverty."

You go on,


That is precisely what this OP of yours is engaged in. You've decided to erase the votes of the majority, pretend people just defaulted into voting for Clinton without thinking. You simply can't conceive that the majority of voters believed she would make a better president due to experience, competence, and depth of policy positions. You decide Clinton and the Democratic Party don't pay attention to economic inequality because....why I'm not sure. Perhaps because they don't capture the rage of a certain segment of the electorate that Sanders tapped into. The voting results show, however, that his message was not universal. It is also my opinion that voters who took time to actually look into his record found a certain inconsistency between rhetoric and action.

This post is a demonstration of why Sanders and his supporters didn't succeed in expanding support to the majority. You continue to dismiss the votes and concerns of the non-white male majority as a "narrative." You are invested in refusing to understand that not all Americans experiences and concerns are identical to yours. You don't respect us enough to even try to understand why we voted as we did. So you talk down to us, dismiss our votes as automatic, unthinking, and in the process show precisely why your candidate lost.

Now, let ME explain.

He was never able to get any significant support among African-American voters.

But for some reason, he was not able to get a significant percentage of African-Americans to vote for him in the primary.

If he had, he could very well have ended up the nominee.

Dems are in a lot of trouble. This absolutely cannot happen but many of us seem willing to give this advantage to them.

The phenomena of the "outsider" candidate is not new, indeed it's to be expected. The success of Sanders was due to his outsider status, rather than despite it. He deliberately set himself up that way, or to be more fair, that's how he rolls in general. It was both his greatest blessing and his downfall.

His failure came not only because in the end, people chose Hillary--she's simply the more qualified candidate (name recognition may have played a part of that assessment of voters, true), she has weathered politics for a long time, and when the left started sounding like the right in conspiracy flavored criticism, it became a series of side eye moments and quite frankly embarrassing--but because he failed to garner a message that reached minority voting blocks and women in large enough numbers, and failed spectacularly.

Hillary failed to reach young voters in much the same way, Sanders message sounds fresh and new to them--a brave new political world. Hilary is a nuts and bolts candidate. Detail oriented and practical. Sanders is overarching in concept, details and nuance not being his thing. Hillary campaigned in relatively intimate settings, meeting people, listening to them, addressing concerns-part of a deliberate and as we have seen, very successful campaign strategy --Sanders filled stadiums with a single, populist message, also a deliberate campaign strategy.

Hillary most definitely was addressing economics in the campaign trail, to multiple and diverse groups. Constantly in fact.

Both candidates understand very well how politics work, what is achievable and what is not.

Regarding your original point, remember there was a certain narritive floating around the Sanders campaign that said that cerain voters did not understand what their best interests were. Not only was this a deadly insult, perceived as part of a common racist narrative, the Sanders campaign bungled it badly trying to refute this--and they did try.

The difference in the failures of the two campaigns is the mistakes made and the successes gained in particular voting blocs was the in numbers of actual voters.

Hillary won overwhelmingly and by every metric.

"Those who didn't go to Sanders didn't go to him because they were stupid, or calcified, or not well informed. Those who did go for Sanders are smart and clear thinking!"

It's just as much bull shit as it has always been, and the fact that it is still being kicked around is proof that BS's supporters NEVER actually considered the positions of those who did not fall at BS's feet.

wouldn't change a word, thanks!
Unfortunately, this thread demonstrates how many are insistently invested in the 'racial divide' meme.

it's over let it go

Clinton was and is better organized. She has had a presidential team since 2008. Her ground game was much more in retail politics than Sanders.

She has the support of many party leaders because she has supported them in the past. Clinton has never been shy about public appearances for down ticket candidates. That was true well before 2008.

Name recognition. Clinton is one of the most well known people in the world and has been one of the most admired women in the world several different times. Most people had never heard of Sanders.

Sanders started his campaign very late and he never had a national campaign apparatus. He also practiced wholesale politics in the form of mass rallies. This is a problem because his audience is more self selected than universal. There is a remove between the wholesale candidate and the average voter.

People should look at the mechanics of an election first when they try to analyze one.