2016 USA Presidential election thread I: The warm-up

[Gredival]

I mean, I get the pragmatism, I just don't care for the whole hog rejection of idealism Gredival gives off sometimes.

Sometimes?

[Ksandra]

Especially Hillary

Unless she's running against Obama

I suppose we didn't have to look very hard to refute this exact point

To be fair, because she couldn't defeat Obama, they worked a lot harder this time around to make sure she got it.

I don't want to sound like a BernieBro or anything, I am going to vote for Hillary without a blink of an eye and definitely recognize that people's thoughts on her are exaggerated.

BUT I am also in the camp of not liking just how stacked the deck was. I don't expect complete equality, but it does cheapen the democratic part (and even the republic part) of the process.


I'm not ignorant to think that money is not going to play a huge part in all this, but I do think it's healthy to call it out when we can to try and curb that behavior as much as possible.

[thetruepandagod]

Trump 44% Hillary 39%. Lets see if the leaks will change these numbers up.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/25/politi...-clinton-poll/

[Krandor]

In regards to the leaks I'm seeing that reddit is having fun with emails from April showing the DNC promising government positions to various top Clinton donors.

But I'm sure everyone involved didn't know that's illegal, so it's cool.

Apologies the source, but if Archie can link rawstory.com I feel like I can get away with the dailycaller.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/24/le...-appointments/

Quick Hillbots, explain why we shouldn't care or default to "but muh supreme court"

[kuronosan]

Look, I'm still voting Hillary but some of these same people saying she won't lose were saying Trump wouldn't win months ago.

This is why politics are hilarious to me. Hopefully she wins.

[thetruepandagod]

Look, I'm still voting Hillary but some of these same people saying she won't lose were saying Trump wouldn't win months ago.

This is why politics are hilarious to me. Hopefully she wins.

I hope Trump wins solely because it gives me the greatest chance of seeing all the people who support Bernie's economic policies self exiling themselves to Canada in their rage fueled tantrums.

[Boyiee]

I don't want trump to win because his supporters that are either friends or friends of friends on my Facebook are some of dumbest people I've ever seen. They are so uninformed and ignorant and just spout libtard to anyone who disagrees or has a discussion with them.

Then again, I also would want to see trump win because I've been watching these same people do this for 8 years referencing Obama, Muslims, etc, and it would be nice to see a change. Especially if in a year or two they 180 after trump does something dumb.

[Gredival]

Copy pasting something I saw from FB. I haven't combed though the leaks personally to verify but apparently they are less damning than what I was defending. The only thing approaching actual rigging the game was the religion strategy in the South, that they never actually used.

You can't prove a negative, but when you strip away the furious spin, the DNC leaks provide strong evidence that the DNC did nothing to influence the outcome of the primaries.

The key here is just how candid and unvarnished these discussions were. It's abundantly clear that they never imagined that these emails would ever see the light of day. They are frank in their contempt for people like Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver. They don't hesitate to say fuck this or that person. They are open in their discussions of how to respond to various accusations that they were influencing the primaries.

And yet, in almost 20,000 very candid emails among seven high-level DNC officials over a five-month period, there is zero evidence that the organization took any action to tilt the playing field. There is a single email where one staffer floats the idea of intervening in the primaries by questioning Sanders' religious beliefs in the South, but that idea was shot down. (I think it's obvious that guy should resign or be fired.)

You can't prove a negative -- maybe they used a Get Smart-style Cone of Silence to discuss rigging the primaries. But one would imagine that in such a large trove of totally unguarded correspondence, some evidence of active intervention would emerge if it were indeed happening.

Again, there's a lot of spin going on here, including by Wikileaks itself, which has been tweeting links to banal documents with inflammatory editorial comments this am.

The leaks reveal two things that are being spun as evidence that the DNC wasn't neutral.

First, it's clear than over the course of the campaign, an enormous amount of bad blood developed between the organization and the Sanders camp. This likely dates back to the NGP-VAN brouhaha. The objective facts were that a Sanders staffer breached the Clinton campaign's data. The campaign apologized for it, and fired the staffer responsible, but then cried foul when its access was suspended for 24 hours while they investigated how it had happened. Their frustration then grew noticeably when the campaign accused the Nevada Democratic Party of breaking its rules at the state convention -- claims that have been widely debunked. Whatever one thinks about those incidents, neutrality does not mean pretending that you aren't pissed off about constantly being accused of corruption.

Others are seizing on the fact that the DNC leadership seemed pretty sure that HRC would be the party's nominee. The implication is that they were only so confident because they had a thumb on the scale. The problem with that argument is that if you surveyed Washington DC-based political professionals, it's likely that 90+ percent of them would tell you that they never though Sanders had much of a chance of securing the nomination. That includes people who *supported* Sanders. I backed him and never thought he could win, and I know many other knowledgeable Sanders supporters who felt the same way. Neutrality doesn't require either believing that all candidates have an equal shot of winning, or pretending to believe it.

The DNC Leaks would be a big nothingburger aside from the fact that they entailed a very serious breach of donors' private data, including financial information.

Also troubling is the fact that some individuals or groups, perhaps allied with the Russian government and perhaps not, are very purposefully trying to intervene in the election in a way that might lead to the ascension of a fascist. That's the part that should be really troubling.

Note that things like hiring people to go protest Trump's events is hardly "sabotage" of Bernie.

[Day]

To be fair, because she couldn't defeat Obama, they worked a lot harder this time around to make sure she got it.

I don't want to sound like a BernieBro or anything, I am going to vote for Hillary without a blink of an eye and definitely recognize that people's thoughts on her are exaggerated.

BUT I am also in the camp of not liking just how stacked the deck was. I don't expect complete equality, but it does cheapen the democratic part (and even the republic part) of the process.


I'm not ignorant to think that money is not going to play a huge part in all this, but I do think it's healthy to call it out when we can to try and curb that behavior as much as possible.

Yeah lmao it was almost a good point if she wasn't the current nominee

[BerenTebogo]

I don't want trump to win because his supporters that are either friends or friends of friends on my Facebook are some of dumbest people I've ever seen. They are so uninformed and ignorant and just spout libtard to anyone who disagrees or has a discussion with them.

Then again, I also would want to see trump win because I've been watching these same people do this for 8 years referencing Obama, Muslims, etc, and it would be nice to see a change. Especially if in a year or two they 180 after trump does something dumb.

Surely you must realize, after watching Rs be the largest factor in govt shutdowns and successfully pointing the blame at Ds, and other innumerable such occurrences, that whatever Trump fucks up will inevitably just be blamed on Obama or Ds in the eyes of his supporters.

"Trump wouldn't have been unable to fix it if Obama hadn't broken it so badly" ad infinitum.

[kuronosan]

Ugh. So true.

[Krandor]

Trump will be doing an AMA on the_donald on Wednesday, 7 PM EST

[Gryffes]

Trump will be doing an AMA on the_donald on Wednesday, 7 PM EST

Holy shit.

[Blubbartron]

Trump confirmed meme master for president. Choo choo motherfuckers.

[archibaldcrane]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...nton-5491.html

Trump has (barely) retaken the national polling average in the two-way race. (Hillary barely leads the four-way). Hillary is still barely ahead in 538's polls only and polls plus, but is losing the "now-cast" as of this morning.

[Fiye]

Trump 44% Hillary 39%. Lets see if the leaks will change these numbers up.]

That convention bump man.

[Fiye]

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/...n-philadelphia

This is going to be an amazing week for DWS

[Melena]

That's only true for the DNC with it's superdelegates. RNC choose by the people(as we've stated they probably wish they had superdelegates). Which then you could extend to the electoral college.

If republicans had super delegates, trump wouldn't have won.

[Day]

Wasn't that his point?

[Melena]

Well being that super delegates were designed by the dnc to stop a trump like candidate, but it sounded like he was bitching about them being a thing.