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Monthly Archives: November 2016
Protecting Democracy
Every day, more nominees. I never thought I’d actually be rooting for Mittens so there will be at least one adult in the room.
If you’d told me that “President of these United States” was an entry-level elected position, I would have laughed.
Who could have predicted that the Weekly World News would have gotten more right over its years of publication than what is shown on most news stations. (At the very end of this post is the best story EVER about the Weekly World News.)
Posted in Disaster, Donald Trump, Elections, House of Representatives, Politics, Public Health, Senate
Comments Off on Protecting Democracy
Transitions
The death of Fidel Castro on Friday is a reminder that the United States is not the only country going through a transition. In some Western democracies, the transition period is very short. For example, in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, the main opposition party has a “shadow” cabinet. After an election in which power changes hands, it is typically a matter of days for the new Prime Minister to officially name the members of the new government (with only minor changes from the shadow cabinet). In the United Kingdom, this means that after a Thursday election, the new ministers take charge on the following Monday (assuming that there is not a hung parliament).
Transition periods are more complex in dictatorships (even ones that are nominally democratic). As Russia has proven over the past decades (and China proved before then), titles are less important than who really has the power. It has been eight years since Fidel officially stepped down and his brother Raul took over as President of Cuba. However, Raul is now 86 and has also stated that he will be stepping down at the end of his current term in 2018. The question is who comes next after Raul.
Early Post-Mortem
This election is a bitter pill to swallow because everybody got it wrong. Apparently even the internal polls of the RNC in the last week of the campaign showed Secretary Clinton ahead. At the end of the day, President-elect Trump managed to avoid shooting himself in the foot just long enough during the last two weeks for Republicans who were telling pollsters that they were voting for Governor Johnson or were undecided to hold their noses and come back home. Certainly, the polls with two weeks to go encouraged the Clinton campaign to dream about states that they could go into and help Democrats in down ballot races. The perception that Clinton would win in some ways gave permission for Republicans to hold their noses and vote for Trump to keep the margin down and for Democrats to cast protest votes for third party candidates.
It’s also a bitter pill because the race got very personal. Since the election, I have gotten e-mails from local activists about the issues that the party needs to address. On most of the issues, there was a plan on that issue from the Clinton campaign. The issues, however, never got aired as the campaign focused on the flaws of the two candidates. I don’t think that the choice of the Democratic candidate mattered on this aspect of the campaign. In the primary, Trump also ran a very personality based campaign, slandering his opponents and coming up with labels to characterize the rest of the Republican candidates. Certain issues that were mentioned in the DNC WikiLeaks memos were not good issues for a Democratic primary but would have proven useful tools for the Trump campaign in the general election. Trump was such a big personality and so uniquely “not ready” to be President, it is hard to see how any Democratic campaign could have avoided the temptation to focus on Trump’s flaws and gotten the media to focus on the issues rather than the personalities.
Given the closeness of this election what needs to change between now and 2020.
Posted in Delegates, Democratic Party, Elections, Electoral College
Tagged 2020 Election, Delegate Selection, grassroot activists
1 Comment
I am Spartacus. Are You?
Yes, Spartacus was a real man. but many of us remember instead the Kirk Douglas character from the 1960 movie, and the line “I am Spartacus” which has come to mean that many people claim to be someone who “they” are going to harm. In case you don’t know, the movie’s screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted by the McCarthy HUAC. President-elect John Kennedy crossed the American Legion picket lines to see the movie. It was that action that finally ended the blacklist.
A new president-elect, and the role of Antoninus is this time played by Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, a US-based international Jewish NGO. Greenblatt announced earlier this week that when and if Trump launches the Muslim registry, he will sign.
If you don’t think that the Trump administration will come for Muslims, Mexicans, hell, anyone whose skin tone is not alabaster, plus LGBQT people, disabled people, etc., is simply naive. And simultaneously they’ll come for SNAP, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but I digress.
Please STOP with the EC Nonsense
I keep hearing from people asking me to sign petitions to basically invalidate the Electoral College, or to convince Electors to vote the popular vote in lieu of how their state voted.
STOP IT! STOP NOW!
The Electoral College is a Constitutional construct. That would be Article 2 Section 1 Clause 4. the 12th Amendement and Section 1 of the 23rd Amendment.
Posted in Electoral College
4 Comments
Rebuilding for the Next Cycle
Tuesday brought a lot of bad news for Democrats and the Democratic Party. It was not, however, a disaster. For the sixth time in the past seven elections, our candidate won the popular vote for President. (However, for the second time in the past five elections, we lost the electoral college while winning the popular vote.) We gained two Senate seats and come close in several others. A slim Republican majority in the Senate will hinder the ability of the Republicans to go as far as some in the Republican party would like. We gained approximately five seats in the House. While the Senate map is favorable for Republicans in terms of the location of races, mid-term elections generally favor the party out of power. (The supporters of the new administration tend to be disappointed by the failure to get more done while the opponents are outraged by what has been done.) In other words, while the party does have to think about its agenda for 2018 and 2020, we are in a slightly better position than Republicans were after the 2008 elections.
Posted in Democratic Party
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Who “Cost” the Election?
I spent Election Day working for the county, greeting voters, putting those voters in one of six lines to make things move more quickly. Our polling place saw about 2200 voters that day, plus 184 absentee ballots. From that one polling place, there is a lot of insight about what went wrong.
The loss was obvious when the tape was run a little past 9, indicating that while Clinton had won the vote, turnout wasn’t high enough and the percentage wasn’t big enough. This ended up being the pattern across both the state of Pennsylvania and the country at large.
First, an anecdote that explains something. The voter who came out from voting grinning ear to ear, proud. Told me that although a lifelong Democrat who had never voted for a Republican, she proudly voted for Donald Trump. Why? “I did all my research because I wanted to be really sure and I think Clinton went bad when she shot all her partners at the Rose Law Firm and then Vince Foster.” When told that never happened, the response was: “Yes it did. I read it on the internet.”
Posted in Bernie Sanders, Democratic Party, DNC, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Politics
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Here’s What We Do: Step 1
The basic plan will be to align with national and local organizations to get people elected to local row offices, county and state positions so that we build our bench and end up in the best position possible for redistricting after the 2020 elections. There will be a lot more on that over the next weeks and months.
For now, step one is that we take back our name. Over the past decade, we have allowed the Republicans to change us from “The Democratic Party” to “The Democrat Party.” We need to take the title “Democratic” and the term “democratic” back. Start today. Correct others. Think about it: we are both a party and a concept about what this country should be. The concept “of, relating to, or supporting democracy or its principles.”
Some of those principles are codified in the US Constitution. So memorize this:
Posted in Democrats
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What Now?
As it all sinks in….at the polls yesterday, I heard from Democrats who were voting for Trump for a variety of reasons. I have looked at the preliminary exit poll data and the turnout numbers and think I have an idea of how this happened. The final cross tabs might change things but bottom line — people who NEVER vote came out in droves. And what they voted against was the same thing that gave Britain Brexit — their hatred of modernity. So what do we do? While we organize (and re-read James Madison’s Federalist Paper #10) we wait somewhat quietly to see if in his first hundred days he DOES:
- deport massive numbers of undocumented human beings,
- ban Muslims,
- repeal the Affordable Care Act,
- add a Supreme who will vote to keep Citizen’s United, repeal gay marriage, ban all abortions even to save the life of the mother
- cut taxes for only the weathly
- leave NAFTA
- et, al.
Because if he does, THEN we know the plan.
Posted in Civil Rights, Disaster, Donald Trump, Economy, Elections
Comments Off on What Now?
VOTE!!!
While technology and methods have changed over time, the essence of what a campaign does has not changed since colonial time. Campaigns have three basic tasks: 1) Identify favorable and potentially favorable voters; 2) Persuade voters to support you; and 3) Get Out your voters on election day.
For all intents and purposes, the identify and persuade phases of the campaign are over, and we are down to the GOTV part of the campaign. With many states having early voting, the GOTV effort has been well under way in many states. To everyone who has voted, thank you. Each person who votes early is one less person waiting in line or getting delayed by traffic on election day.
To those who have not voted yet, please, please do. As the authors on this site have posted for months, this election is too important to skip. If you do not know where to vote, click here to find your location or click here. If those links do not work, most state and local election authorities have a link to help you find your polling place. Additionally, please check your state and local election authorities for sample ballots and your state’s version of ID requirements. Knowing what races and proposition are on your ballot can speed up the voting process, particularly if there are a lot of races and propositions in your city/county/state. If you have any problems voting or notice any problems, you can call 844-464-4455 for the Democratic Party’s voter assistance hotline.
