Early voting seems to indicate that GOP claims that they’re ready for GOTV are true. While Democrats have seen a drop in the number of in-person early voters since 2012, Republicans are seeing an increase. According to Dr. Michael Bitzer, Republicans have shown up at 7% more than 2012, while Democrats are down 8%. Certainly, there’s no indication of a lack on enthusiasm among Republicans.
However, unaffiliated voters have increased their turnout by 35%. We might be able to assume that Democrats are voting for Democrats and Republicans are voting for Republicans but it’s difficult to know who those unaffiliated voters are supporting. If they are younger and more urban, they’re probably voting for Democrats. If they’re older and more rural, they’re probably more Republican.
Since 2012, Democratic registration has fallen from 43% of registered voters to 40%. Republican registration dropped about half a percent. Unaffiliated voters filled that gap. The Democratic decline is the continuation of a trend that began almost 50 years ago as the one-party South disappeared. As older Jessecrats (or Reagan Democrats) die, they’re replaced by unaffiliated voters, many of whom are actually more reliable Democratic voters than the Democrats they replaced.
Still, the numbers should give Democrats pause. African-American voters are 20% behind where they were in 2012 while white voters are 10% ahead. In North Carolina Democrats require a strong African-American vote to win in general elections.
Several factors may be at play that are reducing African-American turnout. First, early voting sites in places like Mecklenburg and Guilford County have been dramatically reduced. Mecklenburg has half the sites open that it had in 2012 and Guilford has been reduced from 16 to 1. More sites will open in the final nine days of early voting so the pattern may change. Second, many of the areas hit hardest by Hurricane Matthew are home to a lot African-American voters. They’re more concerned about where they’re going to live and work than who is getting elected. We’ll see if they start voting as the areas begin their recovery.
A lot can change in the voting over the next week. Right now, though, there’s not much sign that Republicans have an enthusiasm gap despite their presidential nominee and the fallout from HB2. Democrats, on the other hand, are seeing a drop in their base voters. That will need to change if they hope to have good night on November 8.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Yes, A.D.,Unemployment compensation is a tax on employers, collected by the government. (Surely you realize most all government benefits are funded by either taxes or borrowing, and that borrowing is paid for with taxes).
When the loan from the feds was repaid, it had a two fold effect on job creation in NC. It lowered the tax on employers providing them more funds to hire new workers. And it caused many who received unemployments benefits for long periods to seek work. Job growth in NC escalated once the debt was repaid and the length of UI benefits was shortened. Your resort to personal insults doesn’t change the facts.
I heard the same thing Dis. Only it was this splinter shadow group inside the Republican party that is trying to stage a coup to usurp and take power in this country. Is that possible? We haven’t had anything resembling it since the assassination of JFK. After Trump and Burr made their egregious statements of Hills being taken out or with crosshairs on her…maybe a coup isn’t that far fetched.
I’ve heard it compared to the ascension of power by Hitler after being elected in 1933. I’ve heard it called fascism. A strong concept and a strong word. Does it fit? I can’t predict the future but the storm clouds are building.
I guess the severity will depend on two things. Trump winning and how much power Congress will let him have. They could treat him like the Legislature treated Pat McCrory and reduce him to the roll of shill. But they aren’t of the same personality, Donald and Pat. Donald won’t roll over. And there are Republicans in Congress that will march lock step with him.
We will find out soon enough what is in store for us.
Dis, AD, I’d like to share with you a block quote from Robert Reich. He wrote and posted this on his website 30 OCT. I don’t know if anyone could have been more spot on and it speaks to exactly what you gentlemen experienced with ‘corporate benefactors’ and what is precisely at stake with this election.
“The parallels are striking. In the last decades of the nineteenth century – the so-called “Gilded Age”— America experienced inequality on a scale it had never before seen, combining wild opulence and searing poverty.
American industry consolidated into a few giant monopolies, or trusts, headed by “robber barons” who wielded enough power to drive out competitors. A few Wall Street titans like J.P. Morgan controlled the nation’s finances.
These men used their huge wealth to rig the system. Their lackeys literally deposited stacks of money on the desks of pliant legislators, prompting the great jurist Louis Brandeis to tell America it a choice: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.“
We face a similar choice today.
Then, America chose democracy. President Theodore Roosevelt, railing against the “malefactors of great wealth,” broke up the trusts. And he pushed Congress to end the most blatant forms of corruption.
His fifth cousin, FDR, went further – enacting social insurance for the elderly, the unemployed, and the disabled; a minimum wage and forty-hour workweek; the right to unionize; compensation for workers injured on the job; and strict limits on Wall Street.
In other words, between 1870 and 1900, American capitalism got off track. Between 1901 and 1937 (the effective end of the New Deal), America put capitalism back on track.
We’re now in the Second Gilded Age, and American capitalism is again off track. It takes about three generations for Americans to forget how our system, unattended, goes wrong. And then to right it.
Inequality is now nearly at the same level it was in the late nineteenth century. Half of all families are poorer today than they were a decade-and-a-half ago, the pay of CEOs and Wall Street bankers is in the stratosphere, and child poverty is on the rise.
Meanwhile, American industry is once again consolidating – this time into oligopolies dominated by three or four major players. You can see it in pharmaceuticals, high tech, airlines, food, Internet service, communications, health insurance, and finance.
The biggest Wall Street banks, having brought the nation to the brink of destruction a few years ago, are once again exercising vast economic power. And big money has taken over American politics.
Will we put capitalism back on track, as we did before?
The vile election of 2016 doesn’t seem to offer much hope. But future historians looking back on the tumult might see the start of another era of fundamental reform.
Today’s uprising against the established order echoes the outrage average Americans felt in the late nineteenth century when they pushed Congress to enact the Sherman Antitrust Act, and when Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan fulminated against big business and finance.
One hundred twenty years later, Bernie Sanders – the unlikeliest of presidential candidates – won 22 states and 46 percent of the pledged delegates in the Democratic primaries, and pushed Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to adopt many of his proposals.
At the same time, Donald Trump – a faux populist – has laid bare the deep discontents of America’s white working class, which both parties have long neglected. Not incidentally, Trump has also jeopardized the social fabric of America and nearly destroyed the Republican Party.
Hopefully some of America’s current elite will conclude, as it did at the turn of the last century, that they’d do better with a smaller share of a growing economy fueled by a flourishing middle class, in a society whose members feel the system is basically fair, than in one riven by social and political strife.
History has proven the early generation of reformers correct. While other nations opted for communism or fascism, Americans chose to make capitalism work for the many rather than the few.
If Donald Trump is elected next week, all bets are off.
But if Hillary Clinton assumes the presidency, could she become another Teddy or Franklin D. Roosevelt?
You may think her too much of an establishment figure, too close to the moneyed interests, too cautious. But no one expected dramatic reform when each of the Roosevelts took the reins. They were wealthy patricians, in many respects establishment figures. Yet each rose to the occasion.“
Wonderfully written (no surprise), and on the mark. My secret fantasy, as a fairly establishmentarian liberal Democrat, is that Hillary will appoint Reich as Secretary of the Treasury and former (“disgraced”) New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as Secretary of Commerce. Or NY Atty. General Eric Schneiderman for either post (assuming she keeps Loretta Lynch as USAG).
Unlike many, I don’t want to see her name Eliz. Warren to any office, as that would open up her Mass. Sen. seat to an appointment by the Republican governor.
That’s what I’d like best: Obama on the court. He’s only 54 (55?), whereas Warren is 66 or 67, so he’d have a much longer tenure. But he’ really have to be Chief Justice, as Taft was; going from president to junior justice, especially under John Roberts, would be too weird.
I look forward to seeing the benefits of a robust private economy, school choice for families, lower taxes for everyone, fewer government subsidies, roll back of onerous government regulations, protection of private property rights, market-ooriented economics, reliance on economic growth (rather than income redistribution), simplification of the federal tax code, government spending restraint and policies that promote individual individual initiative and ensure domestic tranquility.
total control? You are a special kind of ignorant. last I checked Obama was a democrat… you know the guy that has been if office for the last 7 years…. damn you are stupid
We’ve had the “benefits” of the Republicans’ “robust private economy” in North Carolina the past half-decade. Lower taxes for the rich, but higher taxes and brand-new sales taxes on working families. Tens of millions of dollars pulled out of schools to support corrupt private for-profit academies run by cronies of the governor. Fewer “government subsidies” like unemployment insurance that had been paid into by businesses and workers for emergency use in an economic downturn like the Bush Recession — leaving hundreds of thousands of North Carolina working people getting only half of what they were promised by the insurance they had paid into, and for only half as long. Leading them to rely on Food stamps.
No economic growth in the state compared to that of states that didn’t try to shut down the economy during the recession. “Simplification” of the state’s tax code to move the tax burden from millionaires and businesses, and onto the shoulders of the working class. An end to regulating coal ash, water pollution, air pollution, and support for the fastest-growing industry in the state — clean power — in favor of an end to support for clean power and an increase in subsidies to oil and coal and fracking.
We’ve got the great experiment right here, just as they do in Kansas, Wisconsin, and Louisiana, three other failed states run by Republican ideologues.
Every economist in the country, including most Republicans, warn that imposing Donald Trump’s economic “plans” would plunge the nation into a recession, the world into a depression, and cost the economy 10 million jobs over the next four years.
Ebrun, you are living the Republican dream in NC. Every complaint you have should be directed to the GOP legislature, which has brought about the state’s decline. Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, and in the real world, Obamanomics, including Obamacare, has helped tens of millions, cut the unemployment rate from the GOP Bush level of 10% to 4.9%, increased GDP by 100% in seven years, and increased workers pay this past year (finally) by 2%, after two decades of stagnation.
We’ve had the “benefits” of the Republicans’ “robust private economy” in North Carolina the past half-decade. Lower taxes for the rich, but higher taxes and brand-new sales taxes on working families. Tens of millions of dollars pulled out of schools to support corrupt private for-profit academies run by cronies of the governor. Fewer “government subsidies” like unemployment insurance that had been paid into by businesses and workers for emergency use in an economic downturn like the Bush Recession — leaving hundreds of thousands of North Carolina working people getting only half of what they were promised by the insurance they had paid into, and for only half as long. Leading them to rely on Food stamps.
No economic growth in the state compared to that of states that didn’t try to shut down the economy during the recession. “Simplification” of the state’s tax code to move the tax burden from millionaires and businesses, and onto the shoulders of the working class. An end to regulating coal ash, water pollution, air pollution, and support for the fastest-growing industry in the state — clean power — in favor of an end to support for clean power and an increase in subsidies to oil and coal and fracking.
We’ve got the great experiment right here, just as they do in Kansas, Wisconsin, and Louisiana, three other failed states run by Republican ideologues.
Every economist in the country, including most Republicans, warn that imposing Donald Trump’s economic “plans” would plunge the nation into a recession, the world into a depression, and cost the economy 10 million jobs over the next four years.
Ebrun, you are living the Republican dream in NC. Every complaint you have should be directed to the GOP legislature, which has brought about the state’s decline. Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, and in the real world, Obamanomics, including Obamacare, has helped tens of millions, cut the unemployment rate from the GOP Bush level of 10% to 4.9%, increased GDP by 100% in seven years, and increased workers pay this past year (finally) by 2%, after two decades of stagnation.
I don’t think it’s Eb Dis. If it is, his vocabulary has dropped by about 28,000 words and someone has stolen his grammar and punctuation textbook.
Nope, I think we have ourselves a new troll under the bridge. Judging by the tightness of that red suit, a pre-adolescent one.
As exasperating as Eb can be, he wouldn’t stoop to ‘F’ bombs. He would try something eloquent like; “Go engage in singular coitus.” I know you two have had your differences and that will continue until he caves in and joins the good side; so through perpetuity. He may have threatened, but that’s as far as it will ever go. He has neither the means nor the ability to carry that out.
Nope, we have a new pest and this new pest thinks you’re twelve; methinks that his age isn’t that far removed. Like I said, the grammatical and punctuation errors abound in his posts and Eb would have mashed his own fingers with a ball peen hammer for those kinds of mistakes.
Maybe we should hire three billy goats since junior wants to play the part of troll.
You’re right this time, Troy. I have not and don’t need to use obscenities or even crude aphorisms to express my opinions here or elsewhere.
And D.g. is engaging in another blatant LIE when he claims I threatened him. I guess he must feel threatened when his intolerance and hypocrisy are exposed.
I have been laid off twice in my life. The first time was at NBC in New York, after General Electric bought out RCA Corporation in a deal through which (unbeknownst until three years later) they secretly paid three RCA board members about $6 million apiece to vote yes on the deal. They also didn’t inform shareholders that the $6 billion-dollar buyout included RCA’s stash of cash that was almost $1 billion, so that the actual deal was 17% lower than the shareholders were told. Within three years of when GE took over, under its CEO Jack (“Neutron Jack”) Welsh, the national staff had been cut from 8,800 to 4,400, and two sales offices had closed altogether. My job was eliminated along with several hundred others in NY.
The second time was when I wrote a bi-monthly column for the Asheville Citizen-Times’s op-ed page, earning $75 per column, or $150/month. After Gannett bought the paper and ran it for two years or so, the national CEO and board decided that their profit margin — 10% NET PROFIT — wasn’t up to snuff, because some of the other national media companies were earning more. So they instructed all Gannett papers to cut costs by 10%, so as to allow the profit margin for institutional shareholders to double, to 20%. And, of course, that meant eliminating all local columnists at $150/month and replacing them with syndicated Gannett columnists at $10 per column. Thus getting rid of those pesky local voices at the same time.
No, there were not lots of other jobs that I could just walk into either in 1993 or in 2000. Ebrun might think that, but reality is very different.
Which makes me wonder: exactly what is his career?
A.D., you are obviously grounded in an alternate reality—better known as Fantasyland. You rant on and on with with left-wing talking points but no facts and figures to support your tired cliches. Every economic indicator shows that the NC economy is booming since the GOP took control of the policy-making reins of state government. National business publications have noted over and over the state’s strong economic performance under Republican policies.
At last report, NC’s unemployment rate was below the national average and has been cut by more than half over the past four years. And BTW, it’s no coincidence that the state’s unemployment rate plummeted after overly generous unemployment benefits were shortened. No, it didn”t leave workers to rely on food stamps— most relied on finding a job.
Sorry, Ebrun, but the reason that the state’s unemployment rate “plummeted” after the benefits were slashed by 75% is that the people who had been on unemployment WERE NO LONGER COUNTED AS UNEMPLOYED.
Reality bites. Republicans chew.
Your experience of the real world isn’t too uncommon, disgusted. Many people who have endured the right’s ascendancy since Reagan’s mindless administration have seen their lives and hopes destroyed or severely undermined. Anyone who grew up during the era when working people, and the unions that represented them, were strong and robust and involved with shaping the country knows that they were the people who created “the American century” — not the Wall Streeters and Reaganuglicans who took over in the 1980s.
We were asleep at the wheel from 1981-1986, and now we’re waking up, but it will take at least 20 years to undo the damage they have done. Shallow minds that know no history, only the pablum fed them by the right’s media operation, will probably never get it.
Side note: my grandfather worked at GE in the 1920s to 1950, when he retired. Early in the Depression, the company’s board agreed they had to cut the cost of wages by 30%, and every facility manager was told to do so. How was up to him. In the lab and factory in Cleveland where Grandfather worked, and among almost every other GE facility in the country, the manager put it to a vote: Option one: get rid of 30% of the employees. Option two: Seniority rules, so the newest hired are gone until 30% is reached (meaning the longest-tenured who have the highest salaries or wages stay). Option three: Everyone from the plant manager to the lowest-paid janitor takes a 30% pay cut.
And in every facility offered an option, the vote was Option 3. Not one facility voted to lay off the newest, youngest, or “most expendable”–they were all in it together.
Today that would be dismissed as “socialism,” including by Ebrun. To my family, and millions of others, it was “Stronger Together.”
Wrong A.D., which shows you know nothing about how the unemployment rate is calculated. It has nothing to do with with who gets unemployment benefits. It is calculated through a Census Bureau Household Survey that asks if anyone in the household is unemployed and actively looking for a job.
Best to bone up on your facts before making uninformed comments.
I am retired now, A.D, but I changed jobs and geographic locations at least four times during my working years. I found that to stay employed, I couldn’t just hang around where I was and gripe about not finding a job. I moved to get a new job, and in every instance I got a better job with better pay. I was fired once and had to leave on another occasion because the outfit I was working for was about to go under. In both instances, I didn’t expect the government to assist me with public support.
My point here is that those who take the initiative will usually come out ahead while those who sit back and wait for someone or something to fall in their lap will usually be left behind. It’s a pheonomon that many liberals never quite seem to understand.
You don’t have the foggiest notion of where unemployment money comes from, do you, Ebrun. Not the vaguest idea in that little retired brain of yours.
Unemployment compensation is NOT government money. Period. It is money paid by employers (and self-employed people like myself, who own their own businesses), as a tax, and paid into a fund managed and saved by the government, to support employees who, through not fault of their own, lose their jobs.
It doesn’t come from general revenue, it doesn’t come from property taxes or sales taxes or income taxes or anywhere else. It comes from EMPLOYERS and the SELF-EMPLOYED as, basically, a rainy-day fund — just like every other kind of insurance, including your Social Security — paid for by you and your employers while you were working — and your health insurance, wherever you get it (probably as a “free” benefit from the government you so despise, if you’re old enough for Medicare, and your car insurance, and your home insurance or renters insurance.
You really must be deliberately ignorant or else hopeless dim if you imagine that someone who gets laid off is sucking at the government teat by taking unemployment compensation. It’s INSURANCE. It’s PAID FOR. It is also a promissory note, which the McCrory Administration deliberately tore up and tore into shreds.
The reason the NC Unemployment Compensation Fund had to borrow money from the U.S. government was that our state’s unemployment withholding had been too low, out of deference to corporate wishes. So when the Cheney-Bush Recession hit, there wasn’t enough in the fund to pay it out. So the state borrowed from the U.S., and was paying it back, step by step, as the economy recovered under the Obama Administration’s policies. But McCrory and his cronies wanted to make a show of paying it back more quickly, and the only way to do that was by denying earned compensation to hundreds of thousands of NC citizens.
After all these years of living, reaching the age of retirement, and you still don’t know much at all, about anything.
I’m not so sure about Ebrun, disgusted. Maybe he is a teenage troll, but there are a lot of real people out there who are just as fact-deprived as he is.
You don’t have the foggiest notion of where unemployment money comes from, do you, Ebrun. Not the vaguest idea in that little retired brain of yours.
Unemployment compensation is NOT government money. Period. It is money paid by employers (and self-employed people like myself, who own their own businesses), as a tax, and paid into a fund managed and saved by the government, to support employees who, through not fault of their own, lose their jobs.
It doesn’t come from general revenue, it doesn’t come from property taxes or sales taxes or income taxes or anywhere else. It comes from EMPLOYERS and the SELF-EMPLOYED as, basically, a rainy-day fund — just like every other kind of insurance, including your Social Security — paid for by you and your employers while you were working — and your health insurance, wherever you get it (probably as a “free” benefit from the government you so despise, if you’re old enough for Medicare, and your car insurance, and your home insurance or renters insurance.
You really must be deliberately ignorant or else hopeless dim if you imagine that someone who gets laid off is sucking at the government teat by taking unemployment compensation. It’s INSURANCE. It’s PAID FOR. It is also a promissory note, which the McCrory Administration deliberately tore up and tore into shreds.
The reason the NC Unemployment Compensation Fund had to borrow money from the U.S. government was that our state’s unemployment withholding had been too low, out of deference to corporate wishes. So when the Cheney-Bush Recession hit, there wasn’t enough in the fund to pay it out. So the state borrowed from the U.S., and was paying it back, step by step, as the economy recovered under the Obama Administration’s policies. But McCrory and his cronies wanted to make a show of paying it back more quickly, and the only way to do that was by denying earned compensation to hundreds of thousands of NC citizens.
After all these years of living, reaching the age of retirement, and you still don’t know much at all, about anything.
OMG, the most recent statewide poll in NC (10/28-31) has Trump up by seven! Poll must be an outlier, right? But it was conducted by SurveyUSA for Raleigh TV station WRAL, which is not known being supportive of Republicans. And Nate Silver , the poll guru at the NY Times, gives this poll a grade of ‘A’.
Same poll has Burr up by six. This poll may be way off base or it may reflect a late breaking trend. Either way, I expect it will make some NC progressives extremely anxious.
12. Your 12 years old and living in the great Utopia that Carl Marx envisioned.
The information is quite helpful
I’m “older and more rural” and registered as unaffiliated but I have never voted for a Republican – not out of party loyalty, I just haven’t seen a Republican candidate who is better than his opponent on the issues I think are important. My registration is more for purposes of…shall we say “strategic primary voting.”
The primary difference is the lack of early voting sites and fewer days in the largest, most heavily black counties in the state. That rigging of the vote by the Republicans who run the county elections boards is paying off, at least in the short run, by suppressing the black vote and making it more difficult for urban voters of all sorts to get to the polls. But that will change during the coming week when more sites are open.
I don’t know about Raleigh’s GOTV effort, but here in Buncombe County the Joint Campaign for Hillary Clinton, Deborah Ross, and Roy Cooper is strong and active. I’ve phone banked when there were no seats for all the volunteers so some sat outside at a card table. I’ve canvassed West Asheville and had very good success in contacting identified Democratic voters (especially lower income residents) who have either already voted or are scheduled to vote early, and to drive neighbors and friends as well.
Of course it’s early to tell, but at least here in Buncombe the mood is very positive while the Republicans are acting like very worried, just-this-side-of-desparate losers-to-be. Negative campaigning by an unnknown GOPer for county commission chair, and first-ever radio ads for the county’s worst commissioner in history (Mike Fryar), are part of what’s happening.
Fryar is the commissioner who takes his cue from the DC Teaparty coalition: he has spent so much time in the County Manager’s office demanding explanations and clarifications and justifications for everything she does — information that all the other commissioners are capable of understanding, unlike Fryar — that she had to put in for, and then reject, $30,000 in overtime for herself, and the same for the county clerk. But his ads call him the “fiscally responsible” candidate. And he plays on the City and County divide just as Jesse Helms did: while Asheville is sophisticated, smart, and educated (and 12% black), all the people featured on his ads have deep country accents, questionable grammar, and empty statements about “financial responsibility.”
It’s those darn country bumpkins who are messing with progressive ideology. Democrats should encourage them stay home and tend to the farm. Let upscale urban liberals decide who should run the county.
Democrats don’t encourage people to stay home. On the contrary, we encourage all voters to vote, and all eligible citizens to register and vote. We believe that the best government, and the most successful democracy, exists when it truly represents the will of all the people. Sometimes that means divided government — but 90% of the public wants the Republicans in Washington to work with the Democratic president for the benefit of the country. The Republicans are NOT representing the will of the people — all of them or any of them. Even when 91% of the entire nation wants stronger gun control laws, the Republicans filibuster even the mention of such a thing, because they represent the NRA rather than the people.
It’s only the GOP that consistently tries to suppress the vote, and has done so since Richard Nixon’s and Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy was implemented in 1968. Why? Because they know that the more people vote, the more Democrats win.
It never fails, D.G. Yank your chain and nasty invective comes spewing out. Resorting to personal insults suggests a dearth of intellectual competence.
Ebrum you are very transparent and contrary to what you obviously believe not at all clever. cheers
I think they are being smarter by going after the people who are not reliable voters. In addition, I think we will see the numbers for Dem turnout look better now that early voting sites have expanded in the ur an areas.
reliable vs the reliable base you have to have to win…right.
The task is to get both types to the polls. It is a very serious election so best cover all your bases. So far as I can tell in Raleigh and Wake County the local Party has a much undeserved reputation.
Today’s detailed New York Times of the early voting results and patterns in NC are quite different from what is presented here. Check it out.
I read the same report. Who’s right? Check with Gerry Cohen!
Not surprised. The much vaunted DEMGOTV reputation this year is wanting. I am a reliable Democrat vote. I live in Raleigh in a strong Democratic area. Very Blue. In 2008 I had 3 door knockers for Obama and the Democratic ticket. In 2012 I had two door knockers for the Obama and the Democratic ticket. 2014 zero. 2016 zero. None in my entire neighborhood. In 08 and 12 the GOP haunted our neighborhood. Also 2014. No one this year. Not impressed with the Wake County Democratic effort in 14 or this year. So if Ross goes down like Hagan the GOTV reputation is a myth unless the Obama people are driving it. They have certainly let down Hillary…Cooper…Stein. Less than 2 weeks people. I have not gotten my two tons of mailers from anyone..Democrat or Republican.
Lots of wasted money on tv in this market but nothing else. Hope it works but betting it want.
I’m sure that had the Democrats held and equal and fair primary, there would have been more help in the presidential election. I also believe that people are being sent to questionable locations and not worrying about areas that they are sure of winning.
I take it you’re suggesting that the 16.9 million people who vote for Hillary Clinton, compared to the 13.2 million who voted for Bernie Sanders, somehow cheated? Or are you suggesting that all my friends and I, who supported Clinton, somehow kept my other friends, who supported Sanders, from voting? Or kept their votes from being counted? Or made it more difficult for all those dedicated Sanders supporters to vote? Exactly what do you mean?
To me the difference of 56% to 44% reflected the fact that a solid majority of Democratic voters strongly preferred Clinton to any other candidate — and still do.
And out of curiosity: on what evidence do you base your belief that “people are being sent to questionable locations”? What precisely are “questionable locations” in your mind? What makes you think that “people are being sent to them,” and by whom?
I suspect she means that now that everyone knows the Wasserman fix was in for Clinton from the beginning and the Dem primary was a sham, a sizable element of the Party has reached the conclusion that they need to sit out the election to send a message to Party leadership that the people rule the Party, not the Clintons.
Well, that’s clearly what you mean, TY. That “the fix was in” and “the primary was a sham,” despite the fact that numerous caucuses were held that favored Bernie supporters who waited around for hours discussing how to “fix” the party that many of them refused to join (remember, many caucuses and primaries were open to independents, too). Working people and the elderly didn’t have the time to spare, especially older party members who would have to drive at night.
There was no “fix”; there were rules that were set by the party leadership — elected people from all over the country — long before Bernie suddenly decided that after 35 years in Washington as an “independent socialist” and anti-Democrat he was going to become the savior of the Democratic Party that he’d turned his back on all those years.
Fact is, the people who “rule the party” are the people who get involved and work and volunteer and help shape the platform and get out the vote. Those who stay “independent” or “non-aligned” but then want to force people who ARE party members to “align” with their wishes are arrogant. If you want to rule the party, become a part of it, and dedicate yourself to it and its principles for 40 years, as Hillary and Bill Clinton have done.
disgusted – Your about a special kind of elitist now aren’t you? Yes you are!… My goodness, I read your posts with absolute amazement! I could sit here for several moments and utterly destroy your arguments, but, since my time on earth is limited and I only have so many breaths left given to me by the Lord, I shall waste precious few on useful fools such as you. Now, now.. I understand your ego may feel slightly insulted by this but I must do this: Your fucking stupid if you think anyone other than you believes in the revisionist history that you spout with utter ignorance. Have a nice day jackass.