(11-11-2016, 12:04 PM)Punchwood Wrote: While that is a nice argument, the facts don’t add up. While Bernie did receive lots of support from while working class males, these people leaned to the left. Why would the average white working class male vote for someone who wants to increase the size of government hugely and at an incredible speed? Polls even found that most Americans would not vote for a socialist and that they would sooner vote for an atheist!!!!

08 doesn’t really count as it was such an easy election to win. Any Democrat could have been called the “change” candidate seeing as there was an extremely unpopular Republican incumbent in the White House. In times like these people don’t want change, people want change when they are very unhappy with the incumbent and Obama has record high approval rating. In times like this people want a dull, boring centrist who gets things done even if they don’t change the country overnight.

Someone like Joe Biden could have appealed to Trump’s supporters but Bernie Sanders was never going to be able to do so. You saw the kind of negative attacks on Clinton, imagine what they would have done to a 74, socialist Jew from Vermont.   

In 2020, the Millennials will truly be the largest generational voting bloc in the country. The Baby boomers are dying. The people who gave socialism a bad rep are dying. Today, when more people hear the word, "socialist", they associate the bad connotations that came with it because of the Cold War. People like Bernie don't use Soviet Russia or Venezuela, no offense to RandomGuy199, as examples. Instead, they look to other socialist countries like Denmark or Sweden. Denmark, a NATO ally. NATO was born in the Cold War in opposition to socialism and the Warsaw Pact. Today, NATO has member countries that are socialist. François Hollande, the President of France, is a member of the Socialist Party in France, also a member country of NATO. The CIA is a socialist institution. Anything that is part of the government is a socialist institution. When FDR created social security, the people of the time said it was socialist.

"In times like this, people want a dull, boring centrist who gets things done even if they don’t change the country overnight."  I don't see Hillary Clinton as the President-Elect. The Clinton Democrats have lost. They didn't show up on 8 November. Let's look at the numbers over the years:

• 2008: Dems have 57 Senate seats (maj.), 257 House seats (maj.), 29 Governors (maj.)
  
• 2010: Dems have 51 Senate seats (maj.), 193 House seats (min.), 20 Governors (min.)
  
• 2012: Dems have 53 Senate seats (maj.), 201 House seats (min.), 19 Governors (min.)
  
• 2014: Dems have 44 Senate seats (min.), 188 House seats (min.), 18 Governors (min.)
  
• 2016: Dems have 46 Senate seats (min.), 193 House seats (min.), 19 Governors (min.)
  

There was a 63 seat swing in the House of Representatives in 2010! In 2012, the Democrats had 59,645,531 votes in the House races and the Republicans had 1,417,278 votes fewer, yet the Republicans still held the majority because of gerrymandering. There was 36.4% turnout for the 2014 midterms and that led to the loss of the Senate. This year, the Democrats were supposed to win the White House, win back the Senate, and cut into the wide gap in the House. Instead, Donald Trump is President-Elect, the Republicans hold the Senate, and the Democrats pick up only five seats in the House. That's not just a loss, that is an embarrassment, not to mention Trump's breach of the Blue Wall. Where were the Democrats when their party lost the House in 2010? Where were they when they lost the Senate in 2014? Where were they when they lost the White House this year?

Only the Clinton Democrats showed up, but they were outnumbered (edit: in the crucial states), because they thought that they could screw over Bernie Sanders in the primaries and not expect people to be outraged. When the final results come in, they will show that Trump got as many or fewer votes than Mitt Romney did in 2012. The difference will be that the Obama Coalition was broken in large part, by Clinton and the DNC. Clinton didn't even campaign in Wisconsin. As for Michigan, people should have seen it coming. In the primaries, she was expected to win the state. Instead, Bernie Sanders won the state in an upset victory and people wonder why Trump won that state. In hindsight, people should have seen this coming.