Irrelevant. They had Hillary winning. Trump won. You can talk your way around it, but they were wrong. No other way to look at it,

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

When judging how a candidate performed then yes you actually do need to consider the circumstances. Mondale and McGovern were given an impossible task. It was as impossible for them to win. It would be like blaming McCain for 2008 when it was pretty much an impossible task for a Republican to win after the economic meltdown, 6 years in Iraq, and running against a charismatic Obama. It was flat out unwindable for the GOP

Running against Trump should have been a case where it was impossible for Hillary to lose, yet she lost. By that virtue she is the worst candidate. She had ample opportunity to put Trump away but just couldn't do it.

Are you seriously trying to become a punch line on this board?

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

A national poll cannot give you the electoral college results, they can only give you the popular vote, which is what they came pretty close to accurately predicting.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

I didn't participate in that thread at all and was scarcely triggered by your Hillary crack because it's par for the course for your performative impartiality and your obsession with her. You however seem quite triggered when people say your posts that read like defenses of Trump read like defenses of Trump.


I hated Obama's administration and have never been a fan of crediting politicians in general and the president specifically for broader macroeconomic trends in the absence of evidence. The reason we can't have a real discussion is because of your inability to bring up any policies that warrant this giving him a fairer shake than he's gotten thus far.

Which is why national polls should never be trusted. The electoral college is all that matters. Popular vote is irrelevant.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

They won't get paid for when it's shut down...but when it starts up again they get back pay. It's essentially a delayed paid vacation. Nice huh? They set themselves up with some pretty sweet deals.

Whoever is President gets credit/blame for all economic happenings?

I don't want to put words in your mouth but that seems to be where you're landing on Trump and Black unemployment.

I wouldn't say all, but yes of course the President is credited or blamed for the economy. At least historically.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Agreed that they are not what matters, but at the very least they give you a pulse of the overall country. State polls will give you the electoral college.

I guess my larger point is that you can get a glance from those polls that the country would have fallen behind a Biden candidacy in the general.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

That's exactly the opposite of the truth. I've never been obsessed with who is or isn't president. In fact, I'm sure that if Hillary Clinton were now president my life would be zero percent different. Just like the lives of the vast majority of the goofs marching in pussy hats would be zero percent different if Clinton were president.



I'm not going to play fake economist on a message board. There are guys with PhD's in economics who can't agree on what drives the economy. If politicians don't get credit for the economy, then who is president shouldn't matter when it comes to discussing it. Again, the one thing we do know is that Trump is president and black unemployment is at an all-time low. Of course someone who hates Trump is going to find any other reason for that fact.

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Freedom is our Strength.

I don't care about board consensus. That matters not to me. Many of the people that hide behind that are often wrong anyway. That is cover for being wrong. Its patently stupid to say that a person was a worse candidate than a person that lost 48 states. Largest margin of victory in U.S. History.


Its also patently stupid to disregard the fact that he had to defeat 16 other people to be placed in that position. Its also dumb to continuously make the fallacious argument that this country simply "didn't want the other guy". You want to talk about jokes that would be it.

This country wanted that clown and whether it is guilt or otherwise they aren't willing to admit it. Even at her very worse she wasn't a worse candidate than him. It doesn't take the liberal media to point this out constantly either. Republicans many in fact have constantly made the point of how terrible he is and each and every time his chief apologists are at the ready with a customary defense.

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Economics are complicated. My issue is that if you don't want to credit Trump for black unemployment being down, you shouldn't blame him if it's up. And if anyone here who hates Trump is going to have the nerve to suggest that if black unemployment had doubled in the last year he wouldn't be screaming about Trump's policies killing minorities, I'm gonna ask, who you crappin'?

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

Maybe it's the business I work in (most believe way more in the cyclical nature of the economy than anything else) but not the case in my experience.

Yeah, I'm not suggesting the President should get credit or blame for the economy. Just that they historically have.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

The decline in black unemployment has been more a product of blacks being removed from the labor rolls than anything. That was the case a few years ago and it probably hasn't changed much.

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Well I wouldn't, but I'm not a team player.

I don't think you realize or are willing to admit how many people hate Hillary Clinton. Or how exclusive the Democratic party is becoming.

Agreed.

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Elections have consequences.

I have wondered this about LTG for some time.

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Elections have consequences.

I don't consider you a Trump-hater either. I know you don't like him and didn't vote for him, but I don't get the impression you feel like the world is falling apart because he's the president for four years.

_________________
Freedom is our Strength.

Yup.

That's the case with any candidate. She is a polarizing political figure but so was Donald Trump. There are a number of people that voted for her too.

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That won't change one opinion that I have ever expressed on here either.

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Isn't it sort of laughable to talk about "exclusivity" and "identity politics" when the Republican Party is chiefly regarded as the party of White Men?

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Not really. Both parties have a big problem with identity politics.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

That is a remarkably contradictory position, especially when you correctly include that the gop is primarily governing on behalf of the morbidly wealthy.

_________________
There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

Identity politics have been a staple of the Republican Party since 1968. I laugh each and every time myth purveyors attempt to make the case that it somehow started with Obama or other Dems. Its a damn joke. If Dems reach out to these groups its because the Republicans have first shunned them. Southern Strategists first excluded "the blacks" and the Christian Coalition religous right double down with their exclusion of homosexuals.


That is the history. That can't be ignored. Maybe on this board it can because each time "identity" politics charge is levied it is a placed on Dems. Its simply false.

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Nobody in this thread has said anything to the contrary. Republicans initializing the trend doesn't excuse democrats from diving head first into it the last decade or two either.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Bully for you. This response has little or nothing to do with what I wrote. Maybe it's the case that people say it sounds like you're defending Trump not because they're filled with biased and unfair hate towards the guy or obsessed with giving Hillary the throne or systematically misinterpreting you but because it actually sounds like you're defending Trump, despite your protestations to the contrary.

Again, I'm not the one who brought up the economy at all. That was your response when I asked what Trump has done that justifies giving him a fairer chance than he's been given. Sighing about the complexity of it all rather than offering anything substantive to suggest he should be treated fairer still leaves my initial question in place. I'll accept your implicit concession though that you wrongly assumed I'd be rah-rahing Obama in this scenario.

I'd add that nothing I said entails a conclusion as strong as it doesn't matter who's in office when it comes to the economy. The mere fact that something's complicated does not entail complete agnosticism. But you better have a plausible causal story linking that politician and a given outcome rather than just hastily concluding that whoever's in office at a given point in time deserves all the credit or blame for that outcome.

Deplorables!

Hillary is an awful person and awful candidate. The Democratic party force fed her to us, nobody else was even in the running. I do not disagree with you that there are a lot of racist voters or bigoted people that like Trump's message. I do not believe those people are the ones that turned the election in the states of MI, WI, PA, OH, or FL though. I have no data (and I'm not going to look) but I would suspect those are the states they lost the female vote. The Democratic party is turning people away from it.