election-2016

Democrats need to get a grip if they want to win next time

Saying you lost because the system was rigged against you is self-flattery, and it doesn’t help you learn anything about what to do next time.

.. FBI Director James Comey’s interference in the election was inappropriate and quite possibly swayed the outcome. The best way to prevent that from happening again is to do what political parties usually do: nominate a candidate who is not under investigation by the FBI.

.. Clinton failed to offer a compelling message on how she would help middle-income Americans get ahead through work — a failure that has been common for Republican and Democratic politicians in recent years, but that Trump managed to avoid. The next Democratic nominee will need to figure out how to convince voters he or she can succeed in fixing the job market where Trump fails.

Most importantly, Clinton had major conflict-of-interest issues that positioned her poorly to take advantage of Trump’s corruption.

.. Voters were reasonably suspicious of how much money she and her husband had been able to make by monetizing their contacts and influence, and of what favors they might owe as a result of that.

.. Pick a candidate who can capitalize on Trump’s failures

.. A candidate with a better pitch for these voters — one who understood the skepticism of new, complex government programs at a time of low trust in institutions — probably would have beaten Trump.

.. For all the complaining about how unfair everything was this time, Democrats had the easier hand to play in this campaign than Republicans did.

Democrats faced an often-hostile FBI and a meddlesome Russian government. Republicans had Donald Trump at the top of their ticket. I wouldn’t trade.

.. As Luigi Zingales wrote last month, drawing on his experience observing Silvio Berlusconi’s opponents in Italy, the way you beat the inept clown who runs your country is through normal politics. Instead of focusing your message on how ridiculous he is, focus on how what he’s doing isn’t working, and how you have better ideas.

C.I.A. Judgment on Russia Built on Swell of Evidence

Russian television, which is tightly controlled by the government, has generally portrayed Mr. Trump as a strong, friendly potential partner while often airing scathing assessments of Mrs. Clinton.

.. A senior American law enforcement official said the F.B.I. believed that the Russians probably had a combination of goals, including damaging Mrs. Clinton and undermining American democratic institutions. Whether one of those goals was to install Mr. Trump remains unclear to the F.B.I., he said.

.. Agents examined numerous possible connections between Russians and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including former Trump aides like Paul Manafort and Carter Page, as well as a mysterious and unexplained trail of computer activity between the Trump Organization and an email account at a large Russian bank, Alfa Bank.

Understanding the undecided voters

When George and I spoke, I told him I had been in his town several times, and he told me how the Miners Bank building had been turned into luxury condos. “Nice, but not for me and my neighbors,” he added.

.. “The government never helped me, but I was OK with that,” he said. “I made mistakes, had some scary moments, and my wife worked also at the local library to help out. I paid my bills, including my doctor bills.“Now I see my tax dollars going to handouts for others who don’t want to work as hard as I did, and I can’t afford my health care. Everyone is being taken care of but me. I feel left out, and it makes me feel that I want my country back.”

.. Voters didn’t care whether he paid taxes or not — and thought he was smart to pay none. But they thought Trump’s returns could show whether he was charitable (important) and whether he was as rich as he claimed he was (more important).

.. And they weren’t worried that Trump didn’t know what was going on in Crimea, because they didn’t either.

.. It bothered them that Trump was a bully and was outrageous in his insensitivity to people with disabilities. It bothered them that someone on Clinton’s staff literally took a hammer and smashed her Blackberries.

.. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.

.. I remember wondering whether that moment was like Romney’s 47 percent

.. a rally on Oct. 15 for Trump, along with 10,000 other neighbors. He told me that the Trump rally was “the most fun I have had in years. Trump would say, ‘What am I going to build?’ And we would scream, ‘A wall!’ He would say, ‘And who is going to pay for it?’ We yelled back, ‘Mexico!’ He thought we were smart and he didn’t talk above us. We know that he’s not actually going to get Mexico to pay for it, but it was fun to lighten up, to cheer along with everyone else, just like back in high school, when we would cheer that our teams were definitely going to win, even when they were bad.”

.. They didn’t like either candidate. They just wanted to be understood. At the end of the day, they cared less about Trump’s temperament and more about whether he “got” them.

.. instead of speaking about each other, we need to speak with each other

.. If you had asked me to describe a Trump voter last spring, I would have been largely wrong about their motivations, dreams, and even their values.

.. Empathy — trying to understand others as deeply as possible — is an important first step, whether around the Thanksgiving table or in social media

The CIA concluded that Russia worked to elect Trump. Republicans now face an impossible choice.

Post’s report cites officials who say they have identified individuals connected to the Russian government who gave WikiLeaks emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and top Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta.

.. By acknowledging and digging into the increasing evidence that Russia helped — or at least attempted to help — tip the scales in Trump’s favor, they risk raising questions about whether Trump would have won without Russian intervention.