caribny posted:Kari posted:
Hillary's strengths are obvious -
What's important are the numbers - specifically the Electoral College seats. Can you envision Trump winning these huge States - California, New York, Illinois and Florida? The reality is in the answer to that question.
Hillary has a major white man problem. Its also unknown how enthusiastic the Democratic base is. She isn't charismatic. She isn't black, so will not benefit from the "ethnic loyalty" factor that Obama got. The Democratic base has NOT recovered from the Great Recession, so aren't too happy now.
While Hillary SHOULD win, I will not guarantee that she will. There is hostility from certain parts of the Bernie base, who might stay home, or do something stupid like voting for the Greens.
Hillary has much work to do. She is brilliant and understands the problems and the solutions. She isn't a media savvy politician to an electorate who expect facile answers without nuance. Let us see how she gets passed that.
It might shock you to know how many think that "we will win so often, that we will get tired of winning" appeals to many. This to an electorate which has been fed sound bites since the Reagan era.
Hillary is a weak campaigner, period. But I have to report these excerpts from the New York times in an article last Monday "Why Sanders Trails Clinton Among Minority Voters", on why Sanders trail Hillary so badly among minorities; and let them speak for Hillary and what Obama has meant for minorities.
==============================================One important reason for this may be that African-Americans have experienced somewhat more favorable economic trends in recent years. While still worse off than whites, African-Americans have seen their jobless rate fall a little further than whites have, relative to a prerecession average. Furthermore, the decline has been faster for African-Americans in the last year.
The economist Robert J. Shapiro recently measured the income growth that people experience as they age. He found that, on average in 2013 and 2014 (the most recent data available), incomes for blacks in their 30s, 40s and 50s grew more rapidly than for whites in the same age group. Older people, who strongly support Mrs. Clinton, have also seen income gains relative to other groups since the recession.
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Perhaps a better explanation for Mr. Sanders’s divergent performance is that while African-Americans and white working-class Democrats are experiencing broadly similar economic trends, they interpret them differently.
A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last week found that African-Americans rated the economy as good by a ratio of about four to one, versus about two to one for white Democrats and an even narrower margin for white Democrats without a college degree. A Times/CBS News poll in December found that, relative to two years earlier, roughly three times as many African-Americans said their family’s financial situation was better as said it was worse, while Democrats without a college degree were almost evenly split on this question.
Geoff Garin, a strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign who currently polls for Priorities USA Action, a pro-Clinton “super PAC,” posited that for a more economically marginal group like African-Americans, the unemployment rate — which has declined significantly for all racial groups in recent years — carries more importance than growth in incomes and certain assets, which have been slower to recover. For whites, even working-class whites, whose jobless rate is substantially lower than that for African-Americans, the latter took on comparatively more importance.
“The major source of economic anxiety for working-class white men is not whether they have a job tomorrow,” Mr. Garin said, “it’s that they still haven’t had their personal recovery. Their recovery is about assets and income.” For African-Americans, on the other hand, “you don’t take job growth for granted.”
He cited polling data showing that working-class white Democrats were roughly as concerned about inequality as they were about job growth and economic growth, while African-Americans were overwhelmingly concerned about the latter two. It is no surprise, Mr. Garin said, that Mrs. Clinton, who has had a similar emphasis in her campaign, did better among African-Americans, while Mr. Sanders’s emphasis on inequality resonated more with whites.
In a similar vein, there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that African-Americans and Hispanic voters are more likely to use the economy’s recent low point, in 2008 and 2009, as the base line for their judgment than are whites, who may focus on more recent performance, where improvement has been less pronounced.
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The Affordable Care Act may be another aspect of President Obama’s economic record that minority voters and working-class whites view differently. “Blacks and Hispanics benefited more from the A.C.A.,” said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a policy and advocacy group. “It was a really dramatic lowering of their uninsured rate, which was obviously material to their economic health and their overall comfort in the world.”
Mr. Minor said that while he received his health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs, many of his friends “had no insurance and no possibility of getting insurance.”
“Obamacare has been a boon to them,” he said.
By contrast, many whites, who were insured at a higher rate than the other groups before the Affordable Care Act took effect, saw the program as detrimental to their interests. “The promise of Obamacare was to make it more affordable for everybody,” said J. J. Price, a firefighter and union member in Roanoke, Va., who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 but Mitt Romney in 2012. “It’s done nothing but make it more expensive on us, the working class.”
Mrs. Clinton, of course, has been a dogged defender of the Affordable Care Act, while Mr. Sanders has dwelled on the program’s not going far enough. He prefers a single-payer system akin to expanding Medicare for the entire population.
The dynamic on the Affordable Care Act suggests a broader difference when it comes to African-Americans and working-class whites: When Mr. Sanders implicitly criticizes Mr. Obama from the left, white working-class Democrats may see it as advocating for their economic interests, but the claims tend to fall flat with many blacks, among whom the president is still wildly popular.
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“I don’t think you can discount how important President Obama is,” said Stanley B. Greenberg, a former Clinton White House pollster who recently conducted focus groups with African-American voters in Philadelphia and Cleveland. “Obama and his election and re-election is seen as on a scale of what the civil rights movement achieved.”
He added that Mrs. Clinton, by way of her service in the administration and her eagerness to defend the president’s policies on the campaign trail, “is seen as having a more instinctive identification with Obama.”