You got what you deserve, Republican Party...

[A Black Falcon]

The excuse they are making pretty much gives the game away.

"All these reveals are lies, LIES! Also, they're leaking classified information!" Trump, why would you classify a random lie? Have you classified all possible fictions?

Pretty much, yeah. Trump does not seem to be a great liar, even for his usual incoherence it's obvious that he's struggling to explain away all the Russia ties, and not doing a very good job of it...

So what if she won the popular vote? She didn't win the election. In the system this country has always used to elect Presidents, Clinton lost. Keep fighting the battle you lost and you'll just keep losing more battles in the future.

Winning the popular vote says a lot about what the people of this nation actually want to do, though. Once again we are reminded of how badly the electoral college needs to go away.

And you seem to think, even after three months, that this was just some kind of unusual aberration and not merely the latest and most devastating in a series of election defeats that have handed the entire United States government over to the Republican Party. You don't even recognize the fact that there's a problem.

What are you talking about, the huge problems the Democrats face because of regional sorting (that is, liberals mostly moving to California, Chicago, and such, and leaving places which are turning red such as the Midwest... or more locally, greater Portland growing while Maine District 2 shrinks and reddens significantly...), liberals not voting in off-year elections, Republican gerrymandering in many states, and the sheer number of states totally dominated by Republicans are huge problems that have been around for some time. Republican domination at the state level has been one of the worst things to happen during Obama's time in office, and it's really unfortunate that no one in our party has figured out a way to slow that down, or how to get liberals to actually vote in non-Presidential elections. Maybe the Trump administration will do that, which would be a positive side effect to this terrible administration, if it happens.

The flaw in your case is that you think I'm only talking about the 2016 Presidential election... in which "the most qualified candidate ever" couldn't even beat a literal moron with a third-grade vocabulary, but Democratic candidates also managed to do worse than expected all across the board in all other elections.

Hillary's gender probably was the key behind why she lost, sadly enough. Thanks to not having to deal with latent and overt sexism, a male candidate would probably have won in those same circumstances... and that's exactly the kind of reason why we need a female president, but this election showed how hard it is to accomplish. Pretty sad stuff.

As for that last sentence though, while Republicans did do better than polls indicated, it wasn't a massive miss -- polls were only off by a couple of points. I believe that it's common for polls to be off by that amount.

And that's just in 2016! Let's not forget that there are elections every single year at the local level and Democrats often don't even try to win them.

It wouldn't have mattered that much if Hillary had won. She would have been gridlocked worse than Obama and lacked the personal charisma to make up for it come re-election time because, as I can't stress enough, Democrats have virtually no power anywhere on any level of the United States government except in places where they are already firmly entrenched. Then we would have simply had 2016's nightmare delayed for four years.

There is truth to this, yes. Given the way things went, what would be an optimistic version of a Hillary win, her barely winning by holding PA, MI, and WI? Would that come with the PA and WI senate seats, though? If so then the Dems would have a 50-50 Senate majority (thanks to having the VP's vote)... but lose even one of those, and that'd be easy, and the Republicans keep their Senate majority. But even with a 50-50 Senate, almost nothing would get done because that Republican House majority is going nowhere. Over the past six years the constant state of dysfunction in Washington has been incredibly frustrating, and yeah, winning the Presidency would not have fixed that; instead, it would just continue the status quo as it has been since 2010, where Republicans control most things except for the Presidency, and nothing much gets done. That's a bad place for this nation to be in, but how do we get out of that when Republicans are getting so much from being so terrible and, at times, un-American in their intransigent refusals to actually let government function?

On the other hand though, that same problem is exactly why things are going so badly for the Republicans so far: after running against government for so long, how can you suddenly pivot to actually running it? Can you take away Obamacare like you promised? Some Republicans aren't so willing now that if they passed something it'd actually become law... and what about tax reform? That is struggling as well. And that wall may never get built. Etc. This is a somewhat inevitable result of electing a President who is totally incompetent and did not run on any real policy issues and a Congress dedicated to saying "no" to everything but who now actually have to run things, but it is interesting to watch. The question is, what will the result be? Will they get their act together and start passing terrible, incredibly destructive bills? Will they pass some, but far fewer than they wanted? Or will it all just melt down, as it has been through the first month... who knows.

I just hope that the end result is that Democratic voters actually turn out and vote in 2018, and that maybe, just maybe, at some point the Republicans go back to being an actual political party again who believes in the concept of governance. Because we need a two party system, with two actual parties who believe in democracy!

Of course, if the Democrats don't get their heads out of their asses and actually do anything at all to signal that they've learned their lesson from this, you can look forward to more of the same nightmare then. This party has a crippling competency issue and have become a party of center-left reactionaries. And 'reactionaries' is the key word; Trump plays the Democrats like a fiddle. Every time he says something that makes them react with outrage and not very clever memes, he succeeds in distracting millions of people from what's really going on. Yeah, we get it, Trump's a pussy grabbing racist. If you think reminding everyone of the fact in 2020 is going to win any elections, go sit down and let's find someone else who actually paid attention to the election we just had.



When they feel pressure from the voting public and not until. The democrats and left-wing media bring it up but refuse to focus on it as they should. So they have nothing to fear and have no reason to cave.

There has been a lot of energy on the left since this election, and I expect that it will continue until our representatives finally figure out taht they need to actually resist the Republicans. Work with them if there is actually something reasonable, sure, but everything else MUST be blocked. And with things as they are now, there are not exactly many reasonable policy positions coming from their site at the moment.