Scroll through the Twitter feeds of DC insiders and Hillary supporters and you’ll find a treasure trove of sour grape posts telling you that Bernie Sanders and/or Jill Stein helped to defeat Hillary. Unfortunately for them, the numbers simply don’t add up. The Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcription of the above video:
If you’ve spent any time really going through the Twitter feeds of some of the hardcore Hillary supporters, some of the just D.C. insider pundit class of Democrats, you will undoubtedly see them still blaming either Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the general election. Just yesterday, Peter Daou came out and was so mad still at Bernie Sanders for the damage he caused to Hillary Clinton’s character, and that’s what made her lose the election. Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat here. Never in Peter’s series of tweets about Bernie Sanders did he ever say that what Bernie said wasn’t true.
None of the attacks that Bernie Sanders made on Hillary Clinton during the primaries were false. You got to live with that. He didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. He didn’t pull a Donald Trump. He didn’t make fun of her. He brought up the issues the voters actually cared about, but let’s go on to the bigger issue here because Bernie Sanders did end up campaigning for Hillary Clinton very vigorously, almost more vigorously than Hillary herself. Let’s go on to Jill Stein. What about all this talk about third parties costing Hillary Clinton the election? As a rational human being who has Internet access and who knows basic Math, I can tell you that third parties, specifically Jill Stein and the Green Party, did not cost Hillary Clinton this election.
When you look at the numbers, Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, even if Hillary Clinton had taken both Jill Stein’s voters and Gary Johnson’s voters, she would not have won any of those states. In fact, in every single state that she lost to Donald Trump, if she had every single Jill Stein voter, she still would have lost. Jill Stein could have gotten zero votes. Hillary could have taken all the Green Party votes and still not won the states that she lost. That’s simple Math, folks. You can go look at popular vote tallies, add them up yourself. The evidence is simply not there, and yet we’re still seeing these D.C. insider Democrats blaming third parties.
Now, to be fair, there is an argument to be made that if Hillary Clinton had gotten all of the Gary Johnson voters, yes, she would have won a lot of states that she lost to Donald Trump, and therefore won the electoral vote. Unfortunately for the Democrats trying to make that argument, Libertarian voters don’t typically vote for Democrats. That’s not a valid argument. These Libertarians, the people who voted for Gary Johnson, were not disaffected Democrats. They were disaffected Republicans. There’s no evidence to suggest that there was a massive exodus of Democratic voters who instead went and supported Gary Johnson, no evidence at least as of right now, so you can’t even make that argument.
What we do know is that a lot of more moderate Republicans didn’t want to vote for Donald Trump, so they voted for Gary Johnson. Had they not voted for Johnson, they would have voted for the Republican candidate, so Hillary Clinton still would have lost. Now, the overall point of all of this is that these people who wield a lot of power within the Democratic party, within the media are still blaming these boogeymen out there for Hillary’s loss instead of admitting to themselves that they just put up, supported a bad candidate. My biggest gripe with Hillary Clinton during this entire campaign was that she wasn’t talking about the issues.
For the last year, I have been doing segments on that, telling you, telling her, telling the Democratic Party to go out there and start talking about the issues, and a lot of other Progressives did the same. Where’s the talk on the issues? That was the big question that we’ve been asking for a year and we never got it. We warned you repeatedly, told you what to do, and nobody listened, and that was a big gripe that the voters had. They didn’t know where Hillary Clinton actually stood on anything, so if we say…
Let’s pretend for a second that Hillary Clinton never gave a single speech to a Wall Street bank. Let’s pretend that the Republicans let the Benghazi issue go by the wayside because it was a nonsense issue to begin with. Even if those two things had never happened, I still believe Hillary Clinton would have lost because she wasn’t out there talking about the issues and connecting with voters. It’s not about the scandals. It’s not about the cozy relationship with Wall Street.
At the end of the day, it all came down to her inability to connect with the American public as a whole. That’s why Hillary Clinton failed, and until these D.C. insider Democrats understand that, they’re never going to win an election. Look, it really, really stinks when you put all your time and effort into supporting someone and they lose. I get that. I understand it, and to be perfectly honest, people may not be happy to hear this, I voted for Hillary Clinton. I did. Wasn’t a huge fan of Jill Stein, can’t stand Libertarians, and Donald Trump could very well be Satan himself, so yes, I voted for Hillary Clinton, but I also held her accountable.
I did talk about her problems, and there’s nothing wrong with that. As a member of the media, that is our job. Somewhere along the lines, these Democratic pundits forgot that. They thought that it was good enough to go out there and be Democratic cheerleaders, to sweep the skeletons back into the closet and avoid talk of the issues because you just wanted to thrash your opponent. That’s what they’re still doing today, and these people out there still whining about Bernie Sanders or whining about Jill Stein need to go away. I would say they need to get over it, but at this point, they just need to go away.
