It’s clear to me that the 2016 trauma of Hillary losing has spooked too many voters into discarding hope candidates of color or women can win. The biggest crime Russians committed aided and abetted by Trump and the GOP was taking away that hope. Because I believe she won. 1/25
But the election tampering, voter suppression, disinformation campaign, Comey letter, and Bernie’s scorched earth rhetoric against “The Rigged System” combined to sow doubt that any candidate who wasn’t a white male could win again. Even though it wasn’t the candidate. 2/25
It wasn’t even the message of Stronger Together that failed. The real failures were of the guardrails put in place to protect us. Let’s call them out one by one. 3/25
Guardrail Failure #1. The Media - It never addressed its soft underbelly after its failures in the 90s. In fact, the fault lines only deepened and became more entrenched the *more* we learned about the right wing disinformation machine. By 2016, it operated in the open. 4/25
Right wing disinformation, anchored in think tanks, Fox News, and other wholly subsidized outlets, infected traditional media in all its forms. Its message continuously calibrated to create permission structures to ignore expertise and the incompetence of GOP governance. 5/25
It also became a breeding ground to attack anything that might expose certain shibboleths of conservative ideology, like civil rights for minorities, LGBTQ, and women; voter rights; liberalism; globalism; regulatory oversight; and climate change. 6/25
When Putin’s team decided to invade the American discourse, he found a fully functioning Trojan Horse ready to go in the American media. It was almost too easy. But its harm didn’t only come at the front end or even in real time as the campaign wound its way to Election Day. 7/25
It came at the back end too. Because it erased the voter suppression happening in plain sight. It erased all the indications that the polling locations, poll books, and voting machines might have been tampered with. 8/25
Even today Reality Winner sits in prison largely forgotten after she tried to blow the whistle on information hiding in our classification system. (Thanks, Intercept!) Even today most people think the actual hacking of our election would have been too complex to pull off. 9/25
Which brings us to Guardrail Failure #2: SCOTUS - gutting the Voting Rights Act has done untold harm to the election process and made the US *more* susceptible to hacking because strict Voter ID laws increase the options for mischief. 10/25
You want to swing a district for your favorite presidential candidate, Governor, or Senator? First step, gerrymander districts to concentrate all your enemies into a few choice places. Second step, pass strict Voter ID laws. Third step, hack into voter rolls. 11/25
Change the spellings of names in a certain percentage of voters in the districts you want to suppress the vote. Fourth step, use old machines to build long lines. Fifth step, talk about the unfortunate low turnout and how it’s too bad your opponent didn’t excite the base. 12/25
Guardrail Failure #3: DOJ/FBI - there’s no question that portions the FBI were weaponized by Trump/GOP. The leaks to The NY Times about the email investigation and Comey’s disastrous public statements combined with a disinformation leak to The NY Times exonerating Trump... 13/25
had the impact of powerful propaganda against Hillary. It provided an explanation for a last minute collapse of her campaign that obscured evidence of serious election tampering by Russia and crimes committed by the Trump campaign. 14/25
Add to that the farce that was Jill Stein’s challenge of the election results and the whole topic became an eye-rolling one for the media to cover in real time. 15/25
Guardrail Failure #4: The Primary Process - The GOP primary was a complete and utter failure of the principled conservative wing of its party. But it was not the only guardrail failure in 2015/16. The Dem process has a lot to answer for but not in the way you might think. 16/25
The DNC and the Dem Party was entirely too indulgent towards a campaign that appeared hellbent to trash them. It also failed after 2008 to meaningfully reform a process that still centered white voters over what was increasingly a multicultural base. 17/25
The proportional delegate system and the anti-democratic caucuses allowed Bernie oxygen he had not earned to run an anti-establishment campaign, laying the ground work in the general for *Trump’s* anti-establishment rhetoric. 18/25
At a time when the Democratic Party should have been united running on its record and striving for more, it faced a campaign signal boosted by Russians and ratfuckers that questioned the Democratic Party’s integrity. 19/25
This was particularly infuriating because the shortcomings of the Democratic Party’s record *should* have been laid at the feet of the GOP and the media’s failures. But Bernie’s purity tests were designed for only one group to fail: Democrats. 20/25
Add to that Bernie’s self-serving and immediate post-election diagnosis for Hillary’s loss - the failure to appeal to white working class. No one wanted to be caught out looking too closely at Election Day red flags and Trump Campaign crimes. 21/25
But what if she won? What if the actual will of the electorate was her vision of a country that was Stronger Together? What if the reported election results were not reflective of actual voter intent in 2016? Thanks to the Guardrail Failures, we will never know for sure. 22/25
But the question still has meaning. Because of the trauma of that election, a significant portion of the electorate and in the media believes that in the face of Trump, a POC and/or a woman cannot win. So it matters, if she actually did. 23/25
We cannot keep running with our hands tied. We cannot keep running as if we can pick from a specific limited pool of eligibles. We cannot turn our nose up at money that is willing to support our values. 24/25
We cannot run on rhetoric that questions the integrity, heart, & sincerity of men and women in the trenches and in office who use their platforms to move the needle forward for the people. We also have to start telling the truth about Election Day 2016. It still matters. 25/25
