I recently saw a Reddit thread in r/PoliticalDiscussion asking the question “If the economy is still booming 2020, how should the Democratic address this?” This gets to an issue that’s been on my mind since at least 2016, maybe even 2014: when will the current period of economic growth end?
When I say that I want the investigations of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia strengthened, I hear the infuriating criticism that I’m just a sore loser, that I’m not over the 2016 election, that I’m just upset that Hillary Clinton lost. Sure, I wanted Hillary Clinton to win. I really wanted Hillary Clinton to win, and I really don’t like Donald Trump. But this line of reasoning fails spectacularly to appreciate why I want Donald Trump’s campaign investigated.
Here’s a list of reasons why the “sore loser” argument is wrong.
This week is a slow week. I spent the weekend in Idaho at my grandparents for my brother and grandfather’s birthday, and my grandparents still live in the dark ages (that is, they have no Internet). So this week, I’ll be sharing letters I’ve written to The Salt Lake Tribune that were never published. Enjoy!
In the 2016 election, few spectators realized Donald Trump’s data advantage until after he’d won.
I submitted the following as a letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune. Chances are it will not be published, so I share it below.
Naturally, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been accused of lying; if I had told you in 2012 that both candidates from both political parties were being accused of lies, you would likely have given me a blank, disinterested stare; this alone is not shocking. What is shocking, though, is the level of deceit and how central a theme it was to this campaign season.
I rely on FiveThirtyEight to tell me the direction of the election, and a few weeks ago, Utah suddenly became very interesting. Evan McMullin, a previously unheard of candidate for President (who entered the race only a few months before Election Day), appeared in Utah’s forecast numbers with a surprisingly large probability of winning Utah’s electoral votes. Benjamin Morris then wrote about how Evan McMullin could plausibly not only win Utah’s electoral votes, but the Presidency as well.
There was once a time where only the most extreme leftists would accuse Hillary Clinton of not being a true progressive, prior to, say, 2008. Even after 2008, Hillary Clinton was seen as perhaps being a more moderate Democrat, but still, ultimately, a progressive. Republicans certainly would call Clinton a leftist and still continue to believe so.
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