I’ve already explained she was a poor communicator. That makes for a bad candidate.
Considering how much time I spent bad mouthing Trump, I’m amazed he didn’t lose. My tiny bit of calling HRC a bad choice would have had a minimal impact by your weird logic.
I love arguments that are made entirely of straw.
Unless political commentary is reserved exclusively to the SDMB, your comment is entirely irrelevant.
If someone says to their friends, family, or neighbors, “I am voting for HRC, even though I have to hold my nose because she’s such a terrible candidate”, they are discouraging those people to vote for her.
It’s not pushing the party line to not talk shit about the person that you want to win. It’s just basic common sense.
Although the whole “pushing the party line” bit is lifted straight from right wing talking points.
Yes, she was more likeable than her opponent, but she was still widely disliked. The two of them were the least popular candidates in American history (at least for the 70ish years we have data) This is literally measurable by numbers and was extensively documented at the time.
Election results are driven by many factors, including partisanship and what issues are most important at the time, but the candidate’s personal charisma still matters.
She’s very polarizing, and even among those who like her, there are plenty who are afraid, or could be persuaded to be afraid, of putting her in charge of the country. If she were the candidate in 2024, I could easily see us spending 2025 discussing why she was a terrible candidate.
It’s a bit hard to understand why a Democrat would fall for such nonsense.
You have this whole fantasy world built up, don’t you?
Trump is the worst candidate in my lifetime to get the nomination. Of serious contenders only Cheney (via picking himself for VP) and Ted Cruz are worse than Trump in my lifetime.
Sure, but there has to be some solid candidates that communicate well, motivate people to vote and are under the age of 70. Aren’t there?
Ah, so if Biden had lost, then he would have retroactively have become a terrible candidate?
So, I’m not sure that I understand. Did HRC lose because she was a terrible candidate, or was she a terrible candidate because she lost?
MY post was written in anger? How about the OP’s?
Who are these people you’re talking about? I certainly don’t know anyone personally who identifies as a Democrat and didn’t vote for Hillary. The number of such people on the SDMB probably isn’t zero, but it’s certainly not a common position. If you are thinking of SDMB posters, maybe you could name them and provide cites?
I mean, if such people did exist in significant numbers, I could see being mad at them, but I don’t think they do.
What is your position here? That, for instance, when the polls said most Americans had a negative impression of Hillary, but a positive impression of Bernie, that information should just have been ignored? Do you believe such data are unreliable or made up? Or do you think we are ethically obligated to ignore our knowledge of what voters actually do think, because it conflicts with our beliefs about what they SHOULD think?
Or is it that you are so ignorant you are actually unaware of the existence of this vast body of data, and nevertheless feel entitled to condescend to people who actually know what they’re talking about?
Nope, and I’m not quite sure how you got that from what I posted.
I just said that What_Exit probably* didn’t start calling her a terrible candidate until after events showed her candidacy to have been terribly executed. I’ve always contended that she was an excellent candidate, and I still do. But that’s just it. An excellent candidate can lose due to a terribly-executed candidacy, but that doesn’t render the candidate existentially terrible.
*PROBABLY. I don’t know for certain, so I’ll let him speak for himself.
The three-sentence post you snipped included a counterexample. Yes, all candidates will be smeared by the right wing. So you ask voters what they think of candidates, in order to find the ones who the smears didn’t work on. Then you nominate those candidates. I don’t know how to make this any simpler without writing in crayon.
Yeah right. She’s really not that great a speaker, she’s pretty far off to the left.
It’s unlikely that I’d vote for her in the primary (though I reserve that depending on who else is running), but I’d vote for her in the general without complaint if she got the nomination.
But, I don’t see her getting the nomination, and if so, I see her getting destroyed in the general.
Anyway, there really aren’t all that many younger candidates. They usually get groomed from local offices and work their way up. The overall disinterest in politics that seems to strongly affect Democrats means that all these local offices are filled by Republicans, and there aren’t that many up and coming Democrats.
Maybe, assuming that we even got him. I don’t see why the Republicans wouldn’t string it along for 4 years with an empty seat. They’d still hold the majority.
And I do think that she did less compromise than Garland or the like would have. We would have had an ideological shift in SCOTUS in 2013, rather than 2019.
If someone says to their friends, family, or neighbors, “I am voting for HRC, even though I have to hold my nose because she’s such a terrible candidate”, they are discouraging those people to vote for her.
Well, it depends. I certainly wouldn’t say that to anyone who I thought was on the fence about voting for Clinton. But my friends, family and neighbors all pretty much share that opinion, so I don’t see how my sharing it is going to hurt anything. (My neighbor had a lawn sign reading “Settle For Biden”).
So, again: do you actually know people in real life who said stuff like that to people who they didn’t already know to be committed Clinton voters? If so, you are justified in getting mad at them, but your experiences are different from mine.
I don’t think she was a poor communicator. She was clear and specific on her policies, what they were, and how she would try to bring them about.
People liked to complain about her voice, but I didn’t have an issue with it. Maybe if you are predisposed to not take women talking policy seriously, then you may not think that she was good at communication. Other than that, I really don’t see where you are coming from.
Now, she did make a few statements that were either taken out of context or “paraphrased” to make them look bad. But that’s not her fault, that’s the fault of those who chose to misrepresent what she said.
Depends on where you were doing your bad mouthing. But no, a Democrat criticizing Trump isn’t going to cause anyone to change their vote.
However, a Democrat criticizing Clinton, that’s not only going to cause people to second guess their support, it’s also going to encourage them to repeat that criticism.
I mena, just look at this, right here. You’re trying to tear me a new one because I have the audacity to think that Clinton was actually a good candidate. I saw this all over before the election, where anyone that actually said anything positive about her was torn down.
It’s easier to take your approach, agree with the masses that she’s terrible, but that you will just have to fight back your nausea over supporting such a terrible candidate and vote for her over the worse.
Some people don’t like to choose the lesser of two evils, and so by framing it in that fashion, you discourage them from voting.
And it was not just you. I heard it constantly. Everywhere on the news, everywhere IRL, anyone who was planning on voting for her just had to make the caveat that they really, really didn’t want to. So, I’m not claiming that you had any effect, maybe you swayed one or two people, maybe not. However, the attitude that you take here, that absolutely did, and it is what cost her the election.
Too bad policy takes a distant back seat.
She was a terrible candidate because she was very unpopular, as measured by objective polling data. She still almost won, because her party is more popular and her opponent was also a terrible candidate.
Biden was a decent candidate because he was fairly popular, by the same objective measure.
Being a bad candidate doesn’t guarantee losing, and being a good one doesn’t guarantee winning. But that doesn’t mean there’s no difference between the two, or that there’s no way to tell the difference.
This is a major problem. If Al Gore was a better communicator, he would have beat W.
W. came across to the overall public better even though Gore came across as the smart guy with real policy ideas. Gore still won the popular vote, but W. pulled enough votes in swing states by being folksy.
It’s only a fantasy if it’s my imagination that you and others like you claim that HRC was a terrible candidate.
As it seems as though, unless I’m having a severe psychotic break, those are the words that I see under your posts, it is not I that is having trouble with reality here.
That’s great, and I agree, mostly. Maybe Cruz would be worse, maybe not, but I’d prefer not to find out.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that you say that HRC was a terrible candidate.
You don’t criticize the enemy for winning the battle, you criticize your own side for losing. The enemy isn’t listening to you.