Of the three, which was the worst candidate?
I’d have to say, as a Democrat, Hillary. Such a weak candidate. She lost to Donald Trump. Nixon may have been “Nixon” but at least he was more intelligent and classy than Trump. Reagan was much more stylish and a better speaker than Trump could ever be. The fact that Hillary could lose to Trump to me makes her the biggest failure in modern American presidential politics, and I wish she’d just retire. I keep seeing her pop up in the news saying crap and she seems to be unaware of just how she failed and let millions of people down.
She didn’t let people down. The people who decided to vote for Trump instead of her let people down.
Hillary was doing fine until James Comey dropped a bomb on the election with a week and a half to go.
And I continue to reject the notion that Trump was a bad candidate. Maybe everyone’s forgotten how he demolished a seemingly strong GOP field a year ago.
And as a candidate, he is well suited to work the weaknesses of our media, which during a campaign, covers the issues only in passing, giving the citizenry little idea of how their lives would be affected if one candidate or the other got to implement their platforms, but largely limits their coverage to peripheral scandals and faux-scandals where they can’t be accused of taking sides by reporting on them.
Hillary took metric ton of hits in 2015 and 2016 - Benghazi, emails, more and more emails, her speeches, the Clinton Foundation…it just goes on and on, doesn’t it? And yet she had a solid lead all the way down the stretch, including the week and a half after the third and final debate, after which Trump had zero opportunity to change the dynamic of the race.
I would fault her with only a couple of things:
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She needed to drive home the point that if voters wanted her to do the things she promised she’d try to do, they needed to vote for Democrats for Congress too. If the Dems had won the voting for House of Representatives by two percentage points, it would have at least been a tossup as to whether Paul Ryan or Nancy Pelosi would have been Speaker.
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In the debates, she really needed to make the point that Trump was basically a cargo cult - that behind everything he said he would do, there was no plan to make it happen, and no idea of even how to come up with a plan: no idea of how to come up with something better and cheaper than Obamacare, no idea of why we didn’t already have a border wall, and what to do about the obstacles; nothing you could look at and say, “this will or won’t work, and here’s why.” He was promising to cut runways in the jungle so that planes would magically appear and bring cargo.
The media wasn’t going to tell people this; that would have been taking sides, apparently. So she needed to be the one to do it, and she needed to do it in the one setting where it would cut through the media clutter.
BUT every campaign makes mistakes. The fact is, with two weeks to go, she was set to win comfortably, despite all the stuff that was thrown at her.
So it’s Mondale or McGovern.
So: Mondale or McGovern? That’s a tough choice.
It’s tough because they were both running against incumbents running for re-election in years when the economy was improving. It’s tough for the best of challengers beat an incumbent under those circumstances. So it’s hard for these elections’ outcomes to measure the relative sizes of the enormous gaps between McGovern or Mondale and hypothetical optimal challengers; they can only tell us that these gaps were yuuuuge.
It’s also tough because those election years were 33 and 45 years ago. Even those of us who were old enough to vote in Nixon/McGovern may not remember the particulars very well. McGovern, of course, was the candidate that Nixon wanted to run against, and his team of ratfuckers helped bring that about.
So the person who won the popular vote by close to 3,000,000 votes was a worse candidate than two guys who each lost the popular vote by around 17,000,000 votes?
Not seeing it, sorry.
I reject your terminology. The goodness or badnesss of a candidate is a measure of how good or bad he or she is for the position. Ergo, the worst candidates in 1972, 1984, and 2016, were Nixon, Reagan, and Trump, respectively. McGovern, Mondale, and Clinton would have made excellent presidents.
Bullshit, the Dems let the American public down by deciding ahead of time it was Clinton’s turn. She was the candidate most people didn’t want and a bad candidate at that. She might well have made a fine President, but she was a terrible candidate. Bernie had people excited, and would have won the populist states and beat Trump but no, it was HRC’s turn.
**Mondale **was a boring and weak candidate, but in 1984, FDR would have had a hard time beating Reagan. he was extremely popular and a very strong campaigner. It was almost like he was skilled at acting the part of the candidate. So I would would give Mondale a pass, while a really good candidate might have not lost so badly, they still would have lost. Almost everything was looking better or good in 1984.
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George McGovern** I’m not qualified to speak about, I was too young, but he was a weak candidate without question.
I don’t recall anyone but dismissive Republicans saying Hillary should be nominated because it was “her turn.” Any Democrat could have thrown their hat in the ring, and the one who did, Gov. O’Malley, didn’t do well with the voters. Sanders, not being a member of the party, doesn’t have much room to bitch about the party not being supportive. People lined up to support her because they thought she was going to win, not because she was entitled to it.
Hillary wasn’t my first choice in 2008 or 2016, but I blame her loss on the voters who didnt care how much damage Trump might do. It’s hard to win an election promising competence and progress when voters apparently to blow up our beloved country.
Mondale was so weak that Reagan didn’t even bother to run against him, opting instead to run against Jimmy Carter again.
Wouldn’t the more obvious and interesting question be a comparison of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore? You know, winning the popular vote, but losing in the electoral college, while being perceived as a stiff and uncharismatic policy wonk running against a guy who (a) wasn’t an incumbent, but (b) absolutely excelled at sounding like he was inartfully telling folks whatever popped into his head in real time?
I think the only way this question could be modified so that it was possible to discuss the answers logically and factually (as in without basing the answer on how upset the discussion participants are) would be to ask instead, which one of these losing candidates, had much better possible nominees available to the party that put them forward?
For the democrats of the last election, the only real challenger to Clinton was an avowed Democratic Socialist. I know lots of people liked Sanders, but from a political party’s point of view, anyone running as a Socialist was doomed. The tragedy for the Democrats was, that Hillary Clinton had at least as much political baggage as Sanders, if not more.
Mondale was running mainly against Gary Hart, who was so idiotic he actually taunted reporters into proving that he was screwing around on his wife during the campaign.
McGovern got the nomination for the wrong reason: his people studied the Democratic Party structure after he lost the nominating race in 1968, and then gamed the system to net him an overwhelming victory in 1972. But that wasn’t a real measure of Democratic support, and that wasn’t helped by his horrible choice for a VEEP. Humphrey would have been a much better choice, but since that primary was decided by manipulation, that didn’t matter.
Then you were living in a bubble, plenty of voters from all sides perceived that Hillary was being forced on us.
Forced? Maybe that was a perception, but it’s a free country, and as the Rebupicans established, anyone was free to jump in and try. I don’t see how we have any right to cry that candidate X sat out.
Plenty of people think that vaccines cause autism and climate change is a Jewish hoax; what’s your point?
Your earlier claim is that that was what actually happened, not what people thought happened.
Sorry, look at the post I responded too, you seem to have misread the exchange.
They were all fine candidates and infinitely superior to the pieces of crap that they lost to. Sometimes the voters are dumb shits. It happened in 1972, 1980, 1984, 2000, 2004, and 2016.
Mark me as in the camp of the one who won the popular vote.
It kind of amazes me that the Never-Hills don’t seem to CARE that most of the “political baggage” she had to carry was made up of lies and innuendo. And she’d been carrying those for 25 years or so. Thinking about how Hillary has been treated all this time actually continues to make me ANGRY because so much of it was baseless bullshit and misogyny.
Igor Frankenstein wrote: “Mondale was running mainly against Gary Hart, who was so idiotic he actually taunted reporters into proving that he was screwing around on his wife during the campaign.” Different election, that was in '88, not '84.
Bringing up the Comey factor in the election is like Goliath saying, “The sun was in my eyes,” or Michigan blaming a bad officiating call for losing to Appalachian State.
Goliath was supposed to *crush *David, Michigan was supposed to *crush *Appalachian State, and Hillary herself asked why she was not leading Trump by 50 percentage points IIRC there was a survey done well over a year before the election pitting her against Trump in a hypothetical race and Hillary was projected to gain over 500 electoral votes.