I’m sure all of those factors listed had something to do with why she lost the Rust Belt.
Ohio and Florida were not that close either. as Trump beat her by over a percentage point. He had a bigger margin over her than Obama did over Romney.
But deep down, I think people had something inside them that made them dislike Hillary and like Trump. Non white people and white people alike were less enthusiastic supporters of Hillary, and Trump inspired something deep in the white working class (… this does not speak well of them imo, it makes me respect them infinitely less).
And in that vein, a list like this sounds like justifications that are made after the fact of peoples emotional brains deciding a course of action and drafting a rationale afterward.
Ultimately I think it boils down to Hillary; it was already clear in 2015 that she was a weak candidate with poor approval numbers and it was compounded by a weak strategy which largely ignored the working-class whites in the Midwest who were a crucial part of the Obama coalition. Comey may have played a part in a close election but it should never have been that close in the first place. Hillary had many, many advantages over Trump and she blew it.
The identity politics bubble in which Democratic elites live also played a role since it contributed the delusion that working-class whites were no longer important for them. I also think that groups like Black Lives Matter, Colin Kaepernick etc. have adopted a needlessly antagonistic and counter-productive style even when their underlying issues have merit.
What’s to explain? Trump won the election. To that extent, the Republican primary system, which is much less a function of the party elite “choosing” the nominee, is not reflective of identity politics or the mistake of ignoring Midwest rust-belt state voters.
That’s not to say that the GOP system is good, or good for the country, since it selected a bozo. But the bozo in question is soon to be Bozo-in-Chief.
Lantern “boils down” the situation to Hillary being a bad candidate. He/she also thinks that Democratic elites in their bubble have some role to play; enough to comment on it. But neither of those things would have an effect on the Republican nomination; there must be some reasons for Trump to win (and kick the shit out of, arguably) the Republican nomination which aren’t the issues he suggests. Reasons strong enough for Trump to do as well as he did before even getting to a Democrat/Republican fight.
It would be silly to deny the idea that Hillary issues didn’t play a role in the result. But to claim it “boils down” to that, and that another significant point was a Democratic elite bubble, misses that Trump did fantastically well when those issues weren’t in play at all.
The primary electorate is very different from and much smaller than the general election and the nature of the competition is obviously very different too. So it’s entirely possible for a candidate to win for one set of reasons in the primary and another in the general.
The frame of this discussion as defined by the OP is about mistakes made by the Dems and I have stuck to that. We could also discuss what Trump did well. For the most part I think he ran a weak campaign but he did some big things well: he had a clear message built around populism and nationalism which he sustained through the campaign and he had a sensible regional/demographic strategy of appealing to white working-class voters in the MidWest.
However even these strengths were strengths only because Hillary didn’t attack them effectively and consistently. She had some good lines now and then about Trump stiffing contractors but she should have made that and similar lines of attack her closing arguments and hammered him for his phony populism week after week till the end.
I think the identity politics bubble played a role there too. Trump said some racist and sexist things and was rightly lambasted for them but they weren’t the essence of his appeal as the Democrats mistakenly believed. They are largely making the same mistake in their post-mortems. They are themselves so obsessed by race and gender they don’t understand the source of Trump’s populist appeal which makes it harder to defeat him.
This one doesn’t hold any water for me.
In 2012, Romney won white women 56 - 42. This year, Trump won white women 53 -43. So yeah, he won white women. But he got fewer than Romney and Clinton got more than Obama.
Somewhat surprisingly, however, Hillary won fewer black women’s votes than Obama in '12. Obama had 96%, Hillary 94%. And she got way, way fewer black men’s votes, losing that one 87 - 80 to Obama in '12.
Trump also got more Latino women than Romney in '12, but the same percentage Latino men.
I think you could make a strong argument that the minority vote had a lot to do with Hillary’s loss. She won minorities, but not by the margins that Obama did. Minority turn out as an overall percentage was about the same as in '12.
I think this had a substantial effect, maybe a percent or two. Even if it didn’t change anyone’s mind, it focused everyone’s attention on Hillary’s weakest point at the worst possible time.
Nonsense. While I won’t say no effect whatsoever, we just had a black President for crying out loud! Is sexism supposed to be that much worse than racism?
I don’t think complacency fits. Perhaps both of these contributed to misdirected efforts, but they worked their butts off.
These were certainly substantial, but they are also known quantities. They were known quantities when she won her Senate seat and when she won the primaries.
Yes, and I think this basic issue is what also caused the difference with poll numbers. Polls focus on likely voters and the best predictor is who voted last time. So Obama did much better than polls predicted the first time because his voters came out in force. Hillary came out worse than the polls predicted because many of her likely voters actually stayed home.
Some of this staying home may be related to items 6-8, but I think a lot of people were just genuinely enthusiastic about the first black President in a way that they weren’t excited about the first female President.
No, I don’t think so. Both Trump and Hillary got fewer votes than Romney and Obama. Hillary lost because she got more fewer. For me to think Trump won over Democrats in any meaningful way, I’d want to see an actual increase in his votes over Romney and that’s not what we’re seeing. It’s much more a story of who stayed home.
I also think the liberal attitude is totally irrelevant. The extent that people like union workers in the rust belt may have moved to Trump, it was an economic issue. While the last eight years have been a pretty good recovery overall, the recovery has mostly been for white-collar, college-educated workers.
Yes, to a large extent. We should have considered a Republican win the default, and maybe we would have if Trump hadn’t been such a buffoon. But he still won, and it’s still largely the pattern that voters want a new party in the White House every eight years.
Maybe, a little. But, remember, it’s not that Trump got more votes. They both got less. Trump’s margin was defined by who stayed home, not who he motivated.
I don’t know how highly to rate this. Hillary intentionally positioned herself as “more of the same” on many issues, so ACA is only one of many factors. The truth is that very few people are actually affected by this change - most people don’t buy through exchanges and most people who buy through exchanges don’t pay the full cost. So I think this matters only as one more point in the “change candidate” category.
I think the polls were more right than people want to believe. The polls gave a 15-20% of the outcome we saw. Furthermore, the polls admit to relying on likely voters and there was a shift in who actually voted. In addition, you saw HRC campaigning in many of those states that were a surprise to have lost. Maybe not campaigning as hard as Trump, but in the last days of the election, you saw ad money and appearances shift to the rust belt. She knew what was going on, more or less.
No. People who voted for Trump don’t have the common sense it takes to be embarrassed by it.
OK, I’m phrasing that in a negative and biased kind of way, but the simple fact is that Trump supporters were very vocal about it.
IMO, this is a huge underlying reason. Clinton was perceived by many as being very much part of “the system”, and in fact, as unethically benefiting from it in her various scandals and scandal-ish events.
Trump, by comparison, is perceived as being entirely and wholly NOT part of the Washington system- he’s never been a politician, and his outspoken diarrhea of the mouth was perceived as reinforcing how MUCH he’s not a politician nor part of the system, as anyone associated with the entrenched political system is associated in a lot of people’s minds with equivocation and prevarication when confronted with most questions or positions, especially those with no clear answers.
So by picking Trump, the hope is for one of two things- either he’ll be able to personally do things to better the position of the people who voted for him, OR (more likely to happen, IMO) he’ll act as a huge dose of laxatives to the existing political order, and in the next few election cycles, there will be much more attention paid to the issues that Trump voters care about.
I personally think that the Democrats made a mistake by allowing such savage infighting between Clinton and Sanders. Even if Bernie was playing to his base, every slam of Clinton was published, and made her look bad in a wider context, and basically gave the Republicans ammunition later down the road.
She lost by slightly over 100k votes spread over three states. You can make the list of things that made a difference a mile long and they all would be partially right. Hell, in that close of an election even things like traffic and weather are factors.
True. But the fact of the matter is that we do have the evidence that Trump managed an extremely successful nomination campaign for reasons that aren’t the reasons you’ve highlighted he won the Presidential campaign. With that in mind, even knowing that there’s no necessity that the reasons must be the same, we also have to say that there’s no necessity the reasons can’t be the same.
And a reference to the different nature of the campaigns isn’t really enough in and of itself to look at that.
But, again - the Republicans candidates arrayed against Trump aren’t part of this Democratic bubble mistake. Trump beat people “obsessed by race and gender”; Trump beat people who weren’t.
You’re bringing up purported errors by the Democratic campaign and Hillary and saying they must have made a difference - but simply saying they exist doesn’t tell us to what extent they played a role in deciding the election.
Put it this way; Trump won the Republican nomination without any of these factors having any effect whatsoever. So why couldn’t he have won the Presidential nomination without any of these factors having any effect whatsoever? I don’t think that they didn’t - but it’s not enough to simply say they existed and then declare that that’s what played a major role, especially when we have the evidence that Trump won, with an even bigger result, absent those factors.
Really it boils down to the candidate. Compare Hillary 2016 v Obama 2008:
Obama beat a far better opponent than Hillary faced
The demographics in 2016 were far better for Democrats than in 2008
Nobody questioned Hillary’s citizenship or religion
Obama faced a far tougher primary challenge
Obama wasn’t planning his run for 6 years
Conclusion- Hillary just isn’t a good politician
It’s charisma. Not that her opponent had good charisma, but Hillary just doesn’t have any. No question she’s smart and no question she’s a hard worker, but voters don’t give two shits about resumes.
As I have discussed on other threads, if you look at the three key states of PA, WI and MI, there wasn’t a huge surge for Trump. While he did better than Romney, he actually got fewer total votes in those three states than Bush did 12 years ago. All three states were won by Kerry whose totals would have beaten Trump in each state as would Obama’s in either 08 or 12.
So all Hillary had to do was get the usual Dem voters in states which Dems have won six times in a row. Why did she fail to do that ? I think the points I identified offer a plausible set of reasons.
I think people are making a basic logical error in analysing this election. It’s natural to focus on the winner and because Trump was so unusual it’s natural to focus on what makes him different. Trump was indeed different and Trump won but I don’t think the first was the major reason for the second. I think the major reason was that Hillary was a weak candidate with a bad strategy who failed to persuade regular Dem voters to vote for her.
The thing about this election is that Trump was no ordinary candidate and thus, none of the controversies he generated could sink him. Also, the media gave him a huge amount of attention no matter what he did (even covering his rallies). The Democrats figured they could just stay out of the way while Trump stepped on his own dick and sunk his campaign, so Hillary stayed out of the way or stayed quiet while he did. Only nothing sunk him and the Democrats ceded a huge amount of media time to him and Hillary lost chances to promote her agenda. Even when she did promote her agenda, the media preferred to cover Trump’s latest idiocy more. Perhaps some people saw the problem early on, but I think a lot of people figured letting Trump hang himself was the best strategy, only it wasn’t. And as others have said, they wasted too much time focusing on what stupid thing Trump said rather than his past record. Hopefully, the Democrats learn from this and approach things differently next time, especially since Trump will have an actual political record to run against
The above is probably a huge part of what lost the election for Hillary, but a lot of the other things that have been enumerated probably helped
Yes, Republicans pretending they give a shit about email servers. Funny that we don’t hear anything about Clinton’s egregious use of emails since the election ended. Do you think we’re going to have any more Benghazi hearings? No, because they never actually cared about that in the first place.
5 panels still planning probes of Clinton emails. Link.
Clinton emails still coming. Link. The email releases appear to be an ongoing thing through at least 2018.
We will see what happens. It’ll drop out of the news somewhat, after losing the election the Clintons are pretty much done as far as politics go. But it appears that the issues isn’t going away.
I really doubt if President Trump actually wants two terms. Let alone what the two parties will want then, or what the masses will want. And no matter what ensues from his policies.
He wanted to be president. Once he’d done that, and as a bonus enacted policies that increased his fortune, he won’t need this any more. He’ll have shown everyone. In Like Flynn.