No, this is a complete lie spread by Hillary detractors - not that she won a majority, but that people erroneously using “majority” instead of “plurality” are doing so deliberately with the intent to deceive. And I’ll thank you not to repeat it.
I think it was a legitimate surprise that people out there are still holding torches for the bullshit smears of the 1990’s, that the Vince Foster thing hasn’t died down, that there are people stupid enough to believe the pizza parlor sex ring lie.
Of course it’s no secret that the world is full of mean, stupid, and gullible people, but it was a surprise to see they were sufficiently numerous, organized, and motivated to elect Trump. That’s a hindsight thing, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for failing to see that in 2016. In the future, there will be no such excuses.
I’ll certainly agree with that, although given the Democrats’ latest attempt at a catchy slogan (“A Better Deal”) I’m not confident they’ve learned anything about influencing public opinion.
You’re right. HRC did not run a terrible campaign. She ran a medicare one. Does that make any of her supporters feel any better? I supported her in the general, and it doesn’t make me feel any better.
As Bill Maher said during this latest primary as Bernie shot up from 2% support to almost parity (paraphrasing a bit): “We ran a Black guy with a Muslim name against you last time, and now we’re running a cranky, old Jewish socialist against you. We’re making it as easy for you as we can!”
If we want sports analogies, the presidential election is Match Play, not Stroke Play. (The only caveat being that in Stroke Play the goal is to get the lowest score, not the highest)
But those comments were made more than 10 years before the campaign, had nothing to do with politics, so they can’t really be held up as part of the campaign. Are you suggesting that his campaign purposely leaked the tape? What the OP should be asking, is why so many people seem to think Trump won by luck. Remember, he beat the 17 Republican primary candidates despite the GOP establishment watching more or less in horror as he did so. It might be a bit of an exaggeration, but he terminated Jeb’s campaign with just a few words: Low Energy. That’s pretty swift work for a guy who runs a terrible campaign.
The patient did not survive. 
Hillary got 48.2%. Gore got 48.4%. These are pluralities. Neither of them had the “majority of all votes”. Tilden is the only one of the three you mentioned who got a majority with 50.9%
Hillary Clinton’s campaign was poorly run.
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We can confidently state so because she lost to Donald Trump, who ran a campaign best described as a train in search of a wreck. But the Clinton campaign never figured out that trying to make Trump look bad was never going to suffice; the Trumpistas were ALWAYS going to vote for him, even if he were to murder someone on 5th Avenue.
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We can confidently state so because she lost several states that she should have won, including the crucial states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania (!), not to mention Ohio, North Carolina and Florida. Hell, she almost lost New Hampshire, for goodness sake! She lost those states because, unlike her husband in the 90s, and her predecessor in the office, she didn’t value the core Democratic votes of middle-class working whites in those states, votes she was going to have to work hard to retain because they’ve been alienated by much of what the Democratic Party has been championing for over a decade. For God sake, the Republican candidate won those states by campaigning AGAINST free trade! That used to be the Democratic Party’s bread-and-butter in places like the Mahoning Valley.
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We can confidently state so because the distribution of her campaign appearances, and the resulting distribution of votes in her favor, shows she didn’t understand something the Trump campaign did: the popular vote doesn’t matter. The fact that her adherents to this day continue to tout the fact she won a plurality of votes confirms this error was systemic. It’s almost like she didn’t care. I mean, really, who goes into a state like West Virginia to campaign and promptly states that her policies, if enacted, will put a bunch of West Virginia miners out of work??? That statement is directed straight at her base of liberals on the coasts; it’s certainly not designed to try and put West Virginia (or any other coal state) in play.
We should note that the Clinton campaign was hamstrung from day 1 by a simple fact: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lousy politician. Always has been. Her entire political life as an elected official stems from her successful stint as a very visible, highly effective First Lady. She became the fair-haired hope for women to finally get someone into the White House. But she’s a poor politician. She doesn’t have her husband’s instinct for getting people to like her. She says stupid things regularly. She’s a plodder in the jobs she takes; she was an at best mediocre senator and a decidedly mediocre Secretary of State. She’s cold in her appearances. She’s the quintessential power behind the throne (she did that well in the WH for her husband), but she’s always a bit like Sisyphus when it comes to campaigning. And she was exactly what the Democrats did NOT need running against the populist Republican candidate. Now that’s not the fault of her campaign, so it may be that even a really good campaign wouldn’t have won. But given how close she came (fewer than 100,000 votes spread over three states), it probably would have been sufficient.
But, then again, so would a decent campaign.
Or at least read the thread so you don’t have to repeat yourself.
I agree with most of what you posted, but I have to take exception to this. I think Clinton would have beaten Rubio (he would have come off as a poorly-prepared neophyte in the debates) but maybe not Kasich. Who knows? There certainly weren’t any polls that would suggest anything but a close race. Perhaps running with Bernie would have put her over the top.
The days of landslides are gone for the foreseeable future.
Yes, yes, people need to learn to use the word plurality. The simple fact is that America voted for Clinton and got Trump.
Like many “simple facts”, this is a conclusion based on a false premise. Possibly even more than one false premise.
Well, ok, which one? The one about (number) being less than (number plus 2 million)? That’s not even math, that’s just arithmetic.
False premise #1: “America” votes for a president. Not true; the states do.
False premise #2: “America” is represented by the plurality of votes. If we ignore false premise #1, then most Americans who voted did NOT vote for HRC.
False premise #2a: If we counted the popular vote to determine the winner, then HRC would have won. Maybe, but maybe not. Many popular voting systems require a majority to win. If there is no majority winner, there is a run off between the top two (or top “X” number).
False premise #3: Voting patterns are independent of campaign strategies. HRC purposely tried to win the popular vote. Trump didn’t. Had the results depended on the popular vote, the campaign would have been different and the vote totals would almost certainly have been different. So, if “America” was voting for president (instead of the states), the vote totals would almost certainly have been different. HRC still might have won, but we don’t know.
If Trump’s brilliant strategy was to ignore the popular and focus laser-like on the electoral, then tell me why he was bitching about those millions of “illegal votes”? Why not just say “I meant to do that”, *a la *Pee-Wee Herman? Modesty?
I don’t know. I think people might be thinking that its a deliberate lie because they they assume, perhaps falsely, that Hillary supporters are at least educated and or intelligent enough to know that 48% does not mean majority. I don’t think I know any Hillary supporters personally that are that ignorant, but I guess it’s possible that they’re out there.
But can you really blame them for attributing to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity given the association of the democratic party with higher education and professional employment?
Nobody’s saying it was a brilliant strategy. Working the electoral-rich states is just campaigning 101. Trump did it, Hillary did slightly less.
Why is he complaining now? Given his gross ignorance of basic civics, he probably didn’t know he could win the electoral and lose the popular. Now that it’s happened, he’s butthurt and trying to erase the fact.
Okay, I stand corrected. Plurality not majority.
I think what’s needed is to get rid of the idea that the Democrats need to throw out everything and rebuild their party from the ground up.
I endorse the keep-doing-what-you’ve-been-doing strategy as well.
Her problem was that she under estimated the gullibility of the American people. She assumed that at the end of the day people would be able to see through Trump, and by pushing into other states she might be able to build up a Democratic mandate. And that by behaving conventionally Note that she was not alone in thinking this. Practically every talking head saw Trump as a side show who would eventually be brought down when cooler heads prevailed. As it happened they were all wrong. But you can’t really blame her for thinking what everyone else thought.
This really confuses me. The double standard here is huge. Compared to Trump her comments were positively boring and pedestrian. She may have praised Kissinger but she didn’t praise Foreign dictators like Trump did. The reason that she got in trouble is that most of the time she was able to keep her trap shut and stay on message. So when she made a rhetorical blunder it was front page news, while when Trump did it it was Tuesday.
Clinton’s real failing was 25 years of branding by the GOP. People knew that Hillary was corrupt, untrustworthy and mean not because of any particular incidents but just because it was a general background assumption. The same thing happened to Pelosi. Republcans can get votes for saying they are against Pelosi because everyone knows she is bad, but I don’t think anyone can articulate exactly why she is bad. She is bad because everyone just knows that she is.
All these things are true, and yet, America voted for Clinton and got Trump.
That something like a third of the American populace now gets their news from sources best described as “malevolently fictitious,” and were literally too misinformed to have any idea what how the candidates actually mapped to reality.
I think people are consistently and overwhelmingly underestimating just how badly the media has been corrupted by the right in the US (and apparently assisted by the Russians, of al things), and how all-consuming that information bubble has become.
No other explanation is necessary to account for the election and today’s GOP. I continue to claim that no Democrat could possibly have won the election against that level of deceit and manipulation, and infighting/placing blame on Hillary’s “terrible campaign” is just burying our heads in the sand and setting up for the same result next time.