In 2016, I’d say Clinton didn’t pursue an electoral college strategy. In 2008, it seems like Clinton didn’t mobilize enough in caucus states and Obama was able to run up those tallies. In my view, both point to poor campaigning, independent of who her opponents were or what they did.
Everyone who is saying that, please raise your hand.
And yet Obama won twice as a Democrat. Trump squeaked through with a paltry number of votes to win the EC. Now, those votes were in key states, but still, the number of votes that could have flipped this election was a tiny fraction of the total. To say that no Democrat could win is to not understand the mathematics involved in winning.
We have slipped by gradations into a narcissistic fantasy, keyed off reality TV expectations. If anyone knew that before the vote I’d love to see the cite. Otherwise blah blah blah.
Hindsight thy name is this thread.
The American people.
Easier to pretend Clinton was a poor candidate than to face the reality of who is doing the voting.
Most people can’t even explain or articulate why they thought Clinton was evil/a criminal/unfit to be president, they just believed it to be so.
Electing Trump is like a sick joke, it takes something special for you guys to actually go and do something so completely fucked up as that. And as such it doesn’t matter one whit what Clinton did or didn’t do.
These are largely the same people who elected Obama twice. By all indications, he would have won again if had been able to run.
There is no one thing that caused the election to turn out the way that it did. One of those things was that HRC didn’t run a good enough campaign. If you (the generic you) insist on a simplistic, “this one reason is why Trump won”, you are are going to come up with the wrong answer.
That is not to say she ran a “terrible” campaign, but you don’t have to do that lose. The team that loses the World Series is still the second best team there is. But this is no mystery. She ran a “not good enough” campaign for the primary in 2008. Obama was this largely unknown guy “with the funny name” who came from miles behind to snatch the crown that was almost literally perched atop her head.
The popular vote was not close. The Electoral vote was not close. But this was a close election in the one sense that mattered, the number of votes that would have had to have changed for it to have gone the other way.
I’m not going to say that Hillary was a bad candidate or ran a bad campaign, because that would mean that all the Republicans were bad candidates (from a Republican viewpoint) or ran bad campaigns. The simple fact is that trump was just so unconventional that, even though he should have been beaten, both in the primaries and then in the general, but nobody knew how to beat a guy like this who, uncharacteristically, was speaking the truth when he said he could have shot somebody and his people still would have voted for him.
It’s one thing to lose when the people want you to, it’s another thing to lose when the people want you to win.
Is there any evidence that any of the voters Clinton expected to get in MI, PA or WI would have voted for her if she had just campaigned differently? And would it have even been enough?
I think we take it as understood that campaigning influences voting. Otherwise, why campaign at all? But also, campaigning helps get out the vote. You’re not just trying to convince people to vote for you; you’re trying to convince people to vote.
An interesting observation. When a candidate loses, it’s because people are voting wrong!
What would any evidence of this consist of? Campaigning differently would imply she campaigned at all, and in WI, MI, and PN, I’d say she did a pretty horrendous job in the final stretches. Does this sound like a not-terrible campaign?
“psychological games”. They really showed him! We’re so confident we’ll lose to prove it! Airing more ads in Omaha than in MI and WI combined seems like poor campaigning to me. Would it have made a difference? I don’t know. There is this thought that the more people got to know Clinton the less they liked her, so maybe that was her strategy.
Your president is Donald Trump. Nothing right about that, and you can’t excuse it by blaming the perfectly normal alternative that lost.
Democracy is not designed to produce the “right” result. Or, one could say that the result produced by democracy is, by definition, “right”.
You can get into all sorts of discussion about whether the US is an actual democracy or not (aside from the whole “representative democracy” thing), but this ain’t the USSR and it ain’t The Islamic Republic of Iran.
A post-election poll of people who did not vote for her as to what she could have done to win their vote. I’m sure for a non-insignificant number the answer would have been “nothing.”
Note that your assumption is not quite right, as I addressed earlier.
They need no such justification. They just know that Democrats are lying and destroying the country. Meanwhile, they do everything in their power (including and especially those things that actually ARE destructive to little ‘d’ democracy) to ensure that it starts with an ‘R.’
The biggest mistake Hillary made was not going negative on Bernie and allowing him to develop a cult. She probably thought Bernie would be an adult, but when surrounded by scum like Jane Sanders and Jeff Weaver, that’s a bad bet to make.
Get Sanders of out the race after Super Tuesday, or the New York primary at the latest, then there are no Bernie Bros booing at the convention. That means fewer millennials in Madison, Ann Arbor, or State College throwing their votes away on Jill Stein or doing a silly write in.
Wasn’t going to happen. Any attempt along that line would’ve entrenched the Bernie Bros even more, if that’s possible.
I’m not sure what you’re angle is here. Are you saying that democrats are saying 48% is a majority and that’s an OK way to describe things?
It’s fair enough Hillary sought Henry Kissinger’s support, they are old friends, and if we outside America have some residual reservations about his actions during the Vietnam War etc. — insofar as anyone cares, cos it was a time ago and that heals all things — he remains a major figure in 20th century history.
Her receiving vast cheques from the banksters was less admirable — 2008 is a lot nearer than 1968.
Still, she too has her place in the history book as much as he, all those strange American presidential elections of the 19th century have been out-weirded. For few centuries, if records last that long, they will say of her:
‘This Candidate Lost To Donald Trump’, and go on their way, marvelling greatly.
Now, it doesn’t say what Clinton could have done to get these people to vote. I’d say maybe visiting the state, campaigning there, spending resources on canvassers, ads, etc. may have helped. Then again, Clinton was so unlikable maybe this would have been worse.