Dial it back. Little Nemo acknowledged the oversight in post #36. Do not attribute motives to other posters in this fashion, and especially don’t come close to accusing other posters of lying.
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Literally none of those things are usable in determining how good or bad her campaign was. That’s the problem. She lost to Trump, but it’s perfectly possible she lost to him because, as bad as his campaign seemed, he actually had a message that resonated. She may have lost states she “should have won,” but that again can mean that Trump resonated more, not that Clinton was doing a bad job. We may think she went to the wrong states to campaign in hindsight, but, at the time, it seemed like holding the states was the better strategy, and Trump was ridiculed for going after states he supposedly could not win.
Every single one of your arguments is starting by looking at the results and then going back in hindsight to say that she did a bad job. That is just not a valid way of determining whether she did a good or bad job. You have to argue with what she knew at the time, and only that information.
My argument of a bad campaign is simply that she should have seen from the numbers that she needed to start appealing to the white working class at least in some capacity. I never once say any ad that talked about how she was working for jobs for Middle America. She didn’t let people know why free trade was a good idea.
But I would argue that comes from her weakness as a candidate, in that she always wanted to move with the public rather than try to control the message to the public. If the public says X is bad, she doesn’t try to present it as good. She just agrees with it.
She thought she didn’t have to work on her flaws as a candidate, because she was running against a more flawed candidate. The only emotion she ever tapped into was the anti-Trump emotion, not anything else. Not the anger at the things Trump’s supporters were angry at.
There is a myth that Clinton just ran a bad campaign, when that is really not what sunk her. She ran a mediocre campaign at worst, but was also severely flawed as a candidate. And she ran against someone who ran a better campaign than people will admit, even with all the mistakes. (The foundation of anger was still really strong.)
We need to accept that, so we don’t think Clinton could run again if she just got a good campaign.
I don’t see her quest for the popular vote as a problem in that she chased it instead of the electoral vote. I think she was so confident she’d win the electoral vote that she thought she didn’t really have to work for it. It was hers simply because she had arrived to receive it. Getting the popular vote was going to be icing on the Electoral College cake-- a cake she thought was already baked and decorated with her name emblazoned on it. Turns out, she was wrong. The EC was up for grabs, and Trump grabbed it.
I know! What kind of way is that to analyze something? We should ignore the results and focus on how things looked at the time. That way we are assured of making the same mistakes we swore we’d never make again.
Hillary ran a great Presidential campaign. Two of the best ever. Unfortunately, and according to the existing rules, Hillary lost. Twice.
The Democrats do not need to change anything. Not one thing. With the existing leadership team they currently have in place, the Democrats will clean up in 2018 and 2020.
Samuel Tilden won the popular vote in 1876 due to massive voter intimidation and suppression of the African American vote in the South, so no, he doesn’t deserve much credit for it. (I don’t know much about Tilden so I’m not suggesting that he was to blame for the voter suppression, just that he almost certainly wouldn’t have won a fair election).
Here’s a striking fact: Trump came within half a percentage point of winning the only state that went Democratic in 1984 (besides DC).
If you lose to trump, you ran a terrible campaign, even if you did win the popular vote.
It was a general statement, but specifically as applied to this situation I’m saying that people of a certain political persuasion have a stake in finding the worst possible explanation and applying it to the opposing side as if it were absolute fact, when in numerous other demonstrable circumstances they do exactly what they are projecting onto others.
This isn’t true, and this a great example of why her campaign sucked.
A lot of “Deplorables” voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then switched to trump this year. There is a significant chunk of people who likes Democratic Party positions on economics but is alienated from present-day liberal positions on race, gender, and (especially) immigration. (This largely matches up with the group that Pew in 201-2015 called “hard pressed skeptics”: to some extent I’m in that group although I didn’t vote for trump in November). Many of them voted Democratic as late as 2012. (For example, one of the public opinion polls last year indicated that 33 percent of Obama 2012 voters supported the idea of banning Muslim immigration). There’s no law of nature that says the ‘deplorables’ have to vote Republican: many of them have center left positions on economics, foreign policy and other issues and might have voted for Hillary if she’d tried to run a campaign focused more on economics and less on cultural / social issues.
I realize you think you’re being ironic. But there’s a good chance you’re right. Maybe the Democrats could just sit back and let the Republicans crash.
But I think that would be a bad idea. The Democrats need to get to work. As I’ve been saying, they don’t need to start from scratch. But they still have to do more. They’ve gotten the most votes in six of the last seven presidential elections. Now they have to make sure that getting the most votes translates into winning the election.
They need to forget about winning the most votes and concentrate on winning the electoral college. It’s unbelievable why that seems to be such a difficult concept to grasp. Don’t even think about the popular vote for president, because it doesn’t fucking matter.
Complete bollocks. I was saying she was making these mistakes before the results were in. The fact that the results ended up vindicating my thoughts much better than I expected them to just goes to show that I was more right than I thought.
She ran a campaign filled with poor decisions. She herself was a poor campaigner. Combined, she suffered a disaster (from Democratic viewpoint). And no amount of trying to gloss it over will make that any less true. If the Democratic Party cannot accept that fact, cannot accept that they made two fatal mistakes (first, guaranteeing such a poor candidate the candidacy, second, not working harder to get the campaign to change its strategies), then they are doomed to repeat the mistakes in a later campaign.
You have a choice: she ran a bad campaign or Trump’s campaign was much better than I think anyone wants to give him credit for. Which is it? :dubious:
In order to win popularity it is often necessary to publicly shame people into as much self-contempt as the utter contempt one feels for them. They will then vote for their chiding betters.
Worked for Savonarola.
I voted for Clinton but not because of her campaign, that’s for sure. I saw her ads on TV constantly and they were all about how terrible rump is: something I already knew.
Thom Hartman (who supported Clinton) pointed out why she was in danger of losing here.
Election Fraud and voter suppression in this country might be why rump “won” but she sure could have run a better campaign, no question.
In politics, you appear to win or lose by beating or failing to meet expectations. Same with warfare. (The Vietnamese Communists appeared to “win” the Tet Offensive, despite losing tactically, because the US public had believed the Vietnamese Communists had been beaten more badly than they had been. A recent conflict between Israel and Hamas ended similarly, with Israel taking out most of Hamas’s heavy artillery right at the beginning of the conflict, but Hamas managed to fire slightly larger number of rockets every day than the day before, doing minimal damage… and often appearing to have “won” the conflict.)
In the UK, Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap election when she was far ahead of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn had a reputation for being an incompetent who supported terrorists and who had no business being Prime Minister. May was beating Corbyn by huge margins. Seven weeks later, she didn’t do as well as she hoped. She won more votes than Corbyn, and won almost a majority of seats. (Because UK minor parties actually win a small number of seats, May was able for forge a majority by selling out to an ugly party.) So May is still Prime Minister, but she’s seen as having lost the election.
Hillary Clinton is far savvier and saner than Donald Trump. She did most of the groundwork that Trump didn’t bother with. And yet she only ran a mediocre campaign. She only looked like she ran a competent campaign because Trump ran a far less competent campaign.
Clinton doesn’t have much in the way of charisma. She made one of the same mistakes May made, which was not having much of a platform* beyond “I’m better than Trump” (which admittedly should have been enough to win).
And Clinton did not bring out enough of the coalition of the non-deplorables. I don’t know if it was a lack of charisma, or lack of a ground game, or ignoring rural regions, or believing the polls, but she failed to do enough there.
But it’s not all her fault. Decades of baggage, much of it false, hampered her. It was like getting hit by the Swift Boat Veterans for “Truth”.
Worse, Trump was so lucky it was like he was in a parallel universe. Trump, one year older than Clinton, suggested she was in bad health. It was a wild guess. Then Clinton got mildly sick and tried to hide it and so drew lots of media attention. I doubt that won Trump the election, of course.
Or how about Trump claiming the Obama Administration spied on him. Total BS… but it turns out that some communications coming out of Trump Tower (or Trump something) were “incidentally” swept up. Not something that swayed votes, but someone has been sacrificing to the gods of luck.
Or how about Trump’s claims that classified emails sent to Huma Abedin ended up on Weiner’s mobile device. When the Weiner story came out I first saw it on a Youtube clip for the Daily Show. When I heard the line that Weiner had to apologize to Bill Clinton for a sex scandal I could not leave the stupid story alone until I read several articles about it. It didn’t matter that my favored party (I can’t vote in the US, so more like a fantasy favored party) was getting a black eye, I laughed at first. Then I wondered how he knew the recipients of his “private messages” were grown women. It stopped being funny. Well it turns out Abedin (a high-ranking Hillary Clinton employee) refused to dump the guy who didn’t care if his underwear-covered manhood was being observed by grown men or underaged girls, allowed her not-really-classified government emails to end up on his mobile device, didn’t force him to delete them… and when the police investigated him for sending pictures of his unmentionables to a fifteen year old girl the FBI announced that Clinton was under investigation for not controlling her emails at the worst possible moment. ARRRGGHH! (Turns out there wasn’t anything much wrong with that particular batch of emails. Which god does Trump worship again?)
Trump had even more luck. Yes he kept saying and doing stupid things, driving his support down… but all Trump had to do was not say something as stupid as usual for a few days and his support would go up to a point or two below Clinton’s, just enough to win the Electoral College. Because Trump had acted so stupid for so long, him being able to act not quite as stupid for the last couple of weeks was enough to keep him close till the finish.
Clinton overpromised and underdelivered, just like May, against a more charismatic but less competent opponent (supposedly less competent in Corbyn’s case, decidedly so in Trump’s case).
*She did have a platform. It was probably serious and well-researched. However, platforms can be long, boring and complicated if you don’t find a way to sum them up. Any attempt to do so was ironically drowned out by whatever stupid thing Trump was doing or saying that day.
Another possibility: Obama was a once in a generation politician and using him as the baseline for future Dem politicians is nuts, so they’ll keep losing if they don’t do any actual politics or put up uninspiring robots like Gore, Kerry, and Hillary.
Hillary was a widely beloved figure before Bernie unleashed his Putin propaganda.
This is what Hillary diehards believe.
Evan Drake wrote: “Clinton could only win the general if she ran unopposed.”
If trump had ran unopposed, he would have lost.
Bottom line, both parties nominated candidates that were, for different reasons, unelectable. But one of them had to win. It happened to be trump but had a handful of votes in a few states had gone the other way the Republicans would have been wondering why they ever nominated trump. More of them, that is, than are doing so presently.
I think reminding people that Donald Trump was the alternative was a good point for Clinton to keep on people’s mind. It probably brought her some anti-Trump Republicans and it probably also kept some people from voting for a third party or sitting out the election. These are people who might have not otherwise have voted for Clinton but where willing to do so if it kept Trump out of office. Talking about her policies wouldn’t have had that effect.
Democratic candidates are uninspiring? Bill Clinton got more votes than George Bush or Robert Dole. Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush. Barack Obama got more votes than John McCain or Mitt Romney. And Hillary Clinton got more votes than Donald Trump.
Which party is it that’s running the weak candidates?
Because it’s only necessary to swing a few precincts, at times, to win a state, and with a winner take all method of apportioning electoral votes, a state or two can swing an election. Florida in 2000 came down to just a few hundred votes to swing the election. And voter fraud and illegals voting is just wrong on so many levels.
Clinton’s problem is that as a politician she wasn’t seen as likeable, honest, or trustworthy. Focus group work and polling was pretty consistent with this. She’s known as just about impossible to work with, rude as hell, condescending, and not particularly bright. The modern political campaigns are marvels of carefully choreographed scripted piles of steaming bullshit. Not a hair out of place, softball questions from Diane Sawyer “How long have you been so awesome?” etc. Not singling her out necessarily, but career politicians and the press have an approval rating about on par with dogshit on a stick, so it’s no surprise that it was a tough sell. She did outspend her opponent by a huge margin, and had the entire industrial media complex running interference. It is a remarkable achievement and will be studied for a long time.