Another one of her big problems is that she didn’t actually do much to convince voters that she was good, it was more like “Trump is awful and I’m not Trump”. I never saw much of a “here’s what’s good about me” message from her, it was more of “what are you going to do, vote for the pussy grabber?”. It’s an important difference, because in general just piling on with how awful the other candidate is doesn’t motivate voters to get out and vote for you. Plus in this specific case, Trump reveled in negative campaigning and appeared to love slinging mud around with things like “lock her up”, which made her efforts in that regard even more ineffectual.
And in general a career politician, who’s got a history of lies, broken promises, and backroom deals trying to come off as the ‘better person’ has an uphill battle. I think a lot of people figure “they’re all scum, but at least this one is going to do some of what I want.” It’s even worse in the specific case, because Hillary had both a lot of actual bad history and the whole two decade republican hate-on to overcome. The other Clinton could pull it off because he had the charisma to make people really believe he is their friend, but this Clinton just can’t manage it.
There is a lot to talk about why Hillary lost and most of it is that she is a horrible campaigner. She lost in 2008 to Obama who should never have even remotely gotten close to the nomination. She carpetbagged to New York where the Senatorship was handed to her. And what did she do in 2016? Never went to Wisconsin. Only went to Michigan when Democrat leaders begged her to go there because they knew (despite the polls) that she was losing the state. She focused on urban area and neglected places like western Pennsylvania. She comes across as arrogant and elitist and overall not a nice person - even if you are not deplorable. If she were running against anyone other than Trump (or Cruz) she would have gotten at most double-digits EVs and as it is she lost against Trump who is the biggest political troll out there. Think about that and own it if you want to win in 2020.
This is huge. Trump rallied the Trumpers and the people who voted “not Hillary”. Clinton got the Hillary supporters out and not too many others. It’s hard to say but I think the polls were so skewed because the Centrists supported Clinton but never actually went out and voted for her.
The fact that you never saw it doesn’t mean it never happened; it just means you never saw it. But I’m not really sure what kind of evidence your looking for. If you’re going to make the argument that someone who cleaned an email server is as bad as someone who basically admitted on camera that he’s into sexual assault there’s just not much we have to talk about. You can believe whatever the fuck you want. Nobody here has to believe for a moment that it’s a valid equivalency.
No, I feel the problem is that the Republican Party has narrowed tailored its focus to the rural white minority. And we have a political system that allows the rural white minority to outvote the majority.
But you’re missing the central factor of the election; the voters didn’t do any of the things you described. The voters picked Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump just won the election.
What’s your point, exactly? There is nothing inherently invalid about the electoral college system. The United States is not one large voting bloc; it’s a federation of 50 states with certain degrees of political autonomy. Sorry, but the election isn’t invalid just because you don’t like the way political points are awarded. This is the same kind of denial that Bernistas are guilty of. You can’t invalidate the system just because you’re angry at your fellow voters and you don’t like the outcome.
The fact that I, and a lot of other people observing the election, never saw it means if it did happen it wasn’t done effectively. Multiple people commenting on and analyzing the campaign have made the same point, it’s not just something I came up with. And no, ‘gosh golly if you dig down into her website there’s a thing’ isn’t effective at all, it needs to be in speeches and ads and interviews. As far as evidence, you could point to an article from an analyst talking about what messages she sent, possibly a speech transcript that shows her doing what I said she isn’t, or something along those lines.
If you’re going to just make up an argument out of whole cloth, and semi-attribute it to me, then you’re just creating a strawman, and not engaging in real discussion in the first place. I didn’t say anything about someone being ‘as bad’ as the other, I specifically discussed her campaign and the message it sent. You know, talking about the subject of the thread and not the topic of a rather pointless thread that would be titled “is Hillary Clinton entirely as bad as Trump?”
The left is famous for this, it provides cover for politicians, rather than argue the merits of an idea, attack the opponent as a racist, or misogynist. She is an extraordinarily unlikeable person, with good reason. To suggest it’s because her plumbing is different, well… Good luck with that.
Not outvote per se, the Electoral college is designed to prevent mob rule and a few large cities from dominating elections. Unalloyed democracy always leads to trouble.
I guess I don’t understand your point though. Do whites deserve representation?? WTF?
This “problem” you have identified is the way the system is. That system isn’t going to change. And it serves a valuable purpose. It prevents one specific group of voters from controlling the White House (urban dwellers). Rural white voters aren’t enough to control the White House, and Trump didn’t win because of them alone; he also racked up a significant amount of suburban voters. In short, he had geographical diversity in his support.
Either accept that’s how it works, and figure out how to make that work for you, or lose. It’s not a hard choice to comprehend.
It does provide a minority with veto power over the majority, contrary to the principles of democracy. The “valuable purpose” it was created to serve was to keep the slave states in the union.
The right is certainly famous for claiming that the left is famous for that but it ain’t so, in the same way it ain’t so that Obama was nominated and elected purely on the basis of being black. Yet I still see right-wingers claiming that one too.
Clinton certainly made hay of the fact that if elected she would be the first woman president (more than I would have preferred) but she did not ask people to vote for her purely on that basis.
No candidate received a majority of the votes cast. Hillary Clinton received a plurality of those who voted in the elections that day.
You aren’t voting in one single election. You are voting in a state-wide election. The votes don’t get to roll-over into some other state’s election where the party needs them. So racking up a huge margin of victory in California doesn’t help you here in South Carolina. Most voters understand this at some level.
Persistently complaining because your candidate achieved a statistic that is meaningless to the result of the day is like someone complaining that their soccer team should have won because they had more possession of the ball and took more shots. If you insist upon fixating on that incorrect metric, and imbuing it with an importance it doesn’t truly have, you probably aren’t going to fix what you need to fix to win the proper metric.
No, that’s a false history, as you should know. Virginia was a slave state and had the largest population in the US at the time. Rhode Island, by comparison, was very unwilling to join the re-formulated constitution (they were the last to sign up), and were very concerned about their status as a state with a small population.
But go ahead and ascribe the problem to a false issue; it’s part and parcel with fixating on the popular vote to begin with.
While it is true that the candidate herself never promoted that meme, to claim that the Democratic Party itself wasn’t trying to utilize that thought process is wrong. There were numerous efforts to get women to side with Clinton on the basis of the gender issue.
What is a correct statement is to clarify that, while that was one thought process promoted, it wasn’t the only one, nor was it the main one.
It also requires that different populations with radically different experiences work together politically, which is not inherently a bad thing at all. The fact that there are fewer people living in flyover country doesn’t give the democratic majority that lives in cities and suburbs the right to run roughshod over them – I mean they do produce our food supply, right?
