Hillary: If the election had been held 12 days earlier, I'd be POTUS

Basically she blames the impact of Comey’s announcement of his investigation and the Russian hacking of campaign and Democratic party emails as the cause for changing voters views of her as a candidate.

I’m not a big fan of victimhood. And I have yet to see compelling evidence that there were was significant evidence of Clinton voters switching to Trump or 3rd party candidates because the events that she cites.

I see these as platitudes to sooth her staunchest of supporters, that if only they coulda, shoulda, woulda!

She also said, “I take absolute personal responsibility. I was the candidate, I was the person who was on the ballot.”

Of course, if she had just left it that, but since that’s not all she said, it doesn’t hold much water.

She did take a major dip in the polls with Comey’s announcement, and lost by a razor thin margin, so there is a good chance that she is right, but by the same logic one could blame Monica Lewinsky for the Iraq war.

Oh I totally blame Monica for the Iraq War. And Freedom Fries.

Hillary, please, just go away.

If the election had been held 25,000 years ago Hillary would not be POTUS.

Every poll had her winning even on the day of the election. Polls, schmolls.

She’s not doing herself or her party any favors by making comments like she made today.

Plenty of people, including myself, voted for her more than 12 days before the election.

Exactly. If Comey had been intent scuttling her campaign and the election were held 2 weeks earlier, Comey would have released that info 2 week earlier than he did.

I take absolute personal responsibility, but it was Comey’s fault. Sounds like something Trump would say.

I think her statement is absolutely correct.

The effect of the Comey announcement can not be overstated. It was certainly disproportionate to any substance (IE;none) that it contained. The announcement fed into the whole “crooked Hillary” meme that trump and his forces were pushing in a way that his later “never mind” could not dispel.

It just was!

Potential Hillary voters staying home were probably much more to blame than switch voters. By that time in the election most people knew whether they could stomach voting for Trump or not; these last events would not have changed their minds on that issue, but they might have kept some Clinton people home.

That being said, Clinton ran a horrible campaign. I kept saying to the TV “Stop talking about his character, because it’s clear by now that his voters don’t care.” If she had had a compelling program of her own, instead of being either a wannabe me-too more Obama or so purely anti-Trump, she might have carried it through, because then she would have given her own voters something to vote for, instead of against. But her campaign offered very little except “Vote for me because Trump is horrible and I’m not Trump.”

There is no doubt that Comey’s announcement of reopening the investigation had a negative impact on Clinton in the polls. I doubt it was enough to make a statistically significant number people switch their vote to another candidate, but it could have caused enough marginal Clinton voters to abstain. However, in the swing states where she lost, Clinton lost by enough that it is hard to credibly argue that it would have made a difference in the Electoral College; even if would have made a difference in, say, Michigan and Wisconsin, she still would have lost Pennsylvania and Florida. Voting before probably would have given her more votes in the popular count, but looking at how the votes came out it almost certainly would have lost her the Electoral College votes from critical states that her campaign neglected. (I take the claims by the Trump campaign about their “Moneyballing” their way to an Electoral College win with a few pinches of salt; they may have done a breakdown of what states were sensitive and where to focus their campaign efforts, but that is just basic politicking that the Clinton campaign seems to have arrogantly decided was beneath them in favor of pandering to a confirmed base.)

As for Comey, I think he figured he’d be damned either way so he divulged the reopened investigation rather than be accused of cover up, or giving any excuse to Trump to claim that the election was being rigged against him. He’s been demonized by certain elements but he hasn’t shown himself to be partisan or even particularly favorable to the Trump administration, and I am a little surprised he hasn’t already been asked to step down. It was a poorly timed move thanks to the pathological idiocy of Anthony ‘Carlos Danger’ Weiner, who I’m certain Hillary Clinton wishes she’d never met, and a contentious campaigned riddled with accusations, threats, and conspirnoia which created a very unlevel playing field against the already uncharasmatic and polarizing Clinton. In other words, the reopening of the investigation less than two weeks before the election was just one in a series of issues that made Clinton such a poor candidate that she struggled to compete with a reality TV show host with a limp ferret on his head.

Stranger

Hillary,

The people of Atlanta hear you. If the Super Bowl had ended 15 minutes earlier, the Falcons would be Super Bowl champs.

If only voting had been restricted to people who had held administrative office with the last name Clinton and members of the DNC she would be president today.

If her argument that this was a batshit insane election in year in which a lot of extraordinary factors played a part in her losing, I could probably go along with that. But probably none of it would have mattered if she had not entered the race with the assumption that a) it was her turn to be president, and b) her opponent was a slam dunk victory. In 2016, she ran effectively the same type of dull, aimless, theme-less campaign that flopped in 2008. She lost in 2008, and she lost again in 2016.

One the other hand suppose Trump’s comments about grabbing pussy hadn’t come to light and he hadn’t insulted Hispanics (the judge) and the families of Gold Star veterans: would he have won by a landslide?

Pennsylvania was decided by about the same percent as Wisconsin - around 0.7%. If she had taken the blue wall she would have won.

I don’t know exactly how much blame can be laid on Coney but the pre-election polling showed a series of opening and tightening of the race and the election happened right at a low ebb of Clinton advantage. It’s possible an election two weeks earlier could have been a better chance at a Clinton win.