It’s probably true that, absent the Comey announcement (which did appear to have been done with the intent of damaging her campaign), Clinton would have won.
But then we would have had a government with an even more hostile Congress than the ones Obama faced, plus a country with millions of people who voted for Trump not because they hated Clinton but because they thought Trump would be a good president. And the country would still be fucked up.
And that’s the takeaway that should matter. Look, we have conservatives–here on this board and elsewhere–that just scream bloody murder if you call them racists for supporting votor ID laws: “We’re not racists, even those these laws are blatantly racist–we just think that the integrity of the vote is the absolute most important thing in the whole world!”
Then we have an election where–contrary to any supposed instances of “voter fraud” ever–there’s substantial, at this point nearly overwhelming, evidence that various illegal and unethical actions changed the outcome of an actual national election, and…crickets. The “integrity of the vote is the most important thing” racists lost their shit when it was even suggested that there should be recounts in contested areas, much less that we should be investigating blatant tampering and a President who’s actively undermining the system."
And such ended the last time I paid any heed to conservatives’ false claims.
You think that the FBI unequally sharing information regarding investigations is the same as a video accurately showing what Trump actually said?
I find that very hard to believe.
Well it wouldn’t have been a valid election just as in Hillary’s fantasy. There is only one date that it can be held on by law. It seems like a bizarre argument to make. She may as well wonder how it would have gone in September.
Clinton is right, as in an election that close any change would have made a difference. But it really shouldn’t have been that close, and that’s on her. Comey cost her 2 points. Clinton cost herself 10. It’s kinda like an amazing team losing because the ref made a bad call late in the game.
Blaming Hillary is a popular method for assuaging personal guilt about the election results. “It’s not my fault I didn’t vote, Hillary didn’t energize me.” Or, “don’t blame me for not voting for her, Hillary ran a bad campaign.” People don’t want to accept their own role in Trump’s victory, so they rationalize their actions by blaming Hillary.
STFU Hillary… just STFU.
David Axelrod was absolutely right when he said (paraphrased) that given candidate Trump’s lowest approval numbers in recent history, in what should have been an overwhelming victory for her, Hillary was the only one responsible for beating Hillary.
This logic supposes that (1) a substantial number of people were still “on the fence” about her vs Trump 2 weeks before the election and (2) that Comey’s “We’re not done yet” announcement was enough to swing their votes to Trump.
Trumps electoral domination aside as an HRC voter who was not by any means a fan of HRC I really doubt that. I think it’s a face saving fiction for running a poor campaign against a bloviating demagogue. You need to face the facts SHE WAS A TERRIBLE FUCKING CANDIDATE WHO RAN A BAD CAMPAIGN. She had carloads of baggage and the charisma of a wet sock. It’s her fault she lost and she needs to own that, but like Trump she can’t own he mistakes it has to be someone else’s fault. Comey was barely a ding, at 10 days out in the 2016 POTUS race you were dealing with extremely distinct choices not some coin flipping muddle. Comey did not swing the race for me or others in any way shape or form she lost due to her own strategic fuckups.
The results of the election are the net effect of lots of things. Did Comey’s have an impact? How about the fact that the most shared election thing on Facebook was the Pope endorsing Trump? Both did and it is hard to say how much.
I remember a congressional address where Obama cited economic progress and the refuting comment from Ryan had no statistics just “it doesn’t feel better”. The right has successfully got a small but consistent block to assume anything critical of conservatives is false.
But, if you vote for Trump because you believe he cares about the little guy, or because you like orange or because you think illegal immigrants are a problem, all are valid votes.
Well, that’s a little complicated. It’s understood that there are certain demographics that don’t vote. If you are primarily targeting non-voting demographics as a campaign strategy, then you’d better be confident you can motivate them. Obama could, and yet Obama also made his appeal as broad as possible. Clinton went hard for college students, Latino voters, and black voters. Trump went hard for the white working class. Trump’s strategy didn’t require tons of outreach centers and GOTV efforts. Clinton’s did, and her organization sucked despite lavish funding.
If only things played out differently the result would be different.
The point I was making is that I wonder how many people, exhausted at an endless campaign, threw their hands up and said they’re not voting for either, voting 3rd party, or doing a joke write in. As we know, it was only 77,000 votes, lower than the attendance at a major college football game, that swung the election to Trump.
What’s remarkable and really shows the campaign’s incompetence is just HOW she lost. She wins the popular vote by what, 3 million, yet loses the electoral vote by a wide margin. YOu’ve got to be trying to narrowly lose key states for that to happen.
Slight nitpick: The Dude doesn’t endure; The Dude abides.
Is that not what the evidence suggests?
So because Comey didn’t swing the race for you, he didn’t swing it for anyone? Because the polls show otherwise. And a lot of that “baggage” was pure-D bullshit due to years of right-wing lies. But hey, that’s her fault too.
I’m not arguing that Clinton didn’t run a poor campaign - she did. My point was that even if she had won the country would still be a polarized mess because there are a LOT of voters who genuinely liked Trump and believed the things he said even when they were patently ridiculous and false, and that is a bigger problem for the country in the long term than Clinton’s failings. And whomever the Dems put forward for 2020 - and for that matter any Democrat looking to fight any battle in the next four years - had better be prepared to fight that battle in a post-truth landscape.
Damn, you beat me to it. I came back to say the same thing, so let me elaborate instead. It’s absurd to conjecture what would have happened if one thing changed, but everything else remained the same. Let’s suppose Comey didn’t release the info he did. What would have happened had some lower level person in the FBI leaked that info a few days later? Would that have been better or worse for HRC? You can’t step on the butterfly and assume that only one butterfly dies as a consequence.
If only she hadn’t set up her own private server, lied about it, and wiped a whole bunch of emails and assured us that we didn’t need to see any of them and didn’t have a reputation for contemptuous dishonesty. But of course, that’s not possible, so it’s all Comey’s fault.
Regards,
Shodan
Of course, in that short story, the end result was that a different candidate won the election (along with some other changes), so maybe that analogy isn’t the best one. 
Still, the point is that changing something in the past has unpredictable results.
The Democratic party’s big mistake over the past 10 or more years has been the assumption that it could rely on changing demographics. I heartily agree that the Democratic party’s policies are better for most of America - particularly rural America - than those of the GOP’s, but the Democrats gradually began paying a lot more attention to the surging Hispanic population, the increased African American vote, and other minority voting blocs. And indeed they should respect these constituencies. But Hillary’s decisions to skip campaigning in Rust Belt counties on the assumption that these states are always “blue” is symptomatic of a larger attitude, which is that Democrats have stopped communicating with “Joe Six Pack”. They haven’t stopped representing him, but the communication isn’t as frequent. Trump saw an opportunity and exploited it.
With regard to the email probe, Clinton could have put most of this to bed a long time ago had she simply developed a better crisis management strategy. But she repeatedly looked defensive and argumentative in interviews, in town halls, and when confronted by ordinary people. Understandably, her supporters react viscerally to what was largely a fake scandal. But overblown scandals and hyperbolic media coverage of them are not entirely new. Clinton’s team never really had a message or a real strategy. The fact that her campaign was the first since 32 years to lose WI, MI, and PA speaks of someone who was just never really prepared for battle and not sure what kind of opponent she was up against and what type of fight she needed to wage.
Yes… astoundingly… I am saying that even for progressive leaning voters like myself she had “baggage” apart from right wing gargle spew.
Her “baggage” for me was
1: That yet another Clinton was running for President. The sheer balls out “It’s my turn” presumption and entitlement of this beggared the imagination. Bush I and II were bad enough but now we have Clinton redux? Enough … just fucking enough with this!
2: She knowingly tolerated her husband running around like a dog in heat brazenly chasing tail for decades as long as he wasn’t caught and damaged their political brand and when he was caught (or nearly caught in some cases) she tried to destroy the credibility of his accusers. I found this viscerally disturbing.
3: She was involved in all kinds of sketchy stock deals in Arkansas that yielded absurd returns for almost no risk. This is not the kind of self dealing behavior I want in a prospective POTUS.
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