# I could have beaten Trump, says Obama **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [December 26, 2016, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669 "2016-12-26T23:11:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![doorhinge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a5b964/32.png) [@doorhinge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doorhinge)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/101 "2016-12-29T00:30:40Z")
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#): > > :rolleyes: > > Can I nominate this for some kind of award or something? Of course you can. And just for the record, I think you could have beaten Trump. See how easy it is for an Obama to declare he could beat someone. It’s not as if they are ever going to have an actual contest to prove who would actually win. ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/102 "2016-12-29T03:25:33Z")
Interesting take from a liberal writer on Politico. [No, Obama Probably Wouldn’t Have Beaten Trump And it’s bad for the Democratic Party for him to say so.](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/no-obama-probably-wouldnt-have-beaten-trump-214557) > [@](#): > > As a liberal, it pains me to say the following: President Barack Obama believes he would have beaten Donald Trump, but he’s probably wrong. > > Many Democrats have reason to resist accepting such a horrifying hypothetical. Obama’s favorable rating trumps Trump’s. Obama has a proven track record of winning Rust Belt white working-class votes, while also sparking record rates of African-American turnout. > > But to lean on those arguments risks overlooking the boiling political, economic and cultural forces that bubbled up in reaction to eight years of Obama, and splattered red all over the electoral map. Reading the whole article actually made me reconsider the conclusion I came to in the OP, that Obama would have beaten Trump. Now I’m not so sure. What do you guys think of the article? ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/103 "2016-12-29T04:10:37Z")
There is a great deal of racial resentment among white Americans, and Obama didn’t fix it. ---
**Author:** ![HeweyLogan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heweylogan/32/547_2.png) [@HeweyLogan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeweyLogan)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 10:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/104 "2016-12-29T10:18:11Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > What do you guys think of the article? It had me reading until I got to this part… > [@](#): > > Obamacare looms large, despite the fact that it is one of the most tangible benefits Obama delivered to working-class Americans, regardless of race. Yet the reaction to the program was undoubtedly tinged with racism. I haven’t talked to anyone yet who likes or has benefited from Obamacare. Not one. Undoubtedly it’s because they’re all racists. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/105 "2016-12-29T10:42:45Z")
> [@HeweyLogan](#): > > It had me reading until I got to this part… > > I haven’t talked to anyone yet who likes or has benefited from Obamacare. Not one. Oh yeah? Well I’ve talked to plenty of people who appreciate what Obamacare has done for them, like allowing their college-age children to remain on their family insurance plan or preventing companies from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions. Break out of your homogenous circle of friends maybe? ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/106 "2016-12-29T14:00:55Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > Reading the whole article actually made me reconsider the conclusion I came to in the OP, that Obama would have beaten Trump. Now I’m not so sure. What do you guys think of the article? The article seems to be written by someone who believes that Hillary almost one rather than someone who acknowledges that Hillary lost. He focuses a lot on things that would be problems for Obama in 2016 that weren’t in 2012, but doesn’t touch on the big negatives that Clinton has that he doesn’t, or the big advantages that he has that she doesn’t. I mean, he’s a much more charismatic speaker and much quicker on his verbal feet than Clinton, which gives him a huge advantage in actually winning people over to him and actual-winning debates (as opposed to ‘Clinton supporters declare that she won the debate’). He ran a very successful campaign and visited a lot of smaller states, I can’t see him deciding to campaign heavily in solidly blue states ignoring swing states hoping to cement a popular vote victory at the expense of the election. He actually appeals to a lot of minority voters instead of just being ‘Not Trump’. While not popular with Republicans, he doesn’t inspire the kind of hate Hillary does. He has serious accomplishments in office and not just ‘qualifications’. Obviously, I’m ignoring the issue that running for a third term against precedent and the law would make Obama’s run much more difficult, since the statement was clearly about running a winning campaign and not literally running for a third term. Other than that, though, it’s clear that Obama didn’t make the mistakes Hillary did during his two runs (one of which involved beating her) and was unlikely to decide to make them this time, has more charisma and real accomplishments, and doesn’t have the massive hate-on that Hillary does. ---
**Author:** ![Fretful\_Porpentine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fretful_porpentine/32/2873_2.png) [@Fretful\_Porpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fretful_Porpentine)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/107 "2016-12-29T15:58:13Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > Interesting take from a liberal writer on Politico. > > [No, Obama Probably Wouldn’t Have Beaten Trump > And it’s bad for the Democratic Party for him to say so.](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/no-obama-probably-wouldnt-have-beaten-trump-214557) > > Reading the whole article actually made me reconsider the conclusion I came to in the OP, that Obama would have beaten Trump. Now I’m not so sure. What do you guys think of the article? I would tend to agree, especially with this part: > [@](#): > > But we can’t forget that the president was underwater through much of his second term. He only consistently cracked 50 percent in the Gallup tracking poll after Trump survived the raucous Republican nomination and Clinton was being wounded from the left by Sanders. Obama, safely out of the fray, surely looked preferable by comparison. If he was fully in the campaign fight, facing blow after blow from Trump, he may well have seen his popularity diminished, just as Clinton’s tanked when she entered the race. I think people wildly underestimate the effectiveness of smear campaigns (except, perhaps, against Trump, who seems to be somewhat insulated by the fact that some people like him BECAUSE he’s an awful person, rather than in spite of this fact – but it should be noted that Trump is ALSO limping into office with a negative approval rating). Anybody who wins a major-party nomination, these days, also wins at least six months of incessant mud-slinging from the opposing party. Anyone who wins an _election_ wins four years of it. Obama was pretty clearly compromised by this in the 2012 election, which he won by a much smaller margin than in 2008, and I suspect that 2016 would have been either a loss or a win by a razor-thin margin indeed. I can’t prove it, but I also believe that if the Democratic nominee had been Sanders or Biden or Webb\*, we would have been having virtually identical conversations throughout the election season about how awful BOTH of the candidates were, and why on earth did we nominate an avowed socialist who is probably also an atheist / some gaffe-prone old guy who is like your embarrassing uncle at Thanksgiving dinner / a one-term senator who is practically a Republican and writes embarrassingly un-PC novels, when we could have had a popular and accomplished candidate like Hillary Clinton? I don’t know for a fact that all of these candidates would have lost to Trump, since the election was basically a coin-flip and it’s plausible that one of the others could have flipped just enough voters in the right states, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if any of them lost. And if they did lose, they would look like a uniquely awful candidate right now – the person who lost to TRUMP! – and all of the people who didn’t run, including Clinton, would be looking great by comparison. - This goes for Martin O’Malley too, I just don’t know enough about Martin O’Malley to know what the specific line of attack would have been. ---
**Author:** ![doorhinge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a5b964/32.png) [@doorhinge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doorhinge)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/108 "2016-12-29T18:03:47Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > There is a great deal of racial resentment among white Americans, and Obama didn’t fix it. Considering the number of black voters who voted for Obama, but didn’t vote for either of the two white candidates in 2016, there seems to be a great deal of racial resentment among black voters. Obama didn’t fix that, either. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 8:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/109 "2016-12-29T20:03:00Z")
When you _whoosh_ upon a star… ---
**Author:** ![FavreCo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a698b9/32.png) [@FavreCo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FavreCo)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2016, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/110 "2016-12-29T20:41:22Z")
He would have gotten smoked. He’s right now trying to fuck everything up on his way out. What a total loser. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2017, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/111 "2017-01-03T20:32:38Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > He probably WOULD have won if he’d been allowed to run again. > > So? So maybe the country didn’t become the Ku Klux Klan overnight. Perhaps racism isn’t why Trump won the general election. ---
**Author:** ![Plumpudding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Plumpudding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Plumpudding)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2017, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/112 "2017-01-04T23:28:00Z")
> [@doorhinge](#): > > (post shortened) > > Is it OK for you to attack Trump because you imagine that other people would do the same thing if, maybe, the roles were reversed? Why do you need to fault others to justify your choice? If you want to attack Trump, you’re free to attack Trump. Trying to justify your attack by imagining what others might/maybe/coulda/woulda/shoulda have done seems pointless. IMHO, of course. > > Meanwhile, the methods of communication certainly have been a-changin’. Trump/Hillary are using social media. Kennedy/Nixon used television. (At least Kennedy did.) Lincoln learned to use the telegraph. > > The media outlets are pissed/disappointed that candidates, especially Trump, can talk directly to the public without using the media outlets. Life goes on. > > I wonder what will replace Twitter, and how soon will it get here? Live cams… I’m very happy Trump didn’t catch on during the campaign. ---
**Author:** ![E-DUB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/e-dub/32/403_2.png) [@E-DUB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-DUB)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2017, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669/113 "2017-01-05T02:03:04Z")
There’s a YUGE disconnect in a lot of people’s minds between “Obamacare” the concept and the actual benefits of the Affordable Care Act. Many people who oppose “Obamacare” are solidly for most aspects of the Affordable Care Act. I blame Obama. One of his major problems was that he thought you campaign, you win, you govern. He did not recognize that governing effectively requires that the campaigning never stop. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-could-have-beaten-trump-says-obama/775669.md?page=5)