# If Hillary ran against Trump again, you'd stay home? Please explain **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Tags:** trump\ **Created:** [May 31, 2024, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335 "2024-05-31T15:26:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/101 "2024-05-31T21:52:34Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > No, a terrible candidate is someone who can’t win the election. It has relatively little bearing on how well they’d actually do the job. Well okay then, we’ve been talking past each other because by “terrible candidate” I mean something like what @kaylasdad99 means. > [@What\_Exit](#): > > OK, good enough, but there were other reasons besides sexism for not voting for HRC. And again, I did vote for her. Yeah, I wasn’t talking about people not voting for her, but calling her a “terrible candidate”, which to me is addressing her qualifications and not her campaigning ability. ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/102 "2024-05-31T21:53:07Z")
> [@Kent\_Clark](#): > > I’m proud to say that I’ve voted for many terrible candidates - Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale are two that were far and away worse than Hillary. I did it because I judged their opponents to be much worse. Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were terrible candidates. I think both were worse than HRC, but I don’t Mondale was worse, but just my opinion. ---
**Author:** ![Beckdawrek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beckdawrek/32/3647_2.png) [@Beckdawrek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beckdawrek)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/103 "2024-05-31T21:53:14Z")
Hey, I totally appreciate you liked my inconvenient haiku. I’m a poet and didn’t know it.🤭 About the other part of your post, I couldn’t say. ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/104 "2024-05-31T21:53:53Z")
> [@Pleonast](#): > > Yeah, I wasn’t talking about people not voting for her, but calling her a “terrible candidate”, which to me is addressing her qualifications and not her campaigning ability. But when people say candidate, especially on the SDMB, they are talking about her campaigning ability. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/105 "2024-05-31T21:53:58Z")
> [@Boudicca90](#): > > > [@MyFootsZZZ](#): > > > > So you’re mad at Hillary for blaming progressives that she lost, but you didn’t vote for her? > > Most progressives were never going to vote for her in the first place, since she is too conservative and corporatist for us, yet she expected us to jump ship and join her after Bernie lost the primary. She and the DNC had this general attitude of her win being inevitable, which is why she barely did any actual campaigning, because she thought she had it in the bag. So, we didn’t give you Bernie and therefore you gave us [the America-hating fuckstick]? Thanks, I guess. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/106 "2024-05-31T21:57:46Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > But when people say candidate, especially on the SDMB, they are talking about her campaigning ability. I’m a people, and I use the hiring manager meaning. I’ll note that people on the SDMB also say “free reign” and “tow the line” and “shoe-in.” ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/107 "2024-05-31T21:58:48Z")
> [@kaylasdad99](#): > > I’m a people, Cite? 😉 But seriously we’re talking politics, not HR. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/108 "2024-05-31T21:58:49Z")
If only Bernie had the guts to run as an independent, instead of riding the coat tails of a party he refuses to identify with. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/109 "2024-05-31T22:01:33Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > But when people say candidate, especially on the SDMB, they are talking about her campaigning ability. That’s an interesting question, because there’s at least two of us who don’t. It’s quite possible many of us have been miscommunicating for years. ---
**Author:** ![F.U.Shakespeare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/aca169/32.png) [@F.U.Shakespeare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/F.U.Shakespeare)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/110 "2024-05-31T22:02:52Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > Oh wait, I’m being told it was Whitewater. Benghazi is Arabic for Vince Foster. ---
**Author:** ![Mundane\_Super\_Hero](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mundane_super_hero/32/6304_2.png) [@Mundane\_Super\_Hero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mundane_Super_Hero)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/111 "2024-05-31T22:04:24Z")
Hillary might be a nice person ( never met her ). I know that 8-9 years ago I thought that she had some flaws, but that’s so long ago I can’t even remember what they were. I voted for her. I know that I held the unpopular opinion that she’d been in the political news cycle too long and that the opposition had years to seed hatred of her through lies and innuendo making her candidacy ‘a ship that was already listing’. This is a shame because I know she would have been better than Rump. I’m a little sad that people are fighting about this now. She suffers from the same problem that many of us do as well as both current candidates: age. There’s nothing wrong with that; it comes for us all. ( Even John Cusack, a person some other poster once teased me about as posting/lurking here, isn’t 30 years old anymore. But we love him anyway. ) Anyway, Hillary is Retired. She is living her best life with her family and grandkids. She might even trot out a bottle of ‘Clinton’ white wine for a laugh on special holidays. I think that she has earned both her privacy and her retirement. I wouldn’t want to ruin that for her for anything. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/112 "2024-05-31T22:04:53Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > > [@kaylasdad99](#): > > > > I’m a people, > > Cite? > 😉 > > But seriously we’re talking politics, not HR. I gotta start waiting until I don’t have any potential edits to add before I hit “reply”… You respond too fast. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/113 "2024-05-31T22:06:27Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were terrible candidates. I think both were worse than HRC, but I don’t Mondale was worse, but just my opinion. That’s okay, I voted for Kerry, too. The Democrats often nominate lousy campaigners (I’ll use that term in deference to @kaylasdad99). The point I was trying to make is that when your candidate doesn’t make it out of the primaries, it doesn’t mean you walk away from the process. Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and swallow the bitter pill. Remember, Donald Trump got MORE popular votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/114 "2024-05-31T22:16:45Z")
I’ve started a poll: > [@What does “candidate quality” mean to you?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-candidate-quality-mean-to-you/1002359): > > Continuing the discussion from [If Hillary ran against Trump again, you'd stay home? Please explain](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/109): That’s an interesting question, because there’s at least two of us who don’t. It’s quite possible many of us have been miscommunicating for years. What does “candidate quality” mean to you when talking about people running for political office? [poll](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-candidate-quality-mean-to-you/1002359/1) ---
**Author:** ![SuntanLotion](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/suntanlotion/32/16165_2.png) [@SuntanLotion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SuntanLotion)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/115 "2024-05-31T22:19:18Z")
I would never “stay home”. Voting is important. And I never voted for trump ( lower case). ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2024, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/116 "2024-05-31T23:11:04Z")
> [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](#): > > I suspect it involves blackmail, possibly using data supplied by the Russians, and I am not kidding. Blackmail of whom? 14 Million Republican primary voters? While its possible/likely that Russian Trolls promoted the Trump candidacy on social media, there was no back room shady deal that handed Trump the candidacy. There is no way to cheat your way into being the head of a personality cult. Trump won because the other candidates under estimated the extent to which a decades of Right wing media drivel had turned the minds of GOP primary voters to mush. They were still under the misapprehension that if you came out as a racist and spouted easily debunked lies you would suffer for it. Trump who had political savy, filters or shame went out and spewed what ever nonsense found its way into his head, but it was nonsense that the GOP voters wanted to believe so he was the one guy who actually “got it right” as far as they were concerned, and jumped on the giant band wagon to hell. After the cat was out of the bag lots of others followed his example, but he was the first. Basically the political equivalent of the [Fosbury Flop.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_flop) ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2024, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/117 "2024-06-01T00:52:53Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > So not sexism in a lot of cases, but she was a weak candidate and enabled Trump to get elected with a lot of other factors of course. Including losing some votes to sexism, but by far not all the ones she lost. Oh sure, [the 2016 campaign was largely a debate about email server management](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/25/14037576/trump-won-because-of-emails). I will concede that Hillary lost that particular debate, with an able assist by Comey and the New York Times which, " dedicated [100 percent of its above-the-fold space to coverage of Comey’s letter to Congress](http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/30/ny-times-floods-front-page-fbi-letter-stories-while-acknowledging-it-didn-t-reopen-clinton-server/214202), as well as the general media that dedicated more time to Clinton’s email server stories than to [stories about all policy issues combined](http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/26/study-confirms-network-evening-newscasts-have-abandoned-policy-coverage-2016-campaign/214120)." What do the numbers say though? The numbers say that after controlling for incumbency and the state of the economy [that Trump _under_performed by 5.4 percentage points](https://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu/vote2020/indeane2.htm). Or, alternatively, Hillary outperformed by 5.4 percentage points, which is mathematically equivalent. An epic performance: congrats. Sure, Hillary was terrible at oratory (but often forgotten solid during the televised debates). But at the end of the day she wasn’t a terrible candidate mathematically speaking. What about 2020? Trump underperformed by a still sizable 3.4 points. Call it Biden’s weakness, Hillary’s greatness, or (my choice) reversion to the mean as abnormality was normalized. Either way while fingers can be pointed in many directions, Hillary didn’t do badly historically speaking. ---
**Author:** ![Procrustus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/procrustus/32/2994_2.png) [@Procrustus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procrustus)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2024, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/118 "2024-06-01T01:02:30Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > It wouldn’t have taken much to move the needle. People stayed home then because they didn’t feel the urgency to go out and vote. The urgency was lacking because many of us (including me) thought Trump had zero chance. As a result, Clinton lost a lot of votes because it was easy to hold back your vote for a less than perfect candidate if you didn’t fear the evil on winning. Compacity by the voters (with the media helping), not the campaign, is what screwed us. > [@hajario](#): > > Instead of hobnobbing with movie stars and rockers on the coasts she needed to be making her case in the midwest. I thought this was debunked. She did, in fact, campaign in the Midwest (and who votes for a POTUS based on how many times they visit your state?) But, she also thought (as did most people) she had a blue wall protecting her. Her campaign was wrong about that, but it was conventional wisdom at the time. Like this year, do you really think Biden needs to spend more time in NY? He’ll certainly have egg on his face if he loses New York, but no one thinks that’s a possibility. ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba9def/32.png) [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2024, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/119 "2024-06-01T01:33:35Z")
> [@Buck\_Godot](#): > > Blackmail of whom? 14 Million Republican primary voters? Not the voters. The republicans who lost their spines and enable trump. The ones that don’t speak out, ---
**Author:** ![ThelmaLou](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thelmalou/32/390_2.png) [@ThelmaLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThelmaLou)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2024, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335/120 "2024-06-01T01:40:23Z")
Good grief. This thread has gone off the rails. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-hillary-ran-against-trump-again-youd-stay-home-please-explain/1002335.md?page=7)