Yep, she got over confident because frankly everyone got over confident. It was hard to imagine that a candidate who was so unpresidential could ever win the office. And the polling gernally supported that notion. The problem in my opinion is that since everyone knew that Trump was going to lose, many thought that this would be a good opportunity to launch a protest vote or stay home,and the rest is history.
Was my take from back during the campaign.
I also must say, sorry, I don’t see Combover Boy’s fixers moving money to shush down some sex scandal as damaging Clinton. All the different factors we have discussed for 8 years that inflicted damage on her run remain what did the job: Comey resuscitating the e-mail case just to try to “look fair”; RW media blowing up out of context the soundbites on “deplorables” and “gonna lose a lot of mining jobs” ; 30 years of the RW pounding on and on what a shrill shrew she was; etc., etc.
I mean, in any close election, there are always going to be myriad different things you can point to and say “this made enough of a difference to swing the election”. But when a candidate identifies three states that would be enough to guarantee her victory, and then concedes those states, that’s on her.
Amen, the notion that she only got where she was because “she was married to Bill” got a giant eye roll from me. Nope, no sexism or misogyny here.
Even their greed is about cruelty; less about personal profit than denying prosperity to others. They’ll happily take a loss if it means they can hurt someone else.
This is textbook victim blaming. If a marathon runner is assaulted on the marathon course suggesting that she could have avoided it by running a different route is asinine. The marathon runner is required to stay on the course and it’s perfectly reasonable for her to assume she won’t be assaulted while doing so.
What on Earth are you talking about?
A good part of the left of center population complacently thinks, “Biden won the popular vote by seven million votes last time, he can’t possibly lose!”. But it wasn’t his 7M margin in the popular vote that won him the election, it was is 315K margin in six key battleground states that put him in the White House. In those six states, 315K works out to about 1% of the total vote*. Compared to the national popular vote*, 315K works out about two-thousandths of the total. Biden really only barely won,
Given how the present-day demographics of this country correlates with how people in various states/regions are likely to vote, Trump could win the election with a popular vote margin of 1 (one single voter), or even far less, as we saw in 2016. Biden probably will need a popular vote margin of at least 7M, and possibly even more than that, now that NY and CA have each lost a vote to TX. Because that’s the brutal truth of this fucked up system that we have: Trump has a huge head start straight from the gate.
And I haven’t even touched on the headwinds impacting Biden this time around.
Really things don’t look good because not enough people seem to appreciate the fact that Trump being a convict and a laughingstock that most educated people despise simply isn’t enough to keep him out of the White House. We have to vote in order to do that, and again because of the Electoral College we have to vote for Biden. At least, we have to do that if we want to keep Trump from winning.
*i.e., the total votes for either major party’s candidate for President.
She had a “blue wall”, of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, that would guarantee her victory. Any competent campaigner would have taken that fact, and responded by working hard to win those specific states. What Clinton did was to recognize that those states were essential, and then in response, made no effort whatsoever to win them.
You know, there was quite a bit of news coverage of the 2016 campaign. We can look this shit up and see that what you are saying is utter nonsense.
Take Pennsylvania for example. Between the convention and election day the Clinton campaign held 26 events in Pennsylvania, second only to Florida in number of events. The Trump campaign held 28 events in Pennsylvania.
The Clinton campaign spent $37,762,267 on TV and radio ads in PA compared to $16,875,760 for Trump.
The night before election day Clinton held a rally at Independence Mall in Philadelphia where she was joined by the Obamas, Bruce Springsteen, and Bon Jovi.
They knew the importance of Pennsylvania and worked their asses off to win it. The campaign was by no means perfect, but it wasn’t completely incompetent. Why on Earth would you claim that they made no effort to win Pennsylvania? That is absurd.
| Date | State | City | Speaker | Event |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7/29/2016 | Pennsylvania | Harrisburgh | Clinton / Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 7/29/2016 | Pennsylvania | Hatfield | Clinton / Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 7/29/2016 | Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | Clinton / Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 7/30/2016 | Pennsylvania | Johnstown | Clinton / Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 7/30/2016 | Pennsylvania | Pittsburgh | Clinton / Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 8/15/2016 | Pennsylvania | Scranton | Clinton | Rally/Speech |
| 8/16/2016 | Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | Clinton | Rally/voter registration event |
| 8/30/2016 | Pennsylvania | Erie | Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 8/30/2016 | Pennsylvania | Lancaster | Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 8/31/2016 | Pennsylvania | Bethlehem | Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 9/5/2016 | Pennsylvania | Pittsburgh | Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 9/19/2016 | Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | Clinton | Rally/Speech |
| 10/4/2016 | Pennsylvania | Harrisburg | Clinton | Organizing Event and Press Conference |
| 10/4/2016 | Pennsylvania | Haverford | Clinton | Town Hall |
| 10/5/2016 | Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 10/6/2016 | Pennsylvania | Pittsburgh | Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 10/21/2016 | Pennsylvania | State College | Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 10/22/2016 | Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | Clinton / Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 10/22/2016 | Pennsylvania | Pittsburgh | Clinton / Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 10/26/2016 | Pennsylvania | Allentown | Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 10/26/2016 | Pennsylvania | Newtown | Kaine | Rally/Speech |
| 11/4/2016 | Pennsylvania | Pittsburgh | Clinton | Rally/Speech |
| 11/5/2016 | Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | Clinton | Get Out the Vote Concert |
| 11/6/2016 | Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | Clinton | Speech to Mt. Airy Church of God |
| 11/7/2016 | Pennsylvania | Oakland | Clinton | Rally/Speech |
| 11/7/2016 | Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | Clinton | Rally/Speech |
Campaign events: 2016 Presidential Candidate General Election Events Tracker (maintained by FairVote) - Google Sheets
TV and radio spending: https://adage.com/article/campaign-trail/how-clinton-trump-camps-spent-595-million-TV-radio/306496
Philly campaign closing event: Hillary Clinton winds down campaign with thousands in Philly: 'We face the test of our time'
Yeah, the “she ignored the rust belt states” storyline is one of those things that is entrenched in the collective mind in spite of that when you really look at it, she campaigned there about as much and as well as you’d normally expect at the time. But of course, there is the rub: “as you’d normally expect at the time” – things turned out to not just not be normal but to be way beyond even expected abnormality.
As I can best reconstruct it, in part it spins off from something that was already going on in the end stages of the campaign, along the lines of people inside the national Dems asking “why the Hell are you going to places like Arizona that we’ll never win?” (because then you’ll be told you ignored places like Arizona). After-the-fact of course it became super attractive among the many items in the Big Bucket of Explanations.
So what I’m getting here is “Hillary ran the best possible campaign she could, but lost.”
In hindsight we may she didn’t but in Real Time she was running the kind of campaign that Conventional Wisdom and her own experience up to then told her was the right campaign. (Some of us were finding fault at the time that it looked too much like it was turning into a campaign To Not Lose.)
Her campaign in 2016 got more votes than any prior candidate not named Obama.
Yes, she made some consequential errors, but “terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign?” Don’t be fucking moron.
Her campaign made moronic errors in 2008 as well like literally not knowing how the Texas primary system differed from the other states. I’m glad we got Obama though.
The fact that population is increasing does not imply that Clinton ran a good campaign.
You don’t win with rallies and TV ads. You win with gotv and grassroots outreach. Speaking from first-hand experience, both of those were disastrous in Michigan. National labor organizations, for instance, were told to stay out of Michigan when they wanted to do big city gotv. In-state labor orgs were told to stay away from the big Democratic strongholds and stick with rural gotv. I suspect it was similar in other battleground states.
Combine that with 30+ years of bullshit from the right, and too many people didn’t like her, didn’t trust her and the campaign did very little to change people’s minds on the ground. And when the Russians and Comey got involved, many people who were barely tolerating her already just threw up their hands and stayed home or even voted for someone else. But I was hearing “Fuck Hilary” on the doors and phones in Michigan from Democrsatic union households WAY before Comey and the “Hey Russia, find her email” crap. The campaign was ignoring Black groups in cities like Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Muskegon.
I’d been doing union GOTV from 2003-2016. Never had I gotten so much negative feedback on the ground on a candidate, even weak ones like Kerry. Never had I ever seen a campaign steer us away from big city/urban gotv. It was nuts how much she was disliked by many from the get-go and then did nothing to turn out the voters who still may have voted for her if they ever heard from someone who supported her
You want to cry about victim blaming or sexism? Nope. At this level of politics, you need to be able to win enough votes despite any baggage or negatives you might carry. She didn’t do that, she couldn’t do that because she had too many negatives that could be exploited, rightly or wrongly. Unfortunately in our system, you don’t get bonus points for having a really kick-ass resume or breaking any glass ceilings.
Fucking moron? You don’t win presidential elections in this country by getting more votes nationally than any prior candidate not named Obama.
She ran a normal campaign and lost. How many campaigns have to deal with the FBI announcing reopening a dead and buried investigation a couple of days before the election?
I’d love to have a woman as president, but your uterus is a negative with the all important misogynist demographic, so maybe you should stay home and let the man next to you be the candidate since his penis will draw more votes than your competence.