Clinton represents the status quo more than Biden. People don’t judge these things by resume or policy position but by personality and Biden is vastly more relatable to the average person than Hillary every was. This election was lost because voters in the Midwest who like Obama and voted for him twice sat out. Biden would have almost certainly have gotten these voters and won the election.
And do not underestimate how much people HATE Hillary. Specifically Hillary. My colleges at work are largely conservatives from Ohio, and North Carolina. They all said on the day of the election “I hate Trump but Hillary is the Devil.” Many of them lamented that Bernie was not still in the race. Many thought Biden was honest. All they wanted was someone who they didn’t perceive as being part of the machine. They figured that worst case Trump and Hillary would be the same and one was a Republican. Best case Trump might actually take down the machine. But a vote for Hillary was tantamount to self mutilation.
If only we could look back in recent history to a time when one party held onto the presidency for 3 terms by having the VP of a president with relatively good approval ratings run in the election…
The odds were still with the GOP, assuming we’d nominated a good candidate. Reagan had 60+% approval ratings, Obama was at 53% or so and half of that was the awful spectacle of the election. I suspect that if there had been good candidates running that most voters would have been like, “Obama who?”
Any other Democratic candidate probably would have been just as hated by the end of this campaign. This “hatred” didn’t come naturally-it was manufactured and manipulated by a propaganda machine designed to turn Republican opponents into demons. For any other candidate the words may have been different but the intensity, the consistency and the coordinated uniformity of the hate phrases and accusations would have been the same.
I disagree with the OP. Yes, the Republican negativity campaign would have been used against anyone the Democrats nominated, but it wouldn’t have necessarily worked. It failed twice against Obama, who was a Kenyan socialist atheist Muslim with a weird foreign last name that sounds like that 9/11 terrorist guy and a middle name like that other guy that used to be the dictator in Iraq. Why did it work against Clinton? Because she was just not as good a politician as Obama.
Anecdotally, I know people who expressed opinions like this.
From an Irish immigrant, a woman who is a nurse, “If only we had someone like Kennedy (JFK) still around.” She voted for Trump.
From several close family members “They’re both terrible, we’re screwed either way.” They voted for Gary Johnson, but for Obama in 2008 and 2012.
From a coworker from Arkansas who still lived there during Bill Clinton’s time as governor. “The Clinton’s are corrupt as hell, no way I’d ever vote for her.” Voted Trump this time, Obama the previous two cycles.
Clinton was just the wrong choice.
I guess some people will always believe that she was clean and everything about her was made up.
I, and many other people we know, don’t think she was “clean” – we just thought she would be a great president! Why is this so hard to understand?
I don’t give a rat’s ass if my postman is a terrible cook, as long as he delivers my goddamned mail.
I don’t understand it either, but it happened. Apparently 6 million or so people (that voted for Obama in 2012 but not for Hillary this time) do care that their postman is a terrible cook :(.
It’s not about the racist white guy that is a loyal Limbaugh / Hannity / Breitbart listener and reader. It’s about those 6 million people that voted for Obama in 2012 but not for Hillary. No, they didn’t switch to Trump, who did about as well as Romney did 2012, but not better than that. They just stayed home this time around.
That was directed at Czarcasm, who made the claim that it was all manufactured. I knew who Clinton was and supported her over Trump. But some really needed to believe she was just a victim of a smear machine.
Most of it was made up and/or mischaracterized and all of it was exaggerated to a ridiculous degree. She wasn’t perfect-most people aren’t. She also wasn’t the image that was sold.
How does this scale work, again? Does the Democratic Female have to be the Virgin Mary before she is worthy to take on the Republican male who wrote a book about screwing people over?
At what point is she good enough for you? When she’s half as sleazy and/or crooked and/or racist? 1/4? 1/8?
Exactly how much worse than the Democratic candidate does the Republican candidate have to be before the Republicans finally say “Power is nice, but it ain’t worth selling my soul over.”
Honestly, we just don’t know how any other candidate would have known, and probably can’t know. Of course, we don’t have the option of running the election again with some other candidate, or looking into the alternate reality where we did. So the best we can do is look at our best theoretical models of the political process. But we’ve just been shown quite definitively that those models are very wrong. Sure, we might be able to say that, say, Sanders polled better than Clinton… but that doesn’t mean much, because Clinton polled better than Clinton, too.