Garbage time yards. She ran up the popular vote in a number of states where the additional count had no effect on the outcome.
Sexism is pretty obvious, I’d think, just by the fact that Trump beat two very qualified women in presidential races, but could not beat a man.
Albeit, who knows what the outcome would have been if Harris had been the Democratic candidate from the very beginning.
All else being equal, sure. But there was a massive “get out the vote” initiative due to the pandemic and other factors. Voting numbers overall were higher, which is why Biden won despite Trump getting more votes than in 2016.
Trump also had had four more years to radicalize his base. He’d successfully fearmongered them more about what a Democrat in office would do to them. He’d given those sexists a feel of what it was like to be able to let loose all their bigotry. The default is that you vote for the same guy you voted for last time, and he didn’t give a lot of them a reason to switch away (from their perspective).
I don’t think it’s remotely the whole story. There was a definite “antiestablishment” theme (which carried into the next two elections). And Trump’s campaign itself capitalized on the overarching white cishet male resentment. Clinton herself just never had a sort of enthusiastic support that has been necessary to win elections for a while. Qualifications alone don’t win elections for anyone.
But I think it’s undeniable that Clinton was held back by sexism, and that Trump, with his “it’s okay to be deplorable” message was well-positioned to capitalize on that. Even the “her emails” thing doesn’t hit as hard without it, as the people upset about that never really cared much about the security issues (as shown by what happened when Trump did far more egregious things).
There was an undercurrent of “See, this shows how a woman can’t handle things.” Well, that and just the bias towards caring about the flaws of people you hate while ignoring the ones in people you like. And much of the Clinton hatred was sexist in nature.
I’ve seen people who were outraged that she used a government email system, when she could so clearly have afforded one of her own, and why was she mooching like that!?.
The issue was never the issue. The issue was just that Trump and his media pounded so hard on it that low information voters assumed that there must have been something there.