Considering her biggest drop in voters compared to Obama was among African Americans, this doesn’t seem to hold up. Bernie was not really stealing black votes from Hillary during the primary.
I think the loss can be entirely accounted for by her being a bad candidate that did worse in almost every category than Obama. The only place she did better was in California. She kicked Obama’s ass in California.
You said “much more likely”. Is that based on some sort of a quantitative analysis or more of a gut-level feeling?
Are Californians racists?
Well, there are relatively few blacks in CA compared to most states in the east (except the ones in the extreme north), so that might have something to do with it. But I think she campaigned here a lot more than Obama did, which was one of her big mistakes. You don’t get any more electoral votes by winning CA by anything more than 51%.
Your OP implies that sexism didn’t merely play some role, I mean how the fuck can anyone argue that sexism didn’t play any fucking role at all. Your OP implies that sexism was an insurmountable obstacle that even someone as awesome as Hillary could not overcome.
Mysogyny was not some insurmountable obstacle to the presidency. Not even fucking close. If Hillary wasn’t such a horrible candidate she would have won. If her sex was such a liability then she was a TRULY horrible candidate because she spent a lot of time playing up her sex during the campaign.
You are basically saying that the male dominance built into our collective psyches is more powerful than the white supremacy built into our collective psyches.
Did misogyny play some role? Perhaps. But the misogynous effect is probably eclipsed by the “hillary is a shitty candidate” effect. And I think it is entirely hogwash to say that a woman is not electable in this country.
It wasn’t just the fundraising. There was also fear of political retribution.
Well, not every state is winner take all.
I think this aura of inevitability also hurt er. There were plenty of people who would have held their nose to vote for her and perhaps they figured they could just stay at home and let others do the distasteful work of electing the lesser of two evils because she was going to win anyway.
No, but she spent a shitload of time campaigning (AKA fundraising) there.
Disagree with the OP. If it’s not clear by now, half of America will vote for anyone who promises cruelty against the other half of America. McCain’s strategy in choosing a woman VP to peel off women was very astute IMO, and his only misstep was failing to vet Sarah Palin for the whackjob she was.
But… run the right candidate, press the right buttons, and we’ll have a woman president so fast it will make your head spin. Keep your eye on Nikki Haley.
24% is a pretty good chance.
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At NO POINT?!? Really?
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That’s right. Never once did the polls had Clinton way ahead for a trouncing. There was NEVER a point that was true, not for one single day.
According to 538, the largest NATIONAL gap at any point in Clinton’s favor was approximately eight points, which is not a very big gap as opposed to a genuine crushing, and after all represented a high water mark in August, with a lot of undecided voters, that should not have been taken as a likely margin in November.
Now, Rachel Maddow might have said otherwise. If she did, she was simply wrong. I do have to point out that your Maddow quote does not have her say Clinton would hand Trump, in your words, “a humiliating defeat.” The most common projections had it around 330-208 Clinton or so, enjoying a popular vote margin of 3-6 percent, which is reasonably close by historical standards; most elections have been more lopsided than that. Maddow was saying Clinton was certain to win, not that she would win in a landslide. But even that claim was very stupid; Clinton was fairly considered a favourite but it was never a certainty. The possibility she would lose in precisely the manner she did lose was always a reasonably decent bet if you got the right odds.
Why Maddow chose to ignore reality, I don’t know. You can see in the video she assumes Clinton will win North Carolina, a truly baffling thing to assume; the polling in North Carolina was neck and neck throughout the entire race and voter suppression is, as any political observer should know, as enthusiastically pursued in NC as it is anywhere. She has Ohio and Iowa as toss ups though they polled more strongly for Trump than NC did for Clinton, so why isn’t NC a toss up? So I don’t know, maybe her staff cherry picked polls. Missing MI, WI and PA are understandable - but GUARANTEEING they would go Clinton was dumb. They were never a sure thing, and as Silver and others pointed out, these sorts of things are correlated.
Throughout the entire process, with the likes of Maddow and Sam Wang saying it was in the bag, 538 and other folks were saying “it totally isn’t, Trump has a chance,” and the facts were on their side. Rachel Maddow’s opinions are not facts.
But not a “strong chance”, which is what I was responding to. Also, there was very little of that time that was 24%. Maybe a few days. Most of the time was below 20%.
I am sure Hillary had other slogans.
But where Obama’s main slogan seemed to be Hope and Change (a very positive view), every bumper sticker I saw said “I’m with Her” (using the H logo).
So her main message seemed to be “vote for me because I am a woman”. The other main messages were “vote for me, I will keep doing the same things as Obama” and “Trump sucks, so vote for me”.
None of those things are really winning strategies. And the continued air of “a bunch of dummies elected Trump, so now surely they will all wise up and vote for the non-Trump candidate” does not seem like a winnable strategy either.
What is the message?
Why do we not know a lot of the women politicians? Same reason as most do not know many of any of the politicians. It is incredibly tough to get name recognition and usually those that have it, have it for the wrong reasons. I had never heard of Rubio, or Cruz, or Kaisch prior to the primaries. I knew of Trump from the news and his show. And I knew of Jeb because he was the son and brother of previous presidents.
Honestly, I did not want any more “dynasties”. Had Bush won the primaries, then no matter who won, we would be in for 4-8 years of a family that had already been president for a long time.
I had not heard of Nikki Haley until recently. I read some of her bio and I think on the surface she would be a great candidate. I would have loved for Condi to run.
And no male (other than Trump) is criticized. I seem to remember for years, W being called a chimp, or made fun of for his looks, his voice, his intellect. Reagan was called senile and was constantly scoffed at. Every Republican since Reagan has been called a fascist and a Nazi.
We can absolutely have a female president. The assumption would be that the only voting bloc that is misogynistic is the Republican Party, but that doesn’t wash because they loved Sarah Palin, and she was unqualified for the position. It’s not like McCain would have won if he had a man as VP, though you could argue he lost because of Palin, but that had nothing to do with misogyny; it had to do with the fact she was a bad choice.
Hillary was just plain awful. Remember, many conservatives who are accused of being misogynistic (solely because they are conservatives) were also fans of Margaret Thatcher. Until you can present good evidence that people didn’t vote for her MAINLY for the reason that she is a woman, it’s just conjecture. She lost to Trump. That should tell you how bad a candidate she was.
The woman who gets elected has to be one who is going to be centrist/moderate enough to appeal to both sides and get the swing voters. Obama was able to pull that off. Elizabeth Warren, for example, wouldn’t, because she is firmly entrenched way to the left. If the Dems are going to try get the Presidency, the worst mistake they could do is nominate Warren, and then run a dog-whistle platform of “if you don’t vote for her, you’re a misogynist.”
Making the point that someone should be voted for because they are a certain gender, race, religion, etc., is the most un-American thing I could think of. They should be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, or something like that…I heard that somewhere.
A cursory look at your data and a quick Google search seem to indicate…well, I was wrong. I WAS basing this on articles I read right after the election and hadn’t bothered to look at it again. I guess Trump did, in fact, get more votes than Romney. I haven’t looked at the vote distribution in the various states to see what the EC count would have been, but it seems I was wrong. Thanks for the info. I won’t use THAT argument again at least. 
Based on research findings that news coverage of female politicians tends to skew towards their personal traits over substantive issues more than news coverage of male politicians, and that news coverage of personal appearance for female presidential candidates is about four times as great as similar appearance-based news coverage for male ones.
In other words, as I claimed, female politicians are indeed much more likely to be critiqued for appearance/temperament issues than male politicians are.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that male politicians never get that kind of superficial criticism: they certainly do, and in fact there are some highly unattractive and/or temperamental male politicians who get almost nothing else (e.g., Donald Trump, Chris Christie).
But my point stands that that kind of criticism is disproportionately applied to female politicians.
Note, by the way, that the US population in 2012 was about 314 million and in 2016 about 323 million. If the population keeps increasing while the ratio of voters to the general population stays roughly constant (which I don’t know for sure in this case, but which seems like a plausible general trend), then the absolute number of votes cast in every election is likely to exceed the absolute number of votes cast in the preceding one. So that factor has to be taken into account when attempting to use absolute numbers of votes cast to assess candidate popularity.
Votes by PResidential election:
2016: 136.7 million
2012: 129.1 million
2008: 131.3 million
2004: 122.3 million
2000: 105.4 million
1996: 96.3 million
1992: 104.4 million
1988: 91.6 million
1984: 92.7 million
1980: 86.5 million
There is a general upward trend as the population increases but, clearly, enthusiasm for voting seems to vary from election to election. 1992 saw a whopping increase completely out of proportion to previous elections; one could theorize the 1992 race was simply very interesting, with the prospect for change and a third party candidate drawing many new voters. You then have a big, big jump when Bush 2 was re-elected in 2004, which I admit I find interesting and I’m not sure why that happened, and then another bump in 2008, again probably excitement over Obama. The 2016 turnout is essentially a continuation of 2004-2008; 2012, with a depressed turnout, is kind of the outlier.
Something happened in 2001 that had a profound impact on the fabric of American society and reverbated to the 2004 election.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a substantial margin and only lost in the electoral college by losing three states very narrowly. If she had lost because the country wasn’t ready for a female president, I would think she would have lost more decisively. As it went, any number of things could have tipped the election to her.