Maybe not conventional wisdom, maybe just rules of thumb.
Low voter turn-out favors the Republicans.
Democrats have to fall in love, Republicans fall in line.
Charisma not substance wins (okay, that is just my theory but it holds from 1976 through this one)
No one ever went broke or lost an election by under-estimating the intelligence of the population.
Anything else that is still “true” after this election?
Hillary Clinton has the charisma of a dead fish?
After 8 years in power, many voters will favor a change of party in the White House.
A lot of voters are going to vote for the Republican against the Democrat or vice versa largely regardless of the specific candidates.
It was relevant in this election mainly on the idea of a significant GOP defection from ‘unprecedented’ Trump which hardly materialized, though also some seemed to think the relatively polite, even halfhearted on Sanders’ part, Democratic primaries were somehow specially divisive. In both cases the outcome was relatively conventional as it applied to each party’s ‘own’ voters, with the caveat of relatively weak turnout for Clinton on her side. But that’s nothing earth shatteringly new either. As noted she was an uninspiring candidate, but far from the first one ever, and there’s often fatigue in the base of the party in the WH after two terms.
A woman can’t be elected President.
I thought personal insults, even against dead fish, weren’t tolerated here?
The nationalism (anti-globalism, with a racist tinge) we’ve seen in Europe in recent years is part of a larger wave that may span several continents.
(Not saying I agree with this entirely – had a few thousands of votes around the Great Lakes gone the other way, we’d be telling a different story – but I would call it “conventional wisdom” that has more or less been “confirmed.”)
You can’t win by running against something.
Shit happens.
She really does though, doesn’t she? Now I did notice her trying hard during the campaign… going on comedy shows and being unafraid to poke fun at herself. Obama could do the same and be loved for it. And when he would switch over to serious mode we would listen because he was embodying the best aspects of a professor and a preacher and he had insightful things to say even if one didn’t always agree with him. Hillary on the other hand couldn’t do professor mode without sounding like that bitchy aunt you’d only see at Christmas. You know, the one who would buy you an ugly sweater that you were never going to wear and the one who would have a few too many sips of wine and then spend an hour lecturing you about the dangers of reefer madness. It’s not that Hillary is a woman, it’s that Hillary is that particular woman. Elizabeth Warren has got it going on. Hillary is the actual opposite of charisma, no matter how hard she tries.
Ethical!
…No, that’s exactly what Trump did.
Most of OP’s conclusions are probably correct, including this one:
I think that the more charismatic candidate has won every Presidential election since at least 1952. Nixon wasn’t a bundle of charm, but neither was Hubert Humphrey.
Charismatic is not the first adjective that comes to mind to describe Trump, but I guess it does apply and strongly so. :eek:
True only for Hillary.
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
Hillary needed to make this a central part of her campaign, and not just an afterthought. Much of the recovery has not helped the average working-class American, and white working-class people felt particularly ignored by her.
I rememder back in the day in school teachers called this protectionism.
If you tell a lie enough, it becomes the truth
The taller candidate will win. :smack:
Well, I’ve heard “protectionism” used more specifically for increased barriers to trade – in other words, doing away with blocs like NAFTA or bilateral trade agreements.
Interestingly, while pro-free-trade thinking used to be associated more with right-leaning folks (“neoliberalism”), but with a lot of center-left folks agreeing that, economically, it produced more winners than losers (hence, both George Bush and Bill Clinton were pro-NAFTA)…
…now, as you alluded to, it’s the ANTI-free-trade thinking that has resurged not just among certain left-leaning folks (as we saw with Bernie Sanders), but also among parts of the “right” – namely, many Trump supporters.
I think this, and not any sort of “personality/trust problems” or even “misogyny,” is the best argument why Bernie might have done better than Hillary specifically in those Great Lakes states that ended up causing Hillary so much grief.