I’ve heard many variations of “Hillary was the one candidate that could lose running against Trump in 2016” over the last few years…but is that true? What candidate do you think would have had a decent chance running against The Orange Offal? I’m not asking who your personal favorite was, btw-I am asking what Democratic candidate would have won against Trump. Which candidate would have made it through the Republican smear machine, not alienated Democratic politicians or voters, and been popular enough to get the votes needed back in 2016?
Thank you for starting this thread. However, do you contemplate including some recognition of what I raised in the Hating Trump thread about Putin’s interference in 2016? I don’t feel an honest conversation can be had without discussing this very important component about how we voted and for whom.
Let’s not forget that highly targeted internal campaign data from Trump’s analytics were shared through Paul Manafort with Putin on the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan near the end of the election.
I personally don’t think there was a better candidate than Clinton in 2016, except maybe Joe Biden, and he had his good reasons for not running at that time.
It would not have mattered who was advanced by Democrats. Any and all would have been smeared relentlessly by Trump’s machine – which included both Fox “News” and Russian manipulations in our social media.
Two sides of the same coin, really. We should not ignore it for its influence in 2016 – or what will continue to be attempted in all elections going forward.
I agree with you, but I am wondering if there is anybody that thinks that there were candidates that could have overcome those obstacles.
Thanks for the clarification. I shan’t clutter your thread further with my concerns about the ongoing propaganda being wrought on our citizenry in our elections process.
I’ve already had my say about who I believe could possibly have beaten Trump – but with the multi-faceted smear machine, I’m not sure even Biden could have done it in 2016. No one was paying attention then. And it largely seems they still aren’t.
Clinton had an array of positives and an array of negatives.
Her positives were most appealing to the politically involved: she was a policy maven, she got off on negotiating with adversaries and over time getting the better of the deal, she was a sharpster and conniver and no blind innocent and could joust with the Republicans.
Her negatives were a lot like those of Al Gore or Ron De Santis: she was totally not a charismatic politician, and could not control how she came across and manipulate that to her own advantage.
She was up against someone who had the latter talent in spades, a formidable orchestrator of public opinion, even if he was limited in certain ways. He could get a following, and did.
So, who better than Hilary Clinton at that time?
I have to admit, I’d like to see an alternative history if Bernie Sanders had gotten the nomination. He did have the charisma she didn’t have. But he would have been up against a monumental political hatred in America of anything smelling of communism and socialism and so forth.
I don’t see Jim Webb doing noticeably better than Clinton, although for a mix of different reasons.
If there were a revisionist history I’d really like to see, it would be that Clinton got better campaign managers and handlers. She only lost by the skin of her teeth.
I think Bernie would have been crucified. By the time the Republicans (with an assist from the Russians) had gotten done with him Larry David’s caricature of him would have pulled in more votes.
In an alternate universe where Republicans had gotten the constitutional amendment they wanted in between the summer of 2003 and about mid-2008 or so, I could see Arnold Schwarzenegger flipping parties and beating Trump as a Democrat.
Yeah, but they didn’t.
This is what would have been everywhere had Bernie been the nominee,
I will say that I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, but didn’t vote for Clinton either. I didn’t have faith in either one as POTUS. Note that I’d voted Republican in every previous election, it wasn’t until 2016 that I started to change my mind.
If Bernie was the Democratic nominee back then I would have voted for Trump. Sanders struck me as dangerous. (Ironic now, I know.)
After seeing a Trump presidency and the aftermath, I’d vote for a rabid skunk over Trump. I had no idea then how horrible the guy could be.
I’m a typical Bernie-bro (lefty, centrist-hating atheistic secularist who’s fine with open wealth distribution) who opposed Bernie’s nomination in 2016 almost from the git-go because I recognized, I think correctly, that a Jew from Brooklyn who was elected as a socialist would be maligned so hard by the GOP that we’d never get around to discussing actual issues. The whole campaign would have been “Jew, Commie, New York City pointyhead” and I thought that Trump would have won that sort of campaign in 2016. He would have loved Bernie as an opponent, much more than he loved Hilary as his private speed bag. And we would have heard for the next few generations that our fatal mistake was nominating a leftwing candidate.
I think a lefty candidate is still possible, but he’s gonna have to be (or she) more acceptable to white Christian males than Bernie is capable of being. You can win with 60% or 70% of the white Christian males voting against you, but you can’t with 80% or 90%.
IOW, I think any Dem would have gotten the “worst monster in the world” treatment from the GOP in 2016, and Bernie would have gotten it worse than any other candidate. Trump would have run on his youth, health, and energy against Bernie, and it would have had an element of truth, which would have been a “first and only” for Trump.
I accepted Hillary as the candidate I voted enthusiastically for in 2016, despite opposing her in both her Senate runs in New York state–I thought she was, and is, a centrist suckass whom we could have done much better than in NY state, and a lousy pol and a carpetbagger, and I despise many of her political positions. But I thought she was a good POTUS candidate in 2016, and I still think so. We’re dealing with a serious electability problem in this country where much of the voting public is commited to voting for the most racist/fascist-friendly candidate in the race. That’s a serious problem to overcome, and we can’t afford to hand it to them on a silver platter.
If Hillary had somehow had mostly the same career without being married to Bill I think she would have had a better chance of beating Trump. The Clinton name did her no favors.
The obvious answer is the person that beat him in 2020 - Joe Biden. Would have been seen a continuation of Obama as well as helped hold together the Blue Wall.
I’m not convinced anyone else could have won, but it’s possible.
Who knows? Maybe Biden. Maybe Martin O’Malley (precisely because he’s “generic Democrat”). Maybe Bernie would have gotten some of the previously non-voters who ended up supporting Trump. No way of knowing any more than a guess.
One thing for sure: if anyone else had won the nomination and lost to Trump, you’d never hear the end of “This was SOOOOO unfair to Hillary, it was her turn, the Dems are mean to women, she was our golden opportunity, waaaa, waaaa, waaaa…”
Trump’s victory in 2016 was not due to Hillary Clinton being a uniquely terrible candidate. If that had been the case, then Trump would have lost in a mega-landslide in 2020. That year, he was running against Biden, and voters now had Trump’s actual record to judge him on and not just his own hype. Despite everything, Trump still ran a relatively close race in 2020.
People blame Hillary Clinton for 2016 because they don’t want to blame the electorate. They don’t want to blame the electorate, because without faith in the electorate’s judgment, democracy is on shaky ground! Even so, we must face it – that’s where we stand.
This is true, too.
The appalling thing about her loss to Trump is not that she lost but that she didn’t cream him in record numbers, 70%-30%, or even 75%-25%.
If you’d proposed a thought experiment in 2014 where you posited the Dems would nominate anyone who won their primaries against the worst, least qualified, most unstable, least able to reason his way out of a large paper bag candidate, you’d probably come up with someone not too far from Trump. A dream candidate for Dems to mock, and pile on, and display his character flaws on nationwide TV daily and nightly. If the idea behind the thought experiment were to invent a scenario in which the highest possible electoral margin could be achieved, blowing FDR and LBJ and Reagan out of the water, you’d probably have come up with someone very much like Trump, if not Trump himself.
But other candidates wouldn’t have been smearable in exactly the same way as Hilary. And she was never particularly charismatic—enough charisma can provide a layer of Teflon against the smears, because people want to like you and believe well of you.
So I think that, hypothetically, the right Democratic candidate could have beaten Trump in 2016. I just don’t know who that could have been in reality, given who was available around that time.
Hypothetically, an albino rabbit could have beaten Trump. But I think this thread is dedicated to naming, and defending, a specific person who could have beaten him in 2016. And I’ll defend the position that no one was a more electable Dem in 2016 than Hillary was, and (to paraphrase Al Franken) I despise her as a person and as a pol.