What Democratic candidate could have won against Trump in the 2016 elections?

Politics & Elections
21

And I think that’s a bigger part of the problem right there. Trump was so manifestly unqualified that everyone just assumed Clinton would win in a walkover, and so no one really felt any personal urgency to vote for her. I suspect a lot of the anti-Clinton propaganda was amplified by the, “Well, I think she sucks, but everyone else is going to vote for her so I can just stay home” effect.

So, who could have beaten Trump? Well, it’s a bit of a paradox. We’d need a candidate that a lot of Democrats and Democrat-leaning people would fear couldn’t beat Trump. “I have to get out and vote for Weak Democrat, because if I don’t, they might just lose to that dumpster fire of a Republican!”

Look at the numbers for Biden in 2020. A lot of those millions of votes he got that Clinton didn’t were just such people - they wanted the Democrat to win, but were scared enough of the “Sleepy Joe” factor that they couldn’t count on everyone else getting out to vote, so they did it themselves.

22

Landslides don’t happen with today’s electorate. The most recent one was in 1988. Sure, 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012 were comfortable, but not landslides. We have to back to LBJ in 1964 for the last Democratic landslide. A landslide in 2016 wasn’t in the cards no matter who ran for either side.

Had Biden run in 2016, my guess is he would have won with a map like 2020 except with a red AZ and GA. Florida might have gone blue (these were the old days before DeSantis after all :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:). That’s the best that Biden or any other Democrat could have hoped for.

Of course I think Clinton could have won in 2016 had she taken a different approach. She should have campaigned as an underdog rather than a favorite. If she had done that she would have won.

23

Something I don’t think should be understated is how much of Trump’s attacks on Hillary were effective because she was a woman, following 8 years of a Black president. Trump was a candidate primed to skewer women and minorities. It took finally took an old cis white male to beat him.

I don’t know that a white male could have beaten Trump in 2016. There were some pretty unique aspects to that particular election. But in hindsight it would have been the best shot (I say this as someone who has voted for Hillary in 2 primaries and the general).

24

Without trying to restate @aspenglow’s objections from the top of the thread I have a vaguely similar contention.

Hillary so dominated the D conversation from 2012 to 2016 that she was really the only plausible winner of the D nomination. IMO Saunders was a noisy sideshow whose plausibility as a real candidate was directly proportional to the naivete of the audience he was addressing.

As a result, the Rs knew from 2012 where to direct their ever-intensifying skill and effort at demonization. And, yes, Hillary was naturally by her own attributes a favorable target for that stuff to stick.

Had, counterfactually, there been a couple of other top-rank mainstream D candidates in addition to Hillary back in 2012, the Rs would have had to divide their fire and whoever did win the 2016 D nomination would not have been quite as demonized. Which demonization, as folks have said, both motivated the R base to vote against her, and de-motivated centrists and the less politically aware Ds from bothering to vote for her. Had that other D won the nomination, they might well have beaten Trump.

Had Hillary withdrawn entirely from politics earlier, say at the end of Bill’s term an entirely different dynamic would have obtained within the D party ever since then. People don’t wake up one day and suddenly decide to run for president. For an up-and-comer, there’s years of thinking, and political positioning, getting your age and resume right versus the current waning and waxing stars of your party. The vast majority of folks who have those dreams don’t end up well-positioned enough and well-timed enough to act on them. So we end up with the comparatively few realistic primary candidates on both sides out of the hundreds of millions of eligible Americans.

Had Hillary withdrawn from politics way early, there’d certainly have been one or more candidate spending 2012 to 2016 lining up for their shot at the big time. Maybe people we’ve never heard of. But for sure they too would have been slimed as best the Rs could manage.


Independently of all the above, Hillary, or Mystery D, could have beaten Trump if they’d been just a bit more clairvoyant about the battle they were really fighting. They fought a conventional politics campaign against an unconventional politics candidate and lost. Guerilla warfare is like that. Had they really grokked that “this time it’s different” and altered their message, their tactics, and their geographical areas of emphasis just a bit more than they actually did, the election would have gone the other way.

To be sure, had unequivocally Trump lost in 2020, there’d have been another effort like 2024’s Stop the Steal. But it would have been much less well received and a lot less effective.

25

I agree with this entirely. But his son had just died, so he cited that as his reason to not run (although I do wonder about whether there was pressure within the party - perhaps amongst the superdelegates- to back down so Clinton could emerge).

My suspicion is that the election eve announcement that the FBI was re-opening the email investigation led a lot of people to lose interest in voting or support for Clinton due to a sort of ‘scandal fatigue’. Even if Clinton wasn’t corrupt, I suspect that a lot of people recognized that her entire presidency would be maligned by Republican accusations of bad acts, and we as a people would have to suffer through endless yammering about these issues.

A lot of people were sick of that sort of thing, and that is why, I think, her supporters didn’t come through in the end.

So, I do agree that the electorate screwed this up, but I think we should give an assist to James Comey at the FBI.

(Ironic, of course, since Trump is so enmeshed in immoral, unethical, and illegal activity).

26

I agree about the type of campaign Hillary ran as a big problem. She didn’t realize what was going on, and IMHO that’s why there’s so much criticism against her. She thought she was winning, so she tried some ultimately ineffectual things to run up the score. Had she realized she was behind and responded accordingly things would have turned out differently.

As for Republicans sliming any other candidate, of course that would have happened. The difference is the slime wouldn’t have stuck to many of those other candidates. Obama and Biden managed to win despite that same slime being thrown at them.

27

I am hard pressed to see how Sanders would have done worse.

Losing to Trump seemed near impossible yet you are suggesting the person who came in second in the primary against Clinton would have done worse. By that metric absolutely everyone would have done worse.

For Sanders to do worse you would have to imagine many who voted for Clinton would switch to Trump. Who are those people and what does it say about them?

IIRC Trump’s own pollster opined that Sanders would have beaten Trump.

28

Quoting myself from posts up to offer a belated correction:

Those dates should be 2016 & 2020 respectively. D’oh!


I agree with all this except the repeated “she”. ISTM it was her, her inner campaign team, and much of the D party establishment that all missed noticing what needed to be done differently. I’m sure there were voices in that multitude arguing for those differences, probably even factions. But they were ultimately unsuccessful at persuading the campaign to change course big enough soon enough.

If you were just using “she” as shorthand for her whole team I’m sorry to have misunderstood.

I admit I do not know how much Hillary’s campaign was run as a god-dictatorship versus as board of directors advised by council of experts. If the former than blaming substantially the entire failure on her may in fact be appropriate. I don’t tend to read political post mortems, so I’m just ignorant on this point.

29

I voted for Hillary.
But I had to hold my nose.
After the big Banking Crisis, she met, behind closed doors, with reps from the Big Banks.
And took money.
I was infuriated.
The ONLY reason I voted for her, was that Trump was worse.
Biden has been a good President.

30

Or as PJ O’Rourke said, “She’s wrong about everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

31

With no comment on whether Biden is better or worse Biden has been a life-long tool of banks. He was a senator from Delaware. Banking central in the US.

32

Delaware is corporate central in the USA. He might in fact be a tool of the banks more specifically, but anyone serving in the Delaware state government or DE’s Federal delegation understands that DE is totally beholden to their status as the “flag of convenience” for US corporations from the largest to the comparative tiddlers.

33

The same candidate I think we’d have the best chance with in 2024: Obama. Michelle Obama.

Not that she’d ever run, but if she had, I think she would have kicked Trump’s ass in a landslide.

Great name recognition, and honestly her resume is more impressive than Barak’s up until he added POTUS to it. Her only real haters and detractors were people that wouldn’t ever vote for a Democrat.

For those who loved Obama, it would be seen as a continuation of his administration.

I don’t know that she would have made it, but IMO, she’d have had the best chance.

If that happened, the refrain would be, “Only a Socialist could have lost to Trump!”

Yeah, for some reason, the hate is directed at the people who voted for Clinton in the general, not the people who didn’t vote for Clinton in the general, even though it’s the latter’s fault that we got Trump, while the former did their best to prevent Trump.

Our democracy is on very shaky ground. We have one party that wants to eliminate it entirely, and an unfortunately large part of the other party that doesn’t understand how it works.

Or one that inspires them to come out and vote for them, not just against the other guy. Hence my plugging of Michelle.

34

I don’t agree with this 100% (and the “wife of the pres” crap that hung around Hillary would have been used against her as well-perhaps not as effectively but who knows) but I do think she’d have been a strong candidate.

35

Why is that any worse than “reality TV show host?”

People keep suggesting things in this thread that would kill a candidacy yet someone like Trump overcame that problem. He had loads of negatives and blew past all of them.

36

No, I’m going to have to disagree.

While plenty of good points have been made, from external propaganda influence, to the last minute re-opening of the investigation, I think we keep trying to step back from the painful wound that is simply this: hate sells.

I think the question is not why didn’t Clinton do better (and she could/should have if it were not for the factors above), but why did such a horrible, unqualified individual (TFG) do so damn well?

And that’s back to simple hate. Hate of other, hate of change, hate of being told to be nice and considerate of other people. Hate that the world was so complicated, that the dream of the 50’s affluent white middle class America wasn’t true (even if it had never been that true even as a dream).

Trump, for all hit unspeakable flaws, found that flame of hate and fanned it to a burning dumpster fire like demagogues before him. It’s all those “others” that made this bad, but I’ll stop it and make sure they don’t come here / wall them out! It’s all those Democrats and politicians, I’ll drain the swamp. Rich guys like me aren’t like that, and I’m so rich I can make all the problems go away.

And they BOUGHT IT.

Hillary being a typical politician enflamed it, and trying to run an actual campaign didn’t work well against the groundswell of motivated hate. Every time she tried to be reasonable, it egged the trolls on, because she wasn’t just offering a simple answer.

Still though, with the narrow margins, just a little bit more charisma, less complacency towards the shrinking middle America, or even just the FBI not blowing shit up at the last minute would have kept the win in Hillary’s hands. As MAGA wasn’t quite as virulent as 4 more years of lies would make it, nor had Fox gone quite as “all in on the crazy”.

So again, TLDR, we’re back on the face of it. It’s the electorate, and all who said “plague on both your houses I don’t care anymore” to blame. With substantially more blame for the festering bubbles of hate who saw LGBQT+ and people of color getting a chance to be seated at the big table and screamed “NO!”.

37

Ok…so, per the OP, are you saying no one could have beat Trump in 2016? If Clinton couldn’t beat Trump in the election no one could?

38

No, I’m not. I’ll quote myself:

Many of the factors that worked against her still got her strong support among Democratic voters, almost certainly more than Sanders - she wasn’t proposing scary magical fixes the way Sanders was. She did especially well among female voters, although NOT as well as she expected. She ran a competent if uninspired traditional campaign. She was qualified, did okay, and even just removing one of the factors I mentioned meant should could have won. She was overconfident, but not uniquely so (see nearly every single poll prior to the election).

What I’m answering is the direct question of the first line of the OP:

And by my argument above, the answer is a solid NO. It’s not (just) the candidate, although Hillary brought her own strengths and weaknesses to the table, it’s how Trump’s messaging, combined with massive external factors, that created a candidate out of an unqualified ass. And please remember, we’re looking at this with 20/20 hindsight, sure, in 2016 we knew he was horrible, but not to the degree the last 6+ years have proven beyond a shadow of doubt.

39

I think is exceptionally well said. Thank you.

Some of the hate was surely a reaction to the progressive milestone embodied by Barack Obama, our first Black president.

It’s almost like “bigot” coalesced into a solid voting block after having been dormant for decades. FOX certainly catered to it, and in so doing exacerbated the extremism. After 8 years, these restless people were eager for the candidate that would validate their cries (which I optimistically hope are the death throes of a dying generation), and Trump was perfect for the role.

40

What “scary magical fixes” and were those “scary magical fixes” worse than Trump?

https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/332097-why-sanders-would-have-defeated-trump-in-2016/