Oh, that’s true enough. But really, who isn’t outraged about the President wearing a tan suit?
Stranger
I believe it, but I think it’s mostly because the popular image of a conservative was someone much more buttoned-up, boring, and religious. Whatever his policy positions were, he was perceived as something very different and certainly very extreme, and it worked in his favor.
Partly, it was the sense that we were just repeating names in the Oval Office-Bushes and Clintons. And that (from a few people I talked to) that her being First Lady was an unfair advantage, not to mention having her catch some of the flack for Bill’s less popular actions. None of it logical, of course.
One thing that I believe doesn’t get the attention it deserves is the idea that in 2016 it is highly possible that some voting districts were hacked and the reported vote totals did not reflect the actual vote totals. The only evidence I can offer to support this is:
- It was reported that hacking of voting districts had, if fact, occurred
- It was also reported that this hacking did not affect the result
- The Republicans were arguing so strongly that there was NO Russian interference in the 2016 elections
- The Republicans were arguing so strongly that the voting machines in the 2020 election were compromised
- The rational people in charge in 2016 realized that any questioning of the vote totals would lead to bigger problems.
- In 2016, there were several voting districts that used completely electronic voting. There was no paper trail.
Personally, in 2016 I voted in Texas and there was no paper ballot. Completely electronic. The ballot was a chipped card that was recycled after the vote was recorded. In 2018 and 2020, same thing, except I was living in Mississippi. In both states, I didn’t think anything about it since I had voted this way before. In 2022, however, in MS I now had a paper ballot to fill out.
But, both MS and TX were definitely going to be Republican in the presidential race, so I doubt there was anything going on. But, I wonder how many “battleground” states had completely electronic voting in 2016. I really wonder if states like Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania had completely electronic voting in 2016. If so, there would be no way to check the totals other than checking the individual precinct voting machines, which if they had been compromised, would not have shown any discrepancies.
I don’t know if any of this actually happened, but the evidence is at least as strong, if not stronger, than the 2020 election was stolen. I can also believe that, knowing there was no way to determine if anything had actually been compromised, the officials would not have brought up a question. I do find it interesting that today, regardless of how the voting precincts handle the voting, actual paper ballots seem to be standard.
I know, I need to have my tin-foil had adjusted. But, I still wonder about the accuracy of the 2016 election results.
My 2¢ on all this …
It’s easy to forget that most pundits (not all) believed that Hillary had a lock on the 2016 election and that Trump was a joke (which he was). That was, I admit, my belief. Only a few perceived that America was, in fact, ready for a joke – that is, that many voters, especially on the right, were ready for radical change and ready to jettison “business-as-usual” politics. Few perceived how crazy and inept Trump would be.
What I’m saying is that if we roll back to 2015-2016, and what we knew and believed at the time, Hillary was the only logical choice given that Biden had declined to run. Back in 2008 she had been a strong contender to Obama, and remained prominent in politics subsequently. Bernie Sanders had the enthusiastic support of a minority of diehards, but he would have been totally demolished in the campaign and general election. Even if Bernie had shifted to a way more centrist platform, his political history, though perfectly reasonable by the standards of western democracies, was far too progressive for mainstream America. Apparently mainstream America wants to be hugely screwed on health care, for example, because Saint Reagan and other insurance lobbyists had been telling them since at least the early 60s that even Medicare for seniors would inexorably lead to the dark days of communist tyranny.
If we look at the question from the perspective of what Dems could have done differently if they had a crystal ball and knew then what we know today, I suspect that in the best interests of the nation Biden would have overcome his personal challenges and run in 2016. Without Hillary’s baggage and her grating lack of charisma, I’m pretty sure he’d have pushed it over the top and won the presidency by a significant margin. And today we’d have three new justices on the Supreme Court who were NOT Federalist Society lunatics.
Don’t underestimate McConnell’s ability to undermine the SC nominating process.
I’m sure that some voters thought that, but it is hard for me to get my head around it. Unlike other candidates, Hillary would have had, in Bill, a skilled aide with unparalleled White House experience – and I as a taxpayer would have gotten his services for free. You might just as well say it was unfair that, as a former secretary of state, she had stronger prior experience than other candidates.
P.S. I realize that if Hillary had won, Bill might have, rarely, embarrassed her. Lots of news articles would have been written about how they worked together. It’s unlikely for this to have hurt anyone outside the White House.
When it comes to starting wars, I overestimated how crazy he is.
I thought that he would follow through on his promise to have Mexico pay for the wall, and the only way to even attempt this was war. Plus his many times saying we should have stolen Iraq’s oil to fund the ongoing war there had me worried that he would do that as well.
Significant margin? That no longer happens due to the polarization.
The problem with extending a Democratic hold, on the White House, past eight years is that a small number of voters (in an era where small numbers are determinative) then think it is time for a change. Biden, even more than Clinton, would have been a continuity candidate.
If anyone could have beat Trump in 2016 – and I don’t buy that anyone could have – it would have been a Democratic governor with few prior national positions he or she could be pinned down on.
Clinton was never a logical choice. The only reason anyone ever supported her was “because she was the logical choice”, and there was never any reason given why she should be. At most, people were saying “Well, she’s a Washington insider” at a time when the public was screaming at the top of their lungs that they didn’t want an insider, and “she’s the only one who can beat Trump” when she was polling the worst on that.
There is certainly huge polarization, but there’s also a significant swath of voters – a third of all voters – who are independent and/or hold mixed liberal/conservative views. Slightly more than half of those went for Trump in 2016. That’s enough independent voters that even swaying a relatively small percentage of them could have propelled a better candidate than Hillary to a resounding victory.
This chart confirms both premises: big polarization, but also big opportunity to win over swing voters.
Some supported her because of gender. I think that shouldn’t be considered, but many disagree.
I supported her because:
a. She was on the moderate side when compared to Bernie – and I’m a moderate.
b. As a former Secretary of State, she was tremendously well-qualified. As for being a former senator and first lady, she also would have learned things of value there.
c. All the plausible Republicans were extremists, especially when it came down to Cruz or Trump.
If we’re ever to have any hope of pulling the Overton window back to “moderate”, we’re going to need an extremist to do it.
And Sanders had a lot more experience than Clinton in the Senate. He was well-qualified, too.
There’s no question about Sanders’ good intentions and qualifications to execute them. It’s the zero probability that he’d win a general election in mainstream America that is the issue. Not Sanders’ fault – by global standards Sanders is only a moderate liberal, but by mainstream American standards he’s a Marxist. Sanders is a fixture in Vermont because it’s a very liberal state, probably at the top of the four most liberal states in America. Nationally, he’d have to deal with Texas, Arizona, Mississippi, Alabama, etc etc etc and would probably end up carrying one state, Vermont, and maybe a long shot in WA, NY, and MA.
As I said, knowing what was known at the time, and in the absence of Joe Biden as an option, Dems did the right thing in nominating Hillary. The results with Sanders would have been much, much worse, through no fault of his own.
The other thing working against Hillary and indeed any Dem candidate in 2016 was the “pendulum syndrome”: we’d just had eight years of a Dem president, and it was time to swing the other direction, which is what almost always happens after a 2-term incumbent. Same reason Bush 2000 crossed the finish line (barely).
2016 was a “change” election. Hillary wasn’t change, she was “let’s do the 90’s again!”. Trump and Bernie represented change, but I’m with @wolfpup and others: Bernie wouldn’t have done well, and he was still thought of as being on the Dem side, so not enough change, whatever his policies. I think whoever was (R) in that election had a big advantage because of that pendulum, and Trump got the benefit in spite of himself. Elections are won at the margins, and that pendulum is enough in a ‘change’ year to make a difference.
But, between the actual political baggage and the baggage that would have surely been created by the Republicans and the Russians, was he actually electable?
…in my ideal world Elizabeth Warren would be president right now.
But back in 2016, if the question was who would I personally prefer to be president, Sanders or Clinton? I would have picked Sanders.
Who do I think would have had a better chance to beat Trump, and who would I have put my support behind at the time? (if I actually lived in America and was eligible to vote)
Clinton.
I think anyone would have struggled against Trump. He steam rolled over the other Republicans during the primaries. I think that if Biden had decided to run, he may have had a good chance of winning.
I personally think what ultimately sunk Clinton was an inability to counter the “emails” and the “deplorable” narratives. If it had been Biden he would have simply said “thats just a bunch of malarkey” and that would probably have been the end of it. But a lot of that would come down to male privilege and deference, the media would have simply accepted that and moved on to the next item on the news cycle.
But if Clinton had so much have dared try the same thing, the outrage machine would go into overdrive. Instead, the campaign tried to largely ignore it, which I also don’t think helped. What might have worked better? I’m not sure. There are no simple solutions to the waves of disinformation we are dealing with right now. There weren’t back then. There aren’t any now.
As for Sanders, he would have gotten the Jeremy Corbyn treatment. And…that hasn’t ended well for Corbyn, who isn’t even allowed to run for his seat for Labour at the next election. It was an outright dishonest and vicious campaign that was so convincing that at times even I fell for it. Like with the “her emails” with Clinton, you had to dive deep to find out what the truth was, and diving deep took time and resources.
And Corbyn got it both from the Conservatives, and from powerful factions within his own party. And if Sanders were the nominee, he would have experienced the very same thing.
So I think Biden would have been immune to some of the attacks that Clinton experienced, and if he had chosen to run would probably have edged out Trump. But I also think that out of the eligible candidates, Clinton had the best chance of winning. In a parallel dimension with near identical circumstances, I imagine a butterfly flapping its wings in Siberia could have turned the election, giving Clinton the victory.
Are you under the impression that Tony Fabrizio is trustworthy. You say “Trump’s own pollster” as if you think the “Trump’s own” part makes this information more credible.
This guy worked closely with Paul Manafort for years. After the 2016 election he worked with Manafort on the “Ukraine peace plan” which involved some parts of Ukraine declaring themselves autonomous and being recognized as such by Russia and the US.
You sources for these two figures are wildly different.
The 12% Bernie/Trump number comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study which is a massive 50,000 participant study that involves interviewing the same participants before and after the 2016 election.
The 28% Clinton/McCain number comes from a single regular poll of about 6,000 participants and data was collected one time in March of 2008 while the primary had not been decided and eight months before the election.
That is simply not an accurate to summarize that poll.
Something more like, “When the primary was most heated, 28% of Clinton primary voters and 19% of Obama voters claimed they would vote for McCain if their preferred candidate did not win the Democratic Party nomination.”
You are comparing apples and oranges.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that noticed that.
This is one of my theories about how Obama managed to win. As you said, everyone figured Hillary was the front-runner, so she was the focus of all the Republican propaganda, that just built on the decades of previous propaganda they’d sent her way.
But then Obama came up from behind as a surprise candidate, and there just wasn’t enough time to smear him the way they’d smeared Hillary. They tried, with some of those stories about the church he attended being a hot bed of some kind of subversives, but hey, it was so weak, I can’t even remember the details now. There were also the beginnings of the Birther conspiracy theory, but even there, it took several more years for that to really take off.