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

Politics & Elections
141

Two thoughts:
The answer to a candidate who COULD have won against Trump is clearly Hillary. All she had to do was take the campaign seriously, not try to run up the score, and just spend all her time talking to voters in the rust belt. Also, never get caught on a mic describing potential Trump voters as “deplorables”. She ran a (in retrospect) horrible campaign, and she still easily won the popular vote and came within a football stadium of winning overall. She obviously “could” have won.

The answer to the question of who WOULD have won is, most likely, any other serious candidate, particularly (to be cynical) a safe-seeming white man. Who would that have been? Beats me. But if Hillary has a heart attack and dies in 2013, and Biden is still sidelined by family issues, then SOMEONE is going to run on 2016, and whoever it is, I think they could easily have beaten Trump. All the people who realized how awful Trump was would have voted for him. All the normal democrats would have voted for him. And all the people who had been affected one way or the other by decades of anti-Hillary hate who stayed home rather than voting for someone they hated so much would have voted for him.

The big question mark is, of course, Bernie. Now, I’ve given up trying to really prognosticate… maybe he would have caused absolutely massive, historic turnout among the young. But I think the “he’s been in the public eye for so long, all the negatives are already known” argument is specious in the extreme. Note that despite Trump’s love of giving his opponents denigrating nicknames (Pocahantas, Sleepy Joe, Ron DeSanctimonious, etc) he never really laid into Bernie. Why? Because he couldn’t think of one?

Remember when Bernie was actually the leading democratic candidate early in the 2020 primary season? Why wasn’t Trump (and Foxnews) unloading on him with both barrels of the sewage cannon? I mean, Trump was so scared of Biden that he literally committed treason and got himself impeached trying to get Ukraine to manufacture dirt on Biden. Why wasn’t he even more scared of Bernie if (as some seem to think) Bernie was an even better candidate against Trump than Biden?

The obvious answer to that question is… because they were just praying that Bernie would become the nominee and they could just unload on him.

Now, would he have won anyhow? I mean, who knows? Maybe he would have actually gotten a massive groundswell of young voters. Maybe all the anti-establishment people who had voted for Trump in 2016 would have come out for Bernie and just turned all conventional predictions on their ear. But… I honestly believe that any such electoral plusses Bernie could have brought would have been swamped by the tidal wave of middle America to which communism and the Soviet Union is still the capital-E-Enemy of America. Do they tolerate, and maybe even enjoy, crazy-Uncle-Bernie who says things they mostly agree with and reminds them of Larry David? Sure. Are they aware that he used to have a hammer-and-sickle flag in his office, and took his honeymoon in the Soviet Union? Well, if they aren’t now, they sure would be after several months of those being literally the only talking points on Fox News.

142

And?

Has someone proven that it was totally fine to run the only candidate ever who could motivate her opponents’ supporters to vote in droves against her?

Or are we now admitting that, in hindsight, maybe, strategically speaking that might have been the dumbest shit ever? That literally any other candidate would have won handily? That, while it being unfair & largely undeserved, decades of RW propaganda against you do not make you a good candidate?

143

Yeah, those are the ones I’m referring to. It’s been a far-right trick for quite a while, to show up to a peaceful protest and turn it into a riot.

144

What leads you to conclude that the young people who protested didn’t also vote. By your metric, nearly 1 in 5 people age 18-26 voted. Do you believe it was more than 1 in 5 people of that age who were protesting? Why couldn’t that 19% have done both?

(Realistically, of course, it’s unlikely that 19% of people that age were out in the streets. The percentage who did so is probably far lower, and would nearly fit within the demographic who, in your words, took “3 hours to vote”)

145

Not sure if you’re addressing that to me, but… yes, obviously it was a “mistake” to nominate Hillary, and was “the dumbest shit ever”. Had Hillary not run, or had Hillary lost to someone like Biden in the primary, I think we as a country would be almost immeasurably better off.

That said, I think there are two odd implications in the way you phrased what you wrote: “Or are we admitting that, in hindsight” and “dumbest shit ever”, which sounds like you are implying that:
(1) People have been somehow stubbornly insisting that it was “smart” to nominate Hillary
and
(2) Hillary winning the nomination was “a decision”. As in, some group of people got together, had a discussion, debated the question of who ought to be the democratic candidate in 2016, and settled on Hillary. And boy, did THOSE guys end up with egg on their face. And yes, if it was a decision, it was a terrible one, I don’t see how anyone can deny that. But… it wasn’t a “decision”. It was the outcome of a decades-long chaotic process involving decisions made by millions of people. Sure, it was a “stupid” “decision”, but both of those words are kind of irrelevant in the actual context of the way it ended out playing out, if you see what I’m saying.

(Which is part of why I think some of the arguments people make about whether progressives should hold their noses and vote for the mainstream democratic candidate or vote for Bernie or some other protest-candidate-progressive in the general election are so misguided. “We want to let the mainstream democrats know that they can’t count on our vote”… as if there is a single individual or group of individuals who are the ones who make these decisions and they will see what you did and adjust their decision-making accordingly in the future.)

146

Fine. Let’s do it longhand.

I stayed up for the entire coverage of the 2016 election. The 2016 election was I think declared at 3:30am give or take.
Any network coverage of a presidential election includes a panel of pollsters, political scientists, and others whew spew and revise exit polls, surveys and projections all night long.
19% of voters 18-26 voted in 2016.
Easy enough to look up.

2nd. During the riots in my local city where windows were smashed and businesses looted up and down the proverbial main st, we had a man-in-the-street reporter for the local affiliate of national network who entered the streets asking the hooligans, “Did you vote?”.this reporter said he found only one rioter to respond in the affirmative. And this reporter restated the statistic to each person who said no they did not vote.

“Did you vote”?
“No”
“Did you know only 19% of people age 18-26 voted in this election”? Do you think it would have made a difference if you had voted”?
The typical response ?
No. We need to impeach Donald trump.
We need to trash the electoral system.

The Jan6 riots were awful.
There should have been two investigations.
There should have been two prosecutions.
There should have been two trials.

One trial for the rank and file hooligan rioter.
One trial for any rioter who has previously raised his right hand to swear an oath to defend the constitution.

Pay attention this time. I threw in the Capitol riot of Jan06 to make a point.

The 2016 riots(when trump won) were not an attack on a seated legislative body counting the vote. But those rioters cost many more dollars in damage across the country than did the Jan06 rioters.

I waffle on the notion whether a man convicted of a crime should lose the right to vote.
I very much believe a person should lose his right to vote who interferes with an election or another’s right to cast his ballot.
I think both crowds should on conviction lose their right to vote or at least should face a judge who will decide such.

I also say they should have faced full measure for their rioting as since they did not vote, they have nothing to say worth hearing as it is their own fault.

And I am still certain had the 2016 rioters voted that Hillary would have won handily.

But the real problem here is you angry folk who do not see the problem on both sides of the aisle. On Fox News the Dems are never right and the GOP is never wrong. On NBC the GOP is the devil and The Dems are always correct.

Meanwhile, anger toward opinions expressed at our level ?
We get the leaders we deserve.

Cool down. Vote your heart. And remember… when the other guy wins,
the people who voted for him are also stuck with their candidate for the next four years.

147

This one ridiculously inaccurate line tells me that responding to anything else in your post would be a complete waste of time.

148

I understand Clinton was nominated through a process. But that is not the whole story. She was also nominated because she could out-fundraise the rest of the party, she was also nominated with the support of the PTB in the Democratic Party , the shenanigans with the “super delegates” were not completely democratic.

So yes, it was the outcome of a democratic process and yes, it was also decided by a committee that now has egg on their faces.
It should be obvious that the mechanics that led to the party leadership supporting Hillary against other candidates must be examined critically.
Those are clearly not people you want involved in your selection process.

The tone you are referring to is aimed at the OP.

Hillary was a uniquely terrible candidate, nominated with help of a party who felt “it was her turn” somehow. Trying to rewrite history to claim there were not other candidates is just… something.

149

So, national data gathering and analysis based on the demographics of people who demonstrably participated in voting.

So, an anecdote based on what one person was able to discern by talking to a few people in the middle of a chaotic situation, none of whom may have been telling the truth.

Can you tell the difference?

Look, I am well aware that young people do not vote in significant numbers. And if they did they’d be a powerful voting block.

But blaming the 2016 election results on the youth vote, because you heard someone on the teevee make some pointed remarks, is not sound logic or reasoning.

Really? The problem is people who don’t just … what exactly? Not vote, because both sides are bad? Didn’t you just blame the results on a lack of voting. Perhaps the low turnout among the youth is precisely because of this claim; they see both sides as being equally bad, so they’ve elected to go outside the electoral process, which they consider a fool’s errand.

I haven’t seen this sort of “both sides” in action. Perhaps you have an example of NBC acting like the GOP is the devil and the Dems are always correct (just off the top of my head, I’ve heard the trump administration given credit for Operation Warp Speed, and Dianne Feinstein, a democrat, criticized for not resigning while in bad health).

Your complaint strikes me as the sort of “truthiness” the Stephen Colbert coined years ago - it “feels” right, so it must be true.