#2 was more the way the media portrayed her by mostly just going for the juicy sound bites instead of the boring discussion of issues.
Yeah, the Electoral College was set up to bolster the slave states. So who cares about what the Founders intended?
Not while Chelsea’s around it isn’t. Expect her to run for the Presidency in 2028 or 2032. And she might even pull it off!
The fact that Trump, the political outsider, was able to beat Clinton, the political insider, is precisely proof of the fact that he did it by accident, because it certainly can’t have been through greater political savvy. It’s like the saying that the best swordsman in the world doesn’t fear the second-best swordsman; she fears the worst one, because she has no idea what he’ll do.
And I’m not at all convinced that Sanders’ socialism is out of the mainstream. As folks here are pointing out, it was a known factor. Nobody needed to point it out, because everyone who’s ever heard of Sanders knows that he describes himself as a socialist. And even with that baked in, polls still gave him a ten-point lead over Trump. How would the Republicans have been able to attack him? Just calling him “socialist” won’t work, because the response is “Yes. Yes, I am.”. The hyperbolic slippery slope of “That will turn us into someplace just like Russia!” wouldn’t have worked, because it turns out that the right wing just loves Russia. Highlighting his individual policies? That’s the appeal to the working-class voter that everyone says was deficient in Clinton’s campaign: He’d thank you for the free publicity. Heck, you can argue that Trump won, in part, because he managed to convince voters that he was more socialist than Clinton.
For some people, like my mechanic and Chelsea Clinton, it’s a pretty solid bet they aren’t ever going to run for President. My mechanic because he was born in Lebanon. Chelsea because she is pushing 40 with no real world work experience and a philosophy doctorate.
Yes, Trump won “by accident”. Occam is turning over in his grave.
He beat all 17 of the Republican primary candidates “by accident” and then went on to win in the general “by accident”. No skill involved at all. Let’s ignore the fact that a political campaign is essentially a marketing campaign and Trump, for all his faults, is an extremely good marketer, who has been marketing mainly himself for decades. Very successfully.
But all that stuff in the last year is most parsimoniously described as “an accident”.
He’s been marketing himself for decades, but he hasn’t been nearly as successful at it as he likes to pretend. The goal of his marketing has been to make him money, and he hasn’t made very much money.
He does’t have to be the greatest marketer, just good enough (and to know who’s his market), and he WAS. “I don’t have to outrun the bear, just you”; and he did. Trump’s style is that the goal of his marketing is not about steady profitability, it’s all about “scoring the win” and getting his cut up front; never mind if later on the investors/creditors lose money or the venture falls short, it’s about the initial big headline with TRUMP plastered all over the stage, and later saying HE made a bundle, it was just the other losing losers who did not keep up “and that makes me smart”.
Yep, I’ve heard that myth propagated by a few historians and The History Channel. To call it a minority view would be charitable. It confuses cause with effect, the cause being to protect smaller states from rule by fewer, larger states. How ironic that we now have the complete opposite extreme.
Every Constitutional attorney ever, for one.
The efforts you guys go through to avoid facing reality is simply amazing. Denying that and coming up with insane excuses like ‘the media covered the most unusual presidential campaign in decades, so it doesn’t count as a victory’ is just nuts. Yes, a presidential candidate was covered by the news, that’s their job. I really hope the Democtratic party doesn’t think like you do, but it looks depressingly like they’re drinking the ‘Hillary did nothing wrong, and we should learn no lessons from how Trump ran his campaign’ kool-aid too.
Let’s not forget Clinton’s absolutely horrible mishandling of the whole email issue, where she chose to act guilty and try to cover things up which made it stick around as a scandal that could sink her. Her first response was to lie ineffectively, and that is what made the entire fiasco possible in the first place. If she was either honest or a good liar, Comey wouldn’t have been relevant.
He might not be able to plan his way out of a paper bag, but he did plan his way into being president, a feat Hillary Clinton failed miserably at despite having huge advantages. Declaring that anyone who looks at the election that Trump won and says his campaign strategy had anything to do with that must be a “Trumpist” is pretty hilarious, I can just picture you guys during WW2. “No, the German victory was entirely luck, we shouldn’t look at their combined arms tactics, use of armor, and flexible operational deployment and learn from it, or even acknowledge that anything Gamelin did was a mistake. You’re just a straight up Nazi if you think the Germans did anything right or that Gamelin was anything short of the best military commander in history!”
The fact that he was able to win is proof that he only won by accident and not by having a coherent and effective strategy for winning? Seriously?
Yeah it’s a pretty silly idea. The electoral college may be an odd artifact but it isn’t “based on the 3/5th compromise”. It’s based on however many Senators+Congressman a State has is how many votes for President it gets. The number of Congressmen a State gets was affected by the 3/5th compromise. If they really wanted to appease the slave states then they would have counted slaves as 5/5th of a person.
Look, that ‘swordsman’ line is cute and entertaining – and, yes, contains some truth, since a foolish rookie might try something that’s only unexpected because it damn well should be unexpected: because it’s risky and stupid and gets abandoned by folks with experience because it can so easily be countered; and, as you say, due to the tactical magic of a no-idea-what-he’ll-do situation, it for once works.
And if you want to use that to describe something Trump pulled in a GOP primary? Yeah, okay; maybe that’s a clever analogy, and maybe it’s a useful one.
But by the time he got to Hillary? She wasn’t in a no-idea-what-he’ll-do scenario, was she? She must have known what he’d do by then, right? If she didn’t, then in that analogy she’s not The Best In The World; she’s The Person Who Has A Grape.
Excuse me, did you say “coherent”?
Yes, and I even provided a link from fivethrirtyeight.com that examines Trump’s campaign strategy and points out that a lot of criticism of his strategy during the election was completely bass ackwards. Trump’s campaign was very much focused on winning the election by contesting states where it could get votes, and ignoring states that were completely safe or had no chance of going red.
That’s a good point, but really the ‘master swordsman’ analogy is clearly outright absurd; Hillary is miles and miles away from being a master at winning elections. She’s won a whopping two elections in her lifetime, one where her main opponent dropped out of the race for personal reasons, and the other as incumbent (and both as a Democrat for a seat that’s been Democratic since 1977 in a state that’s had two Democrat Senators since 1998). There’s no evidence that she knows much about actually winning elections, especially highly contested elections that include different demographics than New York, and her campaign clearly turned it’s back on advice given by the Clinton that won two hotly contested presidential races (one against an incumbent) plus a number of others.
At least try to keep the goalposts somewhere within the same state. You claimed as evidence of the Trump campaign’s being so much better than Hillary’s was that she had so much more cash. And I directly refuted it. Trump got FAR more coverage than any other candidate, in the primaries and the general. Which, you know, translates into one gigantic shitload of free money. So spare me how unrealistic I’m being.
Cite that she lied. With, you know, proof, not just your belief. Funny how the FBI never accused her of lying.
What huge advantages? You named exactly two, once again without supporting evidence: the money thing mentioned above, and the support of the Dems for Hillary. Remind me again who made up the overwhelming majority of Trump voters? Tellyawhat, I’ll remind you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016#Voter_demographics
According to polling, a greater percentage of Republicans voted for Trump than Democrats voted for Hillary. Next…
Actually, calling you a Trumpist came from reading a number of your recent posts, on several topics. And please spare us all the ridiculous ad hominem attacks.
So which is your talking point? Hillary sucked at campaigning or Trump was a master? Apparently she was good enough to get more votes than he did, regardless of the EC.
I think the idea is that it is unfair to cover Trump scandals, because that gives him free publicity. It is also unfair to cover Hillary scandals, because reasons.
IOW the press should have been in the bag for Hillary. The trouble is that they were, and she still lost.
Regards,
Shodan
All this talk about “Comey, media $3 billion free airtime, Russia,” etc. is like saying that Appalachian State had an unfair advantage over Michigan because the sun was in Michigan’s eyes, or something. It’s trivial to the point of being irrelevant.
This was David vs. Goliath. Hillary should have absolutely demolished Trump, by at least 15% if not 20% in the popular vote. She was the most “qualified” presidential candidate in decades, going up against perhaps the most “unqualified” candidate in centuries. This should have been an absolute blowout landslide for the Democrats. Hillary herself asked, “Why am I not 50 [percentage] points ahead?”