Hillary lost by a handful of votes in several swing states. If 40,000 voters had swung their votes from Trump to Hillary in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin it would have swung the election. If Hillary had spent more time in these states, she could have won. If she hadn’t moved so far to the left on guns to try to get to the left of Bernie on at least one issue, she could have won. If she hadn’t cheated during the primary debates, she could have won. If the DNC hadn’t shown evidence of bias, she could have won.
Sure there were other factors but this was an election that could have been won by any reasonably electable candidate running a reasonably competent campaign. Hillary is reasonably electable but between all the self inflicted wounds and what may be the worst run general election campaign I have seen in my adult life, I think Trump STILL needed a bit of luck on his side to pull it off.
I think Biden would have won easily. I am pretty sure he regrets not running.
I think the whole woman president thing is a mixed bag. It probably helped her in states she was already going to carry but she was riding that woman thing too much and getting a woman in the white house simply isn’t as important to most people as it was for the ready for hillary crowd.
Biden has a LOT more charisma than hillary. He comes off googobs more genuine than Hillary. He has a historical connection with white working class voters that hillary does not.
I suspect that Hillary takes this one all the way to the convention and then throws her delegates to whoever makes her VP or something. I suspect that a LOT of Bernie voters would have voted for Biden, I know I would have. Biden the senator from fucking Delaware would be seen as less corporatist than Hillary. He was the viable alternative to Hillary that Martin O’Malley was not.
I would go farther. I think ANY male candidate would have won this election, even if his campaign did the exact same things as Hillary’s campaign did. Don’t underestimate how much sexism there is, both subtle and overt, among people who might otherwise have voted for a Democratic candidate. In many cases, it may not even have been conscious – just a vague sense that Hillary didn’t seem presidential enough or trustworthy enough, or that some of the gender-inflected rhetoric about her resonated a little too much. (Remember how she was supposedly “frail” from a mysterious illness, and how she was “shrill,” like that scolding teacher you didn’t like in school?)
I don’t think so. I think Hillary sucked back then too. She had a committed but ultimately very constituency. Her fans love her but noone else seems to be able to stand her.
I disagree. What female candidate do you think would have lost to Trump? I think Hillary is using sexism as an excuse. IMHO, being a woman helps you at least as much as it hurts you. its not that we won’t elect a woman. its that we won’t elect THAT woman.
Here is a gender reversed portrayal of one of the debates:
At the time this came out there were side by side videos of Clinton and the male actor and Trump next to the female actor and the actors do a pretty good job.
Webb was weak for many reasons, but had he won the nomination somehow he’d beat Trump simply because he IS Trump, but with a brain and a moral center. And unlike Trump, his anti-war cred was real, which would have made most Democrats happy enough to turn out to vote for him. Webb probably couldn’t beat any other Republican, but just as he was the perfect guy to put up against George Allen in VA, he was a guy who could have matched up well with Trump
That’s a false choice though. What you want is a candidate who is authentic, intelligent, and honest. Democrats still have some of those. Bernie Sanders is one, although he’s probably too old and can’t turn out minority voters. But there’s also Biden, who probably can bring out minority voters, and Al Franken, who would bring out young voters, and quite a few others, like John Hickenlooper.
I don’t know whether a different female candidate would have won. What I do know is that there was a constant drip-drip-drip of gendered rhetoric against Hillary (her voice! her unseemly ambition! her cankles!), just as there was a drip-drip-drip of racially inflected rhetoric against Obama throughout his presidency, and I believe that in both cases, the candidate’s status as a woman or minority probably hurt them, on the balance, more than it helped. Obviously, the right candidate CAN overcome that sort of thing – Obama mostly did – but it makes everything a tiny bit harder than it would be for a white male candidate, and in this case, the election was so close that that tiny bit could well have tipped the balance.
If he hates it while making irrelevant comments about her unattractiveness, her shrillness, and her frailness, heck yeah, it’s gendered.
And pretty much the only male presidential candidate I can think of who got gendered insults was Dukakis (who got framed as a “wimp” and generally unmanly), although I wouldn’t be surprised to see examples of people talking about Gore or Kerry in similar terms. But when you want to insult a male candidate in a gendered manner, you call him effeminate – in other words, it’s still misogyny at work, just a slightly different flavor of misogyny.
Let’s not forget that Trump beat over a dozen candidates better-qualified than Webb in the GOP primary. You’re still trying to measure support for Trump by conventional metrics. Whatever else Trump is, he was not a conventional candidate, he did not run a conventional campaign, he was not elected for conventional reasons and you can’t make assumptions based on how other elections went.
I don’t think Hillary being a woman hurt her at all. Obama spent almost no time talking about how it was time to elect a black President because he didn’t really think being black would help him that much. Electing a woman was part of her goddam stump speech. If being a woman was bad for her then she was either stupid to keep harping on it or (the more likely option IMHO) she thought being a woman helped her.
And if being a woman hurt her, didn’t we know Hillary was a woman before we nominated her? That was pretty baked in when we picked her wasn’t it? What wasn’t baked in was getting caught cheating during the debates; having Debbie Wasserman Schultz and company revealed to be in the bag for Hillary; Hillary’s decision to spend so little time in swing states and so much time raising money in California and NY; And in the end, she even spent time in places like fucking Texas. Any one of these self inflicted wounds could have “tipped the balance”
