Oh, it wasn’t a mistake. I thought a Dead Nixon would make a better President than a Live Clinton or Trump. And a live Obama on 7 out of 10 days. 10 out of 10 on Foreign Policy.
…yep, we all make mistakes!
I think there is decent evidence that Hillary Clinton failed to recognize her vulnerability in the Midwest, and might have won if she had devoted more attention to their issues.
That doesn’t mean she was an awful candidate, after all very few people recognized this vulnerability until it was too late. But it was still a mistake, and future Democratic candidates should learn from it.
I think it was pretty clear to most observers she was an awful candidate. The rabid Right had decades to demonize her and she didn’t have much in the way of charisma. Everything she said always struck me as being very carefully parsed and inauthentic, but I think that’s just the lack of charisma when speaking combined with the decades of demonization making her incredibly careful in everything she said.
I think she would have been experienced, knowledgeable, and effective (as much as an opposition party would have allowed, which isn’t saying much) President, which is why I voted for her. But I thought she was an awful candidate. After 11/8/2016, the proof is in the Putin (sorry, that was awful. I’ll go physically harm myself now).
Yeah, after seeing Hillary fumble the primaries in 2008, I was convinced she was a weak candidate. I think any candidate other than Trump would have beaten her in '16 (and of course he did beat her!), and Trump was the only one she was going to have a chance of beating. I wish Biden had run.
We were in for a few years of hell however the '16 election came out. We can have the hell we have now, or we could have had who-knows-what with the House and Clinton. It’s not like the House was suddenly going to decide there had been enough Benghazi hearings.
No argument from me there!
Clinton lacks charisma, but it’s not a requirement to be a good candidate. GHWB lacked charisma and won the presidency. Nixon lacked charisma and won it twice. In each case, they campaigned on their experience instead of populism.
I think it’s a fallacy to equate “terrible candidate” with “losing candidate.” There is always a losing candidate, but there is not always a terrible candidate. Clinton won the popular vote and did OK in the EC for a losing candidate. For an example of “terrible candidate”, see Walter Mondale.
Finally, if a “terrible candidate” is one who is demonized by the GOP, then Obama was a terrible candidate and the Democrats will never again have a non-terrible candidate.
I don’t think people are referring to her credentials or experience when referring to her quality as a candidate. She was sure as hell vastly more qualified than Trump.
But I think she ran a terrible campaign that took a lot of things for granted, including buying into the mainstream media’s perception that Trump couldn’t possibly win. Beyond that, if you read the stuff that’s been published since then, her campaign lacked a clear direction and message. All those things together combined to get us where we are now.
This is true, but she lost to Donald Trump. This piece of human garbage in a yam cosplay suit beat her. While he has his rabid supporters, many of (former) Republicans were horrified and appalled by him. I think a better candidate would have had more of those conservatives holding their nose and voting for the Democratic nominee, they just couldn’t do it for Clinton. I know it’s worthless anecdata, but I know so many people that either stayed home or even voted for that sack of garbage because they were horrified about how corrupt a Clinton presidency would be (I know, I know).
To be fair GHWB was a mediocre candidate who beat a worse example of bad than Mondale.
Nixon had no charisma, but never took anything for granted because of 1960,
Unlike that candidate who was going to “Make AZ blue” (Ha!) while losing PA, MI and WI. That’;s like buying a new gazebo while your kitchen is on fire.
It also defines a bad candidate.
Yes, her campaign made some mistakes. But so did Gore, McCain, and Romney. And unlike some of them, her mistakes were not obvious to all at the time ( Palin!).
I don’t think her campaign was significantly worse than the other recent losing campaigns. So either you take the myopic view that the most recent loser is always the worst evar, or you try to put her in perspective among all the other losers.
Lots of people lost to Donald Trump. Apparently he’s a better campaigner than you think.
This is true. And that is the forest, while everyone looks for Hitler (or Putin) in the trees.
GHWB got 168 electoral votes against Bill Clinton. That’s about the same as what McCain got. So no, he was not nearly as bad as Mondale.
That’s an easy call to make in retrospect. But almost nobody called it before November. IIRC, Democrats were all salivating over North Carolina. I’m not sure why we expect Clinton to be omniscient if everyone else gets it wrong.
I’ll give you '92 and aid your argument. Perot lost Bush that race.
But not AZ. I was there. And even the media groupthink that accepted her campaign’s strategy as accepted wisdom
(in italics, because that is why the “in retrospect” is so out of whack…and why Coastal/Blue City America was taken by surprise)
questioned that move in the last 3 weeks.
If Clinton focused on AZ when lots of people were telling her not to, then that was an avoidable error. But it was not the error that cost her the election, so it wasn’t a terrible strategy. All candidates make errors, even the winners.
The error that cost her the election was to take the Midwest for granted. If there were obvious signs at the time, then she would have been a terrible candidate. But there weren’t. If Clinton was terrible at politics for taking the Midwest for granted, then everyone is terrible at politics (possibly except the Trump team).
And the entire Republican field with one hand tied behind his back.
I loathe the guy as much as anyone here, but he obviously tapped into something powerful.
I have heard (don’t remember where) that Obama’s group had polls that were very accurate (whereas Romney’s were terrible) regarding the 2012 race. What happened between 2012 and 2016 that changed that? Why didn’t Hillary’s group know things were going sour?
I don’t think Trump’s campaign knew anything about how big the swing was, I don’t think they expected to win.
The popularity of Bernie Sanders during the midwest primaries should have been some sort of signal.