Keep in mind, it was a change year. After 8 years of a Democratic presidency, you have a strong push from the right to take it back, regardless of the candidate.
But she lost to Trump.
McCain and Romney lost to Obama, who was basically a super candidate.
Winning a third term for a party is near impossible. The media (and her Campaign) thought it was in the bag.
When you ignore 200 year historic norms, you may be a bad candidate (or a bad media…a media that is a shell of what it was 20 years ago in terms of quality and rigor).
The media loved Donald Trump, and loved to give him all the free coverage it could.
Yep, it’s a tough nut to crack, though for Gore and Hillary both it came down to electoral squeakers in which they won the popular vote rather comfortably.
Interesting that GHW Bush, of all people, pulled it off.
What he’s saying is Americans are an selfish, racist people, they don’t need coaching from Putin to vote for evil people, so there will be no blue wave.
Who won more votes than any candidate of either party in every primary and the general election.
“Democracy is the worst form of government … except for all the others.”
I think she was a terrible candidate based on her qualifications. She was a terrible candidate based on circumstances. There was just too much political baggage there, because the right has been demonizing her for 25+ years. I think they were truly afraid of her being President, because she would probably be pretty good at the job.
In the immediate post-mortem I read somewhere that Bill was the only one who was aware of the danger, which explained a lot of his last-minute campaign stops in the Midwest.
I’m still not sure why Bill’s alarm didn’t get across to the rest of the campaign.
A Clinton win in 2016 would have just led to 4 years of intense gridlock, probably followed by some shitty Republican. At least with all the horrors and insanity of the Trump years, I’m hopeful we’ll emerge more Blue overall and gain back the House/Senate.
Reagan is a great opening act to follow. Nixon lost in '60 in another squeaker. You really only have Truman and 41 who could pull it off. Truman almost lost in 48. 41 lost four years later. Undone by a campaign that was overconfident, and spoke of “permanent Presidential majorities”. Hey…that sounds familiar…
What?! How so?
I have a hard time with reactions like these:
…largely because I’ve been that kind of bigoted asshole. I was raised Christian evangelical, and that was my worldview until I got out of that bubble and learned just how hypocritical it was. I was fortunate in that racism wasn’t a part of it, credit to my parents for that, but we had plenty of the “if you’re not Christian we don’t want you or your ideas” bigotry.
I just can’t believe that all the Trump voters are as irredeemable as those kinds of reactions imply. Actually I know that for a fact, because I know some of those people. They didn’t go into the election saying “I’m voting for Trump to screw immigrants” or “this will really put those darkies in their place.” Their thinking was that all politicians are a mixed bag (true) and they’d vote for the guy that held at least some of their positions (largely false since Trump is so fickle, but it’s what they believed). I sincerely believe they were wrong in how they voted, but I also believe it’s worthwhile to learn why and engage with them, not just lump them all into the “piece of shit” category.
“How can anyone who has any kind of brain vote for this guy” was pretty much my thinking around election time, too. And the answer is that people aren’t thinking when they vote, they’re reacting. I read Strangers in Their Own Land a while back and the message really hit home: people aren’t voting for conservative candidates because they think it’ll improve their lives. The hard facts are out there to contradict that. No, they vote that way because they feel that something isn’t right in their lives, and what they’re hearing makes them feel better.
So the next obvious response is, that’s stupid! People shouldn’t be making important decisions on vague emotional bias! And that’s a completely useless response, no matter how true it is. You’re not going to change the minds of people mired in that kind of emotional entrenchment, at least not en masse. Read The Righteous Mind if you’d like some serious detail behind that, but it boils down to this: people will always find a way to justify their intuition. If their intuition says “abortion is murder” or “government regulation kills jobs” or “immigrants are dangerous” then they’re going to listen to politicians that spout those same concepts.
What’s the solution? Obviously I’m no expert, or I’d be out consulting for a campaign somewhere. But I do have two main ideas:
- Turnout matters. A lot. There’s a reason that Republicans oppose anything that makes it easier to vote. The demographics continue to move in the direction of folks whose intuition leads them toward more liberal ideas. If even a few percent more of those folks actually vote, it swings outcomes.
- Rather than giving up on the “deplorables” and vilifying them, maybe we should be looking for issues where their intuition agrees with the message and focusing on those. Going toe-to-toe on the divisive issues is easy. Putting forward different ideas and changing the conversation is hard. I wish I were smarter so I could figure out exactly what issues would do this for a significant number of voters. Hopefully someone politically smarter than me is working on it for 2020.
This is one thing I don’t forgive (the other being the willingness to countenance Trump’s open courting of the disgusting white-supremacist/‘alt right’/Bannonite wing of the party).
They fell for a ridiculous con job rather than vote for someone who actually had policy proposals that would help the lower middle class.
A dumbass electorate deserves what it gets. It’s just a pity the rest of us (and the planet’s atmosphere, to boot) have to get dragged into the quicksand with them.
There are people that sadly view Fox News as actual news, just with a conservative bias. It’s especially true of older folks around me.
Anyway, I have a coworker who is highly intelligent. He’s a great guy, too. I know he and a few other people voted for Trump not because they liked the guy in any way, but they felt like it was either him or a corrupt Hillary who has a known history of selling out her country for every scrap of personal gain she could get her hands on. I know, the irony is richer than my ma’s cheesecake.
I’ve spoken with him a lot since the election. He says his vote for Trump has kept him up at nights. He’s not completely in the bubble, but he has a perspective that I think likely served him well for decades, but isn’t equipped to handle the current climate. In his view, in order to try to decipher the real state of things, you need to get your information from multiple sources and multiple angles, which in principle I completely agree with. He knows Fox News is biased, but he kind of lumps them in with other news sources. They’re just as credible as the Washington Post, NYTimes, or any other paper, so the truth must be somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, Fox News has gone so far off the reservation that “somewhere in the middle” puts you in the latrine of a psychiatric facility.
Bob…I just concur. The reactions are like Birchers in 1960. It’s sad. And treating them as irredeemable guarantees losing again.
And Kevin, I voted Rubio in the Primary and indeed wrote in Richard M. Nixon in the General. I thought Trump was an asshat. But I didn’t support her on policy grounds.
snip my rant :)
Gore and Kerry didn’t significantly outperform Clinton, and they weren’t up against a supercandidate.
What is interesting about 2004 is how the polls overestimated Kerry’s performance, similar to 2016.