With Hilary back in the news and Comey being shit-canned, finger-pointing about the 2016 elections has resumed in several places. I figured we could argue about the myriad reasons she lost in one place rather than spread out among three different threads. Plus, I wanted to talk about a book I’m reading and I couldn’t find a good thread to necro – didn’t we have a “Political Books” thread somewhere recently?
I’m finishing up
The book’s conclusions as to why she lost are far from novel, but it does provide a fair amount of supporting context and examples to back up its (many) suppositions. Very briefly, here are the major thrusts:
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Bernie Sanders. The book is pretty harsh on Sanders. Although it doesn’t necessarily criticize his policies or even his supporters (too much), the book does make a compelling case that Sanders’ constant negative refrains about Clinton, her dealings with Wall Street, calling her “Corrupt” and “Untrustworthy”, and staying in the race long after he could have possibly won had a massively deleterious effect on Clinton’s candidacy. The thesis here is that if Bernie had stuck to policy debates and away from character assassination, then Trump would not have had as firm a platform to stand on in the General.
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Her Emails. Lots of moving parts here – The authors go out of their way to explain Clinton’s thinking behind the private server, and it details how the Clintons just never quite believed that the emails were ever going to amount to anything: they honestly believed that it was just another GOP hatchet job (like Benghazi) that would quickly blow over. Moreover, the book was very quick to point to Bill Clinton’s ill-advised meeting with Loretta Lynch as the pivotal moment in the whole scandal – if he didn’t randomly pop over for a chat, then most Americans would probably be hard-pressed to name the (former) director of the FBI. Instead, because of Bill, Comey became a household name and her Email Server issue just got bigger and bigger. Of course the conflation between the Russian hacking of the DNC and her private server in the eyes of most Americans didn’t help much either.
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Ignoring Rural Voters. This is distinct from ignoring their issues, but it feeds into it. The book makes the case that Clinton’s metrics-based campaign was far too predisposed towards the cities and high-population areas. Her campaign manager was loathe to spend any money at all for rural counties – his data told him (accurately) that Clinton’s supporters were densely clustered in the cities and suburbs, and his analysis said that spending money on ground operations in these rural areas was a waste. They also didn’t want to waste money or effort on converting anyone or arguing her case; they simply wanted to get known Dems out to vote. So they ceded the vast swathes of rural countryside to Trump without a fight; no lawn signs, no outreach, no staff, no nothing. Bill Clinton argued against this approach, but he was overridden. No one seemed to understand that Trump WAS doing conversions within their supposed strongholds.
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No Message. If the book has a core thesis, this is it. Clinton and her staff knew that she stood for lots of stuff. Great stuff like equality for all, helping the downtrodden, and protecting Americans. But she (and her staff) were utterly incapable of articulating any of that to the voters. To the vast majority of Americans, Clinton was running… because it was her turn, dammit. She could explain (at length) what she was about to any individual, apparently, but selling her platform in simple language to a mass-audience was simply beyond her. Trump, by contrast, had nothing but one-line, easy-to-grasp slogans and ideals: Anti immigration, protectionist policies that would help rural voters, and an end to “political correctness” (which could mean whatever you wanted).