No they didn’t. At least not the media I was watching and reading. Clinton passing out during the 9/11 memorial was covered and gone in a few days. It was mostly the pneumonia diagnosis that spun stuff up, and even then not much more than a week.
Compare that to Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” audio coverage. Man, that was literally weeks of major stories, analysis, and debate.
Edit: I mean come on! Most people don’t even remember that Clinton passed out during the campaign. Ask them about Trump’s pussy remark and I doubt you’ll find anyone that doesn’t know about it.
Wow, we have very different memories. The coverage of it was relentless. “Does she have the stamina?” “Should she step down?”.
I remember them harping about it right up to the first debate, where everyone waited with baited breath to see if she was going to cough and ruin her whole campaign.
I’d like to see this “relentless coverage” you remember, because my links show some pretty cut and dried coverage that amounts to “it’s pneumonia, no big deal” - Edit: I just Googled it, and I don’t find any major network coverage of this past a week. Like none.
Are you thinking of pundits in debate panels? Talk show hosts? Bill O’Reilly? These jackasses make their living by commenting and spinning things up.
What surprises me the most is the drop in African American and Hispanic turnout. Simply put, they dropped back to pre-Obama levels. Even running against a white nationalist, Clinton could not convince this part of the electorate to show up and vote, despite basing so much of her message on diversity and being ‘stronger together.’
Voter suppression is surely part of the story. But I think it’s mostly just the next chapter in the old “Republicans fall in line, but Democrats have to fall in love” saga.
I have heard this echoed by multiple people who lived in these areas, even battleground areas. All you would see is Trump signs, for miles, zero apparent opposition.
While I agree that Clinton fucked up the campaign (the 4 point summary nails it), and ultimately was just not a strong enough candidate, there was also a unprecedented confluence of stupid random shit that contributed as well:
Comey and his bullshit (reaping what he sowed, now)
the Russians
Republican partisan tribal pile-ons
low turnout since “the result is gonna be a landslide per all the surveys”
So, here we are. I consider it a thousand year storm, the result was so unlikely.
I have a friend who is deep in Utah politics (he ran for office) and he said McMullin is an opportunist, who votes party ticket down the line on the trigger issues.
White voters were most likely to turn out; 65.3 percent of whites told Census Bureau surveyors they voted in 2016, more than a full percentage point higher than their participation rate in 2012.
But voter turnout among black voters fell almost seven percentage points, to 59.4 percent, the Census figures show — after hitting an all-time high of 66.2 percent in 2012.
Fewer than half of Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans turned out to vote; 49 percent of Asians and 47.6 percent of those of Hispanic origin showed up to the polls last year.
Demographers point to declining black turnout and relatively low Hispanic turnout — two voting blocs on whom Democrats are increasingly reliant — as two of a handful of reasons Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton fell short in a handful of key battleground states last year.
I wonder how much of this depends on your media feed and social circle. I had actually forgotten about this too, but I remember at the time going into the right-wing parts of the internet and being shocked at the stuff I was seeing (suggestions Hilary was an alcoholic, or pregnant, or a drug addict, based on this incident). I can well imagine that in some circles this just didn’t go away for a long time.
The number of votes increased from 128.5M in 2012 to 135.8M in 2016. There’s no way the voting age population increased by 6% in that amount of time. It would probably have been more like 3%. 4% tops.
The problem with the data you linked to is that it’s based on a survey, not on reality. If you read the actual report
They say that the change in turnout for the population as a whole on this survey wasn’t statistically significant.
They estimate the change in number of votes as 4.5M between 2012 and 2016. The actual change was 7.3M. That’s off by 60%. Worthless.
And it has this caveat, which I guess the journalists ignored:
Voting estimates from the Current Population Survey and other sample surveys have historically differed from those based on administrative data, such as the official results reported by each state and disseminated collectively by the Clerk of U.S. House of Representatives and the Federal Election Commission.
So yeah. Turnout was not low. It was the highest absolute number of voters, and probably the third highest relative turnout in 40 years.
White voters without college degrees, by far Trump’s strongest demographic group, were disproportionately concentrated in swing states, while Clinton’s coalition of minorities and college-educated whites (but with declining turnout among black voters) produced huge gains for her in states such as California and Texas without winning her any additional electoral votes.
The turnout probably increased among all major groups of voters — Hispanics, white Democrats, white Republicans — except black voters.
The conclusive data is available in the Southern states where voters indicate their race on their voter registration forms, and they point toward a considerable decline in black turnout.
Yes, but that’s a totally different argument. You said that turnout was low because “the result is gonna be a landslide per all the surveys”. That’s clearly total bullshit,
since turnout was actually up. (Unless you’re claiming that it’s just black voters who were demotivated from voting by the supposed landslide polls. But that seems like an extraordinary claim, and would thus require extraordinary evidence).
If you wanted to say something based on this data, then it’s perhaps that the Clinton campaign made the mistake of thinking that the high black turnout of the Obama years was the new normal, rather than a blip.
Yeah, you’re right, it’s fair to say turnout was only lower among black voters.
Perhaps the revised argument should be
lots of people thought it was OK to vote for bullshit candidates like the Green Party because the polls consistently said the result would be a landslide Clinton victory.
I’m not a fan of the narrative being spun that it was Bernie’s job to make Hillary look good- that he was supposed to be the political equivalent of Barry Horowitz. Bernie may not have thought he was going to win, but it’s not honest or fair to say he should have been Hillary’s personal jobber , he’s supposed to be out there trying to win- and nothing Bernie did was below the belt of what is expected in presidential primary politics.
To me, Hillary lost because she was genuinely despised in a way no Democrat has been since Jimmy Carter- both fairly and unfairly. If it was any Republican other than Trump, it would have been a total landslide.
Debatable. Trump tapped into some real white nationalist / fuck-the-system narratives that resonated with a lot of rural Americans. It is highly unlikely another generic Romney / McCain clone would or could have done that.
Clinton fucked up no question, but Trump had hidden strengths that everyone underestimated.
Clinton “fucked up” by mobilizing the same number of voters who turned out for Barack Obama in 2012. But Trump managed to improve on Romney’s numbers by just enough to flip some key states and win in the Electoral College.
Given that, I find Alstein’s idea that [Generic Republican] would have beaten Hillary in a “landslide” to be dubious. It may be hard to grapple with, but the people who voted for Trump seem to really like Donald Trump.
Stated more succinctly, they hated the system. And Clinton, despite being an OK politician (IMO) was extremely symbolic of “the system”.
Trump is of course a dangerous, erratic, selfish egomaniac who does not give a shit about anyone but himself and his cronies… but there is no question that he was and is absolutely the “I reject your political systems” choice.
So to the extent that he is fucking shit up, that is exactly what they voted for. A bull in a china shop. Who knew the “you’re fired” reality tv show guy would go around randomly firing people. I mean, who could have predicted that?
