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Originally Posted by BoredSocial
Trump had VERY few advantages. The email leaks required Russian help, which would have been a good enough reason for people to vote for a better candidate. Similarly people wouldn't have paid much attention to the email thing if they actually liked Clinton and she seemed trustworthy.
On its face, this is an absurd argument plagued by cognitive bias. Just post your best Bernie Would've Won meme instead--at least we'd get a good chuckle.
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Let's face facts though: the Republicans have an inferior product, fewer supporters, and both of these factors are getting worse by the day.
This is flatly self-contradictory. Have you considered having coffee before posting?
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Originally Posted by DVaut1
HRC is a politician I think with some very tangible and real deficiencies but it's preposterous to argue someone who almost won the nomination once and then won the popular vote for literally the most coveted and highest office in the profession by a decently large margin is actually, in fact, just the worst ever. I can allow it as internet hyperbole but it's not a credible actual argument.
To be fair, "not literally the worst of all time" is maybe not the standard we're striving for?
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Originally Posted by DVaut1
And you're not alone. You have plenty of others saying the same stuff. Which I suppose is the ultimate proof of the point: Hillary Clinton sure is disliked, look at how much people want to re-litigate the election and get all frothily angry about it, over and over. She must really tilt people because these arguments are specifically tailored almost to make no sense, just to give people an opportunity to say HILLARY CLINTON TERRIBLE PERSON over and over. That's fine, it's an opinion, but don't waste people's time making hand-waving attempts to quantify it.
Are you saying, though, that there's no meaningful way to do a post-mortem analysis of any election? For instance, some people blamed Gore's loss on Nader. Their analysis usually proceeded by assuming a hypothetical world in which voters could vote only for one of the two major parties, then making educated guesses about how third-party coalitions would allocate their votes between them. Of course, we know this is not the real world. In reality, the major parties always have to face third-party opposition. So, perhaps this analysis is invalid.
But the world in which Bernie Sanders gets the Democratic nomination is also purely hypothetical. Bernie vs. Trump never happened; therefore, it's pointless to speculate about that scenario. However, this assertion seems to preclude the possibility of acknowledging that either party ever makes a strategic mistake. It seems possible to draw some inferences about what Trump vs. Bernie might have looked like, though, no? What could have been done to sway those pivotal 200k voters into going blue? Freddie deBoer has a somewhat compelling analysis
here.