You can't go back in time and make her be less stupid in her tactical decisions. You can't go back in time and have her use a totally different messaging strategy. You can't go back in time and make better candidates run against her.

I agree that to some extent HRC is only guilty of being herself at the wrong time... But that doesn't mean losing to Donald Trump isn't an epic collapse of historical proportions. Donald Trump is a one dimensional candidate who simply played that dimension as hard as he could. As it turned out nobody found an answer in time.

This doesn't forgive anyone involved. It's their occupation to win elections and their track record over the last few years is awful. If we could figure out how to make a black guy beat Mitt Romney we should have been able to figure out how to beat Donald Trump with a below replacement value candidate... Which is what we had.

To use a sports analogy HRC is like 2 wins under replacement. I wasn't around for Mondale so I can't speak to how bad of a campaign he ran, but he was up against Ronald Reagan ffs. Reagan would probably have clobbered Obama or Clinton too. That man was a much better candidate than Trump.

What advantages did she exploit in CA/NY besides being matched up against Trump? Name one thing her campaign did that made you think 'wow these people are really sharp'. One thing.

Nit: this isn't true, either as a percentage or as a total number.

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/poll.../popular-vote/

http://heavy.com/news/2016/12/popula...st-california/

-DVaut

It's your barbecue, man, follow your bliss, but is this an argument worth winning?

Huh. Guess I've been a victim of fake news.

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.

This is flatly self-contradictory. Have you considered having coffee before posting?

To be fair, "not literally the worst of all time" is maybe not the standard we're striving for?

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.

To be fair, it started as a talking point the morning after the election, when vote tallies were far from complete. I probably posted the same claim at least once in November. Hurts letting that one go, it was a good zinger.

I think you could make the argument that Mondale is still WOAT. Sure he went up against Reagan, but holy balls look at that scoreboard. I'm not enough of a history buff to know if there's some obscure 19th-centruy guy who was even more inept, so I guess I'll concede maybe Hillary wasn't the literal WOAT.

I think losing to Trump is way worse than getting blown out by Reagan. Especially given the demographics today. I thought the Republicans had MAYBE a 15% chance of winning with any candidate before the primaries. That was simply because of how the demographics look. Of course at the time I thought Clinton would be an average or an average+ political candidate. Lol wow how that turned out huh?

EDIT: Also I was NOT a Bernie supporter. I was actually really annoyed that he was doing as well as he was. I'm closer to the most moderate Republicans than I am to the Bernie people. I'm for a VERY light dose of socialism no more.

Semi grunch but 17 candidates played in Trump's favor. He was a screwball and ran only against the other screwball, Ben Carson. Bush, Rubio, Kasich, Cruz, Christie et al ran against each other.

Yeah I think the GOP is where you belong. Hope you're doing ok as a straight, white, smart, educated, financially well-off male in his prime. Let me know if you need some money to help you pay for your Obamacare.

Fox news tho. Fake news spammed all over FB tho. Voter suppression tho. Republicans suppressing education tho. Putin tho...

Your happy to say goodbye to people who both vote and donate money. Cool plan bro.

How many can be convinced, and how much effort will it require?

I mean, if they're gonna act like petulant children, then yeah, **** em. They're like the boomers who were pro choice liberals in their 20's but got duped into voting for McCain and Romney because their religion and FNC were a lethal combo of fearmongering that their privileged asses couldn't overcome. Don't go down that path bro. I know a really cool guy with an IQ of 140+ that voted Trump. He has elite critical thinking skills. Yet somehow he became angry enough to become a single issue voter (trade unions lol), and I fear you're on the same slippery slope as him.

Probably useful to disambiguate this a bit. Is the claim that Hillary Clinton as a candidate was the WOAT? Or that her campaign was? Or just that Hillary personally was the WOAT at retail political skills?*

Here's something nearly everyone agrees on after 2016: we know much less about what makes for a successful candidate or campaign in contemporary national US politics than we thought we did in 2015. In this sense we should lower the likelihood that the Clinton campaign ran a good campaign, even if it is was state-of-the-art. But it also means we should lower the probability that Clinton ran a particularly bad campaign as well. Lack of knowledge about what actually matters in campaigning means that expertise is less valuable and that there appears to be more randomness in election results. More randomness means that individual data points, such as the vote totals on a specific election day, gives us less information about the actual competence of a campaign or candidate.

*I voted for Hillary in the primary because I thought she would be the best President. I don't find her as inspiring a speaker as Obama, but that is a relatively minor part of the job of being President (and over-valued as a campaign skill imo). Primary voting is often a matter of judging tradeoffs between governing and campaigning ability.

i bet hillary uses your/you're correctly

No, I don't have any evidence. It's my opinion. There was also an objection that polling evidence showed no significant "hit" immediately after the remark. That can be checked but if true it should be taken in context of the other events at the time. Also, it may have been more of a slow boil effect. And it was its effect in the battle ground states that mattered most. If nothing else, it gave Trump a powerful attack weapon to fire off in every one of his rallies.

I don't think Hillary ever did really apologize for the remark. She amended it, saying she shouldn't have said "half of Trump voters." imo, None of that mattered. She might as well have said "all Trump voters" because that's what stuck in people's minds.

There's a complaint these days, especially by the white working class, that the left accuses people of being racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and islamophobes too quickly and easily. I think the fact Hillary thought her remark was a good idea is evidence there's something to the complaint. I also think the effect of her remark is a concrete example for the theory some people are expressing these days of how this penchant of the left is partly responsible for Trump's victory.


PairTheBoard

A concrete example you admit you can't show exists?

And the first point seems incoherent to me. You're claiming that the remark's putative effect is evidence that the complaint is correct. But to me it seems it could only be evidence that the complaint exists, since you're also confining your claim of an effect to those same white working-class voters. If they make that complaint, and if they react to an apparent instance of what the complaint contends, the reaction only evidences that they do indeed make that complaint. It doesn't go to showing the complaint is valid.

You can believe what you want but I don't think it's controversial that her remark cost her votes.


What I said was, "the fact Hillary thought her remark was a good idea is evidence there's something to the complaint." Accusing Trump voters of being racists, etc. tripped easily from her lips and was wildly cheered by the choir she was preaching to. Why did she find it so easy to make such a foolish remark?


PairTheBoard

I guess because a lot of them support him.

I think its worthwhile pointing out that in the last 50 years only 3 presidential candidates actively promised to raise taxes in the campaign, Mondale, Obama, and Hillary.

Looks like people don't want more taxes and it is folly for a Democrat to blunder into promising higher taxes.

Today I learned... Clinton lost because she promised to raise taxes.

well, if hornbug posted it, then it must be true

I'll believe whatever you can show me.

You're begging the question of whether it was actually foolish. And she did say half of Trump voters. I'm not at all convinced she was even wrong.

She's wrong. It's way more than half, but Hillary was just trying to be kind I'm sure.

What I thought was genius about the deplorables comment was nobody that's racist thinks they're racist. So when Hillary said half, 98% of them assumed they weren't part of the deplorable half, and the other 2% were busy planning a cross burning. The only people offended by it were enthusiastically voting trump anyway, and it energized her base. IIRC it was planned and written in her speech. And she's not an idiot, so Occam's razor

Yup, genius play, her base was super energized. Just came out in droves in those areas where people have family members supporting Donald Trump in the rust belt, just super duper genius, but thank god those people in California and New York loved the comment, so she could run up the score in them.

She sure showed them.

Damn, I forgot to talk about how it was even genius in the rust belt. Thanks for reminding me. I think her comment helped lots of lean trump voters stay home, because the only thing on the news for the next week was, "How many of them are actually deplorable?" That's gotta stick with some moderates in the rust belt methinks. Nobody wants to associate with that