2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHillary WON the hearts of the voters. She lost the Electoral College,
which is rigged against the voters who live in the diverse, urban areas where most voters live.
Besides winning almost 2.9 million more votes than DT, and virtually matching Obama's 2012 vote, she might have been able to overcome the rigged system, and to have obtained a majority in the Electoral College, if Comey and Russia hadn't interfered.
But anyone who says that "people" weren't enthused about Hillary or that she didn't reach out to "Americans" is falling into the trap set by the Rethugs.
Despite what they want us to believe, white rural voters are NOT more important than the rest of us -- except in the Electoral College, which was deliberately rigged to make it so.
And for the worst reason possible: to sustain our country's original sin: the sin of slavery.
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164670
How the Electoral College Protected Slavery
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/15/the-electoral-college-born-of-slavery-could-stand-against-racism-in-2016/
Part of the Electoral College's original purpose was to protect slave-state power. Will it redeem its history now?
http://www.vcstar.com/story/opinion/columnists/2016/12/17/michael-powelson-electoral-college-slavery-remnant/95536018/
From its foundation, the Electoral College was intended to extend greater power to the Southern slave holders the slaveocracy of the early Republic.
Cha
(305,182 posts)Coyotl
(15,262 posts)Republicans rigging the system with voter suppression laws and voter caging stole 2000 and now 2016 too.
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Chimichurri
(2,911 posts)deist99
(122 posts)I think what scares me most is that this should have never been this close. When you compare Clinton against Drump it should have been a landslide. I mean here is a man who has never held public office and was caught on tape saying he is grabbing women by the p$&@y yet he got 47% of the vote compared to Hillary's 48%. How?!?!?
pnwmom
(109,535 posts)that both major parties had a range of supporters, from conservatives to liberals -- and so they were used to forming coalitions across party lines.
This isn't true anymore, and in the end, most Rethugs lined up behind DT, simply because of the party label.
But Hillary's lead was more than 2 points (not just 1), despite voter suppression, Comey's letter bombs, and the Russians' interference.
The Liberal Lion
(1,414 posts)It should have never even been a contest. Since it was, even it he had no won, it means we must be completely unyielding and uncompromising in our principles. There can be no common ground.
HurricaneWarning
(220 posts)which I think it total bull shit.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/electoral-college-members-receive-death-threats-for-promising-to-confirm-trump-as-president/
Emilybemily
(204 posts)Democrats are not, as a general rule, violent. Repukes are.
HurricaneWarning
(220 posts)But they keep making this false equivalency. It's becoming a pattern.
SunSeeker
(53,614 posts)Larkspur
(12,804 posts)She was nothing more than the lesser of 2 evils for me. Don't mistake popular vote win with how much people love a candidate. More often, it's a lesser of 2 evils vote.
The Electoral College vote wasn't just about slavery. Every state in the infant Union was a slave state when the Constitution was passed. It was primarily to balance the power between large and small states. VA was one of the large states along with PA and NY. New England states, like CT, RI, VT, and NH were and still are small states. The EC votes forces candidates to NOT ignore small states for the larger ones.
Obama found a way to win both the EC and PV. HRC ran a terrible campaign, just like she did in 2008. Even if the Russians had not hacked the DNC, she would have still lost. Democrats had not lost PA since 1988 and MI and WI in about the same time frame, but HRC found a way to do so.
Skittles
(158,672 posts)StevieM
(10,539 posts)Last edited Mon Dec 19, 2016, 12:24 PM - Edit history (1)
Even still, she had the race won decisively, and would have carried in a Democratic Senate, had Comey not disgraced himself by using his office to interfere in the election with 11 days to go. She would have won by a good 6 points, with 333 electoral votes, even assuming that Trump narrowed the margin in the final week.
And, of course, the drip-drip-drip from the Russians did some damage as well, going all the way back to the Convention.
HRC won all the debates and put on a great convention. She did a lot right under very difficult circumstances.
Now that she lost people who didn't like her to begin with are taking advantage of the defeat to belittle her and pile it on.
And, for the record, she did a lot right in 2008 too. People who run terrible campaigns don't get as large a share of the vote as she did. The only basis for claiming that she ran a horrible campaign is that, supposedly, as a former first lady she had a huge advantage. That wasn't true in 2008 and it wasn't true in 2016.
RBInMaine
(13,570 posts)She failed to put a strong compelling populist jobs message front and center. She didn't campaign in many places where she should have. She took way too many days off the trail in the August and September.
She did a lot right but also a lot wrong. We need to fix the problems.
baldguy
(36,649 posts)Larkspur
(12,804 posts)I'm part of the popular vote majority for her.
I'll remember what you say the next time some in this party say to vote for the Establishment candidate because its her/his turn to win the nomination.
HRC's problem was that she ran a lackluster campaign, like she did in 2008, and did not appeal to enough voters in states that could have gotten her the majority of the Electoral College vote and the White House.
baldguy
(36,649 posts)Happily eating the RW dogshit pie about Clinton does. Continuing to spread their false propaganda does.
JTFrog
(14,274 posts)There I fixed it for you.
triron
(22,240 posts)is due to Republican election rigging and interference from Russians and FBI,
not due to any campaign strategy ineptitude.
Please read http://www.cpegonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Unexplained-Patterns-in-2016-and-Earlier-U.S.-Elections.pdf
LaydeeBug
(10,291 posts)msongs
(70,137 posts)like why not?!
JTFrog
(14,274 posts)jfern
(5,204 posts)pnwmom
(109,535 posts)jfern
(5,204 posts)pnwmom
(109,535 posts)One of the more popular media memes of this election cycle is that we have two historically unpopular candidates. This meme simultaneously reflects the medias obsession with balance (mistaking it for objectivity) and obscures how much Republican Donald Trumps presidential campaign is a historical aberration, as well as the deeper problems that his candidacy embodies or symbolizes. In the cable news universe, no one invokes the meme more often than Trump supporters and surrogates.
There are at least three main problems with this meme. First, its a recent snapshot view, which clearly reverses cause and effect. Running for president has severely eroded Hillary Clintons popularity, due to the combination of intense political polarization and partisanship. On the other hand, becoming first the Republican front-runner and then the nominee has elevated Trump, bringing him in early September to his highest-ever level of national popularity.
Second, it ignores how popular Clinton was as secretary of state much more popular than Vice President Joe Biden, her only credible competitor in elite circles at the time. Third, Clinton is not unpopular with nonwhite voters: African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans all have favorable views of her, at least in broad strokes. The meme thus obscures the racialized nature of Trumps and Clintons respective popularity problems.
As a public servant before this election cycle, Hillary Clinton registered broad public approval. From April 2010 through May 2011, her approval rating averaged more than 60 percent, as aggregated by HuffPost Pollster. Her disapproval rating was never above 35 percent. In fact, throughout her tenure in President Barack Obamas cabinet, her negatives remained below that level, while her positive numbers never fell below 56 percent. Her popularity was both high and steady, especially compared with Obamas sharp drop-off early in his first term as president, as he faced increasingly intransigent GOP opposition.
SNIP
As the chart below shows, her popularity fell as a consequence of entering into the highly polarized process of a presidential campaign, beginning just as these stories came out in early 2013. That was when the GOP began shifting the focus of its attacks against her via multiple fruitless Benghazi investigations, for example but that did not succeed in bringing her down into negative territory until mid-2015:
SNIP
jfern
(5,204 posts)No nominee from either party has had favorables as bad as her or Trump. And it wasn't for lack of trying from the other side.
TCJ70
(4,387 posts)...it only matters that it does.
meow2u3
(24,917 posts)The RW has been smearing her since she married Bill Clinton and he became governor of Arkansas and haven't stopped since! RWNJs can't stomach strong women and will do anything--even commit murder--to silence a strong woman like Hillary!
RBInMaine
(13,570 posts)This isn't either/or. We can be a strong grassroots working class/middle class party EVERYWHERE. We can't just be a big city party. The party has been hollowed out all over the country because we have lost small town America. They want a populist champion. Tons of people who voted for Obama this time went for Trump. That is just the truth. Hillary failed to win enough African Americans and young people as compared to Obama. Yes, the other factors also hurt, but we must be HONEST and look at where Hillary and the Dem Party went wrong.
pnwmom
(109,535 posts)He was reelected in 2012 and in 2013 the courts dismantled the voting rights act, which allowed millions of votes to be suppressed in states across the country.
We aren't just a big city party. We ARE a diverse party. Hillary did far better among diverse voters than Bernie did; and she had virtually the same number of voters overall as Obama in 2012.
Aiming at a different group of voters wouldn't have helped Hillary overcome the effects of voter suppression; of James Comey; and of Russian interference.
And if you think the Russian oligarchs would have stood by and let Bernie get elected over DT, you're deluded.
Exilednight
(9,359 posts)She was down, when compared to Obama, in every statistic.
Pop vote: -3%
Hispanic: -6%
AAs: -5%
It just gets worse from there.
aikoaiko
(34,201 posts)The HRC message didn't win enough votes to become president.
It doesn't matter that she won by 3 million votes or 30 million.
Response to aikoaiko (Reply #26)
Post removed
bowens43
(16,064 posts)Running against trump it should not have been close. She lost because she had more baggage then Grand Central Station.
Paladin
(28,740 posts)uponit7771
(91,671 posts)uponit7771
(91,671 posts).... baggage
aikoaiko
(34,201 posts)HRC knew the rules to become President and who she had to win over with her message.
bowens43
(16,064 posts)she was just seen as the lesser of two evils. Her disapproval ratings were sky high.....
Saying that Hillary won the hearts and minds is like trump saying he won in a landslide.
progree
(11,463 posts)uponit7771
(91,671 posts)Response to pnwmom (Original post)
Post removed
progree
(11,463 posts)New York Times has this, just now:
http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president
Clinton 65,818,318 votes (48.1%)
Trump: 62,958,211 votes (46.0%)
Difference = 2,860,107 (2.1%)
If one updated the bar chart you referred to,
https://twitter.com/jonathanwebber/status/796448989931417600/photo/1
it would show Trump doing quite a bit better than the 2008 and 2012 Rethug candidates, while Clinton is within a hair of Obama 2012 (but considerably less than Obama 2008). And the gap between the two candidates in 2016 (2.86 M) would be quite considerable visually on that graph, though quite a bit less than the 4.98 M gap between Obama and Romney in 2012.
Basically, Clinton was about as "popular" as Obama in 2012, while Trump was quite a bit more "popular" than the previous Rethug candidates (ugggggggh).
I also checked CNN http://www.cnn.com/election/results -- its vote totals are a bit less for both candidates than the NY Times one, so it's a little bit behind.
hellofromreddit
(1,182 posts)jmg257
(11,996 posts)Maybe Her in 2020??