2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Hillary Lost Because ... [View all]vi5
(13,305 posts)...her campaigns strategy was to run up popular vote by putting money, time, and effort into states she would never win (Utah? Fucking Utah?) instead of shoring up insurmountable leads in battleground states that she ended up losing that pretty directly falls on her or her people. Unless she was spending lots of time in those must-win states before she even spent a dime in a solidly red state, then her campaign is not blameless, so let's not pretend it was. We can complain all we like about the outdated electoral college but that is what we have and that is what she needed to win but failed to win. So yeah, her strategy managed to get her a popular vote victory at the expense of an electoral college victory in even 1 of the must win states.
Were there a metric shit ton of other reasons well beyond her control why she didn't trounce Trump by double digits everywhere? Absolutely. Only a fool would argue otherwise.
But there were definitely a number of stupid, ill conceived decisions and big gambles by her campaign that never should have happened and that could very well have made this whole discussion moot.