Question about weak candidates.

[karynnj]

96. You can have a smaller group of very enthusiastic people vs a larger group that vote, but are not as

enthusiastic. I agree with you that there were a group of people who were very enthusiastic that HRC was the nominee and many had followed her for decades. I would suggest (with absolutely not a scintila of proof) that, in the primary, she won more of the people not excited about either. If it is true that she won the lion's share of those not excited by either, it would explain why the people who voted Sanders were more enthusiastic.

I suspect that had Sanders been the nominee, he - just like Clinton - would have had a fair number of voters who voted for him with as little enthusiasm as some of his supporters exhibited for her. I would hope that many of her supporters would have considered the importance of the election and looked to find positive things about him. My youngest daughter, who caucused for Sanders in her state which went heavilly for Sanders ended up using her facebook and her other social media to share several very well written pieces she wrote in support of Hillary with links to support every claim she made. On iissues where she disagreed with Clinton, she noted that, but made the best case she could honestly make for Clinton vs Trump. She KNOWS she persuaded some people to vote for HRC. This gets back to enthusiasm. I would say that by election day - by looking at the good even while knowing the negatives - she was very hopeful we would win.

I considered that BOTH candidates were more flawed than our average nominee. I know that I was not alone in this position. I would have loved a candidate I could believe in wholeheartedly. Looking back since I voted for McGovern, I have voted for all our candidates, liked several, but was wholeheartedly only for Obama in 2012 and Kerry 2004. In 2008, I was excited by election day for Obama, but had supported him in the primaries mostly because I rejected his opponents. I know there are many who might have had HRC as the first candidate they wholeheartedly were for and I know from 2004 the pain they are in now.


There were barriers for some of us being as excited about Clinton. She was more hawkish than many of us like. Also, Clinton created a liability for herself by leaving the State Department with no archives of her email which had already been requested for more than a year. The really sad part is that there was nothing to hide. If she would have had a practice of creating an archive of work emails that she could have given the State Department when she left, the State Department could have complied with Congressional and FOIA requests. This would have meant that she would have testified much earlier than she did on Benghazi, where she did nothing wrong, and it is entirely likely that no one would have ever known how she handled email. She compounded this by repeatedly making changes in her explanations of the email. Unfortunately, BOTH the desire for privacy and not telling the complete truth immediately were her two worst traits in the Clinton years. This is why it was after March 2015 when this came out that her favorability shifted very significantly and her scores on honest and trustworthy fell.

It is pathetic that at the time of the election, Trump was winning on "trustworthy" though nearly every thing he ever said was a lie and he clearly paid no taxes for many years. note that HRC won the most votes. My quess is that this reflects that many people who voted for Clinton or Trump did so willing to admit that they did not think she/he was honest or trustwothy. These are clearly reluctant voters. (In fact, very reluctant voters -- I know if polled I would have said I thought Clinton "honest" in spite of any conc3rns I had.)

There were problems with Sanders too. Bernie Sanders was someone who was more comfortable speaking about Denmark, when he could have invoked FDR. It might be that he felt that the combination of the programs that were FDR like AND a massive change in the tax structure to become like Denmark were what he saw necessary. In addition, while there were great things in his bio - he was a very good mayor, he did work in the Civil Rights movement in Chicago and he was a very good Senator and Congressman for VT, his background was not typical of someone who intended to run for President.

However, while these things did make various people unexcited -- Trump was awful enough to make all of us committed to beating him.