Donald Trump Is President-Elect Because The Democratic Establishment Picked The Wrong Candidate

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Democrats might be doomed to continue to lose if they fail to understand why they lost the 2016 election. Hopefully Clinton aides are not typical of the party as they are now blaming everyone other than their candidate. Politco reports on how they blame James Comey, as well as other factors:

Most Clinton supporters agreed that was part of it. But it wasn’t just that.

So much of the campaign’s energy was spent explaining inherited issues, they said, like the paid speeches Clinton delivered to Wall Street banks, pay-to-play accusations about the Clinton Foundation, and fallout of Clinton’s decision to set up a private email server at the State Department. “They spent their time protecting her, explaining her, defending her, with all these issues, the speeches, the Foundation, the emails — that became the energy of the campaign,” sighed one longtime Clinton confidante.

The paid speeches and the glitzy fundraisers, they said, did not paint a picture of a woman connected to the real suffering in the country. But that, they said, was just who Clinton was after so many years in the spotlight. “Her outlook is, ‘I get whacked no matter what, so screw it,’” explained one longtime confidant. “I’ve been out here killing myself for years and years and if I want to give the same speech everyone else does, I will.”

What the Democratic establishment which rigged the system for Clinton miss is that all of these problems were predictable and should have been considered before giving Clinton the nomination. All of these problems are based upon Clinton’s actual actions. They are not fabrications of the right wing media as Clinton apologists often claim. I was writing blog posts for months before the nomination warning how risky it was to nominate Hillary Clinton. Michael Moore predicted Trump would beat Clinton in July. Among the major reasons was The Hillary Problem:

Our biggest problem here isn’t Trump – it’s Hillary. She is hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. That’s why she fights against gays getting married one moment, and the next she’s officiating a gay marriage. Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it’s the sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they should just shut up and go bake some cookies. But the kids don’t like her, and not a day goes by that a millennial doesn’t tell me they aren’t voting for her. No Democrat, and certainly no independent, is waking up on November 8th excited to run out and vote for Hillary the way they did the day Obama became president or when Bernie was on the primary ballot. The enthusiasm just isn’t there. And because this election is going to come down to just one thing — who drags the most people out of the house and gets them to the polls — Trump right now is in the catbird seat.

Democrats clearly picked the wrong candidate. Bernie Sanders was beating Trump by double digits in head to head polls, while Hillary Clinton was at best barely beating him. If Sanders was the candidate we would not have faced any of these scandals. Bernie Sanders could have attracted the votes of those voting for change, including those voting due to economic anxieties.

Fredrik deBoer wrote in The Washington Post that Bernie Sanders Could Have Won.

Donald Trump’s stunning victory is less surprising when we remember a simple fact: Hillary Clinton is a deeply unpopular politician. She won a hotly contested primary victory against a uniquely popular candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders. In her place, could he have beaten Trump?

That Clinton has unusually high unfavorables has been true for decades. Indeed, it has been a steady fact of her political life. She has annually ranked among the least-liked politicians on the national stage since she was the first lady. In recent years, her low favorability rating was matched only by that of her opponent, animated hate Muppet Donald Trump. In contrast, Sanders enjoys very high popularity, ranking as the most popular senator for two years in a row. Nationally, his favorability rating is more than 10 points higher than Clinton’s, and his unfavorability rating is more than 15 points lower. This popularity would have been a real asset on the campaign trail…

But turnout matters in a close election, and here she suffered significantly compared with President Obama in both 2008 and 2012. In Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties in Michigan, the heart of Detroit’s black voting bloc, Clinton won 55 percent of the vote — compared with 69 percent for Obama in 2012. Meanwhile, it was in Michigan that Sanders won his most shocking primary victory, probably through the same forces that hurt Clinton on Election Day: Her agenda did not seem to offer much hope to those hurt by deindustrialization and outsourcing. We can only guess how much better he might have performed there, or in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which he also won in a surprising primary upset) had he been the nominee. But there is little doubt now that his success in the Rust Belt was a canary in the coal mine for the Clinton campaign, a now-obvious sign that she was in trouble.

Indeed, turnout overall was a major problem for the Clinton campaign; though not all votes are yet counted, it’s clear that Clinton received millions fewer votes than Obama in several states, while Trump frequently received more than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Nor did Clinton enjoy the benefits of party crossovers. There was much talk of “Clinton Republicans” who would, in the spirit of the Reagan Democrats, cross party lines to oppose Trump. But according to the exit polling of the New York Times, more Democrats crossed over and voted for Trump than Republicans crossed over and voted for Clinton. Sanders, notably, never had trouble drawing crowds, and in the Democratic primary campaign, turnout rebounded from 2012 lows. Whether that rebound was a result of voters’ enthusiasm for Sanders or the opposite is hard to say; what’s clear is that Clinton wasn’t able to get out the vote herself and that she lost both Democrats and independents to Trump, while Sanders had notorious luck with independent voters.

Some Clinton apologists are blaming her loss on third party votes, but most of these votes were not from people who would have ever considered voting for Clinton. Many of those making the argument use bogus assumptions that Clinton would have received the third party vote if they were not on the ballot while Trump was not affected by votes for Gary Johnson and Evan McMullen. In reality Trump lost around the same number of votes to third party candidates as Clinton did.

Aaaron Blake looked at how the math does not support the claims that Stein and Johnson cost Clinton the election. Besides, Clinton was never going to get the votes of most of those who voted for Stein and Johnson. To argue that Clinton could have won with their votes is as nonsensical as saying Clinton could have won if she received the votes of those who voted for Donald Trump. Mathematically true, but the argument makes no sense in the real world.

Those who made the mistake of backing Clinton for the nomination need to learn from their mistake and look at why people felt that Hillary Clinton was too abhorrent to consider voting for. Stein and Johnson were both on the ballot in 2012 but they did not stop Barack Obama from winning. Clinton’s bigger problem were not those who voted for third parties, but Democratic voters who either voted for Trump or stayed home. As Paul Waldman pointed out, “She got 6 million fewer votes than Barack Obama did in 2012, and nearly 10 million fewer than he did in 2008.” That is despite everything we know about Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton thought she could get people to turn out to vote for her by showing how awful Donald Trump is. Her campaign centered on attacks on Trump, rarely providing any good arguments to support her. While she was right that voters had a low opinion of Trump, she failed to recognize that voters had a comparable view of her. This was a no-win strategy with Clinton as the nominee.

1 Comment

  1. 1
    Kathleen Greene says:

    She so richly deserved to lose because she, and the DNC, CHEATED to get the nomination. I would have voted for her if I didn't live in CA, though, to save us from having Trump win. And I think she, and Bill Clinton, would be in jail if war crimes were prosecuted in the US, as well as the financial crimes they've committed, starting with selling a Presidential pardon to Marc Rich.

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