EAllusion wrote:Clinton campaigned a ton in PA and lost PA. She needed PA to win. This renders the "should've made more physical stops in WI" argument moot. That being said, research published on this suggests that physically showing up to a state to campaign in it moves the needle for presidential candidates approximately not at all. It's meaningless symbolism. It's such a iffy reason to lay Clinton's defeat at. If you are looking for faults in how she ran her campaign, there are fatter targets. A lot of Clinton advertising focused on Trump personally being unfit for office. But anyone paying attention to coverage of Trump already knew about his questionable fitness. He does the work for you on that front. Clinton's team probably didn't need to hammer it home anymore than what already was out there. Instead, her team should've taken that argument as a given and focused all their messaging might on issues where polling favored them in an effort to move the national conversation there. Oh well.
Everything I heard about Clinton's ground game was not encouraging to say the least. On the other hand, maybe her lack of charisma advised against her glad handing Ma and Pa Kettle. Either way, these are problems that involve her talent and charisma as a candidate. In any case, I think there is plenty of weakness and lost opportunity to invoke in the shortcomings of the Clinton campaign, and I have heard them from multiple sources.
EAllusion wrote:I don't think there is any "thee decisive factor." Elections outcomes are the result of a multiplicity of causes with each by themselves having potentially smallish impacts. When an outcome is close, and the 2016 outcome was razor thin, then a very large number of factors have the potential to be decisive.
I don't believe that the election was necessarily something that had to be decided on a razor thin margin. It was at least partly because of the candidates involved. Clinton was the wrong candidate for the time. I stand by that position. She could have, and probably should have won. If you can beat a highly intelligent and experienced candidate with an unprincipled, undisciplined, and inexperienced moron with no morals for reasons that have little to do with the choice and quality of the candidates, then we are well and truly screwed.
EAllusion wrote:I remember the weather being cold, overcast, and filled with light rain on 2016 where I was. Maybe that cost Clinton Wisconsin. I don't know. It's possible given published research on the magnitude of impact of weather on election outcomes.
And maybe they don't come out in the cold, overcast, rainy weather for... do I need to say it?
EAllusion wrote:I don't think you have to look to the future and hypotheticals with Warren. We have an example in the recent past. John Kerry was a strong candidate who almost certainly overperformed the fundamentals of his election a little. One of his great strengths was that he was a war hero, which cut right into the heart of George W. Bush's waving the bloody flag strategy. And yet, the man was swiftboated. His strength was turned into an albatross. It's quite possible that if he wasn't swiftboated, he wins the election. Does this mean he was actually weak? I don't think so. That was a generic R's election to win and Kerry just barely lost it. It just means that the right-wing attack machine is really formidable and something about every Democratic candidate can be manufactured into a major issue. Lying isn't hard to do.
Of course, the Democrats had their line about Bush being a coke fiend and a draft dodger. I don't know, EA, these excuses sound appealing when I think of which candidate I supported. Yeah, I voted for Kerry, the first time I actually voted Democrat, and largely because I thought the Iraq War was a complete fiasco BEFORE we started it. But the guy had zero charisma. It was easy to believe he was weak and unpatriotic. I didn't believe it, but it wasn't because he seemed like a good candidate. It was more because he had the right position on the issues. I had to overcome my dislike of Kerry in order to vote for him. I did not have a lot of confidence he would win. I just figured he might because of the disaster in Iraq. Boy was I wrong.
Obama won in '08, yes, but Obama was set up with the most gimme election Democrats had for them since 1964. He then ran in 2012 with modestly favorable conditions and won a modest victory. I don't know how you can overlook factors like this. This isn't to say that Democrats are up a creek. Republicans have their own problems to work through too. But I do think you are making a mistake in equating final outcomes with strength of candidate. Clinton was hosed by a lot of factors outside of her control that I think any objective observer should regard as unfair. It's really hard to know to what extent Clinton, and Clinton alone, was susceptible to them.
If Obama had won more narrowly, then I might be inclined to agree. Clinton narrowly lost something that she really ought to have won. Given Obama's accomplishments and her role in the Obama administration (that is, if one can truly dismiss the cuckoo opposition as you seem to believe we can), she was an easy choice over Trump, except that she ended up not being one, largely, I think, because of her history and personality. I give more than full props to Hillary as being wicked intelligent and highly competent. I think she has a strong appeal among those who know her and identify with her. But there are many, many people who are tepid in their emotions about her. Or even slightly negative, when they ordinarily vote Democrat.
To the issue of Russian hacking, it is notable that the leaked emails mostly just showed a remarkably buttoned up organization. I was genuinely surprised by how little was there given how much of a blood sport politics is. It was necessary to manufacture controversies out of that by either misleading about their contents or taking small issues likely to be present in any political campaign and magnifying focus on them to create division. Since we know Russia also hacked the RNC, and we know that if Russia can hack Clinton associates, Russia can hack Bernie or some other Democrat too. Would Russia be as brazen in their attempt to do so if they weren't trying to defeat a hawk like Clinton? Is getting world-class clown Trump in office victory enough? Would the media be so ravenous with their coverage if it were some other Democrat? Maybe. It's hard to run the counterfactual. But it is entirely possible that there is some alternate universe where presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is having to answer charges about some red-baiting pseudo-scandal regarding hacked emails that plays right into the unending media controversy over his questionable past associations with communists.
I think it was easy to manufacture those fake controversies because of all of the things I have mentioned about the long-lived anti-Hillary cult, that somehow Kevin Graham believes I am trapped in, or a member of, or some such. There is a reason I did not support Bernie. I thought he was vulnerable. That said, he was at least singing the right tune, and quite a number of Bernie supporters ended up voting for Trump. So, I don't know. I am not really convinced that you have made a good argument for Hillary having lost this thing primarily because of factors that have nothing to do with Hillary.
If that is true, then it is true of everyone. And we are still left with that margin where the candidate does matter. So we are right where we started. If candidates matter at all, then there were plenty of good reasons to think a Hillary win was a very risky proposition. But, since the Clintons have been so important to the DNC for such a long time, there was really no way she was not going to be the nominee. I can accept that, whereas Bernie Bros tend not to, but then also contend that the inevitability of this choice almost inevitably led to the Democrats losing the election.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
