So, this is another reaction type post. I've been thinking about 2016 a lot lately, and how screwed up everything got because of that election cycle, and looking at this, I feel like liberals have learned nothing.
It's a shame. As America polarizes and we face real threats from authoritarian factions on the left and right, the liberal center, which should be taking the reigns and giving people an alternative to preserve the country have their heads so far up you know where that I really question if we are going to be able to respond adequately to the challenges of the times.
Listening to these responses was disheartening, and I really have to share, if only because watching liberals get 2016 so wrong just ends up frustrating me to no end.
Pretty much the same as at the time. It was overconfident. They underestimated the American people’s tolerance for Trump and overestimated their tolerance of a woman in the presidency. They made the mistake of thinking the Obama win signaled permanent progress as opposed to a wave that would trigger backlash.
I recall at the time hearing one of her campaign managers in Chicago say Clinton polled low in terms of likability but that they were planning to ignore that and lead with policy. It was naive.
overestimated their tolerance of a woman in the presidency.They made the mistake of thinking the Obama win signaled permanent progress as opposed to a wave that would trigger backlash.
I did concede a little but that it's MOSTLY imaginary vs completely though. I have noticed that a lot of people hate Kamala Harris (despite liking Biden) and I don't see much of a reason for that other than her gender and race. So, can an assertive career woman potentially trigger some feelings of dislike in some? Yes. But honestly, Clinton's attitude made it FAR WORSE than it would be otherwise.
But..the whole..."Look at me I'm a woman" followed by accusing everyone who doesnt like her of being a sexist kinda has....shall we say, "nice guy" vibes. Ya know the whole trope of the undateable guy who goes on about how undateable he is and then goes on about how he doesnt understand why he isn't getting anywhere because "he's a nice guy"? And you know how a certain segment of women pick up on those vibes and see them as big red flags that make them less likeable, leading to the exact same problem they're complaining about?
Yeah. That's how I view "sexism" against hillary. The primary reason why people dont like Hillary in relation to her womanhood is that she and her supporters won't stop bringing it up or accusing everyone else of being sexist. Clinton's campaign had this vibe of not being able to fail, only to be failed by the American voter. And the 2016 democrats literally did have obnoxious "nice guy" vibes with their attitudes toward the voting population. Which decreased their likeability, which increased prejudice (much of which was justified in this case, keep in mind not all prejudice comes down to some sort of ism) toward her and her campaign.
As far as social progress. While 2016 does represent some backlash vs the obama years, I'm of the opinion that it didnt really have to happen. Elections are won with enthusiasm and candidate likeability. And clinton leaned into every stereotype that had built up against her over the decades in ways that made her look entitled to the presidency and "playing the woman card" incessantly, while trump tapped into the anti politically correct streak that exists in American culture. The fact is, hillary turned people off, while Trump tapped into something that resonated.
Sounds like a perception issue. She had pretty solid policies on most issues and talked about them extensively.
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This is your own bias and probably related to the news you were into at the time. She was a policy wonk and had a ton of great policy ideas, and spoke on them at length.
Of course, that's not what people care about, they were more interested in some dumb email scandal and listening to Trump rant and insult people like a child.
One thing I always thought was funny is people being like "Hillary doesn't care about the unemployed factory and coal workers, she's not doing anything for them!" when she actually had a pretty extensive plan that would provide more funding for such people, education plans to get them back into the workforce, job training, etc.
Okay, at this point, I feel like I should jump in here. While she had a website full of policies, they didn't resonate.
As you guys can tell, I'm a policy wonk too. But Clinton's policies? Eeek. I actually looked over a few relevant policies to my own interests again and yeah...I kinda looked at them like bland oatmeal that I just threw back up.
Like...she had a policy on expanding the ACA so that maybe one day, we might have a public option. I admit in 2016 I was pretty dogmatically single payer, but even now, with me being pro public option, her plan was weak sauce. The fact is, I've seen enough of the ACA to know that that approach isn't working, and the public option can either be good or bad by implementation. If her idea of public option was so plan you could purchase on exchanges, that's bad, that sucks. Meanwhile the medicare extra for all public policy i endorse as a public option is basically single payer light, taking medicare, medicaid, etc., consolidating them into one comprehensive plan, and then giving that to everyone who wants it, often auto enrolling uninsured people into them. It would have the same effect as single payer almost, for a fraction of the cost.
Nothing about Clinton's plan read like that. A public option wasn't even guaranteed.
Her free college/student debt forgiveness plan wasnt much better. On free college she means tested her plan to only include people making under $125k, and IIRC she originally had work requirements on it, forcing some weirdo forced service plan on people in exchange for "free college" because nothing can truly be "free" in this world and she had to appeal to the weirdo right wingers with work fetishes. And her student debt forgiveness plan was mostly tweaking IBR, which was something we already had and has been tweaked and retweaked for years. She didn't even talk about getting rid of the tax bomb when the loans are eventually forgiven.
And workforce training and crap? Let's go back to the fundamentals of the war on normal people here, that stuff NEVER WORKS. It's just meaningless politician speak. It's basically "if you're on unemployment you're forced to attend seminars at careerlink in order to make yourself more employable" and bullcrap like that.
My original "new new deal" in comparison was simple. UBI, single payer, free college/student debt forgiveness. I admit I've expanded it in some ways since, I've moderated it in others since (mainly due to pragmatic concerns), and I've largely tweaked it to stay relevant through the times, but here's the thing. Her ideas didn't resonate. They were the same old weirdo technocratic incremental fixes that didn't actually do anything. And most people just werent interested. Say what you want about Bernie, but he offered more comprehensive policies that would've actually attempted to fix the problems. Hillary's platform and policies amounted to a whole lot of nothing. They were typical third way nonsense that kinda sorta addresses the problems in an overly complicated way but doesn't actually do much in solving them. They're more political theater than anything.
The worst thing was she actually privately considered running on UBI but decided not to. So instead she leaned into jobism and crappy solutions and lost.
It's a shame. All she needed to do to get me to vote for her was whatever UBI program she was thinking of.
Yeah she really doubled down on accusing her opponents of sexism. It was the Bernie-bros, and before that the Obama-boys. Making people out to be bigots for not supporting you really doesn't help your campaign.
Yes, keep in mind what I said about the "nice guy" thing. She really had a habit of alienating anyone who already didn't actually like her.
Second top level comment:
Her losing was a freak occurrence that could have been mitigated had she spent more attention in places like Michigan and Wisconsin. She was up against a man who violated all the norms and pandered to peoples' basest instincts, in a way that was frightening and dangerous for our nation.
I don't fault her at all for calling the racist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc, Trump supporters a basket of deplorables. They are. Clearly. I do fault her for saying they represented 50% of Trump's supporters, even if it was true. When she said that she made it too easy for people who believe "they are the least racist person out there" and people "without a racist bone in their body" to say "hey, she's calling ME racist."
She should have just said some Trump supporters are clearly drawn to him because of the racism, and those racist people are deplorable.
Her campaign was fine. It's hard to go up against someone who has Russia hacking and releasing your email.*
"She was up against A MAN"....I mean....can these feminists STFU? No one likes these people. All they do is alienate and turn people off. They're the literal female equivalent of "nice guys".
Also, calling your opponents' supporters bigots IS a bad look. I don't deny that some of those "deplorables" actually existed. And the number is even bigger now. Because her tactics were so offputting they ultimately ended up making trump's support stronger and driving them into that alt right bubble.
Quite frankly, Clinton was just very alienating and offputting and her campaign had something bad to say about any group of people that didnt actually like her.
And this person isn't really sorry. This poster has some really bad comments further down in this thread I'll address later, but yeah.
As far as russia releasing her email. I can't say that didn't hurt, but the dems overestimate how much it hurt her. Most people who were swayed by that already had reasons to hate her. All it did was give us further proof.
And of course, responses to this one:
She spent more on campaign events and had more staffers than Obama did.
I mean, having staffers doesn't mean much. You can have the best marketing team in the world but if youre selling something no one actually wants then that's not gonna matter.
It's far more likely they did find a lot that was interesting but kept it as blackmail material. It would explain why the party suddenly became pro-Russia.
This is in reference to RNC emails. I could believe this.
She didn't campaign in Wisconsin
Hillary Clinton’s failure to visit the key battleground state of Wisconsin in 2016 has become a popular metaphor for the alleged strategic inadequacies of her presidential campaign.
She thought it was safe. That was a mistake.
Yeah. I mean, her campaign did, generally speaking, neglect the rust belt, the region of the country that was doing poorly under neoliberalism and that didn't react well to her mediocre policies that barely did anything.
Third top level response:
Maybe a 6 or 7 out of 10. I'm not going to say she was perfect but a lot of her loss was outside her control. Obviously we have the FBI investigation coming at the worst possible time but we also have an entire country doing whatever they could to make sure she loses, a heated primary that left people so butthurt over their guy losing that they would abandon all logic and refuse to support her even if it meant supporting the guy actively working against their interests.
Many people are going to cry about her "lack of campaigning" in the swing states but that's complete bullshit. She had more staffers than Obama and spent more on campaign events than him in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Wisconsin was the only state she could have done better in but the data she had gave her the impression she was already winning that state and she decided to relocate her resources accordingly.
With such razor-thin margins taking away any 1 of the things going against her and she would be president.
I mean, I'm not going to deny that there were tons of factors and given the margins, anything could've pushed it back the other way. But honestly, it never should've come to this, and wouldn't have, if the democratic party was not selling a turd.
The democratic party in 2016 decided to kow tow to the ambitions of one woman who felt entitled to the presidency, and from there, everything was a post hoc rationalization of her campaign. Her entire marketing pitch was basically trying to sell something to the american people that most of them had no interest in.
I really feel like this needs to be talked about more. Seriously, who wanted her? Most of her campaign seemed to be about trying to bully and corral a voter base that didn't like her into voting for her anyway. And then people wonder why she lost. Yes, I'm not saying the FBI investigation, russia, what have you, played a role. But even if her strategy worked, it shows a significant weakness in the democratic party. There is an enthusiasm problem. Again, enthusiasm wins elections. One of the reasons Biden is struggling right now is because people arent enthusiastic for him.
Because the dems repeated the strategy they did in 2016 with Biden and because they were able to shift the national environment 2.5 points to the left, Biden won. That's really all that made the difference between 2016 and 2020. Around 2.5 points nationally. 2% or so of the popular vote vs 4.5%. And those 2.5 points were enough to shift michigan, wisconsin, and PA back to team blue, as well as flip arizona and georgia (while losing ground in places like florida, ohio, iowa, etc.).
Also, if sexism exists, that's all that it impacted in the worst case scenario. 2.5 points. That's all it was. And that's if you ignore every other factor like Trump's horrid handling of COVID and issues like the BLM protests, which I would argue mattered a lot more.
Also, more tropes about having staffers in the rust belt. Yeah, but she didn't have a good platform.
As for Bernie bros...as one of them. Again, it was this. Clinton felt entitled to the presidency. Her entire strategy relied on treating her voter base like crap and then forcing them to vote for her. So some people said "no."
I dont endorse voting for trump. I myself didn't vote for trump. If youre gonna not vote for the dems out of principle and you're on the left, PLEASE dont vote for trump. Vote for a third party guy, or stay home. That's all I'm gonna say.
Responses:
I've thought a little bit about BernieBros, and how nonsensical it was for supporters of one of the kindest and most just candidates to turn around and vote for one of the meanest and shittiest.
In the end I think they were just populists looking for an outsider to shake things up, and maybe make their shitty lives a little better by sticking it to someone else. I don't think they supported Bernie because of the moral high ground. They were just shellfish populists. Through that lens 2016 makes more sense to me.
Look, I don't like Trump, but I understand the guy's appeal. He offered people something, didn't. Hope. And while he was a blowhard with no real solutions I kinda get why, in 2016, some people would just vote for him out of spite.
And yes, populists wanted an outsider to shake things up and make their lives better. You can either offer policy that actually does that, like Bernie did, or a lot of people are going to fall for blind populism. And we got blind populism.
And as for selfish. YES. MOST PEOPLE ARE.
Like, this is something that's a very rude awakening for a lot of people on the left, BUT THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ARE SELFISH. And honestly, there's nothing wrong with it. Seriously a lot of the left loves to act all high and mighty about empathy and caring for others, but you guys just look like self righteous blowhards. People want solutions to make their lives better. And you cant tell people to vote for democrats because minorities and gay people and stuff and privilege shaming them.
I admit it, I'm selfish. But so is most of the country.
COPE.
Seriously, the democrats need to get their heads out of their you know wheres on this one. And btw, I really feel like this is why the democrats because the loser party in the past generation. The lesson of reagan was one that the country will NOT do the right thing, they'll do the easy thing. I think we are relearning that with 2016 and the response to covid. Most people dont wanna be told to sacrifice or give up on something for the sake of the collective. SO you can either attempt to bridge collective and individual interests like I've been trying to do, or you can just remain a self righteous blow hard.
Honestly, the democrats have a problem with performative morality. The SJW mindset is cancer on the left, and I'm tired of pretending it isn't. Most people dont care. That stuff isn't popular, and yes, a lot of people will vote against you out of spite rather than advancing your interests. Because they dont care, and your self righteous moralizing makes you UNLIKEABLE.
The reason Bernie was popular among some independents, and on the right, and the ex right like me, is because a lot of us have more egoist perspectives. We vote for our self interests regardless of what they are. And when the left fails to make a case for how their ideas and policies actually help them...people vote for republicans. It's literally a tale as old as time. It's been this way since the Nixon years. Remember Robert Putnam and how we abandoned collectivism in favor of individualism? Yeah. You can either meet people where they are and push for ideas in ways that resonate, or you can lose.
I don't understand why this is so hard. All I know is the self righteous moralists on the left just push people away.
Originally a Bernie Bro was just a male Bernie voter. It sounds like you're retroactively using it as a pejorative to mean male Bernie voters that voted for Trump.
It's better to think of Bernie -> Trump voters as a separate thing. Half of them were Republicans and Independents.
Of course, SJWs are literally as annoying as zubats so...I can see why it happened.
Really....2016 put into motion this cursed SJW vs alt right spectrum of politics and it's terrifying. Because a lot of people when placed in that environment will literally vote for fascists before they vote for SJWs. Because fascists are likeable and SJWs aren't.
I don't know if there's all that many people that supported Bernie and then voted for Trump. Maybe some. Might be more narrative than anything. I think what did happen is a lot of Bernie supporters stayed home. You could save a stay-at-home is the same as a vote for Trump, and fair enough. But that's different than actually going out and voting for Trump. I could be wrong. Maybe there were a sizable number of people that did that but seems like it would be quite a mental stretch to go from one to the other at least in a short period of time.
But yeah. let's just say my parents who voted 2012 for Obama liked Bernie but went Trump over Hillary. Of course my parents are actual moderates/independents. They were republicans but they shifted left over the course of the great recession and the obama years, and clinton shifted them back right. Of course trump shifted them left again and now they're both pro biden.Ya know, part of that 2.5% that swung between 2016 and 2020.
I think it’s not really talked about that she practically lived in Pennsylvania during the final month, she needed it, and she still lost it. If she had kept Wisconsin she still would have failed. The narrative doesn’t make sense.
The GOP and their talking heads on radio, TV and the internet had been preparing for a Hilary run since before Bill left the white house.
There was a whole generation of conservative voters who had grown up hearing Hilary was the devil in talking points spread by Limbaugh, Fox and Breitbart to everyone around them as constant background noise from as early as they were able to start having political thoughts.
I don't think a single presidential candidate has had the other side campaigning against them for so long, with such dedication. Forget the email leaks and anything that happened in the immediate 2016 run. No analysis of her campaign is complete without acknowledging the mountain of oppositional effort built up over so many years.
I think the fatal flaw in her campaign was that she, like most of the rest of us, underestimated Trump's appeal. There was too much playing-it-safe, too much risk aversion. She was playing a hand as if she was up fifteen points when it reality it was neck-and-neck.
It wasn’t good in hindsight but it’s also really hard to win three straight presidencies. Nothing is ever perfect and imperfections plus mistakes will pile up, inevitably being blamed on the party in power. I think she would’ve beat him handly if we had been coming off two straight gop terms
And then party A wins the house. Then party B gets reelected. And party A wins the house and senate. And party A wins the presidency.
And as someone who was a republican in 2008, I'm going to be honest. I feel like hillary had a lot of john mccain vibes. Honestly, the country knows what it wants, the voters know what they want, and often times when you get one party in office for long enough, people get tired of them. And people reached that level with the GOP in 2008. And in 2016, the dems did too. In order for the dems to win, they needed to adapt their strategy. But they decided to just run on a third obama term no one actually wanted.
As such, democratic enthusiasm was depressed, and republican enthusiasm was up.
Arrogance.
She acted like the throne belonged to her and she was the rightful heir, forgetting that she had to earn the votes of a majority of the electors (not just the voters).
She'd been in politics for 50 years, and still didn't get this basic concept of how presidents are elected.
Ya know the further down we get, the more the takes make sense. The first few were inflammatory. People were sexist, people were selfish. Clinton was actually great, they just didn't realize it. Blah blah blah. Ya know, all the crap that any normie outside of these echo chambers can be like BUT THATS WHY SHE LOST!
Now we're seeing the real reasons. third term curse, and now arrogance. She did. She acted entitled. She was the answer to a question no one asked and her campaign was mostly marketing analysts trying to figure out how to sell something to the american people that no one wanted. And it just didn't work.
It looked to me like her whole campaign was Trump is bad so vote for me. I don't recall her talking much about policy positions or definitely not offering any real vision for the country, and that's what usually wins elections. Morning in America, yes we can, hope and change, make America great again. Clinton really lacked all that. I caucused and supported Sanders and also was kind of mad cuz I felt they threw him under the bus and he should have had the nomination. But, Clinton not only pretty much ran on Trump is bad, but also, she had this very entitled attitude like how dare you not vote for me. She even got to the point of demanding why people aren't going to the polls to vote for her with a terrible pokémon joke. She also really seemed to pander and just seemed so un genuine. The opposite of Bill who's real strength was his seeming genuine-ness and sincerity.
She was also an extreme insider when people wanted an outsider. That isn't really her fault and I don't know if you can blame her campaign or her campaigning, but it was a big detraction for her so maybe she could have worked to counter that somehow instead of running on I'm next in line in this machine.
Oh that was another part of it probably. I think she kind of positioned herself as Obama's successor when she was nothing like Obama. Maybe that's part of lacking any real vision or unique essence that she offered.
You can't forget how much being an older woman with baggage harmed her and how much the Russian hacking and misinformation campaign along with comey's announcement days before that suppressed turnout.
I don't remember where I heard this (I feel like it might have been The Majority Report) but in the days leading up to the 2020 election, I remember hearing an interview with a staffer who worked on both of Bernie's campaigns.
He said that after the primary, Bernie's people contacted Hillary's people and asked what they could do to help with the general election, and Hillary's people basically told them to fuck off.
Whereas when they reached out to Biden's people after the 2020 primary, Biden's campaign was more than willing to work with them, and accept all the help they could get.
I'm not saying that alone was a deciding factor, but in hindsight it seems pretty arrogant.
This is a micro chasm of why she lost. Treated the progressives like complete shit and then got mad at them when they didn’t fall in line. She acted entitled from the start and the DNC enabled her to act entitled to the presidency throughout the primary.
As someone who worked with the Democratic party in Tennessee at the time, I think today's progressives forget how fucking nasty Sanders supporters were between March and June of 2016. The longer the primary went, the worse it got.
I won't excuse away Clinton campaign members for acting rashly when feelers were put out, but on a human level if after months of having you and your candidate trashed by a competitor's supporters on a professional and personal level it is understandable you may not want to work with people you perceived as being part of that.
I agree that her campaign was one of the worst I've ever seen, and the timing for it was bad. Progressive felt robbed of Bernie not being the nominee, and the Clinton campaign did very little to convinced frustrated moderates that she wasn't just another bought out bureaucrat, which they were tired of. The Clinton's also had considerable political baggage that was easy to use against them during a campaign, and she was pretty terrible in the debates.
And those two things werent unrelated. Because clinton was both too moderate and too bureaucratic. My ideas are both further left, and also far less bureaucratic.
Clinton is a centrist technocrat in an era where no one wanted that.
In one sentence: snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Not wrong.
Hillary Clinton greatly outperformed the average democrat on the ballot, it was just a really bad year to be a democrat. Things were doing well and people didn’t need help, so they picked a Republican because they thought it was a free and opportune time to attack immigrants for basically no fucking reason.
I learned a lot from 2016, not from the Hillary campaign but the trump one.
Second, the reason the anti immigrant sentiment stuck was because of the "dey tuk r jerbs" narrative. The conservative, nationalist approach to the economic plight of workers in the rust belt was:
1) all your jobs have gone to mexico and china
There was going to be a populist revolt against neoliberalism. It was either going to come from the right or the left. The left response was basically bernie sanders, the right response was donald trump.
it's like "hey we can either have FDR or people are going to fall for hitler." And instead of choosing FDR, the country chose mango mussolini.
She played pretty well to the party establishment, but the zeitgeist of the time was overwhelmingly anti-establishment. It was relatively well assumed that Obama would win a second term, so the delayed frustrations with Washington from the recession, the unifying moment of Occupy Wall Street, and probably dozens of other smaller events all came to bear in the 2016 election more than they did in 2012. It certainly didn't help that she made statements about having "private and public positions," or doing fundraisers with well-heeled megadonors instead of a more grassroots-oriented strategy, or running a platform that didn't meaningfully address actual working-class issues. When the superdelegates were committed to enforcing the party's chosen candidate instead of the candidate who spoke the language of the time, the conclusion was written: the guy who conned his way into presenting as an anti-establishment candidate was going to win.
I would mostly say their campaign did not take Trump seriously enough as a threat. But I think it didn’t help that she had too much baggage attached to her from the likes of Bill Clinton and in general how much boomers were sick and tired of the Clintons.
Again, her entire campaign was the answer to a question no one asked, and her whole strategy was trying to wrestle the voters into supporting her, even elevating distasteful right wing candidates to make that bitter pill of hillary clinton for president easier to swallow.
I don't think her campaign was actually that bad, but I do think it is a microcosm of how the left thinks of campaigns and propaganda and how they kind of suck at it.
The gist of my view is that the left has the same facts as the right in terms of knowing that voters aren't that smart, educated, or informed, but the right accepts that as the reality and leans into it, using persuasive messages that will work on the voters we have. The left believes that part of maintaining the moral high ground means treating voters as if they are smart and reasonable.
A concrete example of that is that HRC's opponents attacked her for being touchy feely and not having concrete plans. The campaign's response was to publish her "plan" for every single thing on her website, even though the majority of her plans were to form a committee to study the problem.
But this is aspirational and ignores the underlying reality: voters aren't smart or reasonable. Despite claiming to, most of them do not understand or even care about policy. They're voting based on vibe, image, likeability, things like that. There was never any hope that people would read her "plans" on her website or go to links posted by her followers.
The original criticisms were substanceless, so it was wrong to treat them as if they had substance. The source of people's feelings that she had no rational plans was misogyny, and that was probably not fixable. But if I were on HRC's campaign staff, I would have been focus group testing her likability, not trying to post plans to prove people wrong for feeling she had no plans.
I think it was sabotaged in equal parts of Russian troll farms on Social Media and dumbass, gullible people who unquestioningly believe everything they see on social media.
She was the most qualified candidate in that election cycle.
She only lost because we have an antiquated system that awards electoral votes based on who wins a state, not who wins the actual votes that were cast by the population nationwide.
She had 48.2% of the nationwide vote to Trump's 46.1%, she had 2.8 million more votes than he did but still lost because of our antiquated system.
I'm not sure you can blame her campaign for losing in an antiquated system that allows someone to win the vote but still lose the election.
Just a reminder, FDR actually had a lot of rural support. And also, clinton, compared to obama, did particularly poorly with them, expanding whatever margins that the republicans normally have.
The "basket of deplorables" comment was a massive mistake.
I honestly think that if she didn't make that comment, then she could have won.
Again, this is why im just in batten down the hatches and ensure trump doesnt win again mode. I think this upcoming election and the trends that follow will be debated in academia and political science circles for decades. Just like the reagan revolution was and to some extent still is.
Just...whatever you take away from this: hillary clinton was a turd, she alienated voters on a mass scale, and what she did should never be repeated. And the democrats need to learn from that and stop repeating the mistakes. It's amazing how so many people from 2016 still blame the voters and act like clinton was great and blah blah blah. No she wasnt. She was a turd, and no one liked her. Let's never forget that.
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