Getting Over Hillary Democrats need to comprehend the Electoral College. James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/getting-over-hillary-1492547416
Among the more remarkable aspects of Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016 is that a political rookie seemed to have a better grasp of the rules of the election than his highly experienced opponent. Specifically, Mr. Trump’s message to voters was premised on the idea that the Electoral College would decide the winner. More than any candidate in recent memory, he offered an explicit pitch to the Midwestern voters he needed to secure an electoral win, while making almost no effort to build a constituency in states he was likely to lose. The losing side in 2016 is still struggling to come to grips with this fact, as it explores various reasons to explain away its failure.
“Why Do Democrats Feel Sorry for Hillary Clinton ?” is the headline on a recent Andrew Sullivan column for New York magazine that blames Mrs. Clinton for her 2016 loss. Mr. Sullivan writes that he’s amazed by the hold that the Clinton family “still has on the Democratic Party — and on liberals in general.”
It might seem obvious to blame a loss on the loser, but Mr. Sullivan observes:
…everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’ — those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department — was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was. And this, of course, is how Clinton sees it as well: She wasn’t responsible for her own campaign — her staffers were.
This column has heard other explanations for Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, including fake news and the WikiLeaks publication of Clinton adviser John Podesta’s private emails. But Mr. Sullivan is urging Democrats to stop making excuses:
Let us review the facts: Clinton had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment… the Clintons so intimidated other potential candidates and donors, she had the nomination all but wrapped up before she even started. And yet she was so bad a candidate, she still only managed to squeak through in the primaries against an elderly, stopped-clock socialist who wasn’t even in her party, and who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union… She had the extra allure of possibly breaking a glass ceiling that — with any other female candidate — would have been as inspiring as the election of the first black president. In the general election, she was running against a malevolent buffoon with no political experience, with a deeply divided party behind him, and whose negatives were stratospheric. She outspent him by almost two-to-one… And yet she still managed to lose! CONTINUE AT SITE
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