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Again, Republicans did this. Don't blame this on Hillary (hint: she won the popular vote). Don't blame this on Democrats. Accept responsibility. As for likable

Again, Republicans did this. Don't blame this on Hillary (hint: she won the popular vote). Don't blame this on Democrats. Accept responsibility. As for likable, Hillary has been the most admired woman in America, 14 years straight. Trump ran the most negative fact free campaign ever to overcome her likability.

jpitz 10y ago
Accepting responsibility, to me, means that the Dems do own part of this.
fjdjcjncnd 10y ago
Because nothing underscores likeability quite like subverting the primary election and hiring an army of internet sockpuppets to shift public opinion in your favor. This is going to happen again in 2020 unless the DNC realizes what they've done. Sanders would have handily won this election and they havr nobody to blame but themselves.
PeanutNore 10y ago
You keep repeating this. It doesn't seem to make sense to me. I voted for Clinton, and I'm a registered Democrat who voted for Sanders in the primary. I'm not sure what we're being asked to take responsibility for here. I feel that my party should take some responsibilty for nominating a candidate who could not prevail against such an unpopular and widely disliked opponent.
fjdjcjcjnx 10y ago
Because nothing underscores likeability quite like subverting the primary election and hiring an army of internet sockpuppets to shift public opinion in your favor. This is going to happen again in 2020 unless the DNC realizes what they've done. Sanders would have handily won this election and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
jackmodern 10y ago
Disagree here completely, DNC rigged the primary for HRC and gave away the independent vote with it. This was a very forseeable albeit depressing outcome.
- CalChris 10y ago
  Yes, the DNC leaned on the scales which really meant fundraising. If you look at Bernie's fundraising, it was about individual small donations. He did well there, well enough. The DNC had control of PAC money and lists. This was a contributing factor but Democrats voted. If Democratic voters are as gullible as you're making us out to be then we deserved to lose. Democrats are a center left party. Bernie is progressive which is a little further left. Democrats voted.
  - jackmodern 10y ago
    Well I am not really calling out the fund raising. I am calling out: 1) The super delegate system that gave HRC a 500 delegate lead before the primaries started. (Watched millions of redditors turn on the DNC over this) 2) The media picking a horse before the primary started, and making it so painfully obvious that it was a slap to the face for Bernie supporters, this made it really challenging to take the media seriously on their Trump bashing (because they did it to Bernie too) 3) Day of primary voter manipulation and questionable practices (illegal) by the Clintons and their support teams. That said I still find the idea of looking at Trump for the next 4 years as president really depressing, but hopefully this teaches the democrats a lesson, choose the impassioned base over the candidate who thinks it's their turn.
    - CalChris 10y ago
      The superdelegate system was put in place in the 70s. Republicans also have superdelegates although they function differently. Superdelegates didn't tip the primary popular vote which Hillary won 16,914,722 to 13,206,428. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Pa... The media is not the DNC. Day of primary doesn't add up to 3.7 million votes. I voted for Bernie and I'm damn proud of that vote.
dhagz 10y ago
However, in light of the DNC email leaks, the Democrat Party's elite seemed to sandbag Bernie, who many believe (citing polls from before the primary) would have given Trump a run for his money. And honestly, this was the Democrats' election to lose, and they did nothing to win it. So I will blame them. I will blame them for going with a candidate that is firmly "establishment" when the general consensus among the public is that the "establishment" has overstayed their welcome. I will blame them for expecting the appeal of having "the first X president" to work the same as it did for Obama.
- JadeNB 10y ago
  > many believe (citing polls from before the primary) would have given Trump a run for his money. Surely, after last night, citing polls is the least convincing way to argue about hypothetical election outcomes.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    Trump won not only on a platform that was largely anti-globalization but also on the public mistrust of his opponent. Objectively, the electorate trust and like Sanders far more than Clinton and he has spent his career trying to make progress on the same issues that gave Trump the presidency. This election was about economic issues from the start and despite how demonized Trump was, Clinton didn't stand a chance because her campaign was orthogonal to what huge swaths of the population cared about. I think the polls were so off this election cycle because Sanders lost the primary. Without him, Democrats lost their only chance to connect with voters that that are liberal but don't always vote based on social issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc (which are, along with minorities and unions, the bread and butter of the Democratic party). Obviously this years polling was a disaster but Sanders' hypothetical matchup polls are by far the weakest argument for why he should have been the nominee.
- StillBored 10y ago
  A lot of people like to talk about his race, but I don't think it really mattered a lot. Obama won, not because he was black and people wanted to vote for that. Obama won because we had just had 8 years of Bush, the economy was in the tank, and he was young and charismatic. The democratic nominee always had an uphill battle against a base of R's motivated for "Change", for the same reason that the party in power tends to fall behind during the midterms.
fjdndnnc 10y ago
Because nothing underscores likeability quite like subverting the primary election and hiring an army of internet sockpuppets to shift public opinion in your favor. This is going to happen again in 2020 unless the DNC realizes what they've done. Sanders would have handily won this election and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
netfire 10y ago
This is just not true. Both Trump and Clinton had some of the most unfavorable ratings of a presidential candidate for a major party in recent history.
- CalChris 10y ago
  You are correct that favorables of both candidates were low. But when you run a negative campaign, and Trump ran the most negative campaign ever, you drag your own ratings down as well. It was his only chance.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  Exactly, they're both unlikeable, and if either party had nominated someone who was likeable, they probably would've crushed, rather than the dead heat we got in the popular vote.
  - CalChris 10y ago
    No. Clinton Most Admired Woman for Record 20th Time: http://www.gallup.com/poll/187922/clinton-admired-woman-record-20th-time.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/187922/clinton-admired-woman-reco...
    - TulliusCicero 10y ago
      That only counts positives, so it's biased towards whoever is most famous, even if they're controversial. Take a look at this instead: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/clinton_favorableunfavorable-1131.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/clinton_favora...
      - CalChris 10y ago
        Yes, when Trump ran his negative campaign, Hillary's favorables declined. Cause and effect. In fact, using your own cite, if you run that back to 2015 and before and she has net favorables. The only thing you've shown is that negative advertising works.
geofft 10y ago
Yup. Remember Texts From Hillary? Back when we all thought she was cool and hip? There was an orchestrated effort to portray Hillary as un-likeable and an out-of-touch elite. I remember this starting roughly with the Benghazi hearings, which is I think when it seemed like she was the likely Democratic candidate and politically worth attacking personally. There was also an orchestrated phenomenon to portray many of the DNC backers of Hillary as unlikeable and an out-of-touch elite, which I think was quite legitimate, but rubbed off on the candidate herself. (And, I suspect, there was an un-orchestrated phenomenon where Hillary happened to be less likeable than the very likeable Bernie. Which isn't to say that Hillary is un-likeable in any absolute sense.)
ohitsdom 10y ago
> Hillary has been the most admired woman in America, 14 years straight Take a poll on Michelle Obama vs Hillary.
mikeash 10y ago
Most admired woman in America, winning that honor with a whopping 13% of respondents. She got 60 million people to vote for her. It's not a surprise that some people liked her. The problem is that many people hated her. Winning that title doesn't disprove that in any way.
- CalChris 10y ago
  The people who hated her were told to hate her. Again and again. And again. If you told them her policies and put an R after her name, they'd celebrate Hillary as an American Maggie Thatcher. Dragging her down into the ditch was the only thing Trump could do. He couldn't run on his business record (terrible) or personal character (worthless). He had only one path and that was to go negative against someone he'd praised over and over. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/trump-files-many-times-donald-sang-praises-hillary-clinton http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/trump-files-many... And it worked for him.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    That's true, but that doesn't mean nominating her was a good choice. It may be the fault of Republicans that she's so hated, but it's the fault of the Democrats that they nominated someone so hated.
    - CalChris 10y ago
      No, she wasn't so hated. In fact, she had net favorables midway through 2015. All you saw was a gutter campaign because really, Trump and the Republicans didn't have anything else to run on. Business record? Please. Personal character? Experience? http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/clinton_favorableunfavorable-1131.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/clinton_favora...
      - mikeash 10y ago
        And we can see how reliable political polling is.... In any case, it doesn't matter if >50% of people see her favorably if they don't see her favorably enough to vote for her, and if the other side sees her unfavorably enough to vote against her. I don't think that gutter campaign would have worked against someone who the Republicans hadn't spent two decades preparing for.
TulliusCicero 10y ago
Why are you assuming I'm a Republican? I'm not registered with any party, and I voted for Hillary. But in the primary, I voted for (and donated to) Bernie. Sad that he lost.
weberc2 10y ago
The DNC did sabotage Sanders' nomination and (apparently) support Trump for the Republican nomination. Besides that, the American Left has been absolutely ruthless in dismissing and demonizing poor, white, and Christian people. I definitely think there is plenty of blame to go around.
rudolf0 10y ago
>As for likable, Hillary has been the most admired woman in America, 14 years straight. Trump ran the most negative fact free campaign ever to overcome her likability. I seem to recall a great amount of distaste to her, even coming from other Democrats (including Obama's and Biden's campaigns), in the 2008 election. Most liberals I knew disliked or even detested Hillary back then, and now detest her more now. I could think of hundreds more American women who deserve the title "most admired".
- CalChris 10y ago
  Melania Trump won't be one of them.
  - rudolf0 10y ago
    Well, yes. But what's your point? Her being bad doesn't make Hillary good.

jpitz 10y ago

Accepting responsibility, to me, means that the Dems do own part of this.

fjdjcjncnd 10y ago

Because nothing underscores likeability quite like subverting the primary election and hiring an army of internet sockpuppets to shift public opinion in your favor. This is going to happen again in 2020 unless the DNC realizes what they've done. Sanders would have handily won this election and they havr nobody to blame but themselves.

PeanutNore 10y ago

You keep repeating this. It doesn't seem to make sense to me. I voted for Clinton, and I'm a registered Democrat who voted for Sanders in the primary. I'm not sure what we're being asked to take responsibility for here. I feel that my party should take some responsibilty for nominating a candidate who could not prevail against such an unpopular and widely disliked opponent.

fjdjcjcjnx 10y ago

jackmodern 10y ago

Disagree here completely, DNC rigged the primary for HRC and gave away the independent vote with it. This was a very forseeable albeit depressing outcome.

CalChris 10y ago
Yes, the DNC leaned on the scales which really meant fundraising. If you look at Bernie's fundraising, it was about individual small donations. He did well there, well enough. The DNC had control of PAC money and lists. This was a contributing factor but Democrats voted. If Democratic voters are as gullible as you're making us out to be then we deserved to lose. Democrats are a center left party. Bernie is progressive which is a little further left. Democrats voted.
- jackmodern 10y ago
  Well I am not really calling out the fund raising. I am calling out: 1) The super delegate system that gave HRC a 500 delegate lead before the primaries started. (Watched millions of redditors turn on the DNC over this) 2) The media picking a horse before the primary started, and making it so painfully obvious that it was a slap to the face for Bernie supporters, this made it really challenging to take the media seriously on their Trump bashing (because they did it to Bernie too) 3) Day of primary voter manipulation and questionable practices (illegal) by the Clintons and their support teams. That said I still find the idea of looking at Trump for the next 4 years as president really depressing, but hopefully this teaches the democrats a lesson, choose the impassioned base over the candidate who thinks it's their turn.
  - CalChris 10y ago
    The superdelegate system was put in place in the 70s. Republicans also have superdelegates although they function differently. Superdelegates didn't tip the primary popular vote which Hillary won 16,914,722 to 13,206,428. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Pa... The media is not the DNC. Day of primary doesn't add up to 3.7 million votes. I voted for Bernie and I'm damn proud of that vote.

dhagz 10y ago

However, in light of the DNC email leaks, the Democrat Party's elite seemed to sandbag Bernie, who many believe (citing polls from before the primary) would have given Trump a run for his money. And honestly, this was the Democrats' election to lose, and they did nothing to win it. So I will blame them. I will blame them for going with a candidate that is firmly "establishment" when the general consensus among the public is that the "establishment" has overstayed their welcome. I will blame them for expecting the appeal of having "the first X president" to work the same as it did for Obama.

JadeNB 10y ago
> many believe (citing polls from before the primary) would have given Trump a run for his money. Surely, after last night, citing polls is the least convincing way to argue about hypothetical election outcomes.
- akiselev 10y ago
  Trump won not only on a platform that was largely anti-globalization but also on the public mistrust of his opponent. Objectively, the electorate trust and like Sanders far more than Clinton and he has spent his career trying to make progress on the same issues that gave Trump the presidency. This election was about economic issues from the start and despite how demonized Trump was, Clinton didn't stand a chance because her campaign was orthogonal to what huge swaths of the population cared about. I think the polls were so off this election cycle because Sanders lost the primary. Without him, Democrats lost their only chance to connect with voters that that are liberal but don't always vote based on social issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc (which are, along with minorities and unions, the bread and butter of the Democratic party). Obviously this years polling was a disaster but Sanders' hypothetical matchup polls are by far the weakest argument for why he should have been the nominee.
StillBored 10y ago
A lot of people like to talk about his race, but I don't think it really mattered a lot. Obama won, not because he was black and people wanted to vote for that. Obama won because we had just had 8 years of Bush, the economy was in the tank, and he was young and charismatic. The democratic nominee always had an uphill battle against a base of R's motivated for "Change", for the same reason that the party in power tends to fall behind during the midterms.

fjdndnnc 10y ago

netfire 10y ago

This is just not true. Both Trump and Clinton had some of the most unfavorable ratings of a presidential candidate for a major party in recent history.

CalChris 10y ago
You are correct that favorables of both candidates were low. But when you run a negative campaign, and Trump ran the most negative campaign ever, you drag your own ratings down as well. It was his only chance.
TulliusCicero 10y ago
Exactly, they're both unlikeable, and if either party had nominated someone who was likeable, they probably would've crushed, rather than the dead heat we got in the popular vote.
- CalChris 10y ago
  No. Clinton Most Admired Woman for Record 20th Time: http://www.gallup.com/poll/187922/clinton-admired-woman-record-20th-time.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/187922/clinton-admired-woman-reco...
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    That only counts positives, so it's biased towards whoever is most famous, even if they're controversial. Take a look at this instead: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/clinton_favorableunfavorable-1131.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/clinton_favora...
    - CalChris 10y ago
      Yes, when Trump ran his negative campaign, Hillary's favorables declined. Cause and effect. In fact, using your own cite, if you run that back to 2015 and before and she has net favorables. The only thing you've shown is that negative advertising works.

geofft 10y ago

Yup. Remember Texts From Hillary? Back when we all thought she was cool and hip? There was an orchestrated effort to portray Hillary as un-likeable and an out-of-touch elite. I remember this starting roughly with the Benghazi hearings, which is I think when it seemed like she was the likely Democratic candidate and politically worth attacking personally. There was also an orchestrated phenomenon to portray many of the DNC backers of Hillary as unlikeable and an out-of-touch elite, which I think was quite legitimate, but rubbed off on the candidate herself. (And, I suspect, there was an un-orchestrated phenomenon where Hillary happened to be less likeable than the very likeable Bernie. Which isn't to say that Hillary is un-likeable in any absolute sense.)

ohitsdom 10y ago

> Hillary has been the most admired woman in America, 14 years straight Take a poll on Michelle Obama vs Hillary.

mikeash 10y ago

Most admired woman in America, winning that honor with a whopping 13% of respondents. She got 60 million people to vote for her. It's not a surprise that some people liked her. The problem is that many people hated her. Winning that title doesn't disprove that in any way.

CalChris 10y ago
The people who hated her were told to hate her. Again and again. And again. If you told them her policies and put an R after her name, they'd celebrate Hillary as an American Maggie Thatcher. Dragging her down into the ditch was the only thing Trump could do. He couldn't run on his business record (terrible) or personal character (worthless). He had only one path and that was to go negative against someone he'd praised over and over. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/trump-files-many-times-donald-sang-praises-hillary-clinton http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/trump-files-many... And it worked for him.
- mikeash 10y ago
  That's true, but that doesn't mean nominating her was a good choice. It may be the fault of Republicans that she's so hated, but it's the fault of the Democrats that they nominated someone so hated.
  - CalChris 10y ago
    No, she wasn't so hated. In fact, she had net favorables midway through 2015. All you saw was a gutter campaign because really, Trump and the Republicans didn't have anything else to run on. Business record? Please. Personal character? Experience? http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/clinton_favorableunfavorable-1131.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/clinton_favora...
    - mikeash 10y ago
      And we can see how reliable political polling is.... In any case, it doesn't matter if >50% of people see her favorably if they don't see her favorably enough to vote for her, and if the other side sees her unfavorably enough to vote against her. I don't think that gutter campaign would have worked against someone who the Republicans hadn't spent two decades preparing for.

TulliusCicero 10y ago

Why are you assuming I'm a Republican? I'm not registered with any party, and I voted for Hillary. But in the primary, I voted for (and donated to) Bernie. Sad that he lost.

weberc2 10y ago

The DNC did sabotage Sanders' nomination and (apparently) support Trump for the Republican nomination. Besides that, the American Left has been absolutely ruthless in dismissing and demonizing poor, white, and Christian people. I definitely think there is plenty of blame to go around.

rudolf0 10y ago

>As for likable, Hillary has been the most admired woman in America, 14 years straight. Trump ran the most negative fact free campaign ever to overcome her likability. I seem to recall a great amount of distaste to her, even coming from other Democrats (including Obama's and Biden's campaigns), in the 2008 election. Most liberals I knew disliked or even detested Hillary back then, and now detest her more now. I could think of hundreds more American women who deserve the title "most admired".

CalChris 10y ago
Melania Trump won't be one of them.
- rudolf0 10y ago
  Well, yes. But what's your point? Her being bad doesn't make Hillary good.