Quote:
Originally Posted by Dragar
But look who Al Gore lost to, and look who Hilary lost to. She lost to Donald Trump, who suffered from the very reverse of everything you ascribe as a positive to Hilary: a worse convention, terrible in debates, terrible policies, and a terrible campaign that was surrounded by scandals at every turn.
And she still lost!
I agree with much of what you say, but it's hard to look at that and not wonder what the hell happened here. It seems too easy to write-off her loss to Trump's appeal to racism. Hilary had some unique downsides, and they were maybe more important this election than they would have been in any other.
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"Terrible policies" is assuming a bit much. A number of Trump's policies were popular and helped him do as well as he did.
On a number of issues, he took both positions and the media didn't make him pay a price (this is partly what makes me a little skeptical that a more economically focused ad campaign would've been a winner - Trump might have simply lied even more about his economic plans and the media would have played along). And a number of those were areas where he took quite popular positions, that I would actually say were good: no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, for example. Tax the rich more. Capital gains taxes are too low. Healthcare for everyone, don't let people die in the street, it'll be terrific.
Well, he also said he was open to entitlement cuts (he said it to movement conservatives), Obamacare has to go (with Paul Ryan and McConnell, it was always obvious what that would mean) and as a consistently greedy conman who'd be working with the Congressional GOP, raising taxes on himself was not going to be a thing either.
But there were a lot of people out there who believed it. His anti-trade stance (based on xenophobia, IMO, not concern for workers) was helped by the left, who used trade to attack Clinton and likely furthered the impression that he would be good or better than Clinton on that issue.
And like Kael, this leads me to believe that polarization/tribalism is perhaps the most important factor here. If you can see how terrible his campaign was, and to me it strains credulity that the
only reason she didn't have a landslide was I dunno, Goldman Sachs speeches... My conclusion is that some of those things just didn't matter as much as we think they would.
Note the result in France: tribalism was not put into play in the same way as it is in the US. The center-right lined up behind Macron, and against Le Pen. The right-wing establishment in the US has no such principles. They were behind Trump because he had the R next to his name. Their team followed. The end.