This will be the first in a series of posts looking at why Democrats lost last year's presidential election--an election that many had assumed they were inevitably going to win.
The reason the Democrats lost the election was that Hillary Clinton won the nomination. This, in turn, meant that she did worse than Obama, which was all Trump needed to win. In 87% of counties, she got fewer votes than Obama did four years ago, and she did particularly worse than Obama in heavily Democratic counties. Ultimately, however, the main reason for her defeat was that she did significantly worse than Obama did in Republican-leaning counties, getting only 84% as many votes as Obama did there in 2012. Why did this cost the Democrats this election? I think there are two main, and very broad, reasons.
Before I explain those reasons, however, I should make it clear that the messenger, not the message, was what went wrong here, so long as by "message" you mean defining policy proposals rather than what some members of the party may have said on occasion about Republicans. Some people have been arguing that the Democratic message is too cultural-centric and not focused enough on what people in the heart of America care about, but I don't buy that. There's little doubt that multiple Democratic proposals, especially expanding Obamacare, reducing income inequality, and raising the minimum wage, are plenty appealing to members of the heartland, especially working-class people.
First, people hate Clinton and perceive her as corrupt, dishonest, and untrustworthy. There are many reasons for this, including the "vast right wing conspiracy" that has tried to portray her as all these things and more for more than two decades. This means people have been throwing as many scandals at her as possible for this entire time in the desperate hope that at least one will stick. Her emails have, of course, been the stickiest of these scandals, as there is little question that 1) she didn't handle her emails right while she was secretary of state and 2) she didn't tell the truth about everything she did in regards to her private email server. Even before everyone started focusing on the conclusions that she violated protocols in using a private server, there was a lot of mainstream media coverage of her emails in mid-2015, some of it inaccurately claiming she was the subject of a criminal investigation. This seems to have been a major reason her popularity abruptly dropped that summer. Of course, she was not indicted for any of this, but the two points I just made are still enough to convince us that she cannot be trusted, and of course her not telling anyone about her having pneumonia didn't help. Another major reason is that people believe her to be untrustworthy is that she is the epitome of the political establishment, which carries with it lots of dubious links to large corporations, especially Wall Street banks. Given that many Americans don't like the excessive influence such businesses have over American politics, this leads to her being perceived as merely doing the bidding of the huge corporations that financially supported her campaign. This image is only reinforced by the fact that she seems to rely on aides and focus groups to decide everything she ever does or says.
Second, throughout her campaign, she seemed to be "more of the same", a continuation of the default, and she never really explained how her presidency would not just be "four more years of Obama". This led to people often comparing her to boring things, like vanilla ice cream and Wonder Bread. This, too, was reinforced by her lack of an exciting message (or Trump's abundant charisma) and a focus on the boring, difficult aspects of being President. Her being part of the establishment also meant that when the mainstream media tried to explain why the scandals surrounding her were bogus, non-Clinton supporters ignored this message, believing it to be the work of the same corrupt government/business establishment in which Clinton was so entrenched. Ditto her lack of a crazy temperament problem like Trump's. This, in turn, led to a huge enthusiasm gap that the Clinton campaign and her supporters desperately tried to close by having famous celebrities perform at rallies and idealizing her as an awesome, rebellious feminist hero.
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