Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. We all know that, but let’s dig into the incompetence and arrogance that permeated the Clinton campaign. First, they started drinking champagne before the votes were counted. They expected a huge turnout. They expected a win. None of that happened. Clinton’s anti-Trump ads, which I admit made me more inclined to vote for him, didn’t impress. Rust Belt voters didn’t care that he had probably evaded taxes for almost two decades legally. Liberals seem to be the only people who really think that everyone likes paying taxes. From the top 1 percent to factory workers, as April approaches, everyone is trying to find ways to avoid paying as much tax as possible. We are Americans; we like to keep our hard-earned money. They didn’t care about his comments about women either. The data was wrong. They needed troops on the ground — and the Clinton campaign didn’t have enough troops to deploy them in a way that could swing the election in her favor. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post he had more:
In Michigan alone, a senior state official told HuffPost that the state party and local officials were operating at about one-tenth the level of paid canvassing that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) had when he ran for president in 2004. Desperate for more human capital, the state party and local officials eventually raised $300,000 on their own to pay 500 people to lend a hand canvass in the final weeks of the election. But at that point, they were operating in the dim.
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A similar situation unfolded in Wisconsin. According to several operatives there, the state campaign office and local officials have been trying to raise nearly $1 million for get-out-the-vote efforts in recent weeks. The Brooklyn headquarters has balked at funding it itself, arguing that the state already has decent coverage through the union-backed super PAC For Our Future and pointing out that Clinton has never trailed in a Wisconsin poll.
The state campaign office also argued for prominent African-American surrogates to lend a hand in Milwaukee. “There are only so many opportunities to get people excited about Chelsea Clinton,” explained one Wisconsin Democrat. But President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama didn’t show up. Neither did Hillary Clinton after the Democratic convention in July. She lost the state, hampered by lower turnout in the very place that worried activists.
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As the Washington Post reported, Clinton’s campaign and outside groups supporting her have aired more television ads in Omaha in recent weeks than in Michigan and Wisconsin combined. And as NBC News reported, in the final 100 days of the election, Trump made 133 visits to Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, while Clinton made 87.
On the sidelines, campaign officials say Clinton’s lack of outreach has done real harm. In Pennsylvania, for example, the campaign had a robust canvassing operation and was brimming with volunteers, many of whom had come from New York and Washington. But according to one longtime grassroots campaigner who was involved in the 2016 cycle, leadership focused largely on mobilizing its own voters, not on persuading others to join.
Hey, arrogance is the default setting for any urban liberal elite. They’re a group of snobs who don’t think you’re worth their time or effort unless you have a college degree, preferably an Ivy League one, and speak with a learned diction. That’s why Clinton ignored rural voters and white Catholics; her campaign considered them a waste of time.
If you’re not white, that’s different. You’re automatically in the caucus because of diversity and all that, although liberals always end up doing next to nothing to lend a hand the disaffected in their communities, but hey — the Democratic Party’s Christmas card looks so diverse, right? Yeah, that’s a demographic thing. It’s not fate. Matt Bai touched on this in his column for Yahoo! Newswhere he noted that Democrats are in the same place they were in 2004: a bunch of total losers. And they’re in that place because they went down the same path as Republicans. They got indolent.
However, the cult of demography was built on false assumptions.
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According to exit polls, which are imperfect but the best measure we have, Obama won 95 percent and 93 percent of the African-American vote, respectively, in his two elections. In 2008, he won 66 percent of the youngest voters.
Clinton won 88 percent of the African-American vote and trailed Obama by several points among youthful voters. You could say she “underachieved,” but the truth is that probably no other Democrat today could match what Obama did in those communities.
The second problem is that even if you believe a Democrat can maximize turnout among minorities and the converted, that doesn’t mean you can just forget about everyone else. In politics, it’s not just about how well you do in your own constituencies; it’s also about how badly you do in the groups you can’t win.
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Of course, some Democrats will argue that even if this election doesn’t prove the demographic argument, all they have to do is wait. After all, they won the popular vote, and those advantages will only grow as America becomes more diverse and millennials more engaged.
They’ll point out that the percentage of white voters seemed to drop another few points this year, following a downward trend. Give it a few years, and Clinton’s model will work just fine.
But that’s another dubious assumption — that because any given bloc of voters is reliably in one camp today, it will still be there 10 years from now. It assumes that Republicans can’t field a candidate who appeals to a larger group of black or Latino voters, a third of whom voted Republican this year.
It also assumes that younger voters aren’t becoming more ideologically diverse as they age. According to an analysis by the Democratic group Third Way, Gen Xers—my generation—became significantly more conservative in the decade between 2000 and 2011. And there’s little reason to believe that millennials will stay put.
The bottom line for Democrats should be this: You can’t hope to win an election by convincing anyone of something they don’t already believe in. You can’t be a truly national party if you need 90 percent of the votes of one minority to be competitive (any more than you can be a national party that relies solely on white voters).
Still, the fact remains that Democrats will have to win back white working-class voters if they want to retake the White House and Congress from Republicans. And that may be possible, because the Rust Belt is not affiliated with any party. Republicans must keep their word, and the first signs of political reward or punishment will come in the 2018 midterm elections, which have already begun.
Overall, voters, including Democrats, disliked Clinton. They distrusted her; more voters I trusted Trump more than Clinton.Millennials Trust Trump more to stop Wall Street. There was no boost in Latino turnout this year — and black turnout fell. Dozens of Obama supporters, millions, voted for Trump, while other liberal regulars were simply enthusiastic enough to vote or decline to vote after seeing the election. For rural voters, some may not have liked Trump at all, but what drives their vote isn’t ideology; it’s survival. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has noted this, while leftist filmmaker Michael Moore, who has offered some startling insights into this forgotten community because it’s his roots, has also pushed back against the narrative that these people are racists.
They don’t live in a bubble, Moore said after the election. These people have been living in an economic disaster for years and they elected Trump to be their go-to guy to crash the establishment party. As you can see from Stein’s article, he went to those communities, too.
While progressives and liberals drown their sorrows, protest, rage, and howl about how Clinton could have lost to Trump. Maybe read the stories about the champagne popping before all the votes were cast, the email server, the alleged unethical dealings at the Clinton Foundation, the Wikileaks emails that make Democrats look bad, her character issues, and the fact that Clinton is not Barack Obama — to understand why Lady Macbeth lost to a political upstart from Fifth Avenue. Also, the decision to simply say “fuck you” to the tens of millions of voters who ran a tractor-trailer over the surface of what was once one of the most powerful political machines in our history. The Trump presidency is about to begin, and Clinton’s chapter is about to close. Yes, she could have lasted another decade, but arrogance, incompetence, and complacency eventually killed her — and thank God for that. We won’t get a third term for Obama, and ill venerable Hillary will finally disappear from our lives.
