Yes, it was Comey that did us in - he knew about these Russian revelations months ago. But - EMAILS!!

Trump did this. Russians did that. Comey did this.  It was rigged. It was stolen. Blah. Blah. Blah.

It is all meaningless chatter unless someone actually gets charged and prosecuted.  

From Andrew Sullivan, writing in the New Yorker about how everyone but Hillary (including Comey) is being blamed for her loss.  

...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. 

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!

“But … but … but …” her deluded fans insist, “she won the popular vote!” But that’s precisely my point. Any candidate who can win the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes and still manage to lose the Electoral College by 304 to 227 is so profoundly incompetent, so miserably useless as a politician, she should be drummed out of the party under a welter of derision. 

yes. Andrew 'The Bell Curve looks like a great book! Let's push it!" Sullivan.

OK.

I'm convinced.

It appears that everyone has their favorite whipping boy to blame.  Hillary is Andrew's.  But sometimes things are more complicated, requiring a multifaceted context of interacting variables, all impacting the final result in varying degrees, as occurred in the last election.

the Clinton campaign was overconfident.  And if they spent more effort on GOTV in PA, WI, and MI they would have won.  All true.  And she was widely disliked.  But the why of how she was disliked is overlooked.  Yes, she was a typical politician in almost every way.  The Clinton Foundation stuff did her no favors.  But was any of it it worse than just about any fundraising done by any politician?  No.  Even Bernie Sanders, whom I supported, had some wonky stuff in his campaign spending that looked like conflicts of interest.

Here were (imho), the main reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the election, and most of it was not due to her or her behavior, or her campaign.

• The main reason, perhaps 90% of the reason she lost was that she was disliked and distrusted by many voters.  This was a result of nearly 25 years of character assassination, not just by the right wing, but by the mainstream media.  A quarter century of "scandals" that were either completely phony like Whitewater, Benghazi and "Travelgate," to overblown "scandals" like her email server that were hyped far beyond their importance.  People just "knew" she was a liar, but couldn't really tell you what important things Clinton lied about.  Despite her reputation, fact checking sites generally rated her as by far the most honest of all the candidates in the 2016 field.
• Her actual policy positions.  Yes, there were real reasons that many people were not excited to vote for her.  From her support of her husband's policies in the 90s like NAFTA, and "law and order" to her vote to give Bush authorization for the Iraq War, to her ties to Wall Street, liberals just weren't going to be enthusiastic about her.
• Racism and sexism.  Not all Trump supporters were racist or misogynistic, but to deny that it played any role would be a denial of reality.  A lot of polling data that has been analyzed since the election shows that racial resentment was a significant factor in how many people voted.  And that vote went to Trump.
• The failures of the status quo to bring prosperity and economic security broadly to the middle class.  There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton was a candidate of the status quo.

HRC is a tragic figure in American politics for reasons m/1 details. 

She shouldn't have followed Bubba to Arkansas.

Will Nikki Haley be our first woman president?

No

LOST said:

No

Any woman on the horizon?

If she was a dude she would have won.

Period.

ml1 said:

the Clinton campaign was overconfident.  And if they spent more effort on GOTV in PA, WI, and MI they would have won.  All true.  And she was widely disliked.  But the why of how she was disliked is overlooked.  Yes, she was a typical politician in almost every way.  The Clinton Foundation stuff did her no favors.  But was any of it it worse than just about any fundraising done by any politician?  No.  Even Bernie Sanders, whom I supported, had some wonky stuff in his campaign spending that looked like conflicts of interest.

Here were (imho), the main reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the election, and most of it was not due to her or her behavior, or her campaign.

• The main reason, perhaps 90% of the reason she lost was that she was disliked and distrusted by many voters.  This was a result of nearly 25 years of character assassination, not just by the right wing, but by the mainstream media.  A quarter century of "scandals" that were either completely phony like Whitewater, Benghazi and "Travelgate," to overblown "scandals" like her email server that were hyped far beyond their importance.  People just "knew" she was a liar, but couldn't really tell you what important things Clinton lied about.  Despite her reputation, fact checking sites generally rated her as by far the most honest of all the candidates in the 2016 field.
• Her actual policy positions.  Yes, there were real reasons that many people were not excited to vote for her.  From her support of her husband's policies in the 90s like NAFTA, and "law and order" to her vote to give Bush authorization for the Iraq War, to her ties to Wall Street, liberals just weren't going to be enthusiastic about her.
• Racism and sexism.  Not all Trump supporters were racist or misogynistic, but to deny that it played any role would be a denial of reality.  A lot of polling data that has been analyzed since the election shows that racial resentment was a significant factor in how many people voted.  And that vote went to Trump.
• The failures of the status quo to bring prosperity and economic security broadly to the middle class.  There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton was a candidate of the status quo.

with the margins so slim in WI, MI, and PA, if you change virtually any factor and she would have won.  No Comey announcement the week before -- Clinton wins.  She didn't vote for the Iraq war -- wins.  Didn't say "basket of deplorables," -- wins.  No Benghazi attack -- wins.

It took the perfect storm of awfulness to put Trump in the White House. 

yahooyahoo said:

If she was a dude she would have won.

Period.

ml1 said:

the Clinton campaign was overconfident.  And if they spent more effort on GOTV in PA, WI, and MI they would have won.  All true.  And she was widely disliked.  But the why of how she was disliked is overlooked.  Yes, she was a typical politician in almost every way.  The Clinton Foundation stuff did her no favors.  But was any of it it worse than just about any fundraising done by any politician?  No.  Even Bernie Sanders, whom I supported, had some wonky stuff in his campaign spending that looked like conflicts of interest.

Here were (imho), the main reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the election, and most of it was not due to her or her behavior, or her campaign.

• The main reason, perhaps 90% of the reason she lost was that she was disliked and distrusted by many voters.  This was a result of nearly 25 years of character assassination, not just by the right wing, but by the mainstream media.  A quarter century of "scandals" that were either completely phony like Whitewater, Benghazi and "Travelgate," to overblown "scandals" like her email server that were hyped far beyond their importance.  People just "knew" she was a liar, but couldn't really tell you what important things Clinton lied about.  Despite her reputation, fact checking sites generally rated her as by far the most honest of all the candidates in the 2016 field.
• Her actual policy positions.  Yes, there were real reasons that many people were not excited to vote for her.  From her support of her husband's policies in the 90s like NAFTA, and "law and order" to her vote to give Bush authorization for the Iraq War, to her ties to Wall Street, liberals just weren't going to be enthusiastic about her.
• Racism and sexism.  Not all Trump supporters were racist or misogynistic, but to deny that it played any role would be a denial of reality.  A lot of polling data that has been analyzed since the election shows that racial resentment was a significant factor in how many people voted.  And that vote went to Trump.
• The failures of the status quo to bring prosperity and economic security broadly to the middle class.  There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton was a candidate of the status quo.

Despite her protestations, wouldn't Elizabeth Warren deserve consideration?  Although, her age (she currently is 67) could be a factor.  

I think it's kind of pointless to speculate with the election for POTUS nearly 4 years away.  At this point in 1989 or 2005, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were just a couple of guys who got to speak at the DNC.

The nominee in 2020 could be almost any Democrat who is or has been a governor, U.S. Senator, Congressperson, or cabinet member.

ml1 said:

Here were (imho), the main reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the election, and most of it was not due to her or her behavior, or her campaign.

• The main reason, perhaps 90% of the reason she lost was that she was disliked and distrusted by many voters.  This was a result of nearly 25 years of character assassination, not just by the right wing, but by the mainstream media.  A quarter century of "scandals" that were either completely phony like Whitewater, Benghazi and "Travelgate," to overblown "scandals" like her email server that were hyped far beyond their importance.  People just "knew" she was a liar, but couldn't really tell you what important things Clinton lied about.  Despite her reputation, fact checking sites generally rated her as by far the most honest of all the candidates in the 2016 field.

I don't understand how you can make the statement that it was not due to her, her behavior, or her campaign, then go on to cite all the items you do.  

Respectfully, this election was hers to lose, and that she did.  

• Yes, she has been the most scrutinized person in politics in a generation.  Did she forget this fact?  Was the family in desperate need of funds for some reason that justified making secret speeches to wall street for huge payments?
• Did she forget that she is female and that the electorate would require more of her than a male candidate?  I'm not saying this is fair, but that it is the world we live in, and she knew it going in.  
• Did she really have to spin Comey's decision not to prosecute (or indict - forget which it was) into full exoneration the way she did?  Did she really think that people would not call her on that?
• Yes, the email issue was overblown, but how could she have thought it would not be scrutinized?  How can she look at a camera and say Condi and Colin did the same thing and expect an already skeptical electorate to buy it?

I'm as pissed as anyone that we have this cretin in the White House.  I fully expect that a few of the regulars will jump down my throat for this, but the undeniable truth is that she let us down.  

I wrote that "most" of it was not due to her. I stand by that. Most of the reason she lost is that many people don't like her. And most of the reason that people don't like her is 25 years of mostly bogus character assassination.

Hillary did NOTHING that was any worse than any other politician. Nothing at all. And she did most other stuff better than most.

And oh yeah - she got 3 million effing more votes than the other guy.

Let's try not to forget that fact when we think that she "lost" and let us down and blah blah blah. The electoral effing college let us down. Obviously.

Anyway - Kirsten Gillibrand for President!

Red_Barchetta said:...
I don't understand how you can make the statement that it was not due to her, her behavior, or her campaign, then go on to cite all the items you do.  




Respectfully, this election was hers to lose, and that she did.  

• Yes, she has been the most scrutinized person in politics in a generation.  Did she forget this fact?  Was the family in desperate need of funds for some reason that justified making secret speeches to wall street for huge payments?
• Did she forget that she is female and that the electorate would require more of her than a male candidate?  I'm not saying this is fair, but that it is the world we live in, and she knew it going in.  
• Did she really have to spin Comey's decision not to prosecute (or indict - forget which it was) into full exoneration the way she did?  Did she really think that people would not call her on that?
• Yes, the email issue was overblown, but how could she have thought it would not be scrutinized?  How can she look at a camera and say Condi and Colin did the same thing and expect an already skeptical electorate to buy it?

I'm as pissed as anyone that we have this cretin in the White House.  I fully expect that a few of the regulars will jump down my throat for this, but the undeniable truth is that she let us down.  

Hillary's biggest problem, and fault, in this campaign was the quite clumsy way she handled the email issue. She should have been far less apologetic and done more to simply explain how national security was never at risk. But failing to adequately parry against the onslaught of a bloodthirsty Republican party (how many Benghazi investigations were there?) aided by a complicit and lazy media can't completely be laid at her feet.

OTOH, the way she finally handled  Benghazi was masterful, I think. That one long day of a hearing, where she waylaid the Republican questioners was a sight to behold.

Why she couldn't handle email with similar aplomb we'll never know, I guess.

In retrospect, I think the "they go low, we go high" approach was a mistake. She should have pushed back in those debates when he told blatant lies and especially when he insulted her. Some would have been turned off but those folks weren't voting for her anyway.

I still stand behind my statement that she would have won if she was a man.
Even if she did everything single thing the same, change her gender and she's the next president.

Hahaha said:

In retrospect, I think the "they go low, we go high" approach was a mistake. She should have pushed back in those debates when he told blatant lies and especially when he insulted her. Some would have been turned off but those folks weren't voting for her anyway.

+1

I don't disagree with this. 

The quarter century of character assassination would not have stuck the same to a guy.

yahooyahoo said:

I still stand behind my statement that she would have won is she was a man.
Even if she did everything single thing the same, change her gender and she's the next president.

yup

yahooyahoo said:

I still stand behind my statement that she would have won if she was a man.
Even if she did everything single thing the same, change her gender and she's the next president.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda...

Maybe Clinton or her entourage could have had a moment of clarity and concluded that she had taken one too many hits over the years - deserved or not - and that she should cede the floor to Bernie.

she

got

3 million

more

votes

is that not enough for you?

tjohn said:

Shoulda, woulda, coulda...

Maybe Clinton or her entourage could have had a moment of clarity and concluded that she had taken one too many hits over the years - deserved or not - and that she should cede the floor to Bernie.

You still don't understand how our system works, I see.

drummerboy said:

she

got

3 million

more


votes

is that not enough for you?

tjohn said:

Shoulda, woulda, coulda...

Maybe Clinton or her entourage could have had a moment of clarity and concluded that she had taken one too many hits over the years - deserved or not - and that she should cede the floor to Bernie.

I understand how it works. Winners are not based on who gets the most votes.

But I think you don't understand math and the significance of numbers.

The person who got the most votes is chastised for being a poor candidate and running a poor campaign.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

tjohn said:

You still don't understand how our system works, I see.

drummerboy said:

she

got

3 million

more


votes

is that not enough for you?

tjohn said:

Shoulda, woulda, coulda...

Maybe Clinton or her entourage could have had a moment of clarity and concluded that she had taken one too many hits over the years - deserved or not - and that she should cede the floor to Bernie.

You speak as if HRC was pursuing the popular vote with no regard for the electoral.  You're not convincing anyone of anything. 

She and her advisors definitely made mistakes in assumptions about some swing states.  But there was clearly some non-trivial polling error, in virtually all of the polls, that nobody predicted.  (It appeared that the winning side was surprised also, although I'm sure that he won't admit it now.)

meanwhile. Kevin Drum has the definitive post laying out the case for Comey throwing the election.

go to the link to see the graph of the Comey effect.

http://www.motherjones.com/kev...

=== Kevin's post starts here and goes to the end. ===

I have frequently made the case that Donald Trump is president because of FBI director James Comey. On October 28, Comey wrote a letter to Congress telling them that the FBI was investigating a new cache of Clinton emails that it found on the laptop of Huma Abedin's estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. That was the turning point. Clinton's electoral fortunes went downhill from there and never recovered.

As shocking as this may sound, not everyone agrees with me. A new book, Shattered, makes the case that Clinton was an epically bad candidate and her campaign was epically badly run. That's why she lost. Yesterday, Shadi Hamid took aim at me for my continued Comey obsession in the face of the story told in Shattered:

Sad to watch smart, liberal writers, like @kdrum, refuse to engage in introspection, instead blaming HRC's loss on Comey, Russia, squirrels
— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) April 21, 2017

I'm citing @kdrum b/c I loved his blog. But then he descended into self-parody. His position—no hyperbole—is that it's all b/c of Comey pic.twitter.com/a2VYVvAfij
— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) April 21, 2017

Let's talk. There's a reason I blame Comey, and it's not because I live in a bubble. It's because a massive amount of evidence points that way. Today I want to put the whole case in one l-o-o-o-o-ng post so everyone understands why I think Comey was the deciding factor in the election. If you still disagree, that's fine, but this is the evidence you need to argue with.

NOTE: I want to make clear that I'm talking solely about Hillary Clinton and the presidency here. Democrats have been badly pummeled at the state level over the past six years, and that obviously has nothing to do with Comey. It's something that Democrats need to do some soul searching about.

Ready? Let's start with some throat-clearing.

First: Keep in mind that Clinton was running for a third Democratic term during a period when (a) the economy was OK but not great and (b) Barack Obama's popularity was OK but not great. Models based on fundamentals therefore rated the election as something of a tossup. Clinton was not running as a sure winner.

Second: For the sake of argument, let's assume that Hillary Clinton was an epically bad, unpopular candidate who ran a terrible campaign. She foolishly used a private email server while she was Secretary of State. She gave millions of dollars in speeches after leaving the State Department. She was a boring speaker with a mushy agenda. She was a hawkish Wall Street shill who failed to appeal to millennials. She lost the support of the white working class. Her campaign was a cespool of ego, power-mongering, and bad strategy. Let's just assume all that.

If this is true, it was true for the entire year. Maybe longer. And yet, despite this epic horribleness, Clinton had a solid, steady lead over Trump the entire time. The only exception was a brief dip in July when Comey held his first presser to call Clinton "extremely careless" in her handling of emails. Whatever you can say about Hillary Clinton, everyone knew about her speeches and her emails and her centrism and everything else all along. And yet, the public still preferred her by a steady 3-7 percentage points over Trump for the entire year.

Third: Every campaign has problems. If you win, they get swept under the rug. If you lose, bitter staffers bend the ears of anyone who will listen about the campaign's unprecedented dysfunction and poor strategy. This is all normal. Both the Clinton and Trump campaigns had all the usual problems, and in a close election you can blame any of them for a loss. But two things set the Comey letter apart. First, it had a big effect right at the end of the race. Second, it was decidedly not a normal thing. It came out of the blue for no good reason from the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. There is nothing Clinton could have done about it.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at the final two months of the campaign. I'm going to use Sam Wang's EV estimator because it gives a pretty sharp day-to-day look at the race. Wang's final estimate was wrong, of course, like pretty much everyone else's, but don't worry about that. What we're interested in is the ups and downs. What Wang's estimate tells us is that, with the brief exception of the July Comey presser, the race was amazingly stable. From January through August, he has Clinton at 330-340 electoral votes. Let's pick up the story in September:

At the beginning of September, Clinton slumps after her "deplorables" comment and her stumble at the 9/11 memorial. After Trump's shockingly bad performance at the first debate she starts to regain ground, and continues to gain ground after the Access Hollywood tape is released. By the end of October she's back to where she started, with a big lead over Trump. THIS IS IMPORTANT: despite everything — weak fundamentals, the "deplorables" comment, her personal unpopularity, her mushy centrism, her allegedly terrible campaign — by the end of October she's well ahead of Trump, just as she had been all year.

On October 25, HHS announces that Obamacare premiums will go up substantially in the following year. This doesn't appear to have any effect. Then, on October 28, Comey releases his letter. Clinton's support plummets immediately, and there's no time for it to recover. On November 8, Trump is elected president.

But how much did Comey's letter cost Clinton? Let's review the voluminous evidence:

• Nate Silver estimates the Comey letter cost Clinton about 3 points.
• A panel survey from the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics suggests the Comey letter produced a net swing of 4 points toward Trump.
• Sam Wang estimates the Comey letter cost Clinton 4 points, though she may have made back some of that in the final days.
• Engagement Labs tracks "what people are talking about." Immediately after the Comey letter, they registered a 17-point drop in favorable sentiment toward Clinton.
• Google searches for "Hillary's email" spiked 300 percent after Comey's letter.
• The tone of news coverage flipped enormously against Clinton after the Comey letter.
• A trio of researchers who looked at the evidence concluded that Comey's letter was decisive, probably costing Clinton 3-4 points in the popular vote.
• Trump's own analysts think the Comey letter was decisive.
• The Clinton campaign agrees that the Comey letter was decisive, and adds that Comey's second letter hurt her too.¹

I'm not sure how much clearer the evidence could be. Basically, Hillary Clinton was doing fine until October 28. Then the Comey letter cost her 2-4 percent of the popular vote. Without Comey she would have won comfortably — possibly by a landslide — even though the fundamentals predicted a close race.

That's it. That's the evidence. If you disagree that Comey was decisive, you need to account for two things. First, if the problem was something intrinsic to Clinton or her campaign, why was she so far ahead of Trump for the entire race? Second, if Comey wasn't at fault, what plausibly accounts for Clinton's huge and sudden change in fortune starting precisely on October 28?

One way or another, it appears that all the things that were under Hillary Clinton's control were handled fairly well. They produced a steady lead throughout the campaign. The Comey letter exists on an entirely different plane. It was an unprecedented breach of protocol from the FBI; it was completely out of Clinton's control; and it had a tremendous impact. That's why I blame James Comey for Donald Trump's victory.

¹The second letter was the one that cleared her. However, merely by keeping the subject in the news, it hurt Clinton.