Why was the Democratic establishment so united behind Clinton in the beginning?

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/2016-barack-obama-hillary-clinton-democratic-establishment-campaign-primary-joe-biden-elizabeth-warren-214023

It was really Obama's decision. He didn't want a scorched earth primary between Biden (or another centrist) and Clinton resulting in someone like Bernie getting the nomination.

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Because it was widely believed that Clinton was a very good candidate and seemed to possess high approval numbers throughout 2013/2014. Also when she got behind the Obama campaign in 2008, it was widely believed by most that in return for an Undivided party, Hillary was to be a shoe in for the 2016 democrat presidential nominee.

She was basically seen as being on par with Biden, meaning that taking on the risk of a 3-way race between 2 centrists and 1 leftist resulting in the leftist winning was unnecessary. If Obama had appointed a Democratic FBI director, and the email investigation was quickly completed, that may have been the case. Instead, he appointed a showman who dragged the investigation out as long as possible and got manipulated by a forged russian document to interfere in the middle of the election.

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I think the dominant narrative here of how party elites wield power is wrong.  No individual actor has the power to shift the odds of any one candidate winning the nomination up or down by all *that* much.  So you're talking about the collective actions of a large-ish group of people (big money donors and party leaders).  Each of these people realizes that their leverage is very constrained, so their incentives drive them to back the person who they think is going to win the nomination anyway, which has the potential to drive a massive bandwagon effect.

These folks thought Clinton was inevitably going to win the nomination anyway (she was leading the polls by like 50 points) and they wanted to be on the winning team.  It didn't hurt that they also thought she would be a pretty good GE candidate (remember that her favorability #s were still reasonably good in 2014), and that many of them believed that a coronation would probably be better than a combative primary.  But they were going with the person who they thought was going to win even without their support.  And they did this because they wanted as much influence as possible with the person who they thought was most likely going to be elected president, and because they didn’t want to give said person a reason to seek vengeance against them.  They would have similarly rallied around Joe Biden or Kirsten Gillibrand, or any other “establishment” figure who had a massive lead in the primary polling and appeared to be popular enough among the general electorate to win the presidency.

Obama gave Hillary control over the DNC infrastructure, she had DWS & co. openly sponsoring her.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/impartial-dnc-finance-chief-helps-hillary-clinton-118558

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Again, I'd maintain that the questions surrounding Biden's deliberations in 2015 misses the point, which is that Clinton had already won the "establishment lane" in the invisible primary before 2015 even began, before the midterms, and many months/years before she formally launched her campaign.  She won it in 2013/14, and she won it not because party elites all got in a room together and conspired to insure that she be the pick, but because each of those party elites individually concluded that she was going to win anyway, and so they wanted to be on her side.  But then the collective aggregate of those individual decisions enhanced her chances of winning a great deal.

Other frontrunners of years past have also done some field clearing by winning the invisible primary, but none who were not either incumbent presidents or vice presidents have done so quite as thoroughly as Clinton did.  Part of it is that her lead in early polling was so enormous so consistently and at such an early stage, part of it is that there was always a suspicion that Biden (either by virtue of his age or by virtue of being gaffe prone) wasn't going to make the transition to the top job, and so Clinton was the de facto heir apparent instead of the VP, and part of it is that she was thought of as more of a known quantity than many frontrunners of years past.  GW Bush also had an enormous polling lead in 1998/1999, but he was new to the national stage, whereas Dem. elites in 2014 thought they already knew enough about Clinton's strengths and weaknesses (oops).

And yes, part of it is that she's a woman, and the thinking was that it was time for a woman.  Or at least, party elites thought that Democratic primary voters would think that.  They thought that Obama's status as first black president had energized a segment of Dem. primary voters in 2008, and that that would be replicated for women in 2016.  I can't find the story right now, but I do recall seeing reporting on Cuomo's deliberations years ago, with his thinking being that he'd be blamed as a party pooper for spoiling the nomination of the first female Democratic nominee and president if he ran against Clinton, as if he was trying to rob America of another first.  IIRC, there was some talk of that being part of Biden's thinking as well, and I'm sure they weren't alone.

It's not that simplistic. Many top Democratic officials knew that Clinton was going to run, and that she was going to be competitive in the primary, not that she would necessarily win it. Biden probably would have beaten her one-on-one with the Obama team backing him, but if you look at what Obama and his team privately feared, it wasn't a Clinton nomination, it was someone from the Sanders/Warren wing winning the nomination as a result of a brutal fight between the party centrists. In other words, Biden running would've added the risk of Sanders/Warren winning the nomination, and that risk was judged as not being worth taking on.

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Remember that one of Clinton's key advantages (especially compared to 2008) was the near-unanimous support among African-Americans, a key part of the Democratic coalition and basically the cornerstone of the party. Black support is the difference between Obama narrowly beating Clinton and Clinton comfortably beating Sanders 8 years later.

Biden would've split AA support with Clinton if he had Obama's backing. Obama didn't want to have a brutal primary fight, so he just let Hillary have it.

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Again, it was the Senate candidates in PA: McGinty, OH Strickland, and IN Bayh, that help sank Clinton.  If Sestak would have won the primary against McGinty things would have been alot different.  And Tim Ryan in Ohio

McGinty, Strickland, Bayh and Clinton were thought to be invincible because of the Black vote.  But, the Bernie Sanders vote didn't support the Senate candidates and supporting 3rd party candidates instead.

Bernie supporters didn't show up for Feingold, the reason for why they didn't show up is due to Clinton. Clinton intentionally courted republicans at the expense of the democratic downballot. She was counting on anti-trump republicans, since WI voted against Trump in the primary, she thought it would be o.k. to rely on them. Comey ruined that strategy and brought republicans back home.

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/137093/clinton-campaign-decision-made-may-doom-down-ballot-democrats