Clinton beat house democrats

[(Still) muted by Kalwejt until March 31]

Many voters felt more comfortable voting for their low energy GOP house candidate than for the orange loudmouth and that would have been the case almost regardless of who the Democratic presidential nominee was.

That's a reasonable assumption, but a 4.3 million swing is quite substantial. It doesn't go without saying that a different democrat would have been able to achieve the same swing, or better (which would have been needed to win the electoral college).

I think the numbers at least suggests that 2016 was a tough prospect for any democratic nominee. Trump made it competitive by being Trump, but a more agreeable republican would probably have been very tough to beat for any democratic nominee (especially given that we didn't have any with the gifts of an Obama).

I think there is a tendency on these forums to underestimate the innate appeal Trump has to people with a working class habitus and to people with slight authoritarian tendencies. They may say to pollsters that they don't like him, but be drawn to him anyway. I also think there is a very strong tendency to make Hillary Clinton a much worse candidate than she was. And make her campaign in general worse than it was. Sure, they didn't see Michigan and Wisconsin coming, but barely anybody did. We had a ton of discussions about this on the forums. I was one of those who were always concern-trolling about those states here, but the polling was always solid for Clinton there. I think the campaign made other mistakes, but hindsight is perfect and I understand why they took the route that they did.

Why are you ignoring Hillary's pandering to Republicans? By normalizing them she hurt her own party. Hillary intentionally damaged her downballot. Hillary tried to win without the support of the left.

+ the argument could be made that with the media constantly saying that Hillary 'had it in the bag', this caused a rush to vote downballot to put a check on her (aided by her own statements that 'normal republicans like Paul Ryan were o.k) that wouldn't have happened in normal circumstances, if you look at 2012, Obama held the downballot fine and it was seen as a horse race between Romney and Obama, and demonized Romney on economic grounds.

-Yup.

[(Still) muted by Kalwejt until March 31]

I'm not really convinced this less-than-stellar performance is the fault of Clinton's strategy. She did make an effort to decouple Trump from the GOP to attract disaffected moderate/suburban Republicans (going by some of those Romney districts that flipped, did it work?) , but how does that damage Democrats? It's not like Clinton attacked her party. At the end of the day, voters still chose between the two parties, except maybe in the minds of some independents/Republicans, Trump mattered less. It was still Democrats who failed to appeal to them. Plus, downballot Democrats made their own extensive efforts to tie their opponents to Trump.

Now, if you want to argue that just by Clinton being our nominee was damaging, I might agree. Her baggage became the party's baggage, and after 8 years of a Democratic incumbent president whose tenure triggered quite a lot of polarization and animosity, Democrats did not have a lot of room to maneuver. If there was any year where we needed to put up a well-liked and relatively scandal-free candidate, this was it. Evidently even against someone as awful as Trump.

Bernie supporters had the idea in their heads that Hillary was a republican-lite, etc. so what does she do? She goes ahead and reinforces that notion by reaching out to republicans? She was snubbing voters calling them deplorable, not even wanting their votes, as in the case of say potential crossover dems who might've wanted to vote dem downballot.

It certainly matters with independents. Independents liked Obama's populist appeal against Romney and his economic message, even Al Gore did a better job at holding the democratic downballot:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-down-ballot-republicans-trump-is-too-much-of-a-wacko-bird-to-be-an-albatross/2016/09/27/ede5579e-84e7-11e6-92c2-14b64f3d453f_story.html

Instead, Hillary just made the campaign a series of personal attacks on Trump and told the public that Paul Ryan was a good man who should be supported.

There are a lot more suburban Republican voters than Bernie supporters out there; in that sense, the strategy made sense. This is a hard thing to say for sure, since this wasn't included in exit polling and polls in 2016 weren't the best, but Hillary had basically gotten all the Bernie voters to support her in 2016. The disaffected Democrats who bolted to vote for Trump mostly did not vote in the 2016 primary (or the 2012 general election, though they did back Hillary in 2008). Consider one of Trump's most shocking pickups, a previously completely safe Democratic working-class area -- Trumbull County, Ohio, which swung from 60/38 Obama to 44/51 Trump. Guess who it voted for in the primary? Sanders, right?

Nope. It voted for Hillary Clinton, 54/45. The idea that the people Trump gained off of Obama were Berniecrats isn't supported anywhere. They were already disassociated from the Democratic Party.

-Trump clearly won some Berniecrats in Western Massachusetts.

Also, Ohio is a bad example to use for many reasons, most notably because many Berniecrats went for Kasich.