Clinton beat house democrats

[justfollowingtheelections]

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.

Thank you.  The Clintons have been a cancer to the Democratic Party and I'm glad their empire is falling apart.