re: #317 Belafon

It took Obama to beat Clinton the first time, and that’s because he used the system to his advantage. I doubt anyone was going to beat her the second time.

The reasons Clinton lost, we are starting to see, are interference by a hostile foreign power, 30 years of investigations by Republicans on made up stuff, misogyny, voter apathy, an economy doing well enough that liberal voters thought they could go elsewhere, and people thinking Trump couldn’t win. She did pretty much everything she could to be the most qualified candidate in the election, and one of the most qualified candidates of all time.

And she won by 3M votes.

It’s tough to say on the first part because the Dems lost a lot of ground in the Senate and governor’s races during the Obama years, so once Biden bowed out, there wasn’t really any other viable candidates. But the fact that Bernie fucking Sanders won 23 primaries/caucuses suggests that she was vulnerable in 2016 the way that she was in 2008.

On the second point, there are obviously a lot of factors that played into the result. Some of which the Clinton campaign bears responsibility for, but much of which they do not.