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Comment by tdb7893 | Hacker News Reader

She'll be within one percentage point of Trump in the end in overall votes (and it looks like she'll beat him actually). All of these commentators seem to be making broad generalizations about the state of politics and how the strategy is obviously going to fail but the reality is that if the election was very slightly different in ways that neither campaign could really control it would've gone the other way. Maybe I'm wrong but all this just reminds me of all of the BS narratives that ESPN concocts to fill air time after football games.

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Normally, I'd agree.

But to not put a polarizing, inexperienced politician like Trump away easily is what makes the commentators (and me) think there are larger trends at work.

She had all the cards.

I agree that there are trends at work but many of the criticisms of her were only apparent in the last few months so saying that the DNC and democrats in general should've known somehow that she wasn't a good candidate and that their picking of leadership was fundamentally flawed seems odd to me.

Maybe if she had divorced and denounced Bill before the campaign run... They were not exactly free of scandal when Bill was in office. Her secretary of state term was... memorable. The situation was only unpredictable to maybe the youngest Millennials.

She was pretty unfazed by most of those scandals in the end, though. I think part of the reason they liked her is because she has been through so many scandals and was still the political force that she was. In the end they were wrong but a year ago it wasn't that unreasonable.

The popular vote is irrelevant for actually winning - what matters is how states at the margins vote. Look at Michigan. Look at Ohio. Look at Pennsylvania. For the Democrats, Hillary was an unmitigated disaster in all of those areas.

Also, keep in mind that most of the electorate votes against party lines, even if the party were to nominate Satan. She completely failed the margins.

I agree with you but a lot of the troubles that she had were difficult to see ahead of time, especially the email server and the leaks. It's easy to slap on a narrative after the fact but at the time Hillary really was the choice most likely to win the the election. I'm not saying that she didn't do an exceptionally poor job in certain areas but all she needed to do was one or two percent better and there would be the narrative of it being a landslide the other way.

That seems very "ends justify the means". Aren't you concerned that pragmatically the Democratic party is objectively unable to effectively govern itself? Given a choice of respectable statesmen something necrotic is instead selecting failure-prone sociopaths instead? Do you have a theoretical model where competent leadership somehow would result in worse end results? Wouldn't competent leadership, for a change, result in a permanent Democratic majority which theoretically would be a good "ends"?

Most of her troubles were difficult to predict ahead of time, especially the email server and the leaks. Besides those she's actually a pretty good candidate for the party. The DNC pushed against Bernie the same way that the RNC pushed against Trump (and in previous election people like Ron Paul) and the difference was at the end of the day Bernie just didn't have the support. I'm not the biggest fan of the DNC but I'm not seeing how the leadership did anything this election different than any other election.

Or just watch market commentators talk about stock price movements. Only after they happened, of course.

That's not quite fair. This election was an upset. I think it's quite reasonable to look for an explanation beyond random noise.

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