‘Shattered’ Charts Hillary Clinton’s Course into the Iceberg | Hacker News Reader

‘Shattered’ Charts Hillary Clinton’s Course into the Iceberg

nytimes.com

24 pointssushobhan17 comments

If Trump lost the elections, we would get a similar book about his mistakes and his campaign's ineptness.

It was a polarising and dirty race.

From an outsider's point of view it seemed as if you guys were all picking between two evils.

How can you accurately represent the opinions, values, and thoughts of 320 million people with option A or option B? It's insane to me. Here in The Netherlands we already have 12 different parties in parliament for only 17 million people ... to me, personally, America's system seems really archaic and backwards.

The President isn't everything. There's Congress, with members voted in by their district.

How those two options are chosen is even more insane.

Read up on the primaries, especially for the democrats. They're absolutely archaic (in some states we're talking about voting for candidates by physically being in a room and moving around for head-counts). As evidenced by Clinton, they are additionally vulnerable to corruption and abuse.

This article doesn't really go into it, but a huge problem with Clinton's campaign was fallout from scandals incurred during her fight with with Sanders. e.g. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was DNC chair during most of the primaries. The DNC chair is supposed to be impartial, but her actions were so egregious that she was eventually forced to resign. She was then immediately hired by Clinton's campaign. You can't make this stuff up!

I'm not american and rarely follow their elections closely, but this last one was a non-stop scandal factory, and that would have been the case even without Trump! For all I've ragged on Clinton and the Democrats here, the Republican side of things is even more insane. Give it another few years and there are going to be some absolute page-turners in the history section about this debacle of an election. One has to wonder how both parties are going to reform their primary processes in the near future.

There were (at least) 32 precedential candidates in 2016 in USA. But due to the electoral system the importance of the other 30 candidates is almost null.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_third-party_and_...

The presidential election is not just A or B. You have to remember that US elections are a two step process. First there is the primary and then there is the general election. In this election people had a bigger choice of candidates than they've had in a long time (17 republicans and 6 democrats). Before the first vote was cast most people would have said that 3-4 Republicans and 2 Democrats had a realistic shot at winning the nominations, and the candidate that actually won wasn't even on that short list.

Also worth remembering that most of these candidates had different enough views that in most countries they'd be representing different parties. So first the electorate decides what kind of candidate they want representing each side of the spectrum and then they decide which side of the spectrum they want.

Well, you can look at the American system two ways - either the primaries are part of the Crucial Democratic Process Of Free And Fair Elections™ (CDPOFAFE) or they're not, they're parties' internal business.

The thing is, the system is pretty weird in both cases.

If the primaries _aren't_ part of the CDPOFAFE it's weird that voters only get a choice between A and B.

If the primaries _are_ part of the CDPOFAFE it's weird that things like superdelegates exist, that independent voters don't get a say, and that the procedures to detect and prevent irregularities are so lax.

Sure I agree with that and think the primary system does need to be cleaned up (and I'm even going to mention caucuses) or perhaps even scrapped in favor of a two round runoff system, but even as broken as the hybrid system is today, it does offer a wider choice than just A vs B.

I can say the same of your system.

You effectively have 2 parties, but they don't exist until after the election. You don't know what they will be. Your 12, the ones you voted for, make dirty deals with each other to "form a government". About half of the original 12 get assigned to the loser party, and half to the winner party. The goals of the winner party are not determined when you vote, because the party doesn't exist until after the election.

Suppose 11 parties each get 5% for a total of 55%, and 1 party gets 45% all by itself. That party with 45% might team up with a couple others and thus take control... or maybe everybody else hates them, so they are the loser despite being 9x more popular than any other party.

You don't even get to choose who is the primary person running your country. That person is picked as part of the dirty deal-making that creates 2 parties from 12.

The two American parties are effectively composed of roughly a dozen factions that just pretend to be unified parties at election time.

Look at the fate of the Ryancare/Trumpcare bill. Republicans control all branches of government, yet they can't even agree to vote on a piece of legislation that was a core campaign promise for the last eight years.

It would feel more honest towards voters if the Republican umbrella were split into actual separate parties: "Economic Liberalists", "Moderate Right", "America First Economic Nationalists", "White Nationalists", etc.

Their are upsides and downsides either way. Moving the coalition-building to before the election, as the US and (to a lesser extent) the UK do, means that voters have a pretty good idea of the final outcome they're voting for.

On the other hand, keeping the coalition-building until after the election allows voters to send a stronger signal about which particular part of that coalition they're supporting, which arguably makes it easier for parties to evolve in response to shifts in the electoral climate.

I don't think so. Clinton was in almost every way except gender a very conventional candidate. Send her back in time to to anytime from 1930 through 2000 and make her male, and she would have made a perfectly normal liberal Presidential candidate.

That is not even remotely true for Trump. He did all kinds of things that in the past would have quickly doomed a campaign.

If Trump had lost that would have just confirmed for people that all those things that the conventional wisdom and past experience has long said would make someone unelectable still make someone unelectable. There would be no need for a book on what they did wrong, for it would be a very short book: "Chapter 1. Don't pick a candidate that did/does almost everything that in the past has doomed candidates. The End".

Clinton losing merits a book because that outcome signals that something profound may have changed.

I have always wondered if the leaked documents about Clinton carried a bigger impact on the election compared to the leaked Access Hollywood tape recordings. Both leaks was intensely written about in international media, discussed on social networks, and framed much of the political advocacy of both camps.

For an alledged "data analysis guru" Robby Mook doesn't seem to have much, or anything, in the way of a technical background.

After something happens, write a book saying that someone predicted that something would happen, ignoring the other people who thought that something else would happen instead.

Clinton also won the popular vote by 2,864,974 votes. A few tens of thousands of voters in a couple states would've turned this entire narrative on its head. Flagged for the same reasons that all of the other—sometimes much better—political articles that end up on the front page get flagged.

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