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Comment by Glyptodon | Hacker News Reader

Much like I think if any Dem other than Hillary Clinton ran against Trump for his winning term 1, I think if the Dems had a proper primary process for this last election they'd probably have picked somebody who'd also have won.

That said, I'm not sure being a woman was worse than being from CA or black with a solid chunk of the electorate. (I'm reminded of how some of my own relatives seemed to want to avoid visiting us in CA growing up because they had such a strong notion of how "communist," "liberal," and dangerous it ostensibly was.)

In some ways this also illustrates that propaganda likely had a significant role, too, IMO.

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They didn’t even have a proper primary with Hillary. She was anointed by the DNC to start and the party itself worked against other candidates any way it could to make sure she “won”. Completely ignoring the fact that she was the opposite of any candidate that might snag a single vote from the republicans, and unlikable among most dem voters themselves. Throw in the fact that they were so convinced of a victory that Trump flipped blue states by virtue of showing up versus ignoring them on the basis of “who cares, they’ll vote for me anyway”, and it was a recipe for disaster.

Had the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to win, or had Biden not picked his running mate on the basis of a Berkeley focus group where the participants were trying to out-virtue each other, we would live in a very different world.

I don't really disagree with this but my opinion is that basically no one is capable of winning a US presidential campaign in the modern era in a matter of ~100 days. The fact Harris was a uniquely bad candidate that weirdly refused to differentiate herself from Biden, just exacerbated that problem.

If Biden and his administration had not been so hellbent on hiding his decline and allowed a robust primary process to start a year earlier, we'd also probably be living in a very different world. There was an extraordinary amount of hubris involved. Hell, even the amount of time between the debate and Biden stepping down (and then initially refusing to endorse Harris) took an absurdly long time. Felt like the lesson with Hillary's campaign was not learned - they expected people to vote for Harris by virtue she was not Trump. Clearly that has not been working.

That’s a good point. The fact that the administration and media spent nearly 6 months telling the world not to believe our own eyes did that campaign no favors.

Especially when it became so untenable to continue the lie that they had to implicitly admit to it along with falsely accusing everyone else of misinformation.

Hillary had 3M more votes than Trump.

That doesn't mean a different candidate wouldn't have had a better electoral map or more votes.

Dems broadly want Trump-esque policies to be enacted. They don't care if it's them or the republicans enacting those policies. They do need to fill both slots to prevent any danger of a left wing person getting elected.

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