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I think this analysis, while good, downplays or skips over a lot of the dynamics that lead up to the 2016 election; two in particular- Hillary did carry a lot of lingering baggage from sexist attitudes towards her from her husband’s presidency, and the Great Awokening was already well underway by 2016 (as you’ve written, 2014 is when it really started to take hold). That being said, I think there’s no denying (or there should be no denying), that it was Hillary Clinton who decided to start injecting wokeism directly into the Democratic Party’s veins. Being pretty woke myself at the time, I was ecstatic to hear her directly refer to systemic racism in a debate. It felt like all the things we’d started discussing among like company during the Obama years but were kind of taboo to bring up in mixed company had been fully “vetted” or something, like we all decided “nope I don’t care if this makes you uncomfortable, I’m going to start telling you The Facts.” Of course, making people uncomfortable is a TERRIBLE way to run for office, and The Facts were more like opinions. But I thought at the time and continue to think that the Sanders folks had and still have no idea how much stronger the backlash to socialism would have been. People on the left still don’t get that the majority of Americans strongly, genuinely oppose it as a concept.

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founding

This essay is makes me profoundly sad. Our politics, our discourse, our society would have been much better today if not for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I think Matt's analysis is spot-on, including the part where any other Democrat would have beaten Trump and consigned him to the trash dump of history where he belongs.

We are going to deal with the damage from the 2016 election for years to come.

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Jul 14, 2022·edited Jul 14, 2022

This is a spot on take of the 2016 primary. Also, James Webb would have won.

We are now still paying for this as Democrats in an ever increasing Woke arms race. We can’t even fight effectively on Roe being overturned because we have to instead focus on off putting to the median voter trans friendly wording like “birthing person” instead of building a broad coalition.

You could almost set a watch to this too with our drop in Hispanic vote and Asian voters. Wokeism made us idiots on education, patriotism, and crime (issues important to them).

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A separate observation from my other comment.

I think one could make a similar claim that it was 2016 Bernie Sanders that unleashed the Mobilization Delusion among progressive activists. Prior to Bernie, no one thought that aggressively tracking to the left was a winning strategy. His supporters did not realize that what made him relatively popular was not his bold, aggressive policy ideas, but that he culturally understood working class white people did not go after them on race. So you get this wing learning the wrong lesson, and instead deciding there’s a “revolution” waiting to be democratically unleashed and if we had a politician who was bold enough, disengaged voters would come out en masse for Democrats. Totally oblivious that an equal (or greater) and opposite number of previously disengaged voters would come out to oppose it or reluctantly switch sides in the general.

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Jul 14, 2022·edited Jul 14, 2022

You claim that the national policy mood had swing somewhat to the right. But I venture to guess that there was also a marked shift to the left in elite coastal cities and among elite-educated, urban young adults. So the kind of people working on the Clinton campaign were living in a more left-leaning milieu, and may have mistaken that left-ward shift among coastal young professions for a nation-wide shift.

I can tell you, as someone who had lived in an elite-educated urban, coastal bubble, that I felt that my friends moved did indeed move quite left on policy issues. In 2008, among my Democrat-leaning friends, I feel that single-payer healthcare was considered an extremist idea. People were split on affirmative action and gay marriage (many would take centrist positions like "affirmative action for socioeconomic status" or "civil unions"). Universal child care and free college were not even discussed. People supported increasing the minimum wage to $10, but wouldn't have thought about $15. And white people were by and large not comfortable with (or even unaware of) the concept of privilege. By 2016, in my urban, Democratic-leaning friend group, single-payer healthcare is widely favored, support for affirmative action, gay marriage, and a 15 dollar minimum wage is unquestioned, and people by and large support significant government help with college and child care (albeit maybe not fully funded government programs). And people started to be more careful to acknowledge and articulate their privilege.

This is anecdotal, but I'm guessing that a lot of people noticed this shift among urban well-educated young people and mistook it for a national trend in 2016. When they forget that most of the country are yuppies and hipsters that live in coastal cities.

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Jul 14, 2022·edited Jul 14, 2022

I think it’s also worth pointing out that HRC was the only possible candidate who could be seen as nullifying the fact of Donald Trump’s personal scumminess. Because no matter how many harassment scandals erupted around him — and the man literally started a beauty pageant so that he could barge into the dressing rooms so there was never gonna be a lack — he could simply ask “and who are you still married to, again?”

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"...if Clinton could have put up Iowa-level numbers among white voters across the board, she would have done even better than she actually did."

Your theory: she got less popular over the course of the primaries, because she pivoted left.

My theory: she got less popular over the course of the primaries because the Republicans coalesced around a campaign *to make Clinton less popular*.

You are forgetting that Bannon's whole plan was to drive her likeability numbers into the ground, by using Cambridge Analytics, Facebook, strategic hacks from Russia, etc., in order to make her look sinister, untrustworthy, and deranged.

And it worked! With a little help from Republican operatives in the FBI, Bannon and Manafort and the whole sick crew managed to make her unpopular.

You think people were still worrying about her Iraq war vote? Ancient history.

Don't deny rat-fuckers their agency, man.

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One important caveat here. Trump was and is an extremist on foreign policy. His wish to leave NATO, love for dictators, mysterious relationship with Russia, casual denigration of allies for unclear reasons all point to an extremism on foreign policy that was unusual.

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I agree with the general point that 2016 was the year "woke politics" went mainstream, but as someone who worked on the ground for Hillary Clinton throughout that entire cycle (Iowa to the general), I think MY's point is under-calibrated.

I want to echo a lot of what Marie Kennedy has said at the top about HRC responding to a very real and mounting pressure from left-wing organizing. Mid-2015 saw many campaign events where BLM activists took the stage or shouted down candidates (Bernie and HRC) and surrogates to pressure them on racial justice issues. The fact of the matter is that HRC actually engaged with those activists in closed-door meetings and reworked her messaging, while Sanders and his surrogates initially took umbrage and tried to insist that socialist economic reform *really was* racial justice. The Sanders campaign really did come around on this issue, but not for months.

About Iowa, and HRC's usual strength there (in spite of the softness of her support among white men). A victory in Iowa really doesn't say anything about popular support. The caucus system is incredibly arcane and lowercase "c" conservative in that the number of delegates up for grabs at any given caucus site is reflective of turnout from the previous year -- not the number of people who show up on caucus day. What this means in practice is that Iowa rewards incredibly strategic organizing, where moderate candidates and campaigns can maximize their victories in low-turnout areas (where the participant-to-delegate ratio is low) and try fight to a standstill in high-turnout areas (where the participant-to-delegate ration high). Sanders may very well have had more people turn out to caucus for him in 2015, but the delegates were rarely up for grabs in those specific caucus sites for it to make the difference. Nevertheless, Iowa was not seen as a victory in the Hillary campaign -- what should have been a crushing victory led to a lot of hair pulling in HQ and in field offices.

People will also be interested to hear that after Sanders' route in New Hampshire, people in HRC land (on the ground, anyway) truly thought the wheels had come off. Nevada was really the final stand. From my perspective, Clinton really did benefit from the "woke"/academic speak in Nevada because her most valuable surrogates and champions in Nevada were Latino representatives in Congress (Rep. Luis Gutierrez) and young and college-educated first- and second-generation immigrants (DREAMers). This combination was incredibly effective at reaching working-class and non-English-speaking Latino voters.

The evolution of HRC's campaign rhetoric reflected a very necessary and intelligent response to a challenge from the left-flank -- I think MY says this well. It was critical to her victory in Nevada and was necessary to stem the bleeding from the profoundly unfair criticisms leveled against her by activists who charged her as supporting racist policies and single-handedly building the system of mass incarceration.

One final point on the constant harping of DJT as "not extreme." I recognize that MY is repeating this talking point which seems to be very popular among people reacting to #Resistance messaging. But it's important to note that "not being a fiscal hawk" is not the same as "not extreme." Build the Wall, the "Muslim Ban," leveraging the National Guard and federal agencies to crack down on DC protesters, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement and the JCPOA -- those are all extreme, actually. And I would posit that the first three examples were absolutely motivated by nativism, Islamophobia, and racism, and all of those are ideologies. Whether or not DJT could write a discourse outlining his theory of governance is beside the point -- he was and is extreme, but he signaled a willingness to compromise on issues of federal spending and certain aspects of the welfare state.

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First of all, I just need to say that my favorite line of political analysis may be this statement “Donald Trump is, as a human being, a total piece of shit.”. Second, although HRC was in ways a flawed candidate, I would not understate the extent that people excused Trump’s moral failings by saying that HRC was just as bad. But many of those “criticisms” really amounted to sexism and general Clinton-hate that was stirred up by Fox et al. over the years when Clinton was the POTUS. Yes, klobuchar would have been better, but some amount of old-white male support for Trump (ie, his base) was dependent on sexist criticisms of HRC.

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The weird thing is absent one narcissistic personality disorder type in the FBI we wouldn’t be having this conversation: James “The EGO” Comey.

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I always think it’s worth mentioning that Clinton had an additional handicap: she’d spent almost 40 years in politics while holding just one elected office and briefly at that. So she was the target of conservative attacks for decades while being, essentially, a courtier who could never really take credit for anything she was part of.

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My biggest issue with Hillary Clinton is that she won her place on the national stage through marriage. It would be disgustingly anti-feminist for the first woman to become President to do so by dint of who she slept with.

I’ve heard people respond that Hillary is really smart, and she is, but Yale Law School cranks out 180 really smart grads a year and hardly has a monopoly on really smart resume gods. Most of these people live fairly anonymous lives in greater New York City or the Bay Area, and have no chance of raising tens of millions (and getting a but ton of free media) if they decide to run for U.S. senate. If they decided to dive into politics, they’d probably start with a campaign for state senate or maybe U.S. House.

Hillary’s political instincts are rather mediocre for a national politician, but her dynastic credentials let her cut in line. Nominating unworthy oligarchs is not a great electoral strategy and it didn’t work in 2016. Trump was more cunning.

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So, I think this piece is set at the wrong level of analysis. Here is a restatement:

* After 8 yrs of, essentially, McConnell vs Obama, the national policy mood had swung to exasperated and disaffected. 10s of millions of people had been crushed by the 2008 meltdown and had seen nothing in the way of help or even focus on them. Just bitter gridlock.

*Rather than running a candidate with no hope of going toe-to-toe with McConnell, et al, the Dems nominated a Clinton who could give as well as take on a platform of toughness and competence; and, importantly, as a woman and therefore a potentially historic break from the same-old, same old inter-a-party dynamics.

*Republicans, having lost 2X but also having successfully kept Obama and the Dems from leading any effort to rescue the millions of people crushed by the last straws of 2008, nominated someone who also was not the embodiment of the status quo gridlock and inter-dynasty (Bush v Clinton) dynamic that had been playing out endlessly for decades.

*This might have set the stage for an overwhelming Republican victory, but the candidate was Trump. SO many still held their noses and voted for the same-old. It was close.

*The clear lesson for Dems, given how Trump’s presidency was playing out, was to nominate someone who could possibly beat Trump in the face of him having rallied those 10’s of millions of disaffected Americans to a refreshingly new style of politics (or actually anti-politics, which is the essence of authoritarianism) which broke the stagnant, ineffective mold and offered at least a lot of cathartic community gatherings and performance opportunities, if not any real actual improvements in the lot of the common people.

And because Trump became ever-more narcissistic, self-absorbed, and crime-boss-like, there was an opening for the Dems to nominate Joe Biden, who by virtue of a lot of stuff I won’t go into here, was the Dem candidate with the best chance of pulling together a coalition of voters strongly motivated by fears of what a second Trump term might bring.

So that’s my alternative. Wish we could discuss, but at least there it is. Thanks.

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Jul 14, 2022·edited Jul 14, 2022

I know this isn't the main point of this post, but there is a "So exactly why do we all think Trump is so bad?" debate that probably should happen among all the different Trump-hating factions of American politics. We all don't like the guy, but some hold that Trump is uniquely bad, even among conservatives, because he is anti-democratic and wants to get rid of elections using a cult of personality, why others think he is bad because he's an ur-conservative rich a-hole, and basically just the worst one of the bunch because they always seem to get worse — and these are somewhat mutually-exclusive reasons to agree with one another. This is all confounded by the fact that Trump is actually substantially more moderate than the "normal" conservatives on some policy issues — unless you count "American democracy existing is a good thing" as a policy. This all ends up in the "Trump is uniquely bad beyond just ideology" people getting very annoyed when the "Trump is really bad because really conservative politicians are really bad" people put out "X really conservative politician is actually Worse Than Trump™" pieces (*cough* https://www.vox.com/2016/2/20/11067932/rubio-worse-than-trump *cough*) or support Dem PACs spending millions on covert pro-Trumpist campaign ads (https://www.persuasion.community/p/dear-democrats-stop-boosting-trumpist). Often it plays out as a never-Trump vs. liberal squabble, but, as you later pointed out, there are liberal reasons to find Trump uniquely bad too (https://www.vox.com/2016/3/13/11214140/trump-is-terrifying)!

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Jul 14, 2022·edited Jul 14, 2022

People are reupping the ‘decades of right wing propaganda / smears’ line again the in comments here. Reasonable enough. But this is, of course, a reason for the party NOT to coalesce around Hillary. It is often wielded as a defense of her candidacy—as though once the right aimed their smear cannon at anyone else they would have suffered the same fate in short order. We have long campaigns in the US but they aren’t 24 years long.

Which brings me to my one complaint about this article: Matt says Dem insider politicians, donors, staffers ‘got sloppy and forgetful’ and produced an unprecedented lockstep coalition in support of her candidacy. This is inadequate. Something very bad happened there and it wasn’t at all sloppy.

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