Slowly, slowly the scrum is moving forward and writers at center-left journals are acknowledging openly what I presume they knew all along: that Hillary Clinton lost the election in November because of her own errors and failings. After a nod to the usual suspects (the Russians, Comey, the media) at Salon Conor Lynch outlines the evidence:
Of course, it is possible that the DNC had excellent data but was poorly managed (by Clinton loyalist Debbie Wasserman Schultz, incidentally), and that Clinton was a terrible candidate whose political baggage doomed her campaign from the start.
In other words, the problem wasn’t bad data, as Clinton chooses to believe (on top of everything else), but bad politics.
[…]
In the end, myriad factors contributed to Clinton’s defeat — and she is right to point to Comey, the Podesta email hack, “fake news†propaganda and so on. But underlying it all was an uninspiring candidate who made some horrible decisions leading up to her inevitable presidential run.
“We lost because of Clinton Inc.,†a “close friend and adviser†told Allen and Parnes. “The reality is Clinton Inc. was great for her for years and she had all the institutional benefits. But it was an albatross around the campaign.†According to the authors, a number of Clinton loyalists share this sentiment, but the majority remain in denial — or are reluctant to contradict their boss.
What is happening today, as I have been saying for some time, is a battle for the apparatus of the Democratic Party. To paraphrase LBJ, if you’ve got the party by the apparatus, the hearts and minds generally follow. Ostensibly the battle is being waged between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters. For decades the DNC had been set up with the objective of getting Hillary Clinton elected president. They did their job, supporting her and strangling her opponents’ campaigns in the womb.
What will happen now? I have no idea. I think the present leadership has to go but I don’t see who will replace them. The present instinct—to exclude all but the most loyal—does not appear to be a willing formula to me.
Yes! What i have said all along. She was a lousy candidate. She would have lost handily against any conventional GOP candidate. The only person she could have possibly beaten was Trump, and she blew that through sheer incompetence.
Steve
I’ve made the same suggestion that it was largely Clinton’s own flaws that were most responsible for her loss several times. The Clinton contingent among the OTB commentariat hasn’t exactly taken it well, much like the pundits that are part of Team Clinton who I see on a regular basis on the talking head shows on CNN and elsewhere. Until they come to that realization, they’re never going to get beyond Election Night 2016. That obsession could be the thing that most helps Republicans in 2018, and perhaps 2020 as well.
Also, this part of the post stuck out for me:
“Ostensibly the battle is being waged between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters.”
The most interesting thing about this comment, which I largely agree with, is that there’s no mention in these conversations about the future of the Democratic Party about Obama supporters. Partly, I think, this is because President Obama spent eight years giving the DNC and the national party with something of a hands-off attitude. Sure, he conducted a lot of fundraiser for them and raised millions of dollars.When it came to on the ground politics, though, he relied pretty much exclusively on his own people and his own organization that had been built up during the 2008 campaign and utilized to re-elect him in 2012. Many Democrats criticized him for this, but Obama didn’t seem to care. Now, with the future of the party on the line, it’s as if Obama’s eight years in the White House had no real impact on the party at all.
The interesting question that leaves us with is how much influence Obama himself might have in the coming years in the battle you refer to. and whether he would have any influence at all.
She lost by 60,000 votes across a handful of states, while winning the popular vote.
That’s close enough that basically everything was a deciding factor. From Clinton playing it safe, to Clinton being a lousy candidate, to the Comey letter, to the Russian interference to her gender to anything else that had a negative effect.
As someone who knows just enough statistics to be dangerous, my go-to explanation is that she was playing it safe, and running like there was a 99% chance of victory, because that’s what she was getting told by the various polling groups. It was a stupid thing to do, since she never had more than 50%, and there were a lot of undecideds, and that 99% chance of victory just didn’t pass the smell test.
She was a far, far better campaigner in her first Senate run, when she was behind for much of it. She really can connect with people, but she doesn’t seem to like doing it, and she didn’t do it this time out.
Most of the Democrats I know are pinning for Biden in 2020. IMO he will be way too old. The Dem gen-x bench seems pretty shallow though. There are a couple of contenders in Congress, but without much experience and national exposure. I guess that’s what happens when the Clinton machine and the boomer cohort sucks the air out of the room.
Not sure about the progressive wing. Who can carry Bernie’s mantle besides Warren? He’s too old too.
Gustopher,
As I’ve noted at OTB several times, a switch of 77.741 votes (or an additional number of Clinton votes) in three states — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio — would have been enough for her to eke out a narrow Electoral College win and make her President. Given that, it’s fair to look at the decisions she and her campaign made that might have impacted the outcome in those states. In Wisconsin, for example, Clinton didn’t visit the state once from the Democratic Convention to Election Day, apparently in reliance on their own data that the state was safely in their corner. The fact that Wisconsin had given Scott Walker three big election victories in the previous four years, and that other polling was showing Ron Johnson slowly overtake Russ Feingold in the Senate race in that state, should have alerted them that something about their data wasn’t right. There were also people on the ground in all three states trying to warn Clinton HQ in Brooklyn (and whose bright idea was that anyway?) that the industrial Midwest was not secure who were apparently being ignored because Campaign Manager Rodney Mook believed his data more than what people who knew these states (such as former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell) were saying. There have also been post-election reports that Bill Clinton himself was trying to tell the campaign that they were making a mistake in not focusing more on the Midwest. We can never know how history would have been different if the campaign had listened and focused more attention on these states, but it seems clear that this failure played a role in Clinton’s loss.
Add into that the issues with Clinton’s own flaws, and the picture becomes clear. Clinton’s post-mortem’s notwithstanding, the fault, dear Hillary, lies not in Jim Comey, but in yourself.
Andy,
Biden will be nearly 80 in 2020, as will Bernie. Neither one of them is going to run. And neither will Hillary or Elizabeth Warren.
Doug,
I agree, but Democrats I know are still hoping for Biden and I read yesterday he started a new PAC in preparation for a potential run.
Who do you think is viable from younger generations?
No one relatively young is in a position to take leadership so soon.
My personal take is Sanders should run in 2020 with a young running-mate and an explicit statement that it will be a co-presidency, with the vice president fully involved and ready to take over at any point. There’s no reason not to use Sanders’ extraordinary popularity to give the next generation a boost; I would suggest Tulsi Gabbard as a possibility. Her military background, intelligence, ethnicity and good-looks make her an appealing candidate.
Doug Mataconis,
I wouldn’t rule Elizabeth Warren out for age alone — she would be old, but she does a great job of explaining how Democratic policies make things better for the middle class, and talking about how the Democrats need to do more for rural America. All without being a socialist.
“We’ve had an economy which worked for the middle class, and we can do so again” is a pretty strong message. It’s a conservative message, in the original and proper definition of conservative.
If her health holds up, and she has the fire in her belly, she would be a great candidate.
Warren comes across as whiney. Sorry. White males aren’t voting of her. Just a fact. Plus, she will be too old, as will the others mentioned. Plus, the conservative media is already attacking her on a daily basis, already primed. Not sure who steps up, but in 2008 we had no idea it would be Obama and in 2016 certainly no idea it would be Trump.
Steve
Clinton was an appalling person, utterly corrupt, blatantly hypocritical, blatantly dishonest, arrogant and openly dismissive and contemptuous of a large, identified part of the electorate.
And yet she got a majority of the vote. Any other Democrat would have won handily. Whether any other Republican could have beat her is dubious in the extreme, especially since they, too, were openly dismissive and contemptuous of the same people, who would not have turned out for them.
Andy,
I think Biden still wants to remain relevant and have a voice in the future direction of his party, that’s why he started the PAC. I suppose it’s possible he’s contemplating a run, but if he passed up the chance in 2016 I can’t really seem him doing it in 2020, especially since it would mean he’d be in his mid-80s by the end of a first term alone.
As for younger Democrats who might be potential candidates, there are several possibilities. Cory Booker comes to mind, as does Sherrod Brown out of Ohio, Kamala Harris in California, Kirsten Gillibrand from New York, Tim Kaine and/or Mark Warner from Virginia. Those are all Senators, of course. On the Governors side, the possibilities include Andrew Cuomo, Deval Patrick, and perhaps a handful of others,
A lot will depend on the state of the country between now and 2020, of course, and one can argue that all of the names I’ve listed are relatively unknown. Of course, the same was true of a guy named Barack Obama at this point in the 2008 cycle. The point is that Democrats don’t have to fall back on their eldest statesmen, and in fact it may be to their advantage to have a younger nominee at a time when the incumbent will be a 74-year-old white guy who most likely won’t be nearly as popular as Ronald Reagan was when he ran for re-election in 1984.
Gustopher,
I think people overestimate the extent to which the progressive politics of people like Warren and Sanders would resonate with the working class white voters that helped Donald Trump win in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
There’s really no lack of possibilities. Just go down the list of big city mayors.
However, that points out one of the Democrats’ key problems. The headlong rush to become a programmatic party rather than a catch-all party, an affliction that plagues the Republican Party, too, has resulted in Democratic power being concentrated in a few states and a few cities in those states which means that today most prominent Democratic elected officials are local officials.
Doug presents a cast of candidates without any political context. How would Cory Booker or Tim Kaine unite their party? What is their moral vision? What are their policies and what are the goals of those policies? How would either candidate, both despised by the left, gain that support? How would either appeal to the Obama coalition voters who chose Trump in 2016?
Even suggesting these two strongly indicates a failure to appreciate the political calculus has permanently changed.
Ben,
This early in the process it was impossible to tell how a guy named Barack Obama would be able to unite the various wings of the Democratic Party sufficiently to win the nomination, or how he would broaden that to attract the support necessary to win the General Election, Indeed, much of what happened with regard to him was the result of circumstances beyond his control, such as the standing of Republicans due to the unpopularity of the Bush Administration (which was not foreseeable at this point in the 2008 cycle) or the surprising ineptness of the Clinton campaign and HRC’s own failings as a candidate. In other words, it’s difficult to say “how” whoever becomes the Democratic nominee in 2020 will get there because it is far too early to make that projection and because there are far too many variables.
Additionally, I was asked to identify younger Democrats who could be potential nominees, not to handicap their individual odds or forecast how they might win. If asked to do that at this point, I would say that it is far too soon to credibly make those projections.