At the Washington Examiner Salena Zito, who has been offering some of the most insightful observations about Donald Trump and his successful presidential campaign, makes this remark, sure to make many Clinton supporters fume:
Here is a shocker: I’d estimate based on my reporting that this election was baked before the debates, before the “Access Hollywood” tapes, before the hacked emails and before anyone took the time to actually notice, listen and understand just how upended the American voter is.
Pollsters will likely become apoplectic over my conclusion. That’s OK, they deal with numbers and could likely argue with great big gobs of data that I’m wrong; while I am not in the business of predicting, I am in the business of listening to people.
It was there in plain sight for everyone to see if they wanted to; it is clear that they did not and that is a bias towards him and prejudice towards the people that needs to be corrected.
If that’s the case, none of the explanations that have been serially proffered for Hillary Clinton’s election loss are relevant let alone explanatory. It wasn’t just the campaign; it was the candidate—who should have been expected to run precisely the sort of campaign she ran.
Throughout the summer and fall, Clinton was leading Trump in the polls, with Trump creeping up, passing and then falling quickly — as if America really didn’t want Clinton, but when too many expressed that by supporting Trump, America was repulsed. As if a large number of people wanted to vote against Clinton, but didn’t want Trump to win and were grudgingly willing to vote Clinton if it mattered.
Election day happened on one of those Trump spikes. Had the media not been saying Clinton had a 90% chance of winning (wtf?), some people wouldn’t have thought their Trump vote was a safe and harmless anti-Clinton vote.
Neither candidate ever got above 50%. This was a nose holding election, not a change election. No, I’ll go one step further — this was a prisoners dilemma election.
Duh! Commenters here noted that she is the second worst candidate in recent history, and that she was a terrible campaigner to boot. What probably made it really possible was the Trump campaign getting him to not tweet or say dumb things the last few weeks of the campaign. Clinton never really had a positive campaign and w/o Trump feeding her daily stuff to work with her weakness was even more apparent.
Steve