I am too young to remember Dukakis, but Hillary was a terrible candidate and a perfect example of how out of touch the DNC has become. Worse than having no charisma she had negative charisma and a "I know better than you" entitled attitude. And I say that as someone who had voted GOP downballot until 2016 who voted for her and hated it. Trump, MAGA, and his friendliness with Russia even back then really felt off to me. I trusted him even less than Clinton and that's saying a lot. Very nearly sat that one out, but I'd voted in every presidential election since I turned 18 and I didn't want to not vote and regret it more.
I hope - I truly hope - that there's still some part of the GOP that isn't MAGA but I haven't been able to vote red since 2016. Way too many candidates campaign on Trump's coattails and that morally goes against what I believe in.
Objectively he is. It's just in 2 out of 3 presidential elections he's been up against someone worse and he had the polished facade of an accomplished no-nonsense businessman from The Apprentice going into 2016. (Obviously he had his string of failed businesses, shorted contractors, and legal issues as well but they didn't seem to gain traction or be as well known outside of NY.)
I don’t quite agree. People know Trump now, they know his secrets and his issues. But he succeeded in convincing many people that the US was in trouble because of the Democrats. He was very good at that. Also, Harris and Biden both faired poorly at acknowledging the economic struggles many people are facing, while Trump echoed or exaggerated those criticisms.
Got it. Just reread your post. Yeah, in this day and age I don’t know how people miss the abundance of information floating around for every presidential candidate, I think there was a lot of anti-Hillary sentiment, manufactured by Trump or lingering from the Clinton administration. People are a lot more judgmental of women it seems to me.
2024 was not a referendum on the American people approving of Trump. It was just proof that Bill Clinton’s campaign in the 90s had it right: “it’s the economy, stupid.”
I’m not doing badly for myself and I’m still making less money adjusted for inflation than I did in 2019. I can only imagine how it must feel living paycheck to paycheck. Meanwhile, the Harris campaign was pissing on those people’s legs and telling them it was raining.
I agree, the Dems spent so much time trying to generate anti-Trump sentiment, which I am OK with, but they ignored the economic issues and lost the gamble.
Trump so normalizes being bad/corrupt that people weren’t swayed by stories of his bad deeds, if anything they were probably getting sick of hearing about… democracy being on the line. And maybe it is, but Harris lost.
Interesting comment. I’m getting on in years and I can personally remember a lot of presidential candidates over the years, and I would say that the #1 ‘I know better than you’ example is Donald J Trump. I agree that Hillary Clinton was very much unliked, or untrusted maybe, but I think it was for other reasons.
Oh, absolutely, I'd agree now. Everything is "I know the most" "I have the best" etc. with him. Anything negative is fake, failing, or rigged. But in 2016 - while he already had that attitude - Clinton was disconnected from the voters and acted rather smug about it. The impression I got was that she thought she had the election in the bag and the actual election was but a formality. I think her and her team vastly underestimated Trump but also underestimated how unlikeable she was to a large portion of the country. Granted, Dems will point to a 30 year long smear campaign against her but she didn't do herself any favors.
This election the economic issues absolutely walloped Dems as so many people are struggling to make ends meet while Dems were trumpeting Bidenomics and how strong the country had recovered and the stock market. It was a disconnected message from what lower/middle class are actually dealing with and Trump was able to capitalize on that. I still think he's a bad candidate and that Harris was dealt a pretty awful hand, but I wish she had done more to distance and distinguish herself from Biden and to address the economic issues affecting Americans that are not rich.
On a more personal note, Trump was appealing to voters like myself. It's been hard to get groceries for my family the last couple of years. Often we've budgeted down to under $10 in checking, nothing in savings, and coasted into the next paycheck with the gas light on in the car and praying nothing came up. We've had to tactically pay bills based on who will get upset if it's a few days late. Despite meeting net and gross income limits for SNAP we were declined. And I can see how easy it would be to blame Biden, or to blame Harris for how hard it has been. But I also understand how Covid affected the supply chain, the greed of some companies taking advantage of that to jack up prices, and that our struggles echo what a lot of the world has had to go through. Trump's promises about making it better are empty air.
Totally agree. I was just in the AskEconomist sub and an ‘expert’ was trying to explain to me that while the cumulative total CPI went up 22% during the pandemic, average cumulative wage increases were 27%
The post might as well have been written by the Harris/Biden campaign! Seriously. So out of touch.
We saw that kind of rhetoric non-stop in r/neoliberal for the past two years. Some of us kept trying to get the yuppies in that subreddit to understand that working class people are having a hard time (a difficult concept for the upwardly-mobile yuppies in r/neoliberal and the DNC to relate to).
Obviously Trump is NOT the solution, but it’s easy to see how he hoodwinked desperate people into believing he is. The Democrats and the media should have taken this into account, but they clearly just assumed that they could simply coast to victory on a message of “but Wall Street is doing great!” and “your grocery bills aren’t high! That’s just ‘vibes’!” 🙄🤦♂️
but Hillary was a terrible candidate and a perfect example of how out of touch the DNC has become
Hillary outran the generic ballot by 3 points. House and Senate Republicans won the popular vote. Trump was literally the only Republican to lose the popular vote that year.
Hillary was worse than Harris. I wasn't around for Dukakis.
To further the baseball analogies, Hillary had bases loaded with one out and hit into a double play. Kamala had to swing for the fences as a 2-out pinch hitter and flied out to center.
Gore still came with in a gnat's ass of the White House. We're also so numbed to scandals post-Trump that it's hard for some people to remember what a Big Fucking Deal it was to a lot of folks that Bill got caught cheating on Hillary by getting blowjobs from an intern and then perjuring himself over it.
Big Fucking Deal it was to a lot of folks that Bill got caught cheating on Hillary by getting blowjobs from an intern and then perjuring himself over it.
I fully understand that.
It's no excuse to lose your own state, which you already won as a Senator previously. Clinton, Dukakis and Harris all managed to win their home states, at least .
Yes which is why I cut Hillary some slack. Though 2016 Trump was a weaker candidate than 2000 Bush. Also unlike this year the 2016 race was considerably more of a stroke of luck for Trump. Play that night over 10 times and I think Trump only wins maybe 4/10.
Just because Clinton gave Gore a blueprint to win doesn't mean it should be discounted that his discretions also hurt him (as a country we were more sensitive to that stuff then)
To be fair to Gore, he did overcome far more of a polling deficit than either Clinton or Dukakis had to.
In April 2000, Gore was down 6 points. In June, he was down by around 12 in certain polls. He turned that into one of the closest elections since the Gilded Age.
Clinton, meanwhile, held an advantage, and for a lot of the time, a huge advantage, in polling over Trump for the entire campaign. Dukakis led Bush by 17 points in July. Dukakis continued leading him easily into August. And he lost in the largest landslide of the past 36 years.
I do agree that Gore fumbled the campaign and could’ve won, but I think Clinton and Dukakis fumbled it more than he did.
Clinton, meanwhile, held an advantage, and for a lot of the time, a huge advantage, in polling over Trump for the entire campaign
See, this is just revisionist history and talk from the Trump crowd that Clinton and Biden were a lock for a landslide election according to the polls.
In fact, if we're using the same trend that we're using for 1988, Clinton spent most of her time around 40%. It's just Trump spent most of polling at 35%.
-8
u/bearcatjoe Right Visitor Nov 16 '24 edited Nov 16 '24
Among the worst major party candidates in my lifetime. I think Hillary or Dukakis are a distant #2 & #3?