She was a moderate, but she was literally hated. A la deplorables comment.
A likeable moderate would have beaten Trump, but the Dems didn't bring one to the table.
Edit - no where did I claim Trump was a moderate.
We don't always agree, but on this one I do agree with you.
Two things to always keep in mind
- Any party nominee automatically gets 45% of votes. That's how Trump got elected even though most Republican establishment rejected him.
- There is always some defection ~ 10% of the people voting in the primary for the other candidates will not vote for the nominee. Happened with Obama (remember PUMA) and Hillary (BernieOrBust)
The "lanes" you are talking about above are not actually correct. Kamala had almost no support from AAs. Same for Booker or Castro. Older AAs are solidly pro-establishment - have always been. They tend to listen to their community leaders who support establishment Dems (like Biden) in exchange for some favors (party or government posts etc). They vote for the "machine".
Also, voters are less ideological than twitterati. That's why second choice of plurality of Biden voters is Bernie.
Morning Consult: The 2020 U.S. Election
In terms of general, Biden will have a hard time beating Trump, even though his numbers are the best now. Trump can simply repeat the same tactics he used in '16 - replacing "emails" with "Hunter Biden". For others too, it won't be a cake walk, though.
One interesting thing about the general is - as you see in the hypothetical matchups in the link above, Trump is only getting 42% against any Dem candidate. A solid majority of Americans are saying they definitely won't vote for Trump (from other polls). We may see another split between electoral college and popular vote - may be with even a higher % difference, though.
A supporting argument:
The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate
Twitter Democrats are overwhelmingly white and very liberal. The non-white Democrats tend to be a lot more conservative and they are the backbone of the party. They don't participate in political threads on Twitter. A lot of older people of color Democrats are actually fairly socially conservative. They did not support same sex marriage, marijuana legalization, or many other progressive movements.
Oh, the age old "shy Trump voter" theory.
The polls were actually pretty good in '20. At national level they were more accurate than in '16. But the state polls were more erroneous. Turns out most of the state polls didn't weigh for education. Once they weighed for education, the polls were quite good i.e. no "shy Trump voter".
Having learnt this, they now weigh for education - and as you saw in '18 the polls were quite good. fivethirtyeight, for eg., got almost no house contest wrong !
An Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the U.S. - AAPOR
The national 2016 polls were highly accurate and Trump with the help of basically corrupt Republican governors and secretaries of state helped a lot. What Republicans do in the states they control is make voting difficult for populations that tend to vote Democratic. Voter ID laws negatively impact people of color because they are less likely to have a state issued ID. They also usually don't allow college ID cards which discriminate against college students. In many states when Republicans instituted these laws, they deliberately closed DMVs in parts of the state with more Democrats keeping open DMVs in more affluent areas populated with likely Republican voters.
Another trick Republicans play is reducing polling places in Democratic areas and putting them in places where it's difficult for Democrats to get to the polls. Other times they have sent too few ballots to Democratic precincts and cull voter rolls removing more Democrats than Republicans.
With a Democratic candidate few liked anyway a lot of voters who would have voted for Hillary may have tried to vote and just gave up when they ran into the hassles. With a candidate they like or if they truly feel voting is imperative, they turn out and put up with the hassles to make sure they vote. They did that in 2018 and a number of Republican controlled states flipped.
You know Clinton would have gone to war with Iran don't you?
Was there ever a war she didn't support?
Vietnam...
Democrats need to quit trashing other Democrats for voting for the Gulf War in 2003. I saw it was a huge mistake and was against it, but 9/11 didn't affect me like it did a lot of people in this country. When I saw the buildings burning in New York my biggest concern was what sort of craziness the PNAC people in Bush's administration were going to get up to using terrorism as an excuse.
I have been reading history my entire life. I was reading history books written for adults when I was in 1st grade. 9/11 was bad, and it was a very successful strike at the heart of the biggest city in the US as well as a capital, but on the grand scheme of things, it was a very lucky blow by a significantly weaker opponent.
Pearl Harbor was a significantly more more important blow. It was a successful attack on the key fleet assets in one of the most important naval bases in the US and shortly after that they ran the table in the Pacific taking and controlling a vast swath of territory, including a three American territories: Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines.
al Qaeda never had anything close to the war making ability of Imperial Japan. They had influence regionally, but their reach in 2001 outside of the Middle East was very limited. Their influence outside the ME grew after 9/11 in part because of the American response. Osama bin Laden wanted the US to commit themselves to a drawn out war in the ME because they could do very little beyond the 9/11 attack.
But a lot of Americans, Democrat and Republican were freaked out by 9/11 and unfortunately when people feel threatened they run to whoever says they will protect them and in this case it was George W Bush. Some of the Democrats in the House and Senate voted for the war because they a) believed the purported threats ginned up by the Bush administration and b) were generally freaked out by 9/11 and were looking for protection. There were also other Democrats who were more skeptical, but they were getting a lot of pressure from their constituents to vote for the war as well as the Patriot Act.
It's easy to Monday morning quarterback and criticize someone years down the road for a bad decision made at a stressful time based on bad information. In 2002 and 2003 there were some political clear heads like Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama, but they were the exception rather than the rule.
I was a shy Trump voter. Aside from this forum, you would never in public see me admit to voting for him. Especially in the deep blue state that I live in.
He was far from my first choice, but believe me when I say I hated Hillary with an unbridled passion and would rather see Satan himself (ahem, is that Trump?) in office over her.
A lot of men feel that way about Hillary. Back in 2008 Five Thirty Eight pointed out the reason men hated Hillary was she reminded them of her ex-wife. More recently my SO came across a study that interviewed men who hated Hillary and most had some woman in their past who abused them, usually an ex, their mother, or a teacher.
I've run into women like Hillary, but I've never had to deal that closely with one. I feel the vibe when I run into women like her and don't like it, but I don't have PTSD from it. I know other men like you who hated Hillary so much they couldn't conceive of voting for her even though they didn't like Trump either.
I didn't vote for Hillary either - but obviously I wouldn't vote for someone like Trump. Being in a blue state I could vote for 3rd party. If I was in a swing state I'd hold my nose and vote for Hillary. Though I should say, Trump has been too chaotic to damage the country too much. He could have been far worse. But he has completely destroyed the Republican party - he is now the absolute dictator of it.
