Is Hilary Clinton the weakest candidate of all time?

[waiguoren]

She was a horrific candidate but far from the worst..

Michelle Bachmann
Rick Perry
Jeb bush
Dennis Kucinich
Jesse Jackson
Pat Robertson

Were all worse..

None of those became a major party nominee. I think that's what the conversation is about.

 

[Jack V Savage]

She couldn't have lost the race without millions of rustbelt Obama voters deciding to vote for Trump. The fact that she neglected the rustbelt (0 visits to Wisconsin, only a late push in Michigan) is part of the reason she is classified as a poor candidate.

Let's be honest: The conclusion is coming first, and then this kind of folksy analysis (contradicted by the evidence, which shows no effect from campaign stops) follows it.

Your post is kind of an example of what we were discussing in another thread. Experts in the field (of elections) are pretty lost, knowing little beyond that traditional methods are not effective, but you have people who just assume a level of expertise that is far beyond what serious students of the issue would ever claim.

 

[uppercutbus]

None of those became a major party nominee. I think that's what the conversation is about.

true, Hillary was terrible.

If she runs for 2020 Dems have already lost lol.

 

[Social Distance Warrior]

None of those became a major party nominee. I think that's what the conversation is about.

Oh my bad...i just took the thread title at face value...

Al Gore was pretty terrible as well...

John Kerry

Dukakis

Some others come to mind...

Obama was a phenomenon many didn't see coming...
I don't fault Hillary Clinton so much losing to him.

However, her 2016 campaign was ran pretty terribly...

 

[Social Distance Warrior]

true, Hillary was terrible.

If she runs for 2020 Dems have already lost lol.

Yea no kidding....

If she does get the dnc nod, I'll be convinced that she's a mole or Republican double agent..

 

[waiguoren]

Let's be honest: The conclusion is coming first, and then this kind of folksy analysis (contradicted by the evidence, which shows no effect from campaign stops) follows it.

Your post is kind of an example of what we were discussing in another thread. Experts in the field (of elections) are pretty lost, knowing little beyond that traditional methods are not effective, but you have people who just assume a level of expertise that is far beyond what serious students of the issue would ever claim.

You misunderstand. Even if the effect of campaign stops is nil (unlikely, by the way), they undoubtedly serve as an indicator of the level of resources and attention a candidate is putting into a state. If you have a better indicator, by all means present it.

As an aside, if the effect of campaign stops is as small as you say, then why did Clinton hold 14 rallies in Florida in the final two months? Just enjoying the weather?

My contention is that the Clinton campaign, DNC and affiliated Super PACs wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on efforts that would do little to improve Clinton's shot at electoral victory. At the same time, they failed to address Trump's dominant strategy (rustbelt), which he did pull off in the end.

According to OpenSecrets, the Clinton campaign alone spent over $225 million on media in 2016. How much of that went into WI, MI, PA? Not much, I'll bet.

Wasting so much money and energy elsewhere was just not smart. Making bad political decisions is part of being a bad candidate.

 

[waiguoren]

Propaganda works. The right wing has been brainwashed.

The right wing losers get their pussies in a bind about her emails and some invisible Benghazi nonsense but they keep hammering lies and that begins to affect normal people. That's why we had a bakers dozen investigation into this bullshit. Normal people start to buy into the BS after being inundated with bile about her 24/7.

Remember when 74% of the country thought Iraq was behind the attacks of 9/11?

Again, propaganda works. That's why Trump asked the Russians to attack her and they did and Trump won with that help.

Other pieces of propaganda that work:

Tax cuts pay out like a broke slot machine, covering the cost of the tax cut. Never happened one time in modern history.

The death tax, that's the estate tax for you uneducated, is crushing family farms and truckers. Again, the answer is no.

Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the world's science community to get grants. No. Peer reviewed work sort blows that out of the water.

Business can self regulate. Do I even have to mention Big Cancer or Wall st?

And this list goes on and on.

It should surprise no one that this little old lady occupies the minuscule minds of right wing imbeciles as an existential threat. Or the weakest candidate of all time...whatever the fuck that means.

Are you a happy person? You seem to be venting a lot.

 

[Jack V Savage]

You misunderstand. Even if the effect of campaign stops is nil (unlikely, by the way), they undoubtedly serve as an indicator of the level of resources and attention a candidate is putting into a state. If you have a better indicator, by all means present it.

I don't see it as an indicator at all, and the information you're asking about is probably available directly. Odd that you haven't looked it up already considering how confident you appear on this issue.

As an aside, if the effect of campaign stops is as small as you say, then why did Clinton hold 14 rallies in Florida in the final two months? Just enjoying the weather?

I think that the practices of campaigns hasn't caught up to what's known fully, sure. Like baseball in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Obama was like the A's, and Clinton is like the Cardinals.

Wasting so much money and energy elsewhere was just not smart. Making bad political decisions is part of being a bad candidate.

Again, I think it's pretty obvious that you formed your conclusion first and are now looking for justifications. I don't think your analysis here has any value.

 

[Amerikuracana]

No man. She's actually pretty refined and presents herself very well. It's the left that was weak, and crooked this time around. Period. The inability to question those with "protected status" no matter what they do or say is REALLY, REALLY damaging to the left right now. They also ditched the working class they previously represented. The left can't stand up to the fringes in their own party, because of the built in cult PC mind-set. It wasn't Comey's letter, it wasn't Hillary herself, it for sure wasn't Russia, it was THAT... And our own media pushing it.

 

[waiguoren]

I don't see it as an indicator at all, and the information you're asking about is probably available directly. Odd that you haven't looked it up already considering how confident you appear on this issue.



I think that the practices of campaigns hasn't caught up to what's known fully, sure. Like baseball in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Obama was like the A's, and Clinton is like the Cardinals.



Again, I think it's pretty obvious that you formed your conclusion first and are now looking for justifications. I don't think your analysis here has any value.

If this conversation is to be meaningful, we should agree on the meaning of "bad candidate". To me, a bad candidate should fail to motivate strong turnout, particularly among his/her base, or squander lots of resources in ways that do not significantly increase the chance of electoral success.

Obama was a great candidate. Romney was a good candidate but far from great. Bill Clinton was a great candidate.

Do you disagree?

 

[Jack V Savage]

If this conversation is to be meaningful, we should agree on the meaning of "bad candidate". To me, a bad candidate should fail to motivate strong turnout, particularly among his/her base, or squander lots of resources in ways that do not significantly increase the chance of electoral success.

Obama was a great candidate. Romney was a good candidate but far from great. Bill Clinton was a great candidate.

Do you disagree?

I'd say that candidate quality should be measured in comparison to replacement level--someone who performs worse than you'd expect another candidate with a similar platform and party support to perform. I'd say that the single best easy metric to use for the evaluation would be performance relative to the same party downballot (particularly in the House). Might be better to adjust that for incumbency, though. The fact that Clinton significantly outperformed by the simple version of the metric suggests that she was probably above average, though I'd be interested to see how a more-sophisticated approach would score it.

I have no opinion about the other candidates if we're defining goodness or badness that way. Just going by gut, I thought Romney seemed like a great candidate and Obama seemed weak in 2008 (but the cards were heavily stacked in his favor) but strong in 2012. I think Bill is grossly overrated as a politician (and somewhat overrated as a president). But, again, that's without really looking as deeply into the issue as I think one would need to to have a reliable position. My view is that we should come up with ways to measure issues that make sense and then apply those to get answers, and doing it the opposite way is how we get so many really stupid positions from people who should know better.

 

[waiguoren]

I'd say that candidate quality should be measured in comparison to replacement level--someone who performs worse than you'd expect another candidate with a similar platform and party support to perform.

For clarity, please specify what you mean by "party support".

 

[Jack V Savage]

For clarity, please specify what you mean by "party support".

Having the nomination of a specific party, but considering stuff like presidents being primaried (so Bush 41, Carter, and Ford were facing serious uphill battles and that should maybe be accounted for). I'm open to the argument that those guys lost their party's support to that extent makes them bad candidates (and if so, they all were monumentally bad--much worse than Clinton).

 

[waiguoren]

I'd say that the single best easy metric to use for the evaluation would be performance relative to the same party downballot (particularly in the House).

Poor metric. The top of the ticket drives down-ticket turnout---just compare turnout in years divisible by four with years not divisible by four. Small discrepancies like those you describe are going to be inconsequential relative to the massive turnout gains due to running a great candidate. For example, a great candidate like Obama might generate huge turnout improvements but would probably just look like a normal candidate according to your metric.

Instead we need a multi-factor metric. Important factors are # of visits to key battleground states (even if this is only a proxy as you allege, it will be easier to track than money), favorability rating among likely voters, Google searches, rally size in key states, and frequency of media coverage.

 

[waiguoren]

Having the nomination of a specific party, but considering stuff like presidents being primaried (so Bush 41, Carter, and Ford were facing serious uphill battles and that should maybe be accounted for). I'm open to the argument that those guys lost their party's support to that extent makes them bad candidates (and if so, they all were monumentally bad--much worse than Clinton).

Just for a bit of extra clarity, how would you characterize Trump's degree of Party support in 2016? How would you rate him as a candidate?

 

[Jack V Savage]

Poor metric. The top of the ticket drives down-ticket turnout---just compare turnout in years divisible by four with years not divisible by four. Small discrepancies like those you describe are going to be inconsequential relative to the massive turnout gains due to running a great candidate. For example, a great candidate like Obama might generate huge turnout improvements but would probably just look like a normal candidate according to your metric.

Maybe. I'm open to refining. But this:

Instead we need a multi-factor metric. Important factors are # of visits to key battleground states (even if this is only a proxy as you allege, it will be easier to track than money), favorability rating among likely voters, Google searches, rally size in key states, and frequency of media coverage.

Is pretty ridiculous and clearly designed to produce a specific outcome rather than trying to come up with a good way to measure and seeing what it says. Also, grouping together a bunch of unrelated things like that is a classic part of junk-stat creation.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Just for a bit of extra clarity, how would you characterize Trump's degree of Party support in 2016? How would you rate him as a candidate?

He was the nominee of the Republican Party. That's the primary thing I was looking at there. No open rebellion like Bush, Carter, and Ford faced. He underperformed House Republicans, which, as I said, is the main metric (I can see adjusting for incumbency, which hurts him here, and you suggested for overall turnout, which was high and thus helps him). From a personal evaluation of his ability to the job, he's historically bad, but from a winnability standpoint, he's just a little below average. I think people who rate him as one of the worst ever as a candidate don't fully appreciate how strong tribalism is.

 

[waiguoren]

Is pretty ridiculous and clearly designed to produce a specific outcome rather than trying to come up with a good way to measure and seeing what it says. Also, grouping together a bunch of unrelated things like that is a classic part of junk-stat creation.

I have recently noticed a pattern in your responses. You are using more emotional rhetoric than in the past, and a lower percentage of your words seem to relate to the content of the issue being discussed. This response in particular is almost content-free. I am slightly worried for your well being.

 

[Jack V Savage]

I have recently noticed a pattern in your responses. You are using more emotional rhetoric than in the past, and a lower percentage of your words seem to relate to the content of the issue being discussed. This response in particular is almost content-free. I am slightly worried for your well being. Feel free to PM me if you need to talk about some shit.

Hmm. Possible that it went over your head?

 

[waiguoren]

[Deleted]