Wow. Mrs. Clinton had planned to conclude her 19-month campaign with an elaborate victory celebration on Tuesday night, complete with confetti shaped like glass shards that would fall from the glass ceiling of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Midtown Manhattan — an extravagant production to mark the history of the evening. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/hillary-clinton-campaign.html?_r=0
It's also the result of some TOTALLY wrong polling. Trump's campaign didn't think it was likely they were going to win either. If they did, do you think they would've had such a low-key victory celebration?
Nate Silver only had her up 70% or so in the end (Meaning President-Elect Trump had a ONE IN THREE shot — far better odds than we saw in '08 or '12), all the while the numbers in various states were skewing wildly enough to give me palpitations these past few weeks. I was confident the last two elections. This one...well, I was probably whistling past the graveyard come to think of it. Watching my home state of Florida swing between red and blue I was nervous, but when it finally landed on blue I figured she was all set. But the numbers *were* swinging, and any bit of good or bad news either way skewed things wildly, which should've told all the pollsters something. As for the Trump camp, I think they smelled the whiff of a chance about a week before...which was why they promptly took away his twitter account and stuffed a gag in his mouth. Which, now that we have 20/20 hindsight, was probably a VERY smart move, and probably spoke to the fact that they saw that tiny opening when few others did. Hillary should've planned a low-key celebration herself, and gotten out to the voters more instead, but who am I to scoff at little scraps of paper cut into "glass shards", that sounds pretty neat! One thing about President Obama, he never made a thing about being "The First Black President" (he left that for others to enjoy), he just focused on being the president. Hubris, man. It'll get ya.
For a very large portion of the campaign, Hillary also downplayed the "first woman" angle, but really started to hit on it again in the last few weeks. Given the abundance of identity politics we've had lately (particularly the overly-broad voting blocks described in various polls), I can't help but wonder if that turned some people off at the last minute. I think it will be interesting to see some better analysis of this once the dust settles While she had all sort of other faults, I don't remember anybody claiming that Sarah Palin was unfit for VP (alongside a very old President) because she was a woman. And she was especially popular among the "deplorables", who are supposedly so sexist that they would never vote for Hillary It's been pretty clear to me for many years that the country has no problem with a woman for President; they just don't like that particular woman
Yeah, well apparently it's not yet time for the DNC to come to grips with that. In fact they're fighting tooth and nail as we speak as to her "greatness". In the meantime, well...we all know what comes next.
Yeah, blaming her loss on the fact that she is a woman is a total cop-out. There were many other reasons.
Well, in a close race, you can "blame" it on any number of factors. But if you read the comments sections of various news stories (the id of the internet), I think you're kidding yourself if you think that sexism isn't a real thing or that quite a large number of people judge women differently than they'd judge an otherwise-identical male candidate.
I don't doubt there is a lot of sexism on the right, which probably affected how they voted. But Trump received fewer votes than Romney did in 2012, so it wasn't like more people came out of the woodwork to vote for Trump in order to defeat the woman. Instead, the Democrats didn't come out to vote - 5 Million fewer voted for her than Obama in 2012. So that is why she lost. But that begs the question, did Democrats not vote for her due to sexism too? If not, then she lost for reasons other than sexism.
