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It was only in hindsight that everyone declared Hillary a weak candidate. In 2015 everyone in America knew that Hillary was probably the next president.
Anyways, Trump isn’t running again. If the theory is Trump is a bad candidate and only beat worse candidates, that bodes well for Republicans. GOP will pick Rubio or JD or DeSantis. Dems will pick…? Maybe they won’t pick a bad candidate for the 4th time running.
Everyone in America in 2015 knew that Hillary would be the Democratic candidate because the Clinton machine had stitched up the primary. I don't think Republicans went into the 2016 primary cycle expecting to lose the general - they had a crowded field of superficially-strong candidates and believed (correctly) that Hillary was unpopular with the median voter. The median voter obviously knew this, the Bernie campaign knew it, and the minority of pundits who actually paid attention to public opinion knew it, but couldn't say it without being called sexist by the pro-establishment left peanut gallery.
Hillary then struggled in an uncontested primary, to the point where she ended up shoring up her position by burning the centre-left commons by attacking Bernie from the left on idpol issues (hence the "BernieBro" slur). Apart from the MSM, the main source of left-wing commentary on US politics I was consuming at the time was Crooked Timber which had multiple posts asking the questions "Do Clinton's problems in the primary predict trouble in the general?" and "Just how many voters are there whose top two preferences would be (1) Bernie (2) Trump?"
Counter @Opt-out below, Hillary's defenders repeatedly said that she was the "most qualified candidate" in decades, not that she was the strongest. They knew they were talking about her CV and not her popularity with the voters.
Hillary was the strong horse. She ran an extremely close primary in 2008 against Obama, which was extremely close and made her the obvious next candidate. She had name recognition and the majority of the Democratic Party on board. She was made Secretary of State as her consolation prize, which meant she was effectively one of the most powerful politicians in America. And she had the better part of a decade for the public to accept that she was the most obvious candidate to be the next President of the United States. Seemingly every TV procedural and light fiction had a blonde lady female President. A woman president! She had this mystique too. Hillary was then able to cut deals within the party to ensure the nomination was all but won. (I do believe the wikileaks reveal that Tim Kaine allowd Debbie Wasserman Schultz to replace him as head of the DNC in exchange for being made Hillary's running mate. But there were other deals made as well.) Hillary was qualified, she was experienced, she was successful, she was famous, she was even relatively popular. Secretary of State, Senator, First Lady, consumate politician. Foreign policy, Domestic policy. In the lead-up to the 2015 Democratic Primary she was the obvious obvious frontrunner, which is a big part of why nobody serious bothered to run against her.
In hindsight the weaknesses there were latent. A lot of it probably had to do with Obama fatigue. A lot of it was natural generational turnover. In hindsight the fact that she so truly represented the best of the Washington political class is exactly what made her vulnerable. But she was the best of them.
Bernie's primary challenge having legs was a surprise to everybody. It was probably even a surprise to Bernie, who can't have expected that after two generations in the political wilderness on the fringes that he was finally about to go mainstream. It was a lot closer than anyone would have expected in 2014. But it still wasn't really close.
Meanwhile the Republicans didn't have anybody of Hillary's stature. They had a lot of solid candidates by traditional Washington candidate standards and felt good that after 8 years of Obama it was finally their turn to win. But nobody was really ready for prime time. Jeb was theoretically the frontrunner and big hitter, but he had no strong public persona besides his Bush name. Ted Cruz was alienating and weird. Rubio was young and untested. Then there were all these governors and senators and winsome folk. In hindsight it's obvious that they were all weak and Trump tore through the field like wet tissue. But then it was assumed that Trump himself would lose, easily, and Hillary was the obvious favorite.
And so many things had to go right for Trump to win that it could be called divine intervention. 2016 was one of the most shocking things to ever happen in the lifetimes of everyone who lived through it. Those woke posters who called it the most shocking event since 9/11 were woke-more-correct. Nobody expected Trump to win. You had to be extremely weird to have considered it. Half the country thought Hillary was up by ten, the other half sanguinely thought it would be closer than that but she would probably win. It was genuinely shocking to the whole world, one of those events that makes people peer behind the veil and realize how arbitrary life can be and how you go along and there's a plan and the world is certainly on it and then suddenly everything changes and you can see history being made. TPP, Wikileaks, Comey, Obamacare rates, the border crisis, ISIS, Pokemon Go to the Polls.
And then she wasn't the strong horse any more. Strong horses don't lose to 1st-term senators. Hilary should have won the 2008 primary according to the establishment-left and MSM conventional wisdom. It was her first big electoral test - she ended up not facing a serious opponent in the NY senate election after Giuliani pulled out due to a cancer scare. She failed it. And the main reason was fairly obvious as well - she was the public face of the centre-left faction that supported the Iraq debacle (for which she never really repented - this was a key line taken against her by both Bernie and Trump in 2016). Anyone who updated on the 2008 primary knew that Hilary was less electable than the MSM insisted she was. I was around at the time and I remember the difference in tone between the two - the MSM glazing of Obama was (among other things) about him being a once-in-a-generation political talent who could connect with the American people/forge a new centre-left coalition/reconcile black and white Americans. The MSM glazing of Clinton in 2015-6 was about her CV, about how she deserved to win because she was a woman, and about how good a President she would be because of various personal qualities that were not visible to voters. Even Clinton's supporters couldn't say she was unusually popular with a straight face.
I will give you that - he was an underdog up to and including the eve of poll.
Trump beating Clinton in the general was a very obvious and visible possibility once he had the nomination. The pundit class refused to consider it, but opinion polls always showed Clinton as a beatable front-runner. Nate Silver had her around an 80-20 favourite for most of the campaign, and about 70-30 on the eve of poll. Hilary's poll lead in 2016 was never as big as Obama's (either time) or Biden's in 2020.
Trump as Republican nominee was obviously possible after New Hampshire, and the most likely outcome after the March 1st SEC primary.
Well I guess we're arguing now about whether Hillary was a strong candidate or was merely perceived to be a strong candidate. But I would say, even if you remove the pundit class bubble the average man on the street thought it was obvious Hillary was going to win. I remember liberal coworkers brazenly exclaiming that Hillary was going to win Texas and wasn't it wonderful. I remember watching the Snowden movie with clips of Trump calling for Snowden to be executed put in the epilogue as a punchline. I was virtually the only person I knew who thought Trump was going to win. Arguments with the liberals I knew. Republican friends and family would pointedly stay quiet when I said Trump was going to win. The only other person I knew who thought Trump was going to win was an ex-auto worker who would call me up and whisper over the phone (I am not rhetorically exaggerating -- he would whisper) that the union guys were all voting for Trump and he might actually carry away with this thing. The only place I could consistently find people who thought Trump could win was on the internet. And privately, after the election, many of these people admitted to me that they hadn't thought Trump would win. That they were just trying to hold frame and save face. That they wanted it to be true but that they couldn't believe it would be.
I remember the Billy Bush tapes and by all conventional accounting everybody thought Trump was toast. "Because you'd be in jail." And I remember the Al Smith Dinner; I heard it from someone who was there that everyone in the room thought Trump was going to lose, and that the bad taste of his mean speech was taken as evidence that Trump knew it too.
I don't think that's true; Romney beating Obama was a mainstream possibility and he was up at times. Trump beating Hillary was an extreme outlier very few pollsters showed at all and many had her leading by quite comfortable margins. (Although I think in more realistic quarters the idea that Hillary was up +10 was not treated seriously and it was supposed that she was up by +3 or +4.)
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Agree on Hillary, you only become a weak candidate when you lose. On paper she may have been the strongest candidate to run for office in decades. First women, married to the only widely popular US President (since probably Kennedy?), Senator, Cabinet, educational bonafides.
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Nah, Trump is an exceptional candidate (in hindsight of course), the GOP will have trouble filling his shoes. It's just also true that the democrats fielded 3 terrible national candidates in a row. So if the trifecta is maintained despite no terrible democrat on the ballot (and the usual midterms reversals), then the republicans are still in good shape, so long as that wasn't dependent on Trump's charisma.
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