She Still Doesn't Get It

I remember hearing a story about a woman who didn’t understand how George McGovern lost since everyone she knew voted for him. It is that type of insularity that typified the Clinton election team.

Clinton blamed her loss on FBI Director James Comey announcing he was reopening the investigation. That is ridiculous. There was a mountain of negative information out there on the email scandal, Clinton Foundation, etc. Adding a few more truckloads wasn’t going to make any difference.

Blame for the loss belongs clearly to Clinton and her team for being out of touch. They tried to win by courting the Obama coalition of minorities, the young and women. They should have known that fewer minorities would turn out without Obama on the ballot and the young were not particularly enamored with her. The key to winning was to court the blue collar voter. Instead, they ignored and insulted them.

A look at Wisconsin tells the story. Obama won the state in 2012 by seven percentage points. Even though they have elected conservative Scott Walker as governor, the Clinton campaign assumed it was an easy win and didn’t even bother to schedule her to appear there during the general election campaign. Trump only got 4,000 more votes than Romney but she got nearly 240,000 votes fewer than Obama. Had they run a more effective campaign, Clinton would be our next president.
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There is a line from an old comic strip that states “We have met the enemy and he is us”. That certainly applies to the Clinton campaign.
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