For the love of all that is holy, stop it. I continually see people, Democrats and Republicans, casually explain that Clinton lost the 2016 election because…(pick your favorite reason)
- She was a lousy campaigner
- Bernie stayed in too long and didn’t support her enough
- Black voters didn’t turn out like they did for Obama
- Young people didn’t turn out like they should have
- She was an uninspiring candidate
I don’t know if any or all of those things are true. But I do know this. Any explanation for why Clinton lost that does not start with Putin and Comey are giving a stunning pass to two unprecedented campaigns to damage a candidacy. Remember, she lost by an extremely narrow margin. She won the popular vote. She lost the election on a technicality called the electoral college. With a loss that close I guess you can pick any reason you like and have it be plausibly true. But we’ve had uninspiring candidates before. Some of them won. We’ve had contentious primaries before, but some of those candidates went on to the White House.
You know what we’ve never had before? We’ve never had a “sweeping and systematic” (and illegal) influence campaign by Russian military intelligence to damage a campaign.
You know what else we’ve never had before? An FBI director who, against longstanding department policy, publicly excoriates someone even though the investigation concluded that there were no prosecutable offenses. And then just a few days before Election Day, he brought it out again only to determine yet again that there wasn’t any criminal wrongdoing to be found.
Those are two things we’ve never had. So if you want to make some comments about Bernie Sanders or Clinton’s likability, go ahead. But if you don’t first acknowledge these unprecedented and devastating challenges, then you’re missing everything important about 2016.