If there is one thing about the American electorate that can be relied on, it’s our short attention span and terrible long term memory. I realize that’s two things. My point stands. The average American voter has the attention span of a cat with ADD. This is especially true during election time. Our attention moves from one shiny thing to another so fast, it’s a surprise we aren’t all walking around rocking neck braces. To be fair to the average American voter, we are bombarded with literal fuck tons of political propaganda every election cycle. This feeds into my next point. The average American voter has the long term memory of a goldfish with Alzheimer’s. This, combined with the aforementioned fuck tons of political propaganda can legitimately warp one’s perception of reality. After a while, it all starts to blend together. How do you keep it straight?
The scary attack ads, with the ominous music and the serious (but concerned) voiceover, and the optimistic “vote for me” fluff pieces all start to look and sound the same after a while. Expose a person to enough bullshit, and after a while, they’ll start to believe it. Lots of people believed that Donald Trump is not only a competent businessman, but also a genius deal maker, all because he played one on TV. Lots of people thought Hillary Clinton was on her death bed because she sneezed a couple of times and there was a picture where it kinda looked like maybe she needed a little help getting up some stairs. Bullshit, when repeated often enough, can quickly come to be viewed as fact.
I spend a lot of time on Facebook. More than I should, really. More than anyone who cares about their own sanity should, but such is life sometimes. On Facebook, I get involved in lots of political discussions. I am a member of several politically oriented Facebook groups, so obviously, I don’t exactly shy away from the stuff. Hence this article.
One subject that I see pop up a lot, especially with the 2020 presidential election looming ever closer, is the 2016 election. Namely, how (and/or why) Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. After all, that should’ve been a cake walk for her. She, an experienced politician and stateswoman wiht a well oiled political apparatus at her back. He, a crude charlatan, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. This was a done deal!
Spoiler alert: she did not win. Bigger spoiler: it was actually a pretty near run thing. There were some REALLY close states that could very easily have gone the other way. Donald Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a combined total of just over 100,000 votes. All things being the same, if 100,000 people voted differently in the 2016 presidential election, we’d be talking about President Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would probably be a historical footnote. Whether that’s good or bad is not really the point of this article.
Yet, for some reason, every time I see people talk about the 2016 presidential election, they act as if Donald Trump won by a landslide. He won by 77 electoral votes. He LOST the popular vote by over three million votes. Now, for all intents and purposes, the popular vote is more or less meaningless. In the United States, the presidential election is decided by who gets to 270 electoral votes first, regardless of how the popular vote breaks down. Usually, one follows the other, as the person who wins is usually the one who is more popular with the overall electorate. But, as can be seen from this example, this is not always the case.
So why do so many people believe that Hillary Clinton got spanked in the 2016 election, when nothing could be farther from the truth? A few reasons, I think. For one, literally EVERYONE expected her to win and win big. No one thought Donald Trump had a snowball’s chance in hell. DONALD TRUMP didn’t think he had a snowball’s chance in hell. Granted, as the election grew closer, polls started predicting outcomes that were more favorable to Trump, but the overall narrative was the same. Clinton was going to win and she was going to win handily. So, when she lost, it just seemed like such a huge upset that the actual margins of victory and defeat became more or less meaningless in people’s minds. Another reason why I think this belief prevails, has to do with the looming 2020 presidential election.
Trump is a shitty president and an even shittier person. A lot of people on the left would really like to see him gone. In order for that to happen, they feel like we need the best possible candidate. Sure, maybe even a relatively weak candidate could beat Trump (the man is, after all, exceedingly unpopular), but there’s too much at stake and you don’t want to take any chances. We don’t want to nominate another lukewarm neoliberal centrist, just to see Trump get another four years. After all, we don’t want a repeat of 2016, when the Democratic Party put forth a shitty centrist nominee, who never quite got the electorate excited. There’s only a small problem with that belief.
The Dems (meaning the party establishment, party brass, the powers that be), did not put forth a shitty, centrist nominee. The Democratic voters did. Overwhelmingly. Hillary Clinton may have been crowned the proverbial Dem nominee on day one by the TV talking heads, but she still had a primary to win, and that was no walk in the park. Bernie gave her a run for her money, but in the end, she won. By a lot more votes. This is the part where some people like to bring up super delegates. For those who don’t know, super delegates (in Democratic Party primaries), are party big shots, lifers, and insiders, who are free to cast their vote at the convention any way they please. Whereas regular delegates are bound to whichever candidate wins their state, super delegates can pledge their support to whomever they like and are free to change it at any time (until the convention, obviously).
At the start of the 2016 primaries, most super delegates pledged their votes to Hillary Clinton, so on paper, it looked like Hillary Clinton had a huge advantage over the rest of the candidates out of the gate. No wonder she won the primary, right? Wrong! Regardless of the super delegates, she simply got a lot more votes than the rest of the people vying for the Democratic nomination. Yes, even Bernie. And here’s the kicker. Hillary Clinton had the support of all the super delegates to start the 2008 Democratic primary, too. So what happened? Obama simply cleaned up in the popular vote, won more states, and the super delegates changed their mind and supported him at the convention. The super delegates generally support the favorite, but they’re not gonna go against the will of Democratic party voters. Technically, they can, but they’re highly unlikely to do so.
So what have we established? In 2016, Hillary Clinton handily beat Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. Once it was all said and done, she had about a thousand total delegates on Bernie and almost four million more votes. Those are seriously overwhelming numbers. She absolutely wiped the floor with him. So, as it turns out, the Democratic Party didn’t foster a shitty, centrist nominee on us. We chose her.
