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But was her message strong? I remember listening to Trump and Clinton give speeches a few days apart to the Midwestern/Rust Belt crowd (maybe Michigan in both cases?). Clinton came off as fake, speaking platitudes to an audience she's supposed to go through the motions with in between stops with the base she really cares about. Trump was more genuine, putting more work into sounding like he really was going to do something for those people. This was probably fed by my biases of having broken with the liberal side of the isle for the more libertarian no-man's-land a couple of years before. But, part of Clinton's campaign was to focus really hard on the areas she was going to win anyway - like the big cities in California - in order to drum up the popular vote, because they feared that Trump would get the popular vote otherwise while Clinton would win the electoral college. Clinton needed to win the popular vote, too, to avoid any electoral drama with Trump. She didn't put the effort into swing states or red states that she maybe should have, and who knows how that cost her.
Speaking of 2016, biases, and post hoc narratives to explain Clinton's loss and Trump's win, one of my favorite postmortems for the 2016 election was an experiment NYU did to see if sexism played a role in the outcome. Some professors got together, hired a couple of actors, and put on a gender swapped presidential debate reenactment to see if the audience - including several other NYU professors, all most likely Clinton supporters - had a different reaction. Many were surprised to find that she-Trump's message and delivery resonated more with them, while he-Clinton came off as cold and unlikable. I don't have time right now to do more than a hard skim, but I'm pretty sure this is the article detailing the whole thing.
Hillary seemed like the porn star who has been in the business for 30+ years, has sagging implants, plastic face, obnoxious moans, and is still wearing school girl uniforms. Trump was like a nymphomaniac doing their first porn scene and genuinely enjoying it.
While I am neither a Clinton supporter nor a SJW, I still find your oddly specific (on the Clinton part) comparison distasteful.
Don't you think that you might have been able to make the same point in a less inflammatory way?
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I don't believe Clinton's messaging was good, but I'm not a Democrat, and would be unlikely to find Democrat messaging powerful even in the best of circumstances. I agree Clinton was imperfect: her campaign choices were questionable, and the sheer disdain she radiated surely turned off portions of middle America, but nevertheless I assert she had a lot going for her.
I remember that performance, too. She-Trump was quite magnetic.
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