I don’t know what to tell you then. Like I said, the analysis was made sometime in May, looong before Comey. IMO, this election was all about how the independent vote went- party ID on both sides were at historic lows, barely more than half the electorate combined.
That was exactly why we weighted our analysis with historical patterns. Typically, candidates receive ~92-93% of affiliated voters, which held true or closely so in this election as well. All across the rustbelt, Trump won with independents, trouncing Clinton in Ohio for the exclamation point (and really, really affirming my decision to never go home.)
tldr: Our hypothesis was that Clinton needed to win yuge with I’s. Over the course of the election, she never once hit those numbers in polls- LR trends of Clinton amongst I’s were shaped like gentle waves, never really spiking in either direction. For many reasons, amongst them the ones @Medievalist mentioned, I concluded that she could not possibly gain the ground she needed. Her tires were flat, and it showed in her campaign’s absence from nearly every key state.
I don’t think Clinton’s a bad person, at least in the sense that she certainly believes that her efforts are for good. I don’t think she’s a very good politician, however, and her lack of political instincts blatantly apparent to me at least, up to and including her most recent tv appearance. It does not help that she appears to be surrounded by yes-folk. I sincerely believe that if Clinton had not run from the start, any number of Democrats, a dozen at least, would have beat Trump. Sanders might not even have run at all, or at least a much more marginal impact. Her insistence on running made a legitimate contest of ideas in the Democratic party at large impossible, and I don’t think that costs from the decision have been fully accounted for yet. Party approval ratings are terrible right now, as bad or worse than Trumps, an absolutely absurd yet very telling fact.
