Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won't end well this time either

The fixation on Hilary two years after the election and when she will not be a candidate smells badly of misogyny.

It’s also pushing the rights smears of her into the next election and doing their work for them.

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Certainly the argument “HRC lost in 2016 therefore women aren’t electable” is wrong on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start.

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I think it’s a mistake to confuse “didn’t win the election (or at least the electoral college)” with “unelectable.”

She wasn’t my favorite to win the nomination but she very nearly won the election and any number of factors could have easily swung the result the other way.

Hindsight may be 20/20 but we still don’t say John McCain was “unelectable” because he ultimately lost to Obama or Al Gore was “unelectable” because he ultimately (kind of) lost to George W. Bush, we just say “they weren’t elected.”

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I’m curious, did most of the polls show these dudes predicted to win by 80%+? Because that’s the difference. A wide yawning abyss between “what is predicted to happen” and what actually happened.

All it takes is a divided field (ala Jill Stein, Bernie, etc) for Trump to divide and conquer. There are many, many ways that defeat can be snatched from the jaws of victory here.

It’s really not. We have plenty of dumb old people that still feel that way. I talked to some lady who works at AutoZone next to my house and she said some old person came in and said: “what do you know about cars, your a woman?”. There are plenty of other cases I’ve heard of in redneckistan. Also those people exist irregardless of where you think society should be at this point.

The polls never showed Clinton winning by a margin anywhere near that large. What most polls actually showed was something like a 70-80% chance of a Clinton victory, which is a totally different thing. As far as predicting how many votes each candidate would get, people like Nick Silver were quite nearly correct in the final days of the election.

If a statistician tells you there’s a 20-30% chance of something happening and it actually happens, that doesn’t mean the statistician was way off base or that everyone who expected the most likely outcome was acting foolishly.

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Right. So were “most” polls showing

  • 70-80% chance of a McCain victory?
  • 70-80% chance of an Al Gore victory?

That’s my question, because that’s the primary difference, and that is what I mean when I say “unelectable”. Literally snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

(I also have a theory, as many people do, about why this is. TL; DR it’s hard to measure sexism in polls.)

To me, “unelectable” means “never had any realistic prospect of winning the election,” not “narrowly lost the electoral college despite being heavily favored to win.”

It’s frankly bizarre to label Clinton as “unelectable” but not McCain when she actually came closer to winning than he did.

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Pretty sure they’d just blame Sarah Palin.

The gap between perception of chances to win as expressed in polling, and actual on the ground reality … was huge with Clinton. Far larger than Gore, far larger than McCain.

Nobody was saying they’d eat a bug if Gore lost, or if McCain lost.

My working theory is that this gap will continue to be large for all female candidates because sexism is hard to measure in polls, especially against Trump and his base.

That’s because Sam Wang wasn’t around in 2000 to make his extremely bad predictions. He’s one of the worst statisticians on the subject.

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Not especially. She underperformed expectations in some key states, yes—but it’s not like she lost in a bunch of places where she was supposed to win by a landslide. She just lost in a lot of places where she was projected to have a relatively narrow win.

Any one of a number of factors could have swung the election the other way. If we’re going to throw around terms like “unelectable” we should save them for candidates who never had a realistic path to victory, like Jill Stein.

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Which is of course a roundabout way of excusing McCain from responsibility for his campaign decisions since he’s the one who decided to make her his running mate.

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You have old people who believe the causitive statement that “HRC lost in 2016 therefore women aren’t electable”? Yeah, that’s pretty dumb.

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Problem is, those old dumb people vote.

And furthermore the old dumb people vote at far higher rates than young people.

(Looks at life expectancy figures over the last 50 years)

Maybe it’s a … good … thing that the US health care system is so bad?

Fair point, though the technical term for Jill Stein is Deez Nuts with a travel budget.

According to a Public Policy Polling survey released Wednesday, almost one in 10 Tar Heel State voters would vote for him in a race between Nuts, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton.

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Uggghh frickin’ Joe Biden.

I guess we’re all doomed to 4 more years of Trump, but then the good news is that it’s illegal for him to be president after that. I mean, until his supporters plus a complicit senate and stacked supreme court remove term limits on presidents.

Count your blessings, he’s dropping in the polls. Hopefully his nose dive continues.

Well I mean if that’s how you feel, why don’t we all just mix up a big batch of flavorade and rat poison and kill ourselves, am i right or what?