If you never wrote a comment telling me that Hillary Clinton would be a bad candidate because the youth vote was all going for Bernie Sanders, then this post isn’t addressed to you.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is consolidating the support of the Millennials who fueled Bernie Sanders’ challenge during the primaries, a new USA TODAY/Rock the Vote Poll finds, as Republican Donald Trump heads toward the worst showing among younger voters in modern American history.
Probably the worst failure of analysis that I see occurs when people focus on the candidates rather than on coalitions of voters. The truth is, aside from some small changes in which subgroups of people decide not to vote at all, the same (types of) people who voted for Obama were always going to vote for Clinton or Sanders or even Lincoln Freakin’ Chafee.
Young people didn’t get behind any of the Republican candidates even though there were eleventy-billion of them because they don’t share the values of movement conservatives and they don’t hear the Republican candidates addressing their concerns. They liked Sanders the best, clearly, and by a mile, but that doesn’t mean they were ever going to vote for a Republican. It’s true that Donald Trump is close to the worst of the lot, but I don’t think Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee or Ted Cruz were going to do substantially better with millennials. Many of them will stay home as people of their age always do, but those who vote will vote overwhelming (historically) for Clinton.
And this should have been predictable.
I also heard some people (including black readers) making the argument that Clinton would struggle to win black support because of leftover hurt feelings from the 2008 campaign against Obama. But that was never going to be true, either. The president supports her and everyone knows that he’s depending on her to win to secure his legacy and his accomplishments. Black turnout will be huge for that reason alone.
This should have been predictable.
I hear people say that Clinton would be losing to any reasonable Republican, but this is complete horseshit. She’d be beating Jeb Bush just as badly, if not worse.
The last two elections were not close at all if you look at it from an Electoral College perspective, and this election will not be close for the simple reason that nothing has changed that would put a bunch of asses in the right column. If anything, there is a huge group of people out there who only voted against President Obama because he had a characteristic that Clinton doesn’t share. Clinton loses nothing by being white even while she gains from it.
The only thing Trump got right is that he understood that you can’t beat Obama’s coalition with McCain or Romney’s or even Dubya’s coalitions. You have to reshape the electorate.
But he’s reshaping it in ways that make things far worse and he’s destroying the cohesiveness of his party in the process.
Yet, that’s a distraction. The GOP would be losing this election no matter who they nominated or who they were running against so long as the Democrats’ coalition holds solid.
And it has been obvious since at least Cantor was ousted in a primary that the GOP is the party that will not hold solid.
