If only...I'd done..a little more...
GOTV did it’s job, registering new voters like new voters have never been registered before and ushering them to vote early.
Small donors did their job, digging deep to help team blue build a massive warchest that put soldiers on the ground and on the phones.
In both of those categories we kicked Trump’s ass all over the place. We kicked Trump’s ass in virtually every possible category except, it seems, the one that counted most in the end.
Hillary simply did not hustle for votes, and this is what negated everyone’s hard work and failed to make up the margins in the states she lost. Trump failed in GOTV and he failed in fundraising. It didn’t matter. His success Tuesday night was built, evidently, on doing the one thing that Hillary was too cavalier — or just unwilling — to do.
Watching the election returns tonight on BBC it was noted that Hillary NEVER VISITED the one state she needed (at the time) to put her over the top for EVs: Wisconsin. A swing state if ever there was one, and Hillary never went there to address the people and ask for their votes, to defend herself against Trump’s lies, to make a few headlines in some critical regional papers.
And then there is October. With the campaign screaming toward the finish Hillary was on the campaign trail for a mere THIRTEEN DAYS. That means 18 days of no visibility at local towns and burroughs that might be critical to carry swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. A couple of those stops were essentially throwaways — like her stop in Arizona — where she was trying to run up the score rather than defend her firewall.
In November she made a grand total of 12 campaign stops, which doesn’t sound bad, except Trump did twelve stops in Florida in TWO DAYS and very likely topped 30 campaign stops in the days that counted most leading up to the election.
This also begs the question — if she could make 12 stops in 7 days in November why did she only campaign for 13 days in October? Did she really need eighteen days to prepare for the debates?
With Hillary’s high unfavorables it is unconscionable that she spent so little time on the road, letting Trump ravage her record in stop after stop after stop without defending herself or her record.
Say what we will about Trump but but he created a vibe. It wasn’t a good vibe or a positive vibe, but it was a vibe that connected deeply with the right people. Hillary’s problem, and something that bothered many of us throughout the campaign, was that there was a palpable lack of vibe. She didn’t strike back at Trump night after night the way Trump was striking at her. Trump was right when he suggested in the second debate that Hillary simply wasn’t showing up. She wasn’t hustling or asking people for votes. She wasn’t creating a vibe that would transcend her partisan audience. He was right and I think some of us, if we were to be honest with ourselves, could feel it.
Ultimately, a lot of unpaid volunteer democrats left it ALL ON THE FIELD to help win the White House. Look at the voter registration, look at the early voting. THAT WAS HUSTLE.
Maybe the polls caused her to get complacent, maybe she thought the Clinton machine was undefeatable — it doesn’t matter. Because let’s face it, down the stretch Hillary went through the motions of a campaign without trying to reach the voters who felt disaffected by politics — yes those lug-eared pickup-driving white guys of whom there are many — who Trump was scooping up by the voteload. So while a lot of us are navel-gazing and wondering where it all went wrong, and what intangibles screwed everything up when this seemed so much like a sure thing — the answer ultimately lies with our candidate. We can blame this election on ignorant racist whites and Comey and whatever else, but all else being equal in this razor-close election she simply did not leave it all on the field.
Hillary was a great fundraiser and was the best in the entire 2016 field to run the country. But she was supremely outhustled by a political neophyte with huge polling negatives of his own, with horrible optics and a horrible convention, who performed horribly in the debates. With so much at stake, with so very much for everyday people to lose, we have every right to be disappointed in our candate’s cavalier approach to campaigning.
Love ya Hillary, but this disaster falls squarely on you.
