everybody who knows how silly such claims are. In every campaign there events that help you and those that hurt you. In both of those groups are things you had control over and things you didn’t. Trying to point to one as the single decider is like a losing baseball team pointing to the single one of 27 outs that lost the game. The assumption behind all the claims like this that I have seen is the HRC was an unpopular candidate who lost an election she should have won. Of course she won the popular vote, but lost the EC vote about as narrowly as possible. Let’s look at some facts. There were five states she lost that we thought she had a good chance of winning — Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin (Michigan is still out). These five states are interesting because they all had a U. S. Senate race we thought we could flip from R to D. Here are the results:
Florida
Rubio 52.0 Murphy 44.3
Trump 49.1 Clinton 47. 2
North Carolina
Burr 51.1 Ross 45.3
Trump 50.5 Clinton 46.7
Ohio
Portman 58.3 Strickland 36.9
Trump 52.1 Clinton 43.5
Pennsylvania
Toomey 48.9 McGinty 47.2
Trump 48.8 Clinton 47.6
Wisconsin
Johnson 50.2 Feingold 46.8
Trump 47.9 Clinton 46.9
In every case, our “deeply unpopular, horribly flawed” presidential candidate out-performed the party’s senate candidate. There are certainly many reasons the election turned out the way it did, and I can’t list all of them, but I am going to need better analysis than “Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate who did X, which lost the election.”