“What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Well, to Democrats trying to figure out exactly how Hillary Clinton lost the election, it makes a lot of difference, Ed Morrissey explains:
For forty-eight hours, Democrats stunned by the most shocking presidential-race outcome in at least 68 years seemed more than willing to follow Team Hillary’s lead in blaming the loss on a string of factors other than the campaign or the candidate herself. . . .
After a couple of days, though, these excuses are wearing thin, even with Hillary’s campaign surrogates. . . .
Hillary Clinton never even set foot in Wisconsin after the convention, apparently assuming for some reason that the state was safe.
Hillary lost Wisconsin because “more than 57,000 people who voted from Milwaukee County in 2012 stayed home in 2016,” according to Steve Chamraz of WTMJ-TV. “Donald Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 28,000 votes.” Even a token effort by Hillary — a couple of October campaign stops in Madison and Milwaukee — might have closed that gap. Clinton’s loss of Michigan, where it appears Trump won by about 13,000 votes, was almost beyond comprehension. In an overwhelmingly Democrat state like Michigan, it required a high degree of ineptitude for the Clinton campaign to lose. By the way, Green Party candidate Jill Stein got more than 50,000 votes in Michigan, nearly four times the margin of Hillary’s loss. In Wisconsin, Stein got 30,000 votes, about 2,000 beyond Clinton’s margin of defeat. The real shocker to me was Pennsylvania, where Trump won by about 60,000 votes in a state no Republican has carried since 1992. So that’s 20 Electoral College votes in Pennsylvania, 16 in Michigan, and 10 in Wisconsin — a total of 46 in states Hillary could not afford to lose. Even without the key battlegrounds of Florida and Ohio, she still might have squeaked by, but she lost three states that were considered “safe” for Democrats. The question is: How?
Sexism. The media. James Comey.
On a call with surrogates Thursday afternoon, top advisers John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri pinned blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss on a host of uncontrollable headwinds that ultimately felled a well-run campaign that executed a sensible strategy, and a soldier of a candidate who appealed to the broadest coalition of voters in the country. . . .
“They are saying they did nothing wrong, which is ridiculous,” said one Clinton surrogate. “She was the wrong messenger and everyone misjudged how pissed working class people were.” . . .
Despite being the wrong candidate for the moment, many allies who have helped the campaign for months were still in disbelief that Clinton did not succeed in putting away a man they see as unqualified to serve as commander in chief.
“She got this gift of this complete idiot who says bizarre things and hates women and she still lost,” said one longtime Clinton ally and fundraiser. “They lost in a race they obviously should have won. They need to take some blame.” . . .
“They spent their time protecting her, explaining her, defending her, with all these issues, the speeches, the Foundation, the emails — that became the energy of the campaign,” sighed one longtime Clinton confidante.
The paid speeches and the glitzy fundraisers, they said, did not paint a picture of a woman connected to the real suffering in the country. . . .
And some began pointing fingers at the young campaign manager, Robby Mook, who spearheaded a strategy supported by the senior campaign team that included only limited outreach to [working-class white] voters — a theory of the case that Bill Clinton had railed against for months, wondering aloud at meetings why the campaign was not making more of an attempt to even ask that population for its votes. . . .
Internally, staff felt that Clinton’s loss ultimately boiled down to white working class voters rejecting her because she was a woman.
At Brooklyn headquarters on Wednesday, Podesta expressed his gratitude and support for the team, and for Mook. “We have the No. 1 campaign manager,” he said, in a staffwide gathering in the afternoon. “I’ve been doing this since 1968, and I’ve never seen a culture and a spirit like we created in this campaign.”
Chumps. All the people that gave money to the Clinton campaign, the volunteers who went door-to-door for the campaign — chumps, all of them. At the end of the day, Democrat operatives like Robby Mook, Jennifer Palmieri and John Podesta get paid big money, even when they lose. They collected huge salaries, and delivered . . . failure.
When allegedly “smart” people get paid money to do a job and fail as spectacularly as Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff failed, there ought to be some consequence, but they’re Democrats, see? Democrats don’t believe in consequences. Screw up and blame your failures on “racism.”
Basically, that’s the history of liberalism since 1963.
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