Clinton beat house democrats

[BuckeyeNut]

I'm not really convinced this less-than-stellar performance is the fault of Clinton's strategy. She did make an effort to decouple Trump from the GOP to attract disaffected moderate/suburban Republicans (going by some of those Romney districts that flipped, did it work?) , but how does that damage Democrats? It's not like Clinton attacked her party. At the end of the day, voters still chose between the two parties, except maybe in the minds of some independents/Republicans, Trump mattered less. It was still Democrats who failed to appeal to them. Plus, downballot Democrats made their own extensive efforts to tie their opponents to Trump.

Now, if you want to argue that just by Clinton being our nominee was damaging, I might agree. Her baggage became the party's baggage, and after 8 years of a Democratic incumbent president whose tenure triggered quite a lot of polarization and animosity, Democrats did not have a lot of room to maneuver. If there was any year where we needed to put up a well-liked and relatively scandal-free candidate, this was it. Evidently even against someone as awful as Trump.

Bernie supporters had the idea in their heads that Hillary was a republican-lite, etc. so what does she do? She goes ahead and reinforces that notion by reaching out to republicans? She was snubbing voters calling them deplorable, not even wanting their votes, as in the case of say potential crossover dems who might've wanted to vote dem downballot.

It certainly matters with independents. Independents liked Obama's populist appeal against Romney and his economic message, even Al Gore did a better job at holding the democratic downballot:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-down-ballot-republicans-trump-is-too-much-of-a-wacko-bird-to-be-an-albatross/2016/09/27/ede5579e-84e7-11e6-92c2-14b64f3d453f_story.html

Instead, Hillary just made the campaign a series of personal attacks on Trump and told the public that Paul Ryan was a good man who should be supported.

There are a lot more suburban Republican voters than Bernie supporters out there; in that sense, the strategy made sense. This is a hard thing to say for sure, since this wasn't included in exit polling and polls in 2016 weren't the best, but Hillary had basically gotten all the Bernie voters to support her in 2016. The disaffected Democrats who bolted to vote for Trump mostly did not vote in the 2016 primary (or the 2012 general election, though they did back Hillary in 2008). Consider one of Trump's most shocking pickups, a previously completely safe Democratic working-class area -- Trumbull County, Ohio, which swung from 60/38 Obama to 44/51 Trump. Guess who it voted for in the primary? Sanders, right?

Nope. It voted for Hillary Clinton, 54/45. The idea that the people Trump gained off of Obama were Berniecrats isn't supported anywhere. They were already disassociated from the Democratic Party.

-Trump clearly won some Berniecrats in Western Massachusetts.

Also, Ohio is a bad example to use for many reasons, most notably because many Berniecrats went for Kasich.

Greatly overstated in its significance.