People forget that Hillary was considered "inevitable" originally not because of her strength or that the party was rigging the primary towards her, but because the Democratic bench for President is pretty much nothing. Coming into 2016, pre-Trump when many were expecting the Republicans to be favored, the only candidates talked about as having a chance at winning the general were Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, John Hickenlooper, and maybe Kirsten Gillibrand or Elizabeth Warren if Hillary said no.
I don't agree with that at all. There were plenty of potential presidential candidates who would have had as good a chance as anyone in a general election, who simply chose not to run because it was clear to them that they couldn't beat Hillary Clinton for the nomination. I'm pretty much with Jonathan Bernstein on this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-03-12/democrats-have-no-bench-be-serious-
I'll go down this list:
-Martin O'Malley
We saw how well he did.
-Elizabeth Warren
-Would have loved
-Andrew Cuomo
Every crazy thing r/bernieforpresident says about Hillary can be accurately said about Cuomo.
-Al Franken, Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Michael Bennet, Jeanne Shaheen, John Hickenlooper, Maggie Hassan
"Generic Democrats only brought up because they are from swing states"
-Mike Beebe
-Christine Gregoire
Wasn't even that popular in Washington, Hillary-lite
-Sherrod Brown
-Again, would have been great but not sure if he makes for a good presidential candidate
-Kirsten Gillibrand
Hillary-lite
-Deval Patrick
Bain Capital employee
I think you are conflating general election appeal with primary appeal. Clinton was going to inevitably dominate the “establishment lane” in the Democratic primary this year, which is why O’Malley did so poorly. Does that mean that O’Malley would have done poorly in a general election campaign, if he were the nominee? I don’t think so. Same with all the people you dismissed as “generic Democrats from swing states”. Why would being a generic Democrat be problematic in a general election when the Republican brand is in worse shape than the Democratic brand? Why would “Hillary-lite” so obviously be a worse candidate than Hillary herself? And why would you think that Deval Patrick would still go to work for Bain Capital in 2015 in a universe where he decides to run for president in ’16 instead?
Most of those people have low profiles because they didn’t end up laying the groundwork for a presidential run in the same way that folks like Marco Rubio and Scott Walker did on the Republican side three years ago. However, in a universe where Clinton doesn’t run (and makes that abundantly clear back in 2013), many more candidates would have run, and we would have gotten to see which were good candidates and which weren’t. Sure, some of these guys would have been duds. But I don’t see why you would call it a thin bench. There are plenty of potential candidates who could have run and done well sans Clinton.
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