1. Would other candidates, for example Sanders and Kasich, have favorable ratings more in line with norms for presidential elections? Or are Hillary and Donald's ratings more indicative of a general dissatisfaction in America?
2. How were two candidates that are so generally unpopular able to win their respective nominations fairly easily?
1. Hard to say. I think Clinton and Trump together received something like 51-52% of total votes cast in the primary season and the others were scattered among the also-rans. It is definitely fair to say that a lot of primary voters were unheard when nearly half of the constituency didn't want either candidate. To me, this speaks volumes about the state of the American political crop in general. Neither side could really come up with a uniter, and this was the result.
2. This is a simple answer...both parties' nomination methods are vastly undemocratic.
On the Democratic side, Hillary was essentially given a three-touchdown lead before a single vote was cast. It's impossible to say now, but it's conceivable that the Dem primary could have taken on a very different trajectory from the start with the Iowa tie and Bernie's NH blowout. Instead of taking the early lead that he should have given those eventualities, they were essentially treated as moral victories for the Sanders campaign since Clinton was able to maintain a large lead on the scoreboard even through setbacks. Hillary's (oftentimes very thin) victories were able to crush Bernie to dust, where his (sometimes substantial) victories did little more than put a dent in her hood.
Of course, the Republicans' primary issues are well documented. While I do think Trump ran a pretty good campaign, no one can deny he was able to gobble up healthy amounts of delegates in the early going by taking advantage of pluralities in WTA states. In the same vein as the other side, we will never know what would have happened to Trump in a two- or even three-way race, but it is all but certain that it would have been a brokered convention had Republicans run a purely proportional race. However, there is no guarantee that the result of that eventuality would produce a more palatable nominee.
