Hillary Clinton Really Shouldn’t Have Told Voters That Trump Wasn’t a Normal Rep

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/clinton-really-shouldnt-have-distanced-trump-from-the-gop.html

People dislike standard GOP policies. Bush in 2000 ran as a moderate medicare expanding anti-interventionist centrist too, don't forget.

Hillary hurt herself with her base and hurt downballot dems with her singular focus on Trump's personality, she ignored the economic message:

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

Downballot dems did the same strategy and failed. This is the consequence of Hillary praising Paul Ryan and 'moderate' republicans.

So for those who say a generic republican could've won, think twice. Hillary would've run a populist campaign and tied the nominee to Romney for repeating the exact same policies as Romney.

The 'Obama coalition' was about economics. He would've won with 2004 demographics.

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According to the RCP average Trump's favorability rating on election day was 21 points underwater. I don't think Clinton needed to make Trump look any worse in the eyes of voters, she needed to make herself look better.

The dems based their campaign strategy on the courtship of suburban republican women. 'Donald would be such a bad role model for your children, vote for Hillary!'.

Cruz and Jeb had similar unfavorables as Hillary (and they were the 2 most well known candidates besides Trump), she wouldn't have run this type of campaign against them. A lot of that is simply due to political polarization.

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I'm not sure about that. The GOP ran well ahead of Trump in the congressional races.

As I mentioned in the OP, Hillary went out of her way to court republicans, praising Paul Ryan, etc. and the Dems used the political strategy of attempting to argue about Trump's personal characteristics rather than economics (their normal strategy) which polled better.

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I think the argument should've been that Trump isn't that different from many politicians in a key way (promising things he can't deliver). Not sure how well that would've worked if Clinton was the one making the argument, but it's clear that arguing Trump was completely different from any other politician helped him enormously.

Hillary's courtship of republicans was against the advice of the DNC which had warned her not to do it. The DNC told her campaign that it was hurting Democratic downballot performance.

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/137093/clinton-campaign-decision-made-may-doom-down-ballot-democrats

Now of course, the leaks themselves are another factor, with Putin slamming the democrats, and praising Trump, would he have even released the emails to help a generic republican candidate even more anti-russian than Hillary? Of course not. So, no DNC leaks, which would've helped dems with their turnout.