Who ran a worse campaign Hillary Clinton Or Michael Dukasis

[South Dakota Democrat]

Dukakis.  He lost in a landslide, and also blew a 20 point lead.

[South Dakota Democrat]

This is a prime example of the narrative fallacy. You see, after elections...idiot pundits and useless journos will go back and create a phony narrative about why so and so lost but the fact is that elections are by and large the product of just a couple fundamentals and national environment that are mostly out of a candidates control.

I want this to be true, because it is the only halfway rational explanation for President Trump.

From the famous Lewis, Beck, and Rice ''prediction models'' of the past:



GOP favored to win in 1988. I dont know why people were so surprised that Nate Silver choked in 2016. Lewis, Beck, and Rice got it wrong 3 times as models are not perfect.

He didn't really choke.  His model is based on polling.  If the polling is off, his model will be as well.  The model was actually much less bullish on Clinton than  many others, because it took into account that there were a lot of undecideds.

[South Dakota Democrat]

Silver's model was also better than others (i.e. Huff Post that had a Clinton presidency at 98% or so) because it assumed correlations among states, i.e. if you were underperforming in Ohio, you were probably underperforming in Wisconsin as well.

[South Dakota Democrat]

Clinton lost the electoral college by 77,774 votes when she lost Michigan by 10,704 votes, Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes and Wisconsin by 22,748 votes. She healthily out-performed Trump in the national vote by nearly 3 million. She lost by a fraction of a fraction. It all boils down to the fact that Republicans showed up come voting day and never had any real sense of moral conflict with Trump to begin with. You don't churn out record shattering numbers of support in Republican counties enough times to win by a fraction of a fraction because you're split about your candidate. She didn't run a great campaign but she did her job.

Dukakis on the other hand learned the hard way that high roads are far to fall from and refused to follow the advice of his management team at every turn right down to not answering the death penalty question the way he was told. He absolutely could have beaten George Bush if he simply ran a more aggressive campaign that was centered on the idea that Republican administration could not be trusted and he had Watergate and Iran/Contra to prove it. It would have been dirty but doable.

This.

[South Dakota Democrat]

Again: after two terms of the vastly overrated and polarizing Ronald Reagan (1984 landslide notwithstanding - that was irrelevant by 1988) and Democrats retaking the Senate in 1986, the burden was on George "Wimpy Lapdog for Reagan/Ford/Nixon" Bush to win the Presidency in his own right without distancing himself from Reagan too much while at the same time, providing his own version of the "vision thing."

George H.W. Bush was, needless to say, not a very smooth campaigner, certainly not a natural (as 1992 painfully revealed for him). And again: Iran-Contra was still very real and very fresh, and he was directly caught up in it, despite his protests to being "out of the loop"*

*(Yeah HW Bush, everyone certainly believed that you - a Vice President whose resume included CIA director, Ambassador to the UN, Presidential Envoy to China, member of Congress - not to mention, being a multi-generation Skull and Bones alum and the son of a US Senator/confidant of Allen Dulles - was "out of the loop" of all of that skullduggery in the 1980s  that included the highest levels of the National Security Council and the CIA in the administration of a senile B-movie actor with no pre-presidential foreign policy experience. Uh huh.

At the very least, Dukakis or any other Democratic candidate should have given "Poppy" a run for his money. Pretty embarrassing result in 1988.