Who ran a worse campaign Hillary Clinton Or Michael Dukasis

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Hillary, however, had a lot going for her, and she still messed up. Sure, the warning signs were not there for most of the campaign, but she still was able to blow a rather large lead and give Trump the technicality needed to win the presidency.

Dukakis started with no chance, and didnt win. Hillary had the race in the bag, and then squandered it. I see that as a bigger loss.

I honestly see a lot of similarities between Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. Both failed to attach themselves to the successes of the incumbent, both failed to separate themselves from the incumbent's downsides, and both won the popular vote while failing to win the electoral. Both dropped states that should have been gimmies (TN for Gore, WI for Hillary). Both lost to a GOP candidate who seemed unprepared for the job. Both failed to capitalize off of bombshell oppo revelations (though the drunk driving charge was too little, too late).

Why not talk about how terrible Gore's campaign was?

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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.

Was this rehearsed, or did it come out of thin air? I wish I could step into Dukakis's body and answer that question for him, starting with, "What the f*** kind of question is that, Bernard?"

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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.

Nate Silver can make up all the fancy sounding excuses he wants but the fact remains that big data and polling alone cannot predict every election. As I seem to recall, Silver said Trump would never win the GOP nomination...let alone the presidency. rofl...the arrogance of the intellectual professional class in this country.

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.

I mean he did choke as all prediction models (whether they are based on polling, fundamentals, economic conditions, etc...) have some blind spots that might not be known until you have some event like a Trump getting the nomination.

The Founding Fathers would've been more shocked by Obama winning the nomination than Trump winning the nomination.

Prolly

They would probably be so shocked that the President has a vast, standing professional army at his command and a personal directorship over a bureaucracy of several million people, that they wouldn't notice who personally held the office.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

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.