When did you feel Hillary Clinton was in Danger of losing

[The Mikado]

I thought Clinton was in real danger of losing through September 2016...but then I basically thought Trump was toast after the Access Hollywood tapes and his horrid debate performances. My posts bear that out: I was very bearish/cautious on Clinton through the summer and early fall, but I thought there was no way in hell Trump could recover from the intense bad press he got in October.

[redjohn]

Always knew there was a chance, but I felt pretty confident she'd win up until seeing some of the shifts from reporting areas in the midwest. The margins of the shifts were atrocious, and although I was still hopeful after seeing the red wave across the region, that's when I knew she was in danger of losing it all.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

She was obviously always way overrated. I figured there would be some shy Trump voters that would bias the polls. I still would have given her a majority chance at winning, though.

[christian peralta]

I always knew that hillary was way overrated and a awful candidate that would be an awful president, but the press, pollsters and every single person believed that she would win the presidency. the first signs of her losing the election where:

1. her tenure as a secretary of state and the controversy surronding her emails
2. the comey letter
3. loopsied margins for trump in kentucky and indiana, while he was favored in those states, the margins where so big (in some counties his support topped 80%)
4. pennsylvania, michigan, minnesota, new hampshire, maine, connecticuit and wisconsin too close to call
5. his big support in florida
6. trump leading in pennsylvania and wisconsin
7. trump winning big in ohio and iowa
8. florida called to trump
9. then, pennsylvania and wisconsin

[Filuwaúrdjan]

From the moment it became clear that she was going to run? I pointed my fears out pretty frequently here for a while back then, until I got bored with them being dismissed as scaremongering.

[Yellowhammer]

It was fairly obvious that she was in danger of losing all along.

[BenBurch]

It was fairly obvious that she was in danger of losing all along.

[GM Team Member and Deputy PPT WB]

At the time I denied that she could lose to Trump of all people, but now it's obvious she could've lost since nearly the start of the campaign.

[courts]

[Confused Democrat]

Election night, maybe around 9:00PM?

I did not see it coming, AT ALL.

[7,052,770]

I was in Denial for much of Election Night until I finally moved on to the Anger stage in the 10-11 hour. I'm not totally out of that one yet.

[wjx987]

I was never that concerned, and I was downright confident on election day thanks to Slate's votecastr thing. Then, when the first numbers from Wayne County, MI started rolling and showed Trump with a narrow lead for the first half an hour I realized something was odd. When it was announced at around 9 that Trump was leading in Michigan by 12 votes and Hillary was showing meh numbers everywhere else, it hit me.

[Da2017]

I was never that concerned, and I was downright confident on election day thanks to Slate's votecastr thing. Then, when the first numbers from Wayne County, MI started rolling and showed Trump with a narrow lead for the first half an hour I realized something was odd. When it was announced at around 9 that Trump was leading in Michigan by 12 votes and Hillary was showing meh numbers everywhere else, it hit me.

I remember the votecastr.  I knew something was off when the upper Midwest was red.

[ηєω ƒяσηтιєя]

I was in Denial for much of Election Night until I finally moved on to the Anger stage in the 10-11 hour. I'm not totally out of that one yet.

This.

Also, when I saw that Trump was leading in Florida. That's when it hit me that he might win, it was like an arrow going through my heart.

[Illini Moderate]

I was very worried after her 9/11 collapse but then after her good performances in the debates (and Trumps awful ones) I felt sure she would win. When the Comey letter hit and she started free falling in the polling I got nervous, but going into election night I still felt very confident. I knew she had lost on election night around 10 PM however when she wasn't winning key states as quickly as I thought. I'm not going to lie, I was shocked. I never thought America would elect a man who lied so often and easily to everyones face. Nor did I think we would elect a man who clearly didn't know what he was talking about on almost every key issue. I think this mindset of "He could never win" hurt Hillary as it lowered Dem turnout. Many people who weren't fond of her, but would have picked her over Trump didn't turn out because they thought she would win either way.

[Consciously Unconscious]

I knew that it was possible for a while, but I doubted that it was going to happen.  Once Trump was leading in Florida and most of the liberal areas had been counted, it started to seem actually feasible. 

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

First time was while watching the Comey press conference live. It was very clear to me how that was going to play in the press - "indictment of her character" etc. Stayed that way for maybe a month. Never panicked, during that stage, but was concerned.

Second time was about two days after the Weiner laptop story broke. My best friend was getting married the next day and I was a groomsman, and I didn't have much of any time to follow the news until after that. Once I finally absorbed it, I was in a panic for the remainder of the campaign.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

I'm going to quote some of my analysis posts from my predictions to lay out how my thoughts shifted over the course of the campaign. Apparently I was more nervous in early September than I remember being.

August 14:

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September 11:

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October 9:

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October 24:

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October 28 (Day of the Comey Letter):

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November 1:

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November 7:

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[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

Quoting from what I was posting on Facebook on election night and the night before.

November 7, 2016, 9:18 PM:

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November 8, 2016, 8:56 PM (By this point it is clear the panic I felt the last week before the election is justified and the election is going to be very close):

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November 8, 2016, 11:33 PM (By this point I thought it was clear Trump was more likely than not to win):

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November 8, 2016, 11:50 PM:

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November 9, 2016, 1:21 AM (When it was clear to me that there was no realistic path for Clinton):

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[Averroës Nix]

As soon as it became clear that she was the next Democratic nominee, which was apparent from the moment that she announced that she was leaving the State Department in December 2012.

This remained true through summer 2016, except for a couple of weeks before the SC primary when Bernie Sanders made things interesting.

There was a brief period of optimism toward the end of the primaries, in late spring of 2016 - this was after Cruz made the bizarre and desperate choice to name Carly Fiorina as his presumptive running mate.This was when it had become clear that Trump would be Republican nominee, but we didn't have a good idea of what the general election campaign would look like.

But I didn't hold on to any illusions of a comfortable victory for long. The Clinton campaign made mistake after mistake, and in retrospect the indignation and impotent outrage of her rank-and-file supporters was portentous. Clinton's awful campaign was predictable, but the ease with which Trump consolidated Republicans behind his campaign after the convention shocked me.

I considered her a slight-to-moderate favorite by September, but even that measured level of pessimism was enough to feel like a bit of a voice in the wilderness.


Sidenote: When I look back on my posts here and on AAD, it's disturbing to remember how upset I was. The campaign was agonizing for me in a way that Trump's time in office really hasn't been, at least past his first couple of weeks in office.

Maybe I've just lost the capacity for getting that upset about politics, but with perspective I think that a lot of it had to with something else: I was part of the target audience for the Clinton campaign. And, as ineffective as that campaign was at winning over voters, it did an incredible job when it came to stoking neurosis among its core demographics.

[Webnicz]

Election night, maybe around 9:00PM?

I did not see it coming, AT ALL.

this ^^^

"Ive spoken too much sh**t at school for her to loose this election"
that was an actual quote from me to my friends at our election night party around 8 PM Arizona time, I did go to school the next day rather embarrassed though I probably deserved it lol.

[SInNYC]

When the Comey letter hit and she started free falling in the polling I got nervous, but going into election night I still felt very confident

According to Nate Cohn of NYT, the freefall in polling (well, more like a fall than freefall) occurred before the Comey letter, going by the date of the polls - google for the nyt upshot article titled "a-2016-review-theres-reason-to-be-skeptical-of-a-comey-effect" (sorry, this site doesn't let newbies post links). See the yellow line in the first graph.  I realize this is contrary to the popular narrative.

[Pericles]

When the Comey letter hit and she started free falling in the polling I got nervous, but going into election night I still felt very confident

According to Nate Cohn of NYT, the freefall in polling (well, more like a fall than freefall) occurred before the Comey letter, going by the date of the polls - google for the nyt upshot article titled "a-2016-review-theres-reason-to-be-skeptical-of-a-comey-effect" (sorry, this site doesn't let newbies post links). See the yellow line in the first graph.  I realize this is contrary to the popular narrative.

NYT would say that. They blew up the Comey letter and Clinton's emails into the most important issue, and are now trying to shirk responsibility for helping Trump win. Nate Silver is far more trustworthy and is actually statistically literate(538 forecast at least warned that Trump could win, NYT were complete garbage).

[7,052,770]

When the Comey letter hit and she started free falling in the polling I got nervous, but going into election night I still felt very confident

According to Nate Cohn of NYT, the freefall in polling (well, more like a fall than freefall) occurred before the Comey letter, going by the date of the polls - google for the nyt upshot article titled "a-2016-review-theres-reason-to-be-skeptical-of-a-comey-effect" (sorry, this site doesn't let newbies post links). See the yellow line in the first graph.  I realize this is contrary to the popular narrative.

Yes, that's the Great Debate between Nate Silver and Nate Cohn. Both are pretty confident in their opinions and have used a lot of statistics to back it up.

The thing to remember is that if Silver is right, the NYT (Cohn's employer) bears a lot of responsibility for her loss since they gave so much coverage to the Comey letter.

[MT Treasurer]

On election night? When it became obvious that Trump was going to win FL (which I thought had Waterloo potential for him), I realized that he had at least a 50/50 shot. When he took the lead in NH (which I considered out of reach for him even in a massive GOP wave year), I knew she was absolutely finished.

Before that? I always thought she was criminally overrated by her supporters and never bought her being inevitable or whatever. The only reason I predicted a narrow Democratic victory in the end (with Trump winning OH/IA/ME-02/NC and Clinton winning FL/PA/WI/NV) was due to Trump's terrible GE campaign.