Which Recent Presidential Nominee Ran the Worst Campaign?

[pbrower2a]

Clinton 2016 -- by far. She ran against someone who should have been trounced, and went on a quixotic effort to expand 'her' map where such was ineffective but let the fascist demagogue get chances in states that she should have never lost. She should have appeared at those Labor Day events in Michigan and Wisconsin.

[Person Man]

The 2016 election almost doesn't deserve to be judged in the same category as any of the other elections, given the simultaneous Russian interference in the election and the utter failure of the press to hold Trump to any of the standards that all previous candidates had been held to. It would be like comparing the 1919 World Series to any other World Series.

[Peanut]

Sadly, Hillary. She could have won in a landslide. She didn't.
Romney, too. McCain was pretty bad too.

[Politician]

Trump ran a good campaign. He won despite every major pundit (except Fox News obviously) predicting a Clinton win, and he won in the face of multiple scandals and the fact that he's, well, Trump.

[Free Bird]

From worst to best.

1. Trump 2016 (If Russia hadn't stepped in, he likely would've lost in a landslide)

Them damn Russians and their Facebook ads. Deceiving the Rust Belt when Trump had a message tailor-made for them!

[Free Bird]

Those who voted Clinton don't know what they are talking about. Take out Comey's letter (something over which she had no control) and the same people would say today what a well-oiled machine her campaign was.

Objectively Trump ran the worst campaign. He was an atrocious fundraiser, lost three debates hands-down, was constantly baited into saying dumb and/or offensive things, and changed three campaign managers. 

1. He showed it doesn't matter.
2. First I'll give, but I would consider the second a narrow win and the third a tie.
3. It got him attention, right?
4. They were all for separate stages of the campaign, and that shows a willingness to change course when needed that he is well known for.

[Landslide Lyndon]

From worst to best.

1. Trump 2016 (If Russia hadn't stepped in, he likely would've lost in a landslide)

Them damn Russians and their Facebook ads. Deceiving the Rust Belt when Trump had a message tailor-made for them!

How obtuse are you? What influenced the election weren't the ads on Facebook but the groups purportedly ran by Sanders or minority voters which sowed constant division among Democrats and/or propagated Breitbart lies and smears. These were very effective according to every one who studied the matter.

2. First I'll give, but I would consider the second a narrow win and the third a tie.
3. It got him attention, right?

1) Nobody cares about your opinion, snap polls showed the vast majority of viewers declared her a winner in all three.
2)Following your logic the Stormy Daniels story would have gotten him loads of attention but for some reason Trump did everything he could to bury it.

[Sir Mohamed]

I'm honest here, it's Clinton. She totally underestimated the desire of the electorate for an outsider, and when she finally came to the realization, she tried to beat Trump in a category she couldn't win (I remember the crazy remark "I couldn't imagine a greater outsider than to be the first woman president"). She also neglected the Rust Belt and handled the e-mail thing not appropriately.

[JG]

Those who voted Clinton don't know what they are talking about. Take out Comey's letter (something over which she had no control) and the same people would say today what a well-oiled machine her campaign was.

Objectively Trump ran the worst campaign. He was an atrocious fundraiser, lost three debates hands-down, was constantly baited into saying dumb and/or offensive things, and changed three campaign managers. 

1. He showed it doesn't matter.
2. First I'll give, but I would consider the second a narrow win and the third a tie.
3. It got him attention, right?
4. They were all for separate stages of the campaign, and that shows a willingness to change course when needed that he is well known for.

Polls showed Hillary to be a clear winner in all three debates. Hillary messed up a lot of things in that campaign, but the debates weren't one of them unsurprisingly. Debates had always been one of her stronger campaigning skills.

[Progressive Pessimist]

The 2016 election almost doesn't deserve to be judged in the same category as any of the other elections, given the simultaneous Russian interference in the election and the utter failure of the press to hold Drumpf to any of the standards that all previous candidates had been held to. It would be like comparing the 1919 World Series to any other World Series.

Long post incoming!

You're right, darthpi. Our institutions absolutely failed us in this election. I hope I'm not a hypocrite for quoting this after the fact since I already posted that I think Drumpf ran the worst campaign. I stand by it though. Seriously, under no circumstances would a truly successful campaign have gone through three campaign managers, one of which was ousted for assault and the other ousted for being a criminal.

I do kind of want to elaborate on your post and come to the defense of Clinton, the apparent popular answer in this thread,  like Landslide Lyndon, Icespear, and a few others have.
You can complain about Clinton's allocation of resources, I get that, maybe that would have made a difference. You can complain about where she did or didn't campaign (though I doubt a visit or two to Wisconsin really would have mattered if Pennsylvania was so heavily invested in and voted against her). You can complain about her past choices to vote for the War in Iraq or how she handled her email sever. I get all that. But most of what affected her negatively, as related to actual campaigning, throughout the general election was outside of her control.

Clinton ran a conventional campaign in a time when conventional was not received well. Drumpf's wild card status and being the constant focus of most of the campaign's attention forced her to run based around him. Even in spite of that, she did have policies that she emphasized and campaigned on. It was hard to pay attention to them as Drumpf's latest outburst or rally made the rounds on the news, but they were there. When she wasn't forced to address Drumpf's controversies; she discussed health care,climate change, student loan reform, paid leave policies, equal pay for women, criminal justice, trade, green energy and the jobs it would bring, preserving beneficial Obama-era policies under her watch from a likely Republican Congress, and her ability to accomplish it all as an experienced public servant with the expertise to back it up. She had the backing of President Obama, Vice President Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and others who helped her try to sell these issues. She aired ads that discussed these things while contrasting her life of public service to Drumpf's life of deceit and self-interest. Does anyone remember that tool on her site that displayed what she was accomplishing and when compared to what Drumpf was doing at the same time? That was a neat and effective idea. I wish more people paid attention to that than her damn emails.

In thinking about it, what I would really fault Clinton for were some of the assumptions, and I don't mean that based on a notion of her inevitability winning. Contrary to what most people thought would happen, Clinton and her campaign knew what was happening especially during the Comey letter aftermath. They never got complacent and I don't remember a spokesperson of her's on the news ever forgetting to emphasize that Drumpf could win and that it wasn't a guarantee that people wouldn't rationalize his despicable behavior or buy his demagogic, near-constant, compulsive lies and his false promises. No. What Clinton assumed was that the American people were more rational than they turned out to be. It's pretty common to hear undecided voters complain about how negative and divisive politics can be. This was no exception, but she ran with the "Stronger Together" slogan to hopefully appeal to people's better instincts rather than their darker ones like Drumpf did. Clearly people wanted politics to be negative and divisive. Oh but she said "basket of deplorables!" That only turned out to be an error since it was taken out of context. If you look at the entire quote it is actually a defense of the average Drumpf voter. She was asserting that just because Drumpf appeals to the alt-right and the David Dukes of the world that it didn't necessarily translate to representing the majority of people who support him. Sure, she ran some negative ads, but it's stupid not to point out his ignorance, numerous hypocrisies, and despotism. She categorized him as "temperamentally unfit and displayed why. Hillary Clinton is an overtly cautious politician and she ran her campaign in a similar fashion, for better and worse. I'm sure everything she did was well researched and evaluated, that's probably why she performed so well in all three debates. But when you are running with factors like an absolute enigma being your opponent, hostile news cycles, the electoral college, and a country of uninformed voters with short attention spans, it's hard to know what to do. That gets especially more difficult in the face of being so vitriolically hated by unreachable right-wing voters in addition to other unexpected circumstances like collapsing from pneumonia or facing an onslaught of Russian commissioned misinformation and manipulation. Honestly, Drumpf won due to luck and the environment which couldn't really be helped either. He also only barely won thanks to a technicality.

Clearly it did not have work out for her. And I certainly don't think it was the best campaign ever, but her losing doesn't necessarily mean that it was a bad campaign to me or that she didn't try her damnest. I didn't hear much criticism of these aspects of her campaign, that I laid out, during the general election. Everyone assumed that conventional was good and it isn't her fault that people chose to put their impulses before their actual interests and chose to focus on petty superficial things rather than constructive policies or ideas. I'm being harsh on the average American voter, I know, and it may not be a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's unreasonable to waive our want of "excitement" or "inspiration" when exposed to a recognizable threat like Donald Drumpf as President. Was running to preserve the Iran Deal, the ACA, the Paris Accords, Net Neutrality, or a rightful Supreme Court Justice nomination really such an "uninspiring" message? I always hear about how Clinton had a weak message but it was pretty clearly "don't fix what isn't broken." That doesn't need to be exciting, it's important! A campaign is a means to an end for a candidate to govern, not a form of entertainment. Drumpf is breaking what doesn't need to be fixed and worsening the things that do need to be fixed. All of the policies and accomplishments that I mentioned in the preceding few sentences have been threatened. Clinton has been right about a lot of what to expect from this administration. Drumpf is indeed temperamentally unfit, and our country (and the rest of the world too) is suffering for it. Even as there is a lot of blame to go around in general, that blame goes way beyond one person's campaign choices. At a certain point we all have to look at ourselves and at our fellow American and hope we all learned a few lessons for the better in 2020. It's the only thing we can do now.

[Da2017]

I went with Clinton. She should of won the election in a landslide . She was up against the most beatable candidate. Seriously that access hollywood tape should of disqualified him. It takes a ton incompetentence to lose someone like that.

[Del Tachi]

McCain 2008 was pretty bad.  While no Republican was ever going to win in that kind of environment, he did inflict a lot of unnecessary wounds on himself that have come to haunt the GOP for quite some time (i.e., Sarah Palin, suspending his campaign to "deal" with the financial crisis, poor debate performances, etc.)

[GM Team Member and Senator WB]

Clinton simply because she lost to Trump. McCain may have gotten crushed, but that would've happened to just about any R after the crash.

[adamevans]

McCain did fairly well imo, especially since he was leading polls in September and the fact he held on to Missouri. No Republican should've gotten close to Obama in that setting, but McCain played his cards correctly.

[Pyro]

Pokèmon Go to the Polls!

[The Undefeatable Debbie Stabenow]

I'm probably just too much of a Clinton apologist, but I legitimately do not think her campaign was particularly bad and I think the uncontrollable political conditions she faced are greatly understated in discussion of why she lost. I don't think her losing to someone as incompetent as Trump proves that her campaign was bad, because there are countless other reasons that a candidate can lose even if their campaign is relatively okay.

For one, it was after 8 years of a relatively unpopular Democratic administration, which is always a handicap; Gore couldn't win after 8 years of Clinton and McCain couldn't win after 8 years of Bush. Additionally, and more importantly, Clinton was absolutely despised by the right, and she was targeted by one of the most aggressive slander campaigns waged by the Republican Party and its supporters in modern history. The public as a whole, partially due to this but also due to her lack of charisma, was not at all favorable to her. Obviously a strong campaign strategy can help, but there is only so much you can do to counteract your innate unpopularity; I think pundits blame her campaign too much for the public's distaste for her, but I think it was more as a result of the image she had garnered over the last several years, an image no one could undo over the course of a single campaign.

I understand the frustration with her lack of campaign stops in Michigan and Wisconsin, but I personally think it would've made nearly no difference because she pretty frequently went to Florida, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, and still lost all three. I doubt a couple extra visits to any given state would've saved her.

Obviously her campaign was still pretty weak overall but I  wouldn't say it's the worst out of the options. I would agree with a couple others than Romney '12 was probably the worst. He seemed terribly out-of-touch and was unable to shed that image, which was only worsened with his 47% gaffe (and others). Gore '00 was disappointing too.

Both Obama and McCain in '08 did pretty well, but the political environment at the time killed any chances McCain could've had.

[Young Conservative]

From first worst to best:

1. Hillary 2016: Losing to Donald Trump alone puts her at the top. No one, outside of Trump's staunchest supporters thought she'd lose and she lost.

2. Mitt Romney 2012: What should've been a close election that could go either way was a decisive win for Obama.

3. John McCain 2008: Granted, McCain was doomed from the start. With that said he picked the worst running mate of the last 50 years and said the fundamentals of our economy were strong as the economy was collapsing around us.

4. Trump 2016: To his credit, he understood the Republican orthodoxy was unpopular and ran against it, and because of that and because of divided establishment and conservative opposition, he won the nomination, and then went on to win the general against a candidate who literally snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. That aside, of all these recent nominees, none had put their foot in their mouth as much as Trump did and no candidate did as much to divide this country (intentionally I might add), as Trump. Trump 2020 might very well out worse Hillary 2016 though as Trump has, for the most part, has pushed an agenda that is  within the Republican orthodoxy.

5. Gore 2000: He went from trailing Bush by double digits in the Spring to being in a dead even race with him by the time the conventions were over, so I can't call this campaign bad. With that said, it wasn't good. He made an ass of himself in the town hall debate when he approached Bush and tried to intimidate him onstage and he didn't use Bill Clinton to his advantage, Hillary used him on the campaign trail and won her Senate race. He also handled the Florida recount poorly as well.

6. Kerry 2004: Would be higher on the list (and might've won the election) if he hadn't flip flopped on Iraq (which was understandable but hurt him) and had he responded to the swift boat veterans for truth ads.

7. Bush 2004: Despite poor debate performances in all three debates, a weak recovery from the early 2000s recession, the truth coming out on Iraq, and despite not being as good as the 2000 campaign, he still did alright and managed to eek out a win.


8. Obama 2012: Outside of the "You didn't build that" gaffe and a poor performance in debate number one, and despite vulnerabilities (weak recovery, Obamacare not having majority support yet, etc...) he ran a solid campaign.

9. Bush 2000: Ran against Peace, Prosperity, and the closest thing to incumbency you could get in an open election and won, even if narrowly and controversially.

10. Obama 2008: Need I explain.

This is pretty much it.