Why did voters care so much about Hillary’s emails?

[darklordoftech]

Why did they care about that any more than they care about Hunter Biden?

[Hope For A New Era]

Public opinion flows from the top down. Everyone talked about it like it mattered, so it mattered.

The Hunter Biden thing, meanwhile, exists only in right-wing echo chambers.

Also, Hillary was running for office. Hunter is not - Joe is.

[Bootes Void]

Because people hated Clinton sometimes irrationally so the emails was sort of used as elan excuse. I'm not excusing the email scandal, I think there was problems with what she did but it was overblown and over the top.

Hunter Biden stuff doesn't work well with Joe Biden is because you are talking about problems with someone else not Joe themselves. Also the media doesn't hate Biden irrationally but they do alot of concern trolling and both side-ism(ex: the 1st debate, the media said the first sucked and was hard to watch but that was only because of Trump not of both candidates

[ultraviolet]

They wanted a reason to hate Hillary

[Alben Barkley]

There was already a perception of the Clintons built up over the previous 25 years as "crooked." It doesn't matter that most Republicans could not if their lives depended on it explain to you just what the hell "Whitewater," "Benghazi," or "Her emails" were or how the Clintons somehow supposedly did something wrong in these situations. The impression that there was just something shady about them was drilled into their heads anyway and it stuck. Bill's charm and the fact that he was a man helped him escape the worst of it for the most part; hell, some people blamed Hillary more than him for his affair!

But Hillary already was an easy target for hate from square one. This was a woman who, before she even became First Lady, went on TV and (in)famously said that she had no plans to "stay home and bake cookies and make tea." Who only took her husband's name with extreme reluctance. Who was more actively involved with policy and administration than any First Lady before her. Who didn't "smile enough." She was an outspoken, unapologetic, ambitious feminist. And that just rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Again, easy target for the right-wing hate machine to go to town on. The substance was completely irrelevant. All they needed was something for the Fox News viewers to chant during the two-minutes hate.

[Figueira]

They didn't. It's just that the 2016 margin was so close that you can point to literally any factor and declare that it cost Clinton the election.

[Pericles]

It was more about the idea that Hillary was rather elitist and there was one set of rules for the Clintons and another set for everyone else. It fed into perceptions of her being untrustworthy, and also that she benefited from a rigged system.

[hughesr44]

I'd take a guess and say it's because of how bad Trump made them seem. Even after the FBI said there was no case, he still came up with tons and tons of lies about them, and eventually the people started to believe him.