[tptacek]

Clinton whomped Sanders, by something like 10x the margin Obama beat Clinton by. I don't think you can reasonably draw a lesson about 2016 from the 2008 primary.

There's something tautological about saying someone "wasn't well-liked enough" to get elected. That's why everyone loses an otherwise fair election.

An equally compelling and even simpler narrative is that it's simply rare for the governing party to hold on to the White House for 3 consecutive terms. The opposition party gets to run a "change" election that the incumbent party can't. For a second term in office, where the incumbent party can run the same candidate, they can run a "continuity" election that more often than not beats "change". But they can't do it for a third term, and so the opposition simply tends to win that term.

[fjdlwlv]

Clinton owned the Democratic party, they followed her sinking the ship instead of unifying behind someone electable.

Clinton's campaign was 100% continuity and that is what her opposition focused on

[tptacek]

This is a just-so story that requires us to believe that Clinton's influence over the party generated millions of extra votes for her. It's an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence (emails from the DNC illustrating that they supported her after her victory became a literal foregone conclusion do not count as that), and one for which virtually no evidence is ever presented.

The party didn't nominate Clinton. Sixteen million individual American voters did. Clinton came within a hairs breadth of the number of votes Barack Obama, the most popular Democratic politician in modern memory, gained. Sanders missed that mark by four million votes.