[exelius]

I think we had an election where misinformation was being spread like wildfire and used to inflame passions to support a populist candidate against the mainstream academics / elite. But the divisions were already there and had been growing for decades; but they hit a turning point during the (very uneven) recession recovery where middle America saw wages and unemployment stagnate, while the top 10% of the country reaped almost all the rewards of the recovery in the form of stock market gains.

I think any other Democrat besides Hillary would have won easily; but a lot of Dems stayed home because they felt a shitty Trump presidency was better than setting a precedent for dynastic politics. I voted for her, but grudgingly for that reason — she’s totally qualified, she has the experience, but there are other people who are qualified and had the experience too; Hillary beat them in the primaries because lots of people owed her favors due to her influence with her husband. She ingratiated herself to the party elites (unelected “superdelegates” who cast a huge percentage of the votes that determine the candidate to represent the party) and won that way.

Hillary ran a tone-deaf campaign, but I think her loss really highlighted how the Democrats lost because they were basically telling people in rural areas that their problems weren’t really problems, and if they were smarter they could figure that out. The Dems need to realize that wealth inequality has disproportionately hit these rural areas, and all the issues we see with Trumpism (Nazis, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment) are essentially borne out of frustration that individuals feel they have less control over their lives than they used to.

[Spooky23]

Not really.

One of the reasons that the Russia thing is such a big deal is that nobody, including Trump, expected Trump to win. Laser targeted ads deployed in a few swing states turned the election much more effectively than anticipated, and the impact of Trump's investments there were amplified by the other social media fodder.

There was also alot of specific targeting of disaffected union guys that moderated the GOTV efforts that are usually fruitful for democratic candidates.

End of the day Hillary was a machine candidate, except the machine broke down.

[eldavido]

Having read the Mueller report, I'm not ready to jump quite that far yet. But I do know it's certainly changed my view of what's possible, from Russia messing with the US election being "total conspiracy level stuff" to "they probably interfered, but it's not clear how effective it was".

I think the bigger point is exactly what you said though, the machine is broken. The candidates are going "direct to voter" and bypassing the "intermediaries" of the party.

[ghfbjdhhv]

Hillary had the majority of non-superdelagates, too.

[saget]

Can't speak for the nation, but in Colorado Sanders won the primary by a landslide yet received exactly 0 super deligate votes. Anyone who lived in a state where this happened could feel the elitism the previous comment was talking about

[exelius]

Yeah, Trump picked up a lot of votes simply because he addressed it as a problem while Hillary said “everything’s fine”. That was pretty insulting for a lot of people, and I don’t think the Democrats realized they were alienating their blue collar base.