Hillary Clinton To Next Female Presidential Candidate: Prepare to Be Brutalized

[karynnj]

71. I have argued for years that you can't compare results from different years -

Bill Clinton was always labeled a political genius,but he won against a President at 39%, with a strong third party candidate also in the race who spent over a year bashing GHWB.

I agree with many points you listed, but many existed even before 2004. The only one that I disagree with is gerrymandering, which can not affect anything at a state level - There are only two states - NE and ME where it could have any impact as those states award on a district level. Others started long ago. The Republicans used a more primitive technology - using CHOICEPOINT which used credit history data to target different mailpieces to different voters as far back as 2004. Companies were already using the same technique on mailpieces they sent. In addition, 2004 was the first year of McCain/Feingold which found their loophole in the PACs like the SBVT. (One ironic thing was that M/F required the candidate to be heard approving all of his messages. The PAC ads did NOT have that and allowed candidates to claim "not me".)

I would argue that following a popular 2 term Democrat is not harder than running against an incumbent President at a 60% plus approval rating in December 2003. There are models which use variable that reflect the economy and other measures to predict the likelihood of which party wins with generic nominees. We did better than anyone would have predicted in 2004 and it was widely predicted that we had the advantage in 2016.

I think most people would agree that 2008 and 1992 were the two years where it was most likely we would win. this would likely be followed by 2012 and 1996 (at least after Dole won). If I had to order the rest, it would be 2016, then 2000, with 2004 being the toughest.