http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/442059/dont-blame-clinton-trump-2016-wouldve-beaten-obama-2012
Update: the author of the NR article has issued a Mea Culpa, that the data that he used was not up-to-date, and that it affected the substance of the article:
UPDATE: Mea Culpa. Here’s what happened: I used the New York Times vote-record database for the numbers in this post. This was a matter of convenience; I had already been using the NYT database because of its excellent interactive feature, which allows you to scroll over counties in any state color-coded indicators of partisan margin as well as raw vote totals. Here’s the problem: The NYT database doesn’t have the correct numbers in some states.
Which means next to nothing given that even on the comparison Obama still would win the EV and that the comparison doesn't even make sense when you consider that people were considering Clinton vs. Trump, not Obama vs. Romney.
ReplyDeleteI allowed (as did the author) that it was "apples vs oranges".
DeleteJohn Bugay
ReplyDelete"For those who are inclined to say that Trump was a bad candidate for the Republicans to nominate,"
Being a good or bad candidate is not only about winning or losing. It's not less than that, but it's likewise more than that.
"consider that, in this admittedly "apples to oranges" analysis, at the very least, he out-performed Romney in 2012:"
Trump outperforming Romney doesn't tell us how another GOP nominee would have fared in comparison to Romney. How would it? It's a counterfactual. For example, we could speculate it's possible Rubio or Walker or even Cruz could have outperformed Trump, who outperformed Romney. We could use various models, plug in various numbers, run various scenarios, etc. but it'd still just be a hypothetical.
I think you forgot to mention an equally important point which helped in the victory:
ReplyDeleteHillary: at least she was worse than Obama!
I agree: Hillary was very bad.
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