Hillary Clinton has famously blamed everyone and everything for her defeat in the 2016 presidential election but herself. Hot Air notes that her latest excuse was that the Electoral College stopped her from entering the Oval Office. Was it not for that meddlesome Constitution, she would be president by now.
How the Electoral College works
The Electoral College was one of those creative compromises wrought by the founding fathers that was designed to prevent the larger states from dominating the smaller ones in presidential elections. The system forces candidates to campaign in places like Iowa and Montana as well as the big states of California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
Generally, the candidate who wins the popular vote also wins the Electoral College. Sometimes, that outcome does not occur, as the winner of the popular vote in 2000 and again in 2016 still lost the election due to having lost the Electoral College. The system worked as it was supposed to, awarding the presidency to the candidate who tried to appeal to the broadest swath of American voters.
Hillary Clinton’s failed strategy
Clinton and the people who ran her campaign were aware of the role the Electoral College played in American presidential elections. They were not that disengaged from objective reality. Their mistake was to make assumptions about which states were in play and which were not.
Clinton and her strategists assumed that states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were safely in their corners as they had been for the previous 20 or so years.
That assumption turned out to be wrong. Those formerly blue states were filled with working class and middle-class voters who had concluded that the governing elites did not respect them.
Clinton did nothing to disabuse them of that notion and did a lot to reinforce it. Trump, on the other hand, actively wooed those discontented voters and they responded at the polls. Hillary Clinton may have been gobsmacked by what happened, but in hindsight, she should not have been.
Clinton promises not to run again
Hillary Clinton has pledged that she will not be a candidate in a future election.
While this promise should be taken with a grain of salt, it is a smart move for her. The decision does not mean that she means to depart from the national stage and retire to a well-earned obscurity. She will continue to speak out, mainly about her favorite subject, that being herself. The media will have to cover it because the Clintons have been a slow moving train wreck for a quarter of a century. She will thus siphon attention from other Democrats when they need it the most.
