2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: You could see it coming. Hillary should never have run in 2016. [View all]StevieM
(10,500 posts)decided not to run. He lead was unprecedented.
And let's not forget that she was incredibly popular when she was Secretary of State. She was polling in the 60s for years, for job approval and favorability.
And in 2014 she was the one Democrat who was ahead of possible Republican candidates in the early polling.
There was no way of knowing how well the GOP would sell the fake email scandal. There was no way of realizing how long they would shamefully try to turn a terrorist attack in Benghazi in to a scandal, constantly pumping false conspiracy theories that they knew to be lies.
We also don't know what they would have done to Bernie Sanders. By the end of the race they might have turned him into Hugo Chavez, however unfairly. They certainly WOULD NOT have run against him as a decent man who they disagreed with on the issues. They would have cultivated a fictional scandal and labeled him a bad human being. In fact, didn't they already have one picked out? Some nonsense about the college his wife worked at?
I can only imagine what they had in store for Martin O'Malley. But rest assured, there would have been something. And he would have turned out to be a bad person too.