Nearly two years after the election of President Donald Trump, a comforting, yet dangerous, fantasy pervades liberal thought about the 2016 race: That Hillary Clinton not only could’ve won, had she made modestly different choices and that, by all rights, nearly any other Democrat could’ve beaten Trump. As New York Times reporter Amy Chozick (echoing numerous other pundits) describes it in her new book about the campaign, it should have been a cakewalk — the “most winnable” race ever
This is a comforting thought for Democrats in the Trump era, because it means that, if they merely run a different candidate in 2020, then victory is essentially assured. But it’s actually a dangerous fallacy: Donald Trump was and is an unusual candidate with a lot of unprecedented liabilities, for certain, but he also had some real strengths. Beating him as an incumbent president will require facing the latter head-on, not simply fixating on the former.
The idea that beating Trump should have been easy took hold because it seems intuitively right to some people — even today, it can be hard for educated liberals to take the idea of President Donald J. Trump seriously.
Any election decided by the kind of razor-thin margins the 2016 presidential election was, by definition, winnable by either candidate.....
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
