That was apparent to my unqualified eyes. You could see it where she was campaigning. Trump was all over contested states. She stuck to the sure things.

“Hilary/she…”

She was the candidate and made the final call but a lot of people work on a presidential campaign. There was plenty of blame to go around but she didn’t personally make all those decisions. Certainly not alone…

Hillary wasn’t focused on the electoral college, she cared about beating Obama’s vote totals to “prove” she should have beat him.

She came up about 8M votes short from Obama’s big 2008 win. If she’d been aiming for that high bar, she missed it by miles.

Ironically, it was Biden who cleared it handily (with Trump coming in at historic-high second place) in 2020 thanks to mail-in voting boosting turnout nationally by nearly 20M votes. Of course, both parties immediately shut that shit down, lest Americans get used to the idea of convenient, accessible popular voting. The Trump/Biden Post Office under DeJoy has been dismantling the very idea of mail-in voting for the last four years.

I suspect 2024 turnout will be significantly lower across the board.

We need to get rid of all those people who haven’t understood American politics for decades

I totally disagree. We could use a lot of new blood, with people who aren’t resigned to the cynicism of the bi-annual election cycle. The folks who don’t simply submit to the psychic pressure of this heavily propagandized and chronically demoralized election waves are exactly the kinds of people who could break it.

Trump’s biggest triumph in 2016 was bringing out conservatives who had otherwise never voted. People who were too depressed by the duopoly to show up came out in droves during the GOP Primary to support their Big Wet Boy. That kept Ted Cruz out of the White House (which I’d argue would have been far worse for the country in the long run) in 2016.

Sander almost replicated the feat against Hillary that same year, but got kneecapped by a media that was hostile to the very idea of Socialism. But if you want any kind of progressive change in America in your lifetime, you need to see Democrats undergo the kind of change that the GOP has undergone, but from the left.

You need more people who aren’t consigned to voting Joe Biden mechanically every four years, even as he’s falling apart in front of your very eyes. You need more people who want to shake up the party establishment and vote out the rotten incumbents. You need people who actually believe what these candidates are saying, rather than accepting a basket of lies at face value and shrugging when the candidates fail to deliver.

But we can’t go into 2030 with a population of voters who just accept the status quo as the best they’ll ever do.