Liberals were incapable of conceiving that idea, but 52% of the voters had no trouble.
Posted on 11/25/2016 8:53:23 AM PST by Kaslin
During this past election cycle, the media did their best to Akinize Donald Trump in Senate and House races across the country. Every time Trump said something outrageous or offensive — and Trump did provide plenty of that material — media outlets would challenge Republicans to repudiate Trump. The assumption was that, as happened in 2012 with Todd Akin in Missouri, Trump would become a boat anchor for the GOP and lead to massive down-ballot losses.
How’d that work out in 2016? Paul Kane at the Washington Post astutely sums up the mistaken assumption by assigning the boat-anchor award to Hillary Clinton:
It’s now clear that Democratic strategists and the media spent too much time focused on the wrong question, asking how Republicans would separate themselves from their unpopular nominee, President-elect Donald Trump.
Instead of Trump being a drag on Republicans, Clinton became the anchor to which Democratic candidates willingly attached themselves. Despite her deep unpopularity throughout the campaign, no Democratic candidate for Senate ever tried to separate themselves from Clinton in any meaningful way.
The results are stunning in their consistency.
Clinton lost Pennsylvania, the first Democratic presidential nominee to lose the state since 1988, with 47.6 percent and a little more than 2.8 million votes. McGinty lost too, by almost the exact same margin, with 47.2 percent and about 50,000 fewer votes than Clinton. Clinton lost Wisconsin, with 46.9 percent, as did former senator Russ Feingold (D) in the Senate race, with 46.8 percent and 1,800 fewer votes than Clinton.
There has been some post-election debate as to whether down-ballot Republicans like Marco Rubio, Toomey, and Johnson helped out Trump or vice-versa. The Hill’s Reid Wilson told me on Tuesday’s TEMS that it’s all but certain that Trump had coattails in these states rather than the other way around, but the extent of it is still uncertain. Pennsylvania is a good case in point. The results in the presidential and Senate race were nearly identical, but Toomey won in districts and counties where Trump trailed, and Trump soared where Toomey struggled. The closeness of their results was almost coincidental.
Either way, Kane hits the nail on the head and makes a point that the media has so far avoided. They focused almost entirely on one unlikeable candidate without addressing the impact of the other unlikeable candidate. Hillary’s favorables were almost as bad as Trump’s and her numbers on trustworthiness were worse, but almost no one asked whether these Democrats should do more to distance themselves from their party’s nominee.
Why? They assumed that most voters shared their perspective that Trump was much more unacceptable than Hillary to the point where it looked like the very thought that it might be the other way around was simply inconceivable. Rather than treat both candidates equally and pepper their down-ballot partners even-handedly about the presidential nominees, the media ran the Akin Plan on Trump and just assumed it was working. That assumption blinded them to the mood of the electorate outside their bubble, and, well … we’ve seen the result over the past two weeks of hysterics and paranoia.
Kane’s analysis also makes another point, one that Kane himself doesn’t make but is clear in the data. Trump’s election was no fluke; voters around the country rejected Hillary and the Democrats who were With Her in no uncertain fashion. Hillary might lead in the popular vote, but that’s an artifact of wide margins in California and New York. Democrats lost in nearly every swing state and even in states where their status seemed assured — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. All of the handwringing over the popular vote ignores that reality, and will likely perpetuate the blindness shared by Democrats and the media over what happened in the 2016 cycle.
Haha... Ed Morrissey of HotAir writing this as if he was not part of it. All HotAir did was talk about what a disaster Trump would be on the GOP down tickets.
To this day, Allahpundit is still trashing Trump. Site is a joke.
Liberals were incapable of conceiving that idea, but 52% of the voters had no trouble.
The ongoing evisceration of the Democratic Party at the sub-presidantial level is a fascinating story, one that most Dems I know try to ignore. After 2018 the GOP could actually have 60+ Senators if they don’t screw it up.
I always thought it was crazy that here in Iowa, where Trump was always winning, Dem candidates consistently tried to link Rep candidates to Trump and never distanced themselves from Clinton.
Rather than refer to Hillary as a “boat anchor,” it would be more accurate to refer to her as a “battle ax.”
Hillary was a butt ugly anchor too.
Notice how she hasn’t been seen or heard from since her landslide lose.
I don’t know. I think “boat anchor” fits her dimensions and stage appearance pretty well...
a popular candidate, herself, the campaign had to take Billy off the trail.
He's a spectacle beyond spectacles.....copping that hokey, hillbilly persona.
The entire globe knows him as a practiced conman.... calculatedly shaking down businesses and foreign countries (especially those w/ untapped valuable resources) for big bucks as Hillary gave out official favor after favor.
The Podesta emails added much to the sinking.
Not to mention The Obamas popping up as the biggest anchor of them all.
Get a clue
. Hillary Rotten Clinton is
They are “not allowed” to distance themselves from Clinton. Any such attempt would have buried him politically both inside and outside Dem party. Dem establishment would not tolerate such a treachery, and many Hildebeast supporters, either.
When you look past the diehards on both sides the mushy middle may have looked at it as crude vs criminal.
“Hillary’s favorables were almost as bad as Trump’s and her numbers on trustworthiness were worse, but almost no one asked whether these Democrats should do more to distance themselves from their party’s nominee. Why? They assumed that most voters shared their perspective that Trump was much more unacceptable than Hillary to the point where it looked like the very thought that it might be the other way around was simply inconceivable”
The conduct of the media in the cycle was central to Trump’s appeal. The more unlikable the media became, the more unlikeable Hillary was to the electorate.
Correction: every time Trump said something that the media outlets could spin so as to make it look outrageous or offensive...
The problem with Akin, as with so many Republicans, is that the media relentless looks for a way to spin as offensive anything that a Republican says, and the Republicans fold every time. Trump did not fold. He showed he has the backbone to stand up to the media, and people liked that.
Maybe Ed will get his own show on Levin’s (QTV) Quisling TV network.
Either is as aerodynamic as she.
We boatanchor fans are offended.
Hillary was a terrible candidate and despite all the organization and money she was totally lackluster. It should have been obvious in 2008 when her coronation was upstaged by an obscure junior senator from Illinois. Again in 2016 a doddering socialist with little money and plodding stump speeches beat her in many primaries and was only beaten off by dirty tricks at the DNC.
More like Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Hillary is a dead stinky Albatross carcass we’ve had to endure around our necks (in our lives) for decades. Time to get rid of it and the rest of the maggots etc.
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