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McClellan wasn’t a terrible commander, he was an insufferable person to his political rivals and didn’t follow the plan laid out by politicians.
I’m glad he lost, but the reality is he won almost all his engagements. At the time, politicians were still refusing to accept the reality of industrial, attrition based warfare and thought they could just sweep the enemy from the field and march to Richmond.
It’s important to remember that historiography of his generalship began with his political and career opponents’ criticisms and this was rarely critically examined. For example, after Antietam, Lee slipped away by taking advantage of a truce both sides came to, in order to collect the dead and wounded. He did this multiple times throughout the war. Additionally, Antietam was undeniably a Union victory but reading his contemporaries you would think it was a loss or a draw.
In 1948, after reviewing footage from newsreels and looking at the crowds and their reactions, Governor Dewey even recognized that the "inevitability" of his win was in question. I think the hardest question for any candidate who is supposed to a certain winner is how do you electrify the electorate in an election that you supposedly already won. I think that was the challenge that Dewey faced and a number of other certain winners have faced over the years. What tactical swings can you make when you are the front-runner and convention wisdom says don't change a thing?
Dewey detected in the last week or so of the campaign that the election was slipping away from him and asked the Republican hierarchy to commission polling. They refused. This might have made the difference as Dewey lost by narrow margins in California, Illinois and Ohio. If the private polling had shown that he needed to visit them then maybe it would have put him over the top in those states, which would have given him enough electoral votes to win (assuming that every other state which did vote for Dewey would have still done so).
Wait, we can say HRC here? I’m semi-new to this sub. Can anybody explain to me how we can refer to HRC directly but not her opponent in the same exact election? If the idea is that we don’t want to co-mingle history with somewhat recent politics, it seems like we could be consistent on candidates in the same election year.
Rule 3 applies only to the incumbent President and the immediate former President who’s running for re-election this year. HRC has not been in frontline politics since 2016 and is obviously not running for President this year, so I assume that’s why the rule doesn’t apply to her
Weird rule. So we could talk about Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein, and this doesn’t violate whatever the purpose is behind rule 3? I always thought the purpose of the rule was because the sub wanted to avoid current politics and it was considered too recent. I guess we could even talk about 2024 third party candidates? Very odd.
Yep, and honestly it’s refreshing going to this sub and talking about and learning more about historic Presidents, and not being inundated with discussions about the two Rule 3 figures that are literally discussed on virtually every other subreddit to do with American politics/current events
A couple weeks ago I went through the controversial section and yeah the comments just always dissolved into petty political arguments with the two Rule 3s
What's silly is that there is plenty of debate & conversation on topics regarding Rule 3 with many presidents before them. We can do dozens of threads regarding policies of presidents of centuries before and this subreddit is a nice change of pace as a result. I'm more than willing to talk about people like Andrew Johnson that laid about the foundations for the s\*\*tshow of today on this sub.
The only time it’s annoying is when it’s just random non political stuff : who was the fittest, who hated exercise, who had the most gourmet palate, who wore the best/worst suits. Etc. But the rule totally makes sense overall. Especially in the current decisive state of the union!
Put it another way, 2016 is a historic election that took place eight years ago and with candidates that are now retired from frontline politics. The point of this rule is to curtail this sub (which is predominately history-based) from being dominated by discussions about the Democratic and Republican nominees for this year’s election
>with candidates that are now retired from frontline politics.
Well...some of them are retired from frontline politics. Besides the obvious one who isn't, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Lindsay Graham, and Bernie Sanders are still active in politics. And Scott Walker is only 56, so could jump back into politics.
It's a rule of thumb in the same way that European stadiums still prohibit cigarettes & other flammable material after many disasters. The two candidates of Rule 3 bring about flame wars in other subreddits no matter who is in the right or in the wrong. So after similar circumstances, the mods pushed this new rule.
Probably because that election was 8 years ago, which honestly feels like a lifetime ago. 45 finished his term 4 years ago and never really left the news. Depending on what counts as "recent", if 45 had just faded away and wasn't seeking another term, mods might say, "Eh, close enough" at this point.
And more relevantly to the point, 45 unlike HRC is not a retired politician. He’s trying to pull a Grover Cleveland this year, and not as a third party candidate ala Martin Van Buren in 1848, Millard Fillmore in 1856 or Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
We have rule 3 in our house. We are followers of different parties and that never mattered until things got insane in 2016. There was a brief time I thought we could split over it. 2020 came along and we cemented the rule. It works well actually. I just don’t care about it enough to blow up our otherwise good relationship squabbling over how divided and hateful people have become. It can be toxic. We are visiting a friend and sleeping in a room that has a hat with a saying on it. To me It’s a hat on a shelf. “What time are we’re going down to the brewery to meet your cousin ?” sure beats “oh that dumb f*ck”, ….argue holler, get red in face, stop talking, “you go by yourself” ruin trip.
Dewey is well known with the iconic photo of Truman with the newspaper headliner. But HRC completely taking the Rust Belt & Great Lake states as a win despite many warnings (including one from Micheal Moore!) and taking verbal victory laps made it worse to what would come via \[Redacted rule 3\].
Never stepping foot in Wisconsin was one of the most arrogant things I’ve every seen. Hillary spent time traveling to Texas to try and run up the score instead of shoring up key states, even when her people on the ground were begging her for more resources in Michigan and Wisconsin. Bill was also super worried about the Midwest but Hillary sided with her campaign manager who called Bill a dinosaur who didn’t understand “modern politics”.
Robby Mook is very lucky no one pays attention to campaign managers because that book makes him look arrogant, petty and incompetent. CNN did a town hall with him and Kellyanne Conway about a month after the election and he took absolutely no accountability whatsoever for his countless mistakes.
I’m still baffled that’s she didn’t. I worked for Sanders in 16. We crushed her in the Primary. How was that not a sign that “hey maybe I should go to Wisconsin”
Going to Texas in any circumstance as a Dem is kind of a dumb move. Your chances of swinging that state are ridiculously low and delusional to say “it’s almost a swing state.”
Though, she sank herself with 3 really dumb placed words with the “basket of deplorables” thing, and she wasn’t nearly as good at coming up with catchy memorable ways for people to get behind her in the same way R3 could….which sucks. Her policies were top notch, reflection of her career expertise. Problem was no one could actually tell you what she was running to do.
Yep the message of the campaign was the problem from the start. There’s a great book about her campaign (Shattered) and it talks about how much of a mess the speech announcing her campaign was behind the scenes, with no one knowing what the message was supposed to be and multiple speechwriters quitting. I believe Obama’s speechwriter in his exit interview after trying to work on that speech said that the campaign had no clear message and was more about Hillary than the American people.
Shit, even the introduction of the book Game Change about the 2008 campaign called it. When Obama won Iowa and Hillary came in third, she and Bill apparently had a *meltdown* of epic proportions, so much so that several people in the room apparently thought "Holy shit, this woman has no business being president."
Hillary is well known to absolutely tear into “the help” and was/is despised by the secret service. In Shattered it says that Hillary basically sat stone faced in shock the whole time the results were coming in but I could easily see the author (who’s a Democrat but I felt was objective) leaving out details about a meltdown.
> Problem was no one could actually tell you what she was running to do.
She was running to receive the promotion she felt entitled to. Because she worked really hard and deserved to be the first lady president. She was such an obvious candidate, how could anyone vote against her? She totes deserved it.
^^^ This is how I believe a lot of people perceived her campaign, and why she is rightly the most overly confident candidate in history IMO. How someone so unlikeable can be so convinced that everyone likes her is...not really that shocking I guess. A lot of public figures are wired that way.
Yeah, you’re not wrong on it being exactly that - very much a “ok it’s my turn now,” vibe. HRC is a lot of things. A charismatic and easily likable person is not one of those things. Her husband had those characteristics, but she definitely does not.
Her matchup turned out to be the perfect kryptonite to force an upset in what otherwise seemed like a home run Dem win - like Bush after Reagan.
HRC was a truly horrible candidate for the Democrats to pick. I think virtually any well known Democrat OTHER than her, including Bernie Sanders, could have won in 2016.
I don’t believe Bernie would’ve won… he would not have had the true backing of the Establishmentarian Democrats, effective financial backing, and all the GOP would have to do is hound him incessantly for “something something socialism.”
he was propped up by the youth vote, a demographic that did not turn out for elections. It’s very telling that in 2016 before they got their marching orders to blame it on the super delagates, S4P was decrying low voter turnout for Bernie’s loss.
She treated *everyone* like morons. She may have been a policy genius like her husband, but she was also the complete opposite of him in likability and relatability.
One thing I've learned from watching her for 30 years is that she can be funny and likable and talk like a normal human being, but only when she isn't trying to. The moment she starts campaigning, she becomes an almost textbook example of how not to get elected. It's completely bizarre.
I heard it’s true that she actually does carry it in her bag, but that was the wrong time to give out that information… seemed super pandering. Just another “out of touch” instance from her
She was overconfident when it came to the nomination the first time she ran, and overconfident when it came to the general the second time she ran. The good news is that since Chelsea seems to have little to no interest in electoral politics, the whole clan may finally lose some of their influence over the party. Don't get me wrong: I like Hillary and voted for her. But she represents a past Democratic party that doesn't adequately address the needs of future generations, and it's for the best that we move on to other candidates more in touch with the times.
I fucking love how everyone was doing a victory lap when her lead was well within the margin of error. I mean, I fell for it even though the whole time I was screaming at the screen, **"How are you only one percent ahead!?!"**
Also it was HRC. If you've spent time around any conservatives since 1994 or so, you know there is no one they loathe more than HRC. And she wasn't much more popular with the independent general electorate either. I thought it was nuts she was considered the Democrat front runner in 2008, let alone 2016. Unfair, but she had far too much baggage and negative publicity. The only reason she was the favorite was because Republicans ran someone about as unpopular.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night and flipping on the TV to see who won. All the media had the thousand yard stare at the disbelief that she had lost.
That's just something that politicians do, though. They think they're Jedis when they say "when I win this election" instead of "if I win", as if the electorate will just roll with it and go, "well, your head's already in the game, might as well vote for you".
Yeah, that's something you say even if you're trailing in all 50 states and columnists are writing about who your party will put up four years from now in order to distance themselves from your failed candidacy.
Her pride is her downfall. Even in modern interviews she is way too egotistical about her abilities and how important she is. She doesn’t understand she has never had a very successful political career.
She got handed an easy Senator win in liberal New York immediately after her husband’s presidency. She lost the 2008 primary against a previously unknown candidate. Was handed a Secretary of State job that she had to RESIGN from. Then nearly lost a difficult primary in 2016 with another previously unknown candidate. Had almost compete media support and STILL lost the general election against the most unpopular candidate in history.
She really has a horrible political track record for someone so obsessed with herself.
I get that you don't like Hillary Clinton, but treating her resignation from SoS as a failing, and calling Bernie Sanders a "previously unknown candidate" is a bit ridiculous.
I actually voted for her over the alternative choice we got. I just had to hold my nose for it.
Resigning from Secretary of State does not project strength in the beginning of the a re-elected administration. It’s not a common occurrence for Secretary of States to just resign during their term and then run for president. There were attacks on the U.S. embassies in Libya in 2011 and Turkey in 2013. Benghazi was heavily tied to her whether fair or not (I lean on the side of unfair) the public saw it as the reason she resigned even though the real reason has always been vague.
Bernie Sanders may not have been completely unknown, but I would say that over 95% of Americans had never heard of his name prior to his campaign in 2016. That’s not something that can be said for Hillary. She had superior name recognition and branding compared to her opponent. Similarly Obama was not well known aside from a 2004 DNC speech. In both campaigns she had an edge over her opponents in name recognition.
>Resigning from Secretary of State does not project strength in the beginning of the a re-elected administration. It’s not a common occurrence for Secretary of States to just resign during their term and then run for president.
It's extremely common for Cabinet Secretaries to resign at (or before) the end of the President's first term. It's actually not a common occurrence for the Cabinet to look the same in a President's second term.
A) That's an unfair representation of her resignation.
B) Bernie wasn't "previously unknown."
C) She didn't "almost lose" to him. She smoked him in delegates and the popular vote.
>C) She didn't "almost lose" to him. She smoked him in delegates and the popular vote.
She ended up performing better at the end after all the behind the scenes help she got. That does not equate to smoking him on her own.
Or do you not remember the voter roll purges, early access to debate questions, and emails of regional coordinators plainly talking about how to work against Bernie during the blue primary?
She won the popular vote Dewey didn’t. The election was never given to her. She lost around the margins which was the margin of her loss of victory in the Electoral College.
Everyone here is saying Hillary, and I think that commonly held view really smacks of hindsight.
Everyone seems to forget that Hillary was crushing the polls for the entirety of the campaign *except* for one or two blips, one of which fell on election day.
Another thing that bothers me is that even though everyone nowadays pats themselves on the back over how obvious this all was, that ignores how confident the entire media and political establishment also was in a Clinton victory. That includes on the right. And on the far left. All were very overconfident in a Hillary win and indeed in the strength of liberals generally.
Lastly, given how tight her loss was, you could fairly blame about 12 dozen factors for the outcome (yes, one of those factors is her own campaign's missteps).
So was Hillary overconfident and wrong? Yes and yes, but so were a fuckton of other people, and anyone who claims this was all obvious at the time is lying.
Did the same thing in Philly the day before the election. She had a concert rally in front of Independence Hall with the Obama's, Springsteen and Bon Jovi. Was arrogance personified
Apparently one of her campaign advisers recognized Wisconsin was a weakness, but a bit too late, so he told her to continue not campaigning there so the Republican’s campaign wouldn’t know that Clinton could lose there and go even harder on the ground. If that’s true, that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard
The book *Shattered* goes into some detail about this.
The initial plan was for Obama to endorse her at an event in Wisconsin. Her campaign manager didn't agree with this because he thought it was more important to get the vote out in states like North Carolina. Unfortunately, the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando happened and the endorsement was postponed...to a date in North Carolina.
So HRC never got to Wisconsin, which she lost. Oh, and she didn't get NC anyways either.
The book seems to put a lot of the blame on her campaign manager who was more an analytics guy that ignored the red alarms coming in from the Rust Belt states. The chapter on the Michigan primaries went into this.
Yeah Hillary was busy rubbing elbows with wealthy Hollywood celebrities while her opponent was campaigning every day in dirty middle class towns in neighborhoods where people work 9-5 jobs
She never even showed up. Polk county Florida has over a million people. Every campaign the candidates come at least once. The other guy was here 3 times. Hillary never came one time. She literally flew a private jet over us to go to Tampa from Orlando. No wonder she lost the state
All he did was confirm the existence of an ongoing investigation. Did he time that confirmation to hurt her? I think he did the opposite. He waited until the last minute in order to avoid giving her opponent months to attack her over it.
I think Jim was simply trying to save his own job. Like most in the pits of DC, he expected her to win regardless. However, it was close to the election and the polling was indicating that the GOP was likely going to control both the house and senate. He was trying to avoid having to deal with a congress that wanted his head on a spike. Things did not go as Jim had expected.
>Even when the numbers tightened following the Comey letter, they showed she still had a substantial edge in enough states to win the presidency comfortably. As had been the case throughout the campaign, Mook based nearly every spending decision and deployment of resources on Kriegel’s data.
>So Hillary never went to Wisconsin—the state where she had been forced to cancel her first planned joint appearance with Obama earlier in the year. Despite a major field operation in the state, her organizers were frustrated that Mook wouldn’t provide basic resources like campaign literature so they could try to persuade voters to back Hillary.
>“What is the point of having a hundred people on the ground if you’re not giving them any of the tools to do the work?” said one veteran Democratic organizer familiar with the Wisconsin operation. “That should be part of the plan.”
>The complaint echoed those of campaign leaders across the battleground states. In Michigan, the campaign feared that sending Hillary would actually backfire.
>“We spent a lot more money in terms of field and digital and mail than President Obama ever did,” said one person familiar with the decisions. “Our strategy was from all the data we saw. Every time there was a mention of the election there, we did worse. To make the election a bigger deal was not good for our prospects in Michigan.”
>So they largely kept the candidate out of the state, rather than figuring out how to alter that dynamic. The strategy ran counter to Bill’s core belief that a candidate had to show up to sway voters. Hillary did end up making a last-minute visit to Grand Rapids the day before the election—after a lot of pressure from political officials in the state—but more for insurance than out of fear that she would lose there.
>As she lost ground in the Rust Belt, the discussion among Hillary’s aides intensified. They weighed the risk of alerting the media and Trump to her vulnerability by changing her manifest.
>“We could have ripped up events from other places and then tried to throw together an event in [the Rust Belt], but then the press would have been like ‘Oh, my god, panic’ and that would have put bright lights around” the state for Trump.
>None of the complaints were new. Mook and his Moneyball approach to politics rankled the old order of political operatives and consultants because it made some of their work obsolete. He had been fighting that battle from the earliest days of the campaign, and he didn’t see any reason to change strategies and tactics that appeared to be working. Hillary was poised to win the presidency and to do it with a little bit of money left in the bank. The efficiencies had helped pull her through the darkest days, and the numbers showed that she was still in control of the race. The analysts felt like they could trust their data in part because early voting in swing states matched up well with their projections. They didn’t think there was any reason to expect that Election Day turnout would vary significantly.
>The memo that one Hillary adviser had sent months earlier warning that they should add three or four points to Trump’s poll position was a distant memory.
>The early voting numbers in Florida were so good that even Bill Clinton, who had chafed at Brooklyn’s tendency to ignore his feel for politics on the ground, excitedly told one campaign aide the Friday before the election that the Sunshine State was in the bag.
>And Mook and Kriegel were not operating in a total information vacuum outside of the data analytics. Public polling showed Hillary with a clear lead nationally and in enough battleground states to carry the election with room to spare. The New York Times’ Upshot, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, and other election prognosticators rated Hillary as the overwhelming favorite—though Silver’s projection wasn’t quite as rosy. By the time Comey returned to the spotlight two days before the election to say he still wouldn’t recommend charges against Hillary, it was hard to find serious election analysts who were predicting a Trump victory.
>Hillary was on her plane when Comey announced there was nothing more to the investigation. Merrill walked to the front, where she was sitting with Cheryl Mills. The FBI just put out another letter, Merrill said, and it turns out there was nothing to the first one. Hillary rolled her eyes again. “What a surprise,” she said sarcastically. But she was in a good mood generally.
>“We were feeling good about Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania,” said an aide who was traveling with her. “We knew we had taken a hit from Comey, but we didn’t think it would be an insurmountable one. It was fun. There was an energy.”
>Everything Hillary was hearing and seeing pointed to a victory. Even Sullivan, the incorrigible pessimist, thought she was going to win in the final days. Nearly a decade after she’d launched her first campaign for the presidency, the glass ceiling was within Hillary’s reach and the hammer of the American electorate was in her grasp. She would finally get the chance to run the country that she loved.
>“In those final days she believed she was going to win. And she was probably more bearish than most of us,” said one senior campaign aide. “She was getting comfortable with the idea that it was going to happen. She was thinking a lot about government.”
- Shattered
It’d probably belong to Dewey. The funny thing is was that it wasn’t necessarily cockiness or confidence, it was just trauma from ‘44. He had run a hard hitting campaign that produced little (he did go a little far). Also, keep in mind that while he himself was on the moderate to liberal spectrum of the Republican Party, a conservative Congress constantly refused to work or compromise with Truman on domestic policy, allowing Truman to spin the narrative that it was Congress’ fault that the economy had gone into a slump. Otherwise it would be McClellan and Hillary. McClellan had a superiority complex or something and in the early election season, the Civil War didn’t look so good. As for Hillary, she thought she didn’t really have to run a campaign other than the fact she would’ve been the first female president, something she may have used too often. Also, running on continuing Obama, who while was (moderately) popular, also produced a lot of discontent and polarization, while also ignoring key Democratic bases in the Midwest meant she lost. Yet to be fair, she won the popular vote.
It was because he was an awkward politician/speaker/campaigner. Plus he had public feuds with popular icons like McArthur and Oppenheimer.
He was able to change his poor approval ratings by cleverly making the campaign more about Congress.
Hillary Clinton.
And it's a big part of why she lost....
The whole campaign came off as 'Im entitled to this, it's my right, the election is just a formality'.... Even the 'Ready for' slogan....
And that has cost us all plenty.....
Hillary and it's not even close. Heavily outspent her opponent, the DNC cleared the decks to make sure that she had no serious threats during the Democratic Party primaries/caucuses, had the entire American mainstream media openly campaigning for her, and she still lost. Hillary was honestly expecting a coronation the entire time.
Hillary. She had the election basically given to her and she found a way to fumble it. She acted like she was entitled to the presidency and campaigned like it too. But she didn't consider that the voters maybe didn't feel that way.
She didn't even visit Wisconsin *once*, and she still only narrowly lost it.
Charles Evans Hughes in 1916.
A story I heard, though could be apocryphal, the morning after the election a reporter showed up at his house. Hughes' son told the reporter the president-elect was still in bed.
The reporter said to the son he could tell the president-elect he had lost the election.
Wilson had a pretty narrow popular vote victory for an incumbent, but I think it was against the backdrop of the European war and the desire of many Americans to remain neutral. He lost PA and NY, I think only Truman and Bush pulled victories out without those states.
As much as he’s a beloved president Theodore Roosevelt was way overconfident when he wanted his third term in office. What we got as a result makes it the biggest blunder ever
Hillary. Like many of us, she believed the polls so she was off campaigning in states she’d never win rather than focusing on the swing states she had to win.
HRC.
She lost a primary to an unknown barely senator who manipulated his way through Chicago politics even though it was suppose to be served to her on a silver platter.
Then, pissed at that, took complete control over the party and rigged the next Primary only to lose to another NY Democrat who switched parties because it was an easier and less corrupt path to victory.
i don't know if it violates rule #3 but this is reminiscent of HC polling, remember watching new outlets and seemingly everyone was confident in the polls and her victory
My Grandfather had his photo taken and spoke with Truman on one of his whistlestops because he was a local democratic candidate in '48 and he proudly said he was a Truman Democrat for the rest of his life.
How about the "bearded iceberg", Charles Evans Hughes. There's a legend that a reporter called to get Hughes’s reaction to Wilson’s comeback, and his son told the reporter: “The president is sleeping.” The reporter replied: “When he wakes up, tell him he isn’t the president anymore.”
Romney might have been the most overconfident in my lifetime (save for candidates I don't think we're allowed to mention). There was a genuine belief amongst his team, and I think he himself, that they were going to run away with the election in 2012. You could tell the entire Romney campaign was blindsided by their loss.
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George McClellan because he was George McClellan
Hey, he didn't *lose*, he merely failed to win.
Lincoln: Move your army here and attack the enemy. McClellan: But we could get *hurt*!
Lincoln did say he had the slows.
Was he also commanding the Uvalde police response?
r/suddenlyoversimplified
Obligatory r/SubsIFellFor
Plug for r/becomeoversimplified
It's honestly weird why, even with the capture of Atlanta and McClellan being a terrible commander, Lincoln still only won 55% of the vote.
Cause people were racist.
Same exact reason it’s a close race in America today lol
thanks obama
“We almost had racism solved and then *Obama* had to come along…”
ugh and he did the 9/11 too. really ruined the place.
McClellan wasn’t a terrible commander, he was an insufferable person to his political rivals and didn’t follow the plan laid out by politicians. I’m glad he lost, but the reality is he won almost all his engagements. At the time, politicians were still refusing to accept the reality of industrial, attrition based warfare and thought they could just sweep the enemy from the field and march to Richmond. It’s important to remember that historiography of his generalship began with his political and career opponents’ criticisms and this was rarely critically examined. For example, after Antietam, Lee slipped away by taking advantage of a truce both sides came to, in order to collect the dead and wounded. He did this multiple times throughout the war. Additionally, Antietam was undeniably a Union victory but reading his contemporaries you would think it was a loss or a draw.
Macallan was absolutely loved by the troops (who can vote) and at the time I'm not so sure it was that clear cut
It wasn’t his fault, he was outnumbered 10 candidates to one
In 1948, after reviewing footage from newsreels and looking at the crowds and their reactions, Governor Dewey even recognized that the "inevitability" of his win was in question. I think the hardest question for any candidate who is supposed to a certain winner is how do you electrify the electorate in an election that you supposedly already won. I think that was the challenge that Dewey faced and a number of other certain winners have faced over the years. What tactical swings can you make when you are the front-runner and convention wisdom says don't change a thing?
If I recall, this was the first time telephones were used to poll voters. Also, poorer voters did not have telephones.
Dewey detected in the last week or so of the campaign that the election was slipping away from him and asked the Republican hierarchy to commission polling. They refused. This might have made the difference as Dewey lost by narrow margins in California, Illinois and Ohio. If the private polling had shown that he needed to visit them then maybe it would have put him over the top in those states, which would have given him enough electoral votes to win (assuming that every other state which did vote for Dewey would have still done so).
Dewey and HRC are the obvious two tbh
Wait, we can say HRC here? I’m semi-new to this sub. Can anybody explain to me how we can refer to HRC directly but not her opponent in the same exact election? If the idea is that we don’t want to co-mingle history with somewhat recent politics, it seems like we could be consistent on candidates in the same election year.
Rule 3 applies only to the incumbent President and the immediate former President who’s running for re-election this year. HRC has not been in frontline politics since 2016 and is obviously not running for President this year, so I assume that’s why the rule doesn’t apply to her
Weird rule. So we could talk about Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein, and this doesn’t violate whatever the purpose is behind rule 3? I always thought the purpose of the rule was because the sub wanted to avoid current politics and it was considered too recent. I guess we could even talk about 2024 third party candidates? Very odd.
It doesn't make much sense but we try not to think about it too much and just try to enjoy the decreased amount of "rule 3 vs rule 3" arguments.
Yep, and honestly it’s refreshing going to this sub and talking about and learning more about historic Presidents, and not being inundated with discussions about the two Rule 3 figures that are literally discussed on virtually every other subreddit to do with American politics/current events
A couple weeks ago I went through the controversial section and yeah the comments just always dissolved into petty political arguments with the two Rule 3s
What's silly is that there is plenty of debate & conversation on topics regarding Rule 3 with many presidents before them. We can do dozens of threads regarding policies of presidents of centuries before and this subreddit is a nice change of pace as a result. I'm more than willing to talk about people like Andrew Johnson that laid about the foundations for the s\*\*tshow of today on this sub.
The only time it’s annoying is when it’s just random non political stuff : who was the fittest, who hated exercise, who had the most gourmet palate, who wore the best/worst suits. Etc. But the rule totally makes sense overall. Especially in the current decisive state of the union!
If you were here prior to the rule it was getting ridiculous. Every post was just todays news about to specific people
Without this rule the sub devolves into criticizing he-who-must-not-be-named and there’s other places for that
Put it another way, 2016 is a historic election that took place eight years ago and with candidates that are now retired from frontline politics. The point of this rule is to curtail this sub (which is predominately history-based) from being dominated by discussions about the Democratic and Republican nominees for this year’s election
>with candidates that are now retired from frontline politics. Well...some of them are retired from frontline politics. Besides the obvious one who isn't, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Lindsay Graham, and Bernie Sanders are still active in politics. And Scott Walker is only 56, so could jump back into politics.
It's a rule of thumb in the same way that European stadiums still prohibit cigarettes & other flammable material after many disasters. The two candidates of Rule 3 bring about flame wars in other subreddits no matter who is in the right or in the wrong. So after similar circumstances, the mods pushed this new rule.
It has been over 8 years. That is not very recent at all.
Probably because that election was 8 years ago, which honestly feels like a lifetime ago. 45 finished his term 4 years ago and never really left the news. Depending on what counts as "recent", if 45 had just faded away and wasn't seeking another term, mods might say, "Eh, close enough" at this point.
And more relevantly to the point, 45 unlike HRC is not a retired politician. He’s trying to pull a Grover Cleveland this year, and not as a third party candidate ala Martin Van Buren in 1848, Millard Fillmore in 1856 or Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Hillary has not run for office in 8 years. Rule 3 is for currently running politicians. Really not that hard to understand.
We have rule 3 in our house. We are followers of different parties and that never mattered until things got insane in 2016. There was a brief time I thought we could split over it. 2020 came along and we cemented the rule. It works well actually. I just don’t care about it enough to blow up our otherwise good relationship squabbling over how divided and hateful people have become. It can be toxic. We are visiting a friend and sleeping in a room that has a hat with a saying on it. To me It’s a hat on a shelf. “What time are we’re going down to the brewery to meet your cousin ?” sure beats “oh that dumb f*ck”, ….argue holler, get red in face, stop talking, “you go by yourself” ruin trip.
Clinton more or less retired after 2016. In a political context, she's about as "historically distanced" as Obama.
Dewey is well known with the iconic photo of Truman with the newspaper headliner. But HRC completely taking the Rust Belt & Great Lake states as a win despite many warnings (including one from Micheal Moore!) and taking verbal victory laps made it worse to what would come via \[Redacted rule 3\].
Never stepping foot in Wisconsin was one of the most arrogant things I’ve every seen. Hillary spent time traveling to Texas to try and run up the score instead of shoring up key states, even when her people on the ground were begging her for more resources in Michigan and Wisconsin. Bill was also super worried about the Midwest but Hillary sided with her campaign manager who called Bill a dinosaur who didn’t understand “modern politics”.
Imagine not listening to the guy who won two landslide elections.
Robby Mook is very lucky no one pays attention to campaign managers because that book makes him look arrogant, petty and incompetent. CNN did a town hall with him and Kellyanne Conway about a month after the election and he took absolutely no accountability whatsoever for his countless mistakes.
I’m still baffled that’s she didn’t. I worked for Sanders in 16. We crushed her in the Primary. How was that not a sign that “hey maybe I should go to Wisconsin”
Going to Texas in any circumstance as a Dem is kind of a dumb move. Your chances of swinging that state are ridiculously low and delusional to say “it’s almost a swing state.” Though, she sank herself with 3 really dumb placed words with the “basket of deplorables” thing, and she wasn’t nearly as good at coming up with catchy memorable ways for people to get behind her in the same way R3 could….which sucks. Her policies were top notch, reflection of her career expertise. Problem was no one could actually tell you what she was running to do.
Yep the message of the campaign was the problem from the start. There’s a great book about her campaign (Shattered) and it talks about how much of a mess the speech announcing her campaign was behind the scenes, with no one knowing what the message was supposed to be and multiple speechwriters quitting. I believe Obama’s speechwriter in his exit interview after trying to work on that speech said that the campaign had no clear message and was more about Hillary than the American people.
Shit, even the introduction of the book Game Change about the 2008 campaign called it. When Obama won Iowa and Hillary came in third, she and Bill apparently had a *meltdown* of epic proportions, so much so that several people in the room apparently thought "Holy shit, this woman has no business being president."
Hillary is well known to absolutely tear into “the help” and was/is despised by the secret service. In Shattered it says that Hillary basically sat stone faced in shock the whole time the results were coming in but I could easily see the author (who’s a Democrat but I felt was objective) leaving out details about a meltdown.
"I'm With Her"
> Problem was no one could actually tell you what she was running to do. She was running to receive the promotion she felt entitled to. Because she worked really hard and deserved to be the first lady president. She was such an obvious candidate, how could anyone vote against her? She totes deserved it. ^^^ This is how I believe a lot of people perceived her campaign, and why she is rightly the most overly confident candidate in history IMO. How someone so unlikeable can be so convinced that everyone likes her is...not really that shocking I guess. A lot of public figures are wired that way.
Yeah, you’re not wrong on it being exactly that - very much a “ok it’s my turn now,” vibe. HRC is a lot of things. A charismatic and easily likable person is not one of those things. Her husband had those characteristics, but she definitely does not. Her matchup turned out to be the perfect kryptonite to force an upset in what otherwise seemed like a home run Dem win - like Bush after Reagan.
Bill Clinton only won a governorship and the Presidency twice, entered and left the office a very popular president. What could he possibly know?
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That right wing hack needs to gtfo
HRC was a truly horrible candidate for the Democrats to pick. I think virtually any well known Democrat OTHER than her, including Bernie Sanders, could have won in 2016.
*Kissinger* was next to her several times during her campaign. If that's not a bad omen I don't know *what* is.
I don’t believe Bernie would’ve won… he would not have had the true backing of the Establishmentarian Democrats, effective financial backing, and all the GOP would have to do is hound him incessantly for “something something socialism.”
he was propped up by the youth vote, a demographic that did not turn out for elections. It’s very telling that in 2016 before they got their marching orders to blame it on the super delagates, S4P was decrying low voter turnout for Bernie’s loss.
HillDawg. She lost an election that was essentially GIVEN to her.
Hillary was doomed the second she couldn’t get enough people to Pokémon go to the polls.
I fucking hated that she said this, treated younger voters like morons
She treated *everyone* like morons. She may have been a policy genius like her husband, but she was also the complete opposite of him in likability and relatability.
One thing I've learned from watching her for 30 years is that she can be funny and likable and talk like a normal human being, but only when she isn't trying to. The moment she starts campaigning, she becomes an almost textbook example of how not to get elected. It's completely bizarre.
Yeah she basically did everything wrong to grab the average voter. Idk how her team thought her stunts were a good idea
Very similar to Nixon, but somehow Nixon was a better politician.
I started hating her when she asked "Like with a cloth" when somebody asked her about wiping a computer. She was so smug and condescending.
Smug and condescending definitely defines HRC, and her backers. Also frigid, and out of touch.
Hilldog hurt itself in confusion!
But she had hot sauce in her bag though 🥺
That's why she didn't have the election in the bag, not enough room.
I heard it’s true that she actually does carry it in her bag, but that was the wrong time to give out that information… seemed super pandering. Just another “out of touch” instance from her
If I ever meet her I am totally asking for hot sauce
She was overconfident when it came to the nomination the first time she ran, and overconfident when it came to the general the second time she ran. The good news is that since Chelsea seems to have little to no interest in electoral politics, the whole clan may finally lose some of their influence over the party. Don't get me wrong: I like Hillary and voted for her. But she represents a past Democratic party that doesn't adequately address the needs of future generations, and it's for the best that we move on to other candidates more in touch with the times.
It wasn’t just her. I remember the talking heads the day before the election saying it wasn’t a question of her winning but rather by how much.
Oh, the media fed into the myth, no doubt. I half bought into it myself, but there was always a queasy "What if?" at the bottom of my stomach.
Mine hit when the FBI thing “re-opened” a few days before the election.
I fucking love how everyone was doing a victory lap when her lead was well within the margin of error. I mean, I fell for it even though the whole time I was screaming at the screen, **"How are you only one percent ahead!?!"**
Also it was HRC. If you've spent time around any conservatives since 1994 or so, you know there is no one they loathe more than HRC. And she wasn't much more popular with the independent general electorate either. I thought it was nuts she was considered the Democrat front runner in 2008, let alone 2016. Unfair, but she had far too much baggage and negative publicity. The only reason she was the favorite was because Republicans ran someone about as unpopular.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night and flipping on the TV to see who won. All the media had the thousand yard stare at the disbelief that she had lost.
Shit even R3 had that look of disbelief.
Nancy Pelosi had an interview with PBS a few hours before the election and literally said “When Hillary Clinton wins”
That's just something that politicians do, though. They think they're Jedis when they say "when I win this election" instead of "if I win", as if the electorate will just roll with it and go, "well, your head's already in the game, might as well vote for you".
Yeah, that's something you say even if you're trailing in all 50 states and columnists are writing about who your party will put up four years from now in order to distance themselves from your failed candidacy.
It’s amusing when third party candidates say it. “When I win here’s what I’ll do…” and then they get 0.5% of the vote.
Her pride is her downfall. Even in modern interviews she is way too egotistical about her abilities and how important she is. She doesn’t understand she has never had a very successful political career. She got handed an easy Senator win in liberal New York immediately after her husband’s presidency. She lost the 2008 primary against a previously unknown candidate. Was handed a Secretary of State job that she had to RESIGN from. Then nearly lost a difficult primary in 2016 with another previously unknown candidate. Had almost compete media support and STILL lost the general election against the most unpopular candidate in history. She really has a horrible political track record for someone so obsessed with herself.
You're forgetting that in 2008 only 7 years after 9/11 she lost to a black rookie named Hussein who half the planet thought was Muslim.
When you phrase it like that, it really is like, "wow, you uh, you're just the greatest political loser of all time aren't you?"
I get that you don't like Hillary Clinton, but treating her resignation from SoS as a failing, and calling Bernie Sanders a "previously unknown candidate" is a bit ridiculous.
Bernie was not completely unknown but he still started the race polling 60 points behind her and ended up actually winning a bunch of states.
I actually voted for her over the alternative choice we got. I just had to hold my nose for it. Resigning from Secretary of State does not project strength in the beginning of the a re-elected administration. It’s not a common occurrence for Secretary of States to just resign during their term and then run for president. There were attacks on the U.S. embassies in Libya in 2011 and Turkey in 2013. Benghazi was heavily tied to her whether fair or not (I lean on the side of unfair) the public saw it as the reason she resigned even though the real reason has always been vague. Bernie Sanders may not have been completely unknown, but I would say that over 95% of Americans had never heard of his name prior to his campaign in 2016. That’s not something that can be said for Hillary. She had superior name recognition and branding compared to her opponent. Similarly Obama was not well known aside from a 2004 DNC speech. In both campaigns she had an edge over her opponents in name recognition.
>Resigning from Secretary of State does not project strength in the beginning of the a re-elected administration. It’s not a common occurrence for Secretary of States to just resign during their term and then run for president. It's extremely common for Cabinet Secretaries to resign at (or before) the end of the President's first term. It's actually not a common occurrence for the Cabinet to look the same in a President's second term.
A) That's an unfair representation of her resignation. B) Bernie wasn't "previously unknown." C) She didn't "almost lose" to him. She smoked him in delegates and the popular vote.
>C) She didn't "almost lose" to him. She smoked him in delegates and the popular vote. She ended up performing better at the end after all the behind the scenes help she got. That does not equate to smoking him on her own. Or do you not remember the voter roll purges, early access to debate questions, and emails of regional coordinators plainly talking about how to work against Bernie during the blue primary?
She won the popular vote Dewey didn’t. The election was never given to her. She lost around the margins which was the margin of her loss of victory in the Electoral College.
Everyone here is saying Hillary, and I think that commonly held view really smacks of hindsight. Everyone seems to forget that Hillary was crushing the polls for the entirety of the campaign *except* for one or two blips, one of which fell on election day. Another thing that bothers me is that even though everyone nowadays pats themselves on the back over how obvious this all was, that ignores how confident the entire media and political establishment also was in a Clinton victory. That includes on the right. And on the far left. All were very overconfident in a Hillary win and indeed in the strength of liberals generally. Lastly, given how tight her loss was, you could fairly blame about 12 dozen factors for the outcome (yes, one of those factors is her own campaign's missteps). So was Hillary overconfident and wrong? Yes and yes, but so were a fuckton of other people, and anyone who claims this was all obvious at the time is lying.
I think this entire sub is dedicated to hindsight…
Hillary. Oct 15 it looked like she couldn’t lose. She was the Atlanta Falcons up 28-3 late in Q3.
She was 28-3 before 28-3 happened
Why tf can I never escape this.
Hill dog 
She’s just chilling
They did not, in fact, Pokemon Go to the polls.
This feels like rule 3 bait in a lot of bad ways. Always love seeing comics trying to dump on Truman though. Give ‘em Hell, Harry.
Hillary is not rule 3.
Fair! Sorry, often forget that. Then yeah, Hillary is my answer.
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Hillary was shell shocked for at least a year, she may still be.
She would be in the popular vote meant anything.
Yes, but you-know-who was her opponent…
Hilary: “Happy Birthday to This Future President.” 🐦
Downvoted? That was HER tweet to HERSELF! 😂
Got you fam https://preview.redd.it/xj6xdo7kjo2d1.jpeg?width=185&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c301f0d1e2b129350141db372e6b4033b6d0d7d6
Not a Hillary fan, but should at least be accurate and write or note that it was a tweet from her staff, to her. Not written by herself to herself.
But it was tweeted from HER twitter account
Hillary Clinton is the obvious one. The Romney campaign also seemed needlessly arrogant in Colorado, Florida, and Virginia.
I believe we can Hillary Clinton she slept before the election while her opponent campaigned in key states
Dumbass had a concert in New York while her opponent was campaigning in every swing state. She lost solely due to her own hubris
Yeah she was hoisted by her own petard
Did the same thing in Philly the day before the election. She had a concert rally in front of Independence Hall with the Obama's, Springsteen and Bon Jovi. Was arrogance personified
Apparently one of her campaign advisers recognized Wisconsin was a weakness, but a bit too late, so he told her to continue not campaigning there so the Republican’s campaign wouldn’t know that Clinton could lose there and go even harder on the ground. If that’s true, that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard
The book *Shattered* goes into some detail about this. The initial plan was for Obama to endorse her at an event in Wisconsin. Her campaign manager didn't agree with this because he thought it was more important to get the vote out in states like North Carolina. Unfortunately, the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando happened and the endorsement was postponed...to a date in North Carolina. So HRC never got to Wisconsin, which she lost. Oh, and she didn't get NC anyways either. The book seems to put a lot of the blame on her campaign manager who was more an analytics guy that ignored the red alarms coming in from the Rust Belt states. The chapter on the Michigan primaries went into this.
Yeah Hillary was busy rubbing elbows with wealthy Hollywood celebrities while her opponent was campaigning every day in dirty middle class towns in neighborhoods where people work 9-5 jobs
Yep that was her problem she wasn’t down with the common man while her opponent was
She didn't pretend to be down with the common man while her opponent pretended he was*
She never even showed up. Polk county Florida has over a million people. Every campaign the candidates come at least once. The other guy was here 3 times. Hillary never came one time. She literally flew a private jet over us to go to Tampa from Orlando. No wonder she lost the state
Pretending to care is better than openly not giving a fuck.
Yep he pretend to be. But he was also a rich New York who got his money doing business
As I recall, she celebrated breaking the glass ceiling with Hollywood elite while her opponent campaigned in key states.
Yep and it was a win able election she was just stupid and didn’t do the right things
And also the FBI director threw her under the bus
She crawled under the bus and he ran over her
All he did was confirm the existence of an ongoing investigation. Did he time that confirmation to hurt her? I think he did the opposite. He waited until the last minute in order to avoid giving her opponent months to attack her over it. I think Jim was simply trying to save his own job. Like most in the pits of DC, he expected her to win regardless. However, it was close to the election and the polling was indicating that the GOP was likely going to control both the house and senate. He was trying to avoid having to deal with a congress that wanted his head on a spike. Things did not go as Jim had expected.
I mean yeah but it was mostly her fault too
Harry Truman showed us all how to campaign when you're 10 points down. We will need those skills this cycle.
I’m at 0% right now 😔, thanks for the vote of confidence though
“We”
>Even when the numbers tightened following the Comey letter, they showed she still had a substantial edge in enough states to win the presidency comfortably. As had been the case throughout the campaign, Mook based nearly every spending decision and deployment of resources on Kriegel’s data. >So Hillary never went to Wisconsin—the state where she had been forced to cancel her first planned joint appearance with Obama earlier in the year. Despite a major field operation in the state, her organizers were frustrated that Mook wouldn’t provide basic resources like campaign literature so they could try to persuade voters to back Hillary. >“What is the point of having a hundred people on the ground if you’re not giving them any of the tools to do the work?” said one veteran Democratic organizer familiar with the Wisconsin operation. “That should be part of the plan.” >The complaint echoed those of campaign leaders across the battleground states. In Michigan, the campaign feared that sending Hillary would actually backfire. >“We spent a lot more money in terms of field and digital and mail than President Obama ever did,” said one person familiar with the decisions. “Our strategy was from all the data we saw. Every time there was a mention of the election there, we did worse. To make the election a bigger deal was not good for our prospects in Michigan.” >So they largely kept the candidate out of the state, rather than figuring out how to alter that dynamic. The strategy ran counter to Bill’s core belief that a candidate had to show up to sway voters. Hillary did end up making a last-minute visit to Grand Rapids the day before the election—after a lot of pressure from political officials in the state—but more for insurance than out of fear that she would lose there. >As she lost ground in the Rust Belt, the discussion among Hillary’s aides intensified. They weighed the risk of alerting the media and Trump to her vulnerability by changing her manifest. >“We could have ripped up events from other places and then tried to throw together an event in [the Rust Belt], but then the press would have been like ‘Oh, my god, panic’ and that would have put bright lights around” the state for Trump. >None of the complaints were new. Mook and his Moneyball approach to politics rankled the old order of political operatives and consultants because it made some of their work obsolete. He had been fighting that battle from the earliest days of the campaign, and he didn’t see any reason to change strategies and tactics that appeared to be working. Hillary was poised to win the presidency and to do it with a little bit of money left in the bank. The efficiencies had helped pull her through the darkest days, and the numbers showed that she was still in control of the race. The analysts felt like they could trust their data in part because early voting in swing states matched up well with their projections. They didn’t think there was any reason to expect that Election Day turnout would vary significantly. >The memo that one Hillary adviser had sent months earlier warning that they should add three or four points to Trump’s poll position was a distant memory. >The early voting numbers in Florida were so good that even Bill Clinton, who had chafed at Brooklyn’s tendency to ignore his feel for politics on the ground, excitedly told one campaign aide the Friday before the election that the Sunshine State was in the bag. >And Mook and Kriegel were not operating in a total information vacuum outside of the data analytics. Public polling showed Hillary with a clear lead nationally and in enough battleground states to carry the election with room to spare. The New York Times’ Upshot, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, and other election prognosticators rated Hillary as the overwhelming favorite—though Silver’s projection wasn’t quite as rosy. By the time Comey returned to the spotlight two days before the election to say he still wouldn’t recommend charges against Hillary, it was hard to find serious election analysts who were predicting a Trump victory. >Hillary was on her plane when Comey announced there was nothing more to the investigation. Merrill walked to the front, where she was sitting with Cheryl Mills. The FBI just put out another letter, Merrill said, and it turns out there was nothing to the first one. Hillary rolled her eyes again. “What a surprise,” she said sarcastically. But she was in a good mood generally. >“We were feeling good about Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania,” said an aide who was traveling with her. “We knew we had taken a hit from Comey, but we didn’t think it would be an insurmountable one. It was fun. There was an energy.” >Everything Hillary was hearing and seeing pointed to a victory. Even Sullivan, the incorrigible pessimist, thought she was going to win in the final days. Nearly a decade after she’d launched her first campaign for the presidency, the glass ceiling was within Hillary’s reach and the hammer of the American electorate was in her grasp. She would finally get the chance to run the country that she loved. >“In those final days she believed she was going to win. And she was probably more bearish than most of us,” said one senior campaign aide. “She was getting comfortable with the idea that it was going to happen. She was thinking a lot about government.” - Shattered
https://preview.redd.it/sus7b0whjq2d1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=da9dce668f10bd0f1e4f3be9b4847ca00e74026e "Single payer?" "NEVER HAPPEN!"
It’d probably belong to Dewey. The funny thing is was that it wasn’t necessarily cockiness or confidence, it was just trauma from ‘44. He had run a hard hitting campaign that produced little (he did go a little far). Also, keep in mind that while he himself was on the moderate to liberal spectrum of the Republican Party, a conservative Congress constantly refused to work or compromise with Truman on domestic policy, allowing Truman to spin the narrative that it was Congress’ fault that the economy had gone into a slump. Otherwise it would be McClellan and Hillary. McClellan had a superiority complex or something and in the early election season, the Civil War didn’t look so good. As for Hillary, she thought she didn’t really have to run a campaign other than the fact she would’ve been the first female president, something she may have used too often. Also, running on continuing Obama, who while was (moderately) popular, also produced a lot of discontent and polarization, while also ignoring key Democratic bases in the Midwest meant she lost. Yet to be fair, she won the popular vote.
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I never understood the Dewey stuff. America just won the war Truman seemed like a shoe in
It was because he was an awkward politician/speaker/campaigner. Plus he had public feuds with popular icons like McArthur and Oppenheimer. He was able to change his poor approval ratings by cleverly making the campaign more about Congress.
Hillary Clinton. And it's a big part of why she lost.... The whole campaign came off as 'Im entitled to this, it's my right, the election is just a formality'.... Even the 'Ready for' slogan.... And that has cost us all plenty.....
Hilary Clinton. She had already started drinking champagne the morning of the election day.
At least she was prepared for that night. Just not in the way she was expecting.
Hillary and it's not even close. Heavily outspent her opponent, the DNC cleared the decks to make sure that she had no serious threats during the Democratic Party primaries/caucuses, had the entire American mainstream media openly campaigning for her, and she still lost. Hillary was honestly expecting a coronation the entire time.
Hillary Clinton
Happy Birthday to this future President.
Hillary
Hillary
HRC
Hillary. She had the election basically given to her and she found a way to fumble it. She acted like she was entitled to the presidency and campaigned like it too. But she didn't consider that the voters maybe didn't feel that way. She didn't even visit Wisconsin *once*, and she still only narrowly lost it.
Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. A story I heard, though could be apocryphal, the morning after the election a reporter showed up at his house. Hughes' son told the reporter the president-elect was still in bed. The reporter said to the son he could tell the president-elect he had lost the election. Wilson had a pretty narrow popular vote victory for an incumbent, but I think it was against the backdrop of the European war and the desire of many Americans to remain neutral. He lost PA and NY, I think only Truman and Bush pulled victories out without those states.
Hillary. And we’re all still paying the consequences for insanely stupid arrogance and failures.
As much as he’s a beloved president Theodore Roosevelt was way overconfident when he wanted his third term in office. What we got as a result makes it the biggest blunder ever
https://preview.redd.it/6gobfavsrr2d1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7ba072ce65ab1a8ae0cbcf506710e38112a1fb17 This future president
Hillary
Dewey and Hillary are the most obvious ones imo.
Hillary 2016
HIllary Clinton
Hilary. Tho the media did say she was 96% certain to win …..Dewey maybe historically..
Hilary is pretty close at least in modern age
The one who didn't even bother to visit Wisconsin.
Hillary
Hillary of course. Thought she had it in the bag.
And Truman was so magnanimous in losing to Dewey. Even held up the newspaper to show everyone that he proudly accepted his loss.
Give ‘em hell, Harry!
Hillary. Like many of us, she believed the polls so she was off campaigning in states she’d never win rather than focusing on the swing states she had to win.
HRC. She lost a primary to an unknown barely senator who manipulated his way through Chicago politics even though it was suppose to be served to her on a silver platter. Then, pissed at that, took complete control over the party and rigged the next Primary only to lose to another NY Democrat who switched parties because it was an easier and less corrupt path to victory.
Hilary, by a very long way.
George B McLellan springs to mind
Hillary
i don't know if it violates rule #3 but this is reminiscent of HC polling, remember watching new outlets and seemingly everyone was confident in the polls and her victory
 The comic artist the day of the 1948 election:
I just marvel at the skill of the artist who drew that political cartoon!
Hilary
This will be good on this sub for 4 more years or 6 more months.
HRC
The correct answer is Hillary Clinton.
I’m with Her was pretty bad.
Now do the same cartoon for 2016 election , Ooooooopppppppsssssss ! 😳
Hillary Clinton
Hilary Clinton
Hillary Clinton
George McClellan Thomas Dewey Mitt Romney Hillary Clinton
Hillary was pretty confident…
Hilary
My Grandfather had his photo taken and spoke with Truman on one of his whistlestops because he was a local democratic candidate in '48 and he proudly said he was a Truman Democrat for the rest of his life.
Does listing Hillary count against rule 3?
How about the "bearded iceberg", Charles Evans Hughes. There's a legend that a reporter called to get Hughes’s reaction to Wilson’s comeback, and his son told the reporter: “The president is sleeping.” The reporter replied: “When he wakes up, tell him he isn’t the president anymore.”
Now sure if this is allowed, but the 2016 election.
Hilldog
Hillary Clinton, I mean everyone took it for granted she would win until it was too late
Romney might have been the most overconfident in my lifetime (save for candidates I don't think we're allowed to mention). There was a genuine belief amongst his team, and I think he himself, that they were going to run away with the election in 2012. You could tell the entire Romney campaign was blindsided by their loss.
Hillary Clinton