#NeverHillary beats #NeverTrump

#NeverHillary beats #NeverTrump

Throughout the 2016 campaign a vocal minority of the Republican Party refused to support the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. So called #NeverTrump Republicans had many concerns about his candidacy which are nicely summarized by my friend Ryan Darby here. I shared some of these concerns and had several others. I always acknowledged Trump could beat Hillary Clinton.


I feared though that a Trump victory would change the Republican Party from a party based on principles into a cult of personality


I was also concerned that conservatives would be denied a chance to nominate a movement conservative until at least 2024.
https://twitter.com/jasonjacksonNE/status/728435977379680257
In aggregate, what #NeverTrump amounted to was a veto of a Trump presidency. Conservative “NeverTrumpers” acknowledged there were insufficient conservative votes to elect their preferred candidate, but they believed they did have sufficient strength to deny an unacceptable candidate the White House. Much fanfare was made about this cohort of Republicans, and their failure to get onboard fueled pundit class speculation of Hillary’s inevitability. What the conventional wisdom failed to anticipate was that on the left #NeverHillary was an even stronger electoral force than Trump objectors. Hillary underperformed President Obama’s 2012 campaign by 6 million votes, while President Elect Trump underperformed Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign by about 1 million votes.

Those 6 million Obama voters effectively vetoed a Clinton presidency by switching their votes or registering their indifference to the Democrat nominee. Trump on the other hand got a much higher percentage of the Romney coalition to pull the lever for him. The pundit class in the media is now talking a lot about Trump having mobilized a new coalition of voters, but the real story of this election is how #NeverHillary swung the White House to Trump.

A few other quick thoughts on the election:

– America is already great … its our federal government that’s the problem.
– Hillary Clinton’s undoing was her hubris. In 2008 her campaign’s failure to organize in caucus states cost her the nomination to Barack Obama. In 2016 her campaign’s failure to campaign in critical electoral college states cost her. In each case she seems to have bought in to the narrative of her own inevitability.
– In 50 years Hillary will be remembered like William Jennings Bryan or Adlai Stevenson – personalities that most dominated the politics of their era while falling short of the presidency.
– Congrats to my friends Kristine Alesio and Amanda Rigby on their reelections to the La Mesa and Vista city councils respectively. And congrats also to my friend and Mayor-Elect Richard Bailey on his victory in the City of Coronado. I was happy to endorse Richard and I know Coronado will benefit greatly from his leadership.

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