Who’s the biggest loser? Ranking Hillary Clinton among the also-rans who won the popular vote – By Matthew Rozsa (salon.com) / Sept 17 2017
As America prepares to hear Hillary Clinton’s side of the story regarding the 2016 presidential election, many pundits are proclaiming that she should no longer be taken seriously in politics today.
Considering her unique status as one of a select group of presidential candidates who won the popular vote but lost the electoral count, this reaction is curious, to say the least.
At least officially, there have been five presidential candidates who won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College: Andrew Jackson in 1824, Samuel Tilden in 1876, Grover Cleveland in 1888, Al Gore in 2000 and Clinton in 2016.
That statement comes with a few qualifiers. Because African-Americans were systematically denied the right to vote in nearly a century’s worth of presidential elections (from 1868 to 1964), we can never know for sure how the popular vote counts in any of those contests would have turned out under a fairer system. In many presidential elections during the early history of the republic, electors weren’t chosen by direct popular vote in any place. As recently as the 1960 presidential election — an exceedingly tight race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon — convoluted rules in certain states meant that either candidate could theoretically have won.
Those points aside, there are at least five occasions in which we know for sure that the candidate preferred by a plurality of those who cast votes did not become president. That carries considerable symbolic significance, considering that the United States presents itself to the world as a beacon of democracy.
Hillary Clinton, it seems to me, is being treated differently than the four men who came before her.
The most fortunate of the bunch, of course, were Jackson and Cleveland, since each of those losers was elected president the next time around (in 1828 and 1892, respectively). Although Samuel Tilden suffered some hits to his reputation thanks to a smear campaign launched against him after the 1876 defeat, his esteem among Democrats was high enough that he would most likely have been the party’s nominee in 1880 had he not dropped out due to his declining health.
Those are all 19th-century examples, of course, drawn from a drastically different period in our political history. But even Clinton’s most recent analogue received considerably better treatment. After Al Gore’s controversial loss to George W. Bush in 2000, he had a 56 percent favorable rating in opinion polls (versus 40 percent unfavorable). That declined somewhat by 2002, when Gore decided not to run in 2004 in order to focus on his newfound role as a climate-change apostle, but he was still at a reasonably healthy 46 percent favorable and 47 percent unfavorable rating.
By contrast, Clinton’s most recent breakdown was 41 percent favorable and 57 percent unfavorable, while a December poll found that a walloping 62 percent of Democrats don’t want her to run again in 2020. (She recently announced that she would not do so, and that her career as a political candidate was over.)
So what gives? Why is Clinton faring so much worse than Jackson, Tilden, Cleveland and Gore?
To a degree, I think the answer defies quantitative analysis. To a much greater extent than any of her predecessors in this peculiar category, Clinton’s presidential campaign was viewed as a sure thing. While the candidates who became president instead of the previous popular-vote winners — they would be John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush — don’t exactly belong on Mount Rushmore, none of them was remotely comparable to Donald Trump. Each had previous experience in political office, and all fell within the ideological mainstreams of their respective parties.
PB/TK – Let’s rid our elections of either the Popular or Electoral College as they have become a massive headache for some time. Everyone will dwell on the woulda coulda shoulda of their losing candidate. Yes what would’ve happened if 9/11 fell under a POTUS Al admin? Yes how would’ve a POTUS McCain handled WikiLeaks? We can speculate till 2020 but until then Hillary has got to go away
