“Are you sick of Republicans? Or just right-wingers in general? Do you want to send a message to Washington that you aren’t going to buy into their racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and classist nonsense for one second longer?”
“Then do the very thing that Donald Trump unintentionally encouraged in a recent tweet: Encourage Hillary Clinton to run for president in 2020!”
That’s the actual top to a story posted Friday on Salon.com titled “Here’s your leftover turkey: The case for Hillary Clinton 2020 — What better way to honor the holiday than with a spiteful argument for yet another Clinton candidacy?”
The story jumps off of a post on Twitter last week by President Trump.
Yes, Trump does seem fixated with Hillary. He vanquished her in 2016, dispatching the two-time loser to a book tour in which she’s selling her pathetic book, “What Happened.” But of course he would love to run against her again in 2020 because she’s so beatable.
How beatable? Let’s recap. In 2008, America so disliked her that they opted for a first-term senator with no experience of ever running anything in his life. Eight years later, America picked an egotistical billionaire who ended up as a reality TV star.
That’s how much America doesn’t like Hillary.
Since her 2016 defeat, things have only gotten worse. Evidence has emerged that Clinton rigged the Democratic primaries so she could take out Sen. Bernie Sanders. And Trump has also recently suggested that she may soon be under federal investigation for other shenanigans she’s pulled, like deleting tens of thousands of emails from her secret server.
More, Hillary’s waaaay more unpopular now. A recent poll of Democrats and independents found 62% think she shouldn’t run again. The big winner in the poll? “Someone entirely new,” at 66%.
But no, to Salon, Hillary’s perfect in 2020.
The story has crazy subheds, like these:
1. Hillary Clinton is the Winston Churchill to Vladimir Putin’s Adolf Hitler.
and:
2. Hillary Clinton being elected president (at last) would monumentally piss off misogynistic trolls, and what’s not to like about that?
But this passage is our favorite: By winning the popular vote convincingly in 2016, Hillary Clinton has earned the right to be considered the presumptive nominee in 2020.
As I wrote in September, Clinton is the first defeated presidential candidate to win the popular vote without being automatically considered a frontrunner in the next election. Two of the previous four popular vote-winning also-rans were actually elected in the subsequent cycle (Andrew Jackson in 1828 and Grover Cleveland in 1892), while two others were widely regarded as frontrunners before dropping out for personal reasons (Samuel Tilden and Al Gore).
Let us not forget that, for all of the smack talk about how poorly Clinton ran her campaign, she bested Trump by nearly 3 million votes. This was no razor-thin margin of victory, but a decisive expression of the American public’s preference. In terms of percentage points, her margin of victory was roughly comparable to that by which Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976 or George W. Bush beat John Kerry in 2004. She also held Trump to a lower percentage of the popular vote than that garnered by Mitt Romney in 2012.
Let’s hope Democrats take this fantastic advice to heart.
