He did draw attention to the problem of superdelegates, most of which were lined up for Clinton before the primaries even started. Despite the media repeatedly being told not to report unpledged delegates in the totals they kept doing so anyway, and this made it look like Clinton had a greater lead than she actually did.

The Republicans have not acted in the American people's best interests for a very long time now, drawing attention away from their shortcomings by blaming some boogeyman for why things can't be any better than this. Working conservatives were already frustrated with the impotency of the mainstream GOP (still are, judging by the way their town hall meetings are going) and all Trump needed to do was dispose of the dog whistles and use a bull horn to own up to these stances to greater extremes than most candidates would have been willing to go to, giving him the image of being "strong". A figure like Trump was predicted years ago. This all should have been a gift from heaven for the Democratic Party, but instead it is curiously they who have lost every branch of government, the Supreme Court soon to follow, with Obama handing the keys to the White House to his most prominent nemesis as ex-Democrats hemorrhage out of the party in disgust and frustration. All the while, the party grows more and more to resemble the Republicans, taking so much corporate money and demonizing foreign bodies. Wikileaks and Comey might be blamed for Clinton's loss, but the whole party coming undone at the seams not so much.

This is a very bad omen, as it is important to have an opposition party for balance, especially against the kinds of ideas the Republicans push. Preferably opposition based on policies and ideas rather than "We oppose $CurrentPOTUS, but we don't have any good ideas of our own." Unfortunately it appears the Democrats would prefer their slow death to the medicine needed to get better, and that does not bode well for next year, much less 2020.

He became the Republican nominee through the primary process, sure. I'd wager it was because he got considerably more media coverage than other Republican candidates but if you don't think that matters we can put that aside. Whichever the case, in your opinion why did a candidate with so much experience and recognition, rose colored by her husband's reign over the dot com boom, lose to a candidate with no political experience who acted like a strawman parody of a Republican? What, if anything, might the Democrats have done wrong?

A link I was trying to cite that didn't go through in my post, regarding said recent study: https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/for.2016.14.issue-4/for-2016-0040/for-2016-0040.pdf

GP is right, the Democrats are responsible for Trump being in the White House. The short of it is that the party's chosen (chosen by the party officials than the voters, to be specific) candidate spent over a billion dollars on a campaign running against a candidate looked down on as a bad joke, and still managed to blow it. Even worse, according to the Podesta e-mails this was the candidate they wanted to run against.

A slightly longer answer is that the Clinton campaign outspent Trump 2:1 in a determined effort to crown a DINO with two FBI criminal investigations underway while she was running for president when they had a candidate that dominated the Independent vote with a much cleaner record, much better intentions, and explosive popularity. She courted the donors and ignored the voters. She made no efforts to smooth things over with the younger, progressive wing of the party and went on to call the Republicans "a basket of deplorables"-- who exactly did she expect to vote for her? She ran the least substantive campaign in a very long time only able to say "Donald Trump must be defeated" while offering as little as she could get away with offering, and recent studiesnow say as much. One convenient excuse is to blame the voters for not getting out to vote, but getting people to vote for their candidate was their responsibility; what was the point of spending that 1.2 billion? Another convenient excuse is that Hillary won the popular vote, but only sixteen years ago it was demonstrated that the popular vote alone was no guarantee.

I'll go further than the GP: The Democrats are going to be responsible for the Republicans winning again in 2020. They do a lot of bleating about Russia, third parties sabotaging them, or Trump being pure evil, and they aren't saying anything about policies that would energize and motivate their base. The election of the new DNC chair was a slap in the face to their constituents, and they're quite aware of it.

It's because this isn't even the first time Hillary's questionable choices are silently ignored or forgiven and this is just one more aspect of it. This private server of "convenience" has been chaos and compromise that anyone with fewer clearances get punished far more severely for. The State dept did not have access to the private server. Special Access Program information was found on it, and nobody is quite sure how many other Guccifers out there might have gotten to it. Some of the messages from Hillary's private server weren't getting through to the State dept so they turned off the spam filters. Now it is a scandal of ongoing investigations with the potential for indictment as she presses forward campaigning to be leader of the free world with a policy of Not Being Donald Trump, and the FBI's response is basically "okay she was careless and did do things we normally punish, but we don't recommend indictments anyway". At this point it feels as if the entire government save for a few angry Republicans are looking for ways to excuse, ignore, or make special exceptions for all of the things Hillary has ever done or has been involved with.

Whoops, I should have clarified. I meant that in the context that the State Department didn't have access to her private server. Considering that the private server was said to have less security than a web e-mail service, I don't doubt that foreign intelligence had a shot at the e-mail server.

More or less. Why is the espionage act being used with prejudice against soldiers that take selfies in the wrong places or marines trying to warn comrades of trouble but Comey takes it upon himself to declare that he recommends against indicting Clinton on the grounds that there was no intent? Over a hundred of her "Special Access Program" e-mails got onto a private server that nobody else had access to except herself, Chelsea, and Huma Abedin, the server had to go down at least once on fears that it might have been hacked, and Comey in his own words described how careless and negligent this was, but he couldn't find intent? Why is the FBI granting so much immunity in this case? Why is the FBI negotiating with Clinton and her aides instead of just treating them the way they'd treat anybody else they wanted to confiscate evidence from? And perhaps the most intriguing question: What kind of power does Hillary have over the FBI that they have to tiptoe around this disaster?

Watch the documentary Clinton Cash and then describe which one of the nominees is more ethical.

It's complicated, and some voters aren't even in the same world as you are any longer. For some people this is no longer Democrats vs. Republicans, but establishment vs. anti-establishment. We are at the point that many people both on the left and right feel that voting for the candidate that represents them less is a strategy worth considering out of fear that their own nominee is giving their party cancer.

This election has been so foul that there isn't really a "lesser" evil any longer. The whole "lesser evil" paradigm has been pushed to such an extreme that it's just Evil vs. Evil now and we are looking at a lose-lose situation. During the recent debate did either candidate talk about Citizens United? Which of the major candidates will mean less war, or even if you like war, smarter war? One is a threatening, blood-soaked Secretary of State that never changes and never learns, and the other is a hot head with a fragile ego. Many of the things you fear from Trump, Clinton has already actually done or at least pushed for.

They have both handled their campaigning in perplexingly abrasive ways. While I don't need to waste any time on Trump's "mistakes" because MSM will jackhammer them into the heads of anyone who dares to listen, consider Hillary's. After that controversial primary election that left Sanders' supporters feeling shafted, Hillary did very little to bring them on board, and many of them are young people voting or first time voters, getting this kind of sour experience with the Democratic Party. On the contrary, the convention did everything they could to silence the Sanders wing, and Hillary instead sought to cozy up to Republican donors. While you'd think this is part of that deceitful "triangulation" strategy that her husband made popular, she then went on to call Republican voters a "basket of deplorables." Does she think that her donors alone will get her enough votes?

I suggest that if anyone who doesn't live in a battleground state wants to vote third party, do so. Johnson is on the verge of meeting that arbitrary debate entry percentage, and Stein, who is on the ballot (or can be written in) in all states except Nevada, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, should be qualifying for federal funding at 5%. The electoral college will deliver your state to one of the top dogs even if you convince everyone you know to vote third party. If you do live in a swing state however, well congratulations on holding the power to decide which evil we wind up with.

Here's the weird thing about that: why is Comey, an investigator, the one making the judgement on how to interpret the law instead of the DoJ?

Well okay, that's not the only weird thing. I could list off just about everything else leading up to that press statement, too.

While I am no Trump supporter and think he will be a disaster for this country the funny thing is that he's right about sticking to his original behavior and his campaign staffers are wrong. In such frustrating economic circumstances the public is very vulnerable to demagoguery (whether it's blaming immigrants or blaming "privilege") and he charmed a substantial portion of the country with his "alpha male" approach, which if nothing else, should be applauded for eliminating the likes of Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz from this race.

Even more baffling is the mainstream media openly snorting about Trump refusing to pivot, as if the Clinton family treachery of feigning left during the primaries and then running to the right during the general is somehow commendable behavior.

Truly, the country is in a terrible way when Donald Trump manages to be more honest and sincere.

The Democrats punch hardest to the left.

It will be fine to vote third party of your choice if you don't live in a swing state. All this Prisoner's Dilemma garbage is how the public is continuously convinced to vote against their best interests, and all these years of hoping that things will be better the next election has shown quite the opposite. Also I would humbly disagree that it can't impact the outcome; quite the contrary if the third parties build up enough support, they become bigger thorns in the side of the major parties that have enjoyed a monopoly on their respective wings' votes. Make them compete instead of forcing a sham down our throats every four years.

Hillary is a DINO that doesn't represent what at bare minimum half liberal voters want, much less many independent voters who are disgusted with both parties. We have two Republican parties running against each other this election, and as a result of the lack of representation, there will be record turnouts for third parties this time around. If it wasn't for Johnson rising on the scene and Hillary's connections putting their thumbs on the scale, the impending "#DemExit" would be a slam dunk for the Republicans.