Trump’s Oxygen Supply and Campaign Counterfactuals
By 
A couple of addenda to this discussion thread.
First, there are bound to be many hawt takes about how Clinton’s book will CONSUME OXYGEN and be a DISTRACTION from Trump when he’s imploding. This is silly. Let’s return to this:
Apropos of IOP mtg, this is how much Trump dominated news coverage in the general election: pic.twitter.com/eMfXlgjh7R
— Monkey Cage (@monkeycageblog) December 2, 2016
Clinton couldn’t consume enough oxygen to stop Trump from getting lots of coverage during the Democratic National Convention, for Chirssakes. This book is not going to stop the media from covering Trump, it’s not going to help Trump’s popularity numbers, and it’s not going to affect the 2018 midterms at all. And to the extent that it baits Republicans and reporters into doing another round of Clinton-bashing rather than setting up narratives about Sanders or Gillibrand or Harris or someone else who might actually be the Democratic nominee in 2020…uh, good?
Second, there’s another discussion of how Clinton would have fared against a generic Republican nominee that makes the fatal mistake of most overconfident campaign counterfactuals — that is, they hold variables constant that cannot be held constant. As I’ve mentioned before, one problem is that even if you assume arguendo that a Republican with higher favorables would have done better in the popular vote, you can’t assume they would have had Trump’s unusual Electoral College distribution. Leaving aside the meta-problem that if they could have won the nomination they would be different candidates, it’s entirely possible that Rubio, Jeb!, or Cruz would have done better in the popular vote and lost the Electoral College.
But there’s an even bigger problem. Such counterfactuals implicitly assume that everything else — most notably, the vastly disproportionate attention lavished on EMAILS!/the Clinton Foundation’s troubling shadows/Hillary’s impending death and Comey’s prejudicial interventions — would have played out the same way. But you can’t assume that! Trump being the Republican nominee affected how Clinton was covered, because most journalists decided to cover Clinton as the president-elect and Trump as a joke. CNN wouldn’t have cut away from Clinton’s speeches to cover Jeb Bush’s empty podium. And it’s well-established that the assumption that Clinton would win played a significant role in Comey’s decision to send the letter that destroyed America. Maybe things would have played out similarly anyway — but you don’t know that. And one upshot is reality is a lot more complicated than “Trump was a terrible candidate.”