2020 Democratic Candidates Tracker - Part II

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BobTheCoward said:
But the thing you describe, advantages running against a vulnerable candidate, manifests as more votes for you rather than the other person. And that happened.
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Exactly: the advantages she had, not her own skill as a candidate, got her the popular vote. But the candidate's job isn't to win the popular vote, it's to win the election, and she lost the election.

If she wasn't a weak candidate, she would have won. Her popular vote margin would have been much bigger, but that's not what matters. She was running against a weak candidate. It should have been an easy victory. But it was a loss, because she sucks.
 
JoeMorgue said:
"Donald Trump (praised be his name) is a better candidate then Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton was such a bad candidate shouldn't couldn't even beat Donald Trump" is certainly an... intellectually flexible way to view reality.
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Donald Trump was a better candidate than Hillary because he beat her. That's what defines what a better candidate is, and that's not really disputable.

The claim that Trump was a weak candidate in more absolute terms is necessarily speculative, and is based on the idea that Trump would have lost to a more typical hypothetical Democrat opponent. You can argue that I'm wrong about that, but there's nothing "intellectually flexible" about it. It's a very straight forward and logical analysis.
 
Ziggurat said:
If she wasn't a weak candidate, she would have won. Her popular vote margin would have been much bigger, but that's not what matters..
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It is highly speculative that a strategy that led to a few more votes in a few swing States would have also been a much larger vote margin. That may simply be untrue.
 
BobTheCoward said:
It is highly speculative that a strategy that led to a few more votes in a few swing States would have also been a much larger vote margin. That may simply be untrue.
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Her quality as a candidate isn't only a function of strategy.

BobTheCoward said:
The better team doesn't always win.
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The better candidate always wins, by definition, because that's what being a better candidate means.
 
Ziggurat said:
The better candidate always wins, by definition, because that's what being a better candidate means.
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Victory is the only criteria that matters, eh? No accounting for outside interference, cheating, differences in ability, or anything else that others may take into account. Thanks for showing the quality of your argumentation again.
 
Ziggurat said:
Donald Trump was a better candidate than Hillary because he beat her. That's what defines what a better candidate is, and that's not really disputable.
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No, that is how you define a better campaign. Also, this wasn't exactly a level playing field.

A better candidate is the person better suited for the job.

The claim that Trump was a weak candidate in more absolute terms is necessarily speculative, and is based on the idea that Trump would have lost to a more typical hypothetical Democrat opponent.
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OR if he didn't have outside help and a propaganda machine in FOX news.

You can argue that I'm wrong about that, but there's nothing "intellectually flexible" about it. It's a very straight forward and logical analysis.
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As long as you change the definitions, sure.
 
Ziggurat said:
Her quality as a candidate isn't only a function of strategy.



The better candidate always wins, by definition, because that's what being a better candidate means.
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The better candidate doesn't always win. For example, economic conditions has some influence and that is independent of a candidate.
 
Aridas said:
Victory is the only criteria that matters, eh? No accounting for outside interference, cheating, differences in ability, or anything else that others may take into account. Thanks for showing the quality of your argumentation again.
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I think we can safely say that any candidate who gets their lunch eaten by a handful of Facebook ads in states where she didn't even bother to campaign is objectively a piss-poor candidate. Both in terms of innate voter appeal, and in terms of basic campaign strategy.

Supposedly Vladimir Putin had access to better polling data, better analysis, and better campaign strategy than Hillary Clinton. What else? Did he suborn Comey's Oktober Surprise? Commission the decades-long anti-Clinton smear campaign Hillary's CTist fans like to talk about? He was KGB, so that kind of long game is actually a little bit plausible.
 
theprestige said:
I think we can safely say that any candidate who gets their lunch eaten by a handful of Facebook ads in states where she didn't even bother to campaign is objectively a piss-poor candidate. Both in terms of innate voter appeal, and in terms of basic campaign strategy.
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Two things to note here. First, my response was to the attitude shown more than the specific case in question. The whole "victory is the only thing that actually matters" attitude that I've seen increasingly much is poison to working governments, let alone to a democracy. Second, what you just said doesn't even remotely describe what happened in 2016.

theprestige said:
Supposedly Vladimir Putin had access to better polling data, better analysis, and better campaign strategy than Hillary Clinton. What else? Did he suborn Comey's Oktober Surprise? Commission the decades-long anti-Clinton smear campaign Hillary's CTist fans like to talk about? He was KGB, so that kind of long game is actually a little bit plausible.
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That's quite the interesting caricature of the facts of the Russian efforts and their effects. Given how bad a caricature it is, though, I'm going to assume that it's intentionally bad and not spend a bunch of time dissecting it.
 
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BobTheCoward said:
The better candidate doesn't always win. For example, economic conditions has some influence and that is independent of a candidate.
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Well, no. It's sort of like fitness in evolution: there is no universal measure, fitness is always in relation to an organism's environment. Similarly, a candidate's quality is always in relation to the specific election they're running in. It isn't some purely intrinsic property. External factors can change what properties of a candidate make that candidate better or worse for that election. What's an advantage in one election might be a disadvantage in another.
 
SezMe said:
That stands as the dumbest argument you've ever made.
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It's not an argument at all, it's merely a definition. If you want to propose using a different definition, feel free to do so. But your inability to recognize the difference between a definition and an argument isn't my problem.
 
Aridas said:
Victory is the only criteria that matters, eh?
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Nope, I most certainly never said that. Among the more obvious things you've missed, there is a difference between the best candidate and the best officeholder. Some people who are great as candidates are lousy at the actual job they get elected to, and vice versa. One would like the best candidate to also be the best officeholder, and when things work well there's at least a correlation between the two, but they're absolutely not identical.
 
Ziggurat said:
Nope, I most certainly never said that.
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My apologies, then, for taking -

Ziggurat said:
The better candidate always wins, by definition, because that's what being a better candidate means.
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As a case of conflation and oversimplification. The only meaningful criteria to work with in that is victory, which means victory is all that matters when left as is.

Ziggurat said:
Among the more obvious things you've missed, there is a difference between the best candidate and the best officeholder.
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No. That I firmly reject your definition and that I pointed out that others also reject it is not valid grounds to claim that I missed that.

Ziggurat said:
Some people who are great as candidates are lousy at the actual job they get elected to, and vice versa. One would like the best candidate to also be the best officeholder, and when things work well there's at least a correlation between the two, but they're absolutely not identical.
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Not even remotely identical, of course, when, for example, dead candidates can and have defeated the living.
 
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Aridas said:
As a case of conflation and oversimplification. The only meaningful criteria to work with in that is victory, which means victory is all that matters when left as is.
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Victory is what defines a "better candidate", in cases where victory can be/is determined (it becomes messier for hypothetical matchups). But it's a mistake to conclude that whether a politician is a better candidate is the only thing that matters about them. It obviously isn't.
 
I think the problem here is that "better" is a word loaded with multiple meanings. A candidate who wins is a successful candidate, those who lose are unsuccessful. Using the term "better" implies qualities beyond mere success or failure.
 
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