2016 Postmortem

- yes it is small, but it is diverse enough to have been a refugee resettlement center since the 1980s. One benefit - more interesting food with Nepalese, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Turkish, and even Somali refugees opening restaurants.

The fact is that NO set of places shown in a short ad could have represented everyone's view of America. Many of bernie's ads used parts of Vermont, a state he is proud to represent. Why not? It is a beautiful travel destination! My favorite ad other than this one, was a Bernie ad where a VT dairy farmer talked about Bernie. Here was an articulate, intelligent man from a very rural area of VT speaking of how Bernie would listen to people like him. These ads helped explain why a man that all the pundits considered to be as likely as Dennis Kuchinich to win won about 46% of the pledged delegates to the convention.

I wonder if HRC would have won if she hired the Sanders team that designed these ads. So many people speak of the private HRC being a warm, witty caring person. A team like this could have found a way to get that side out. Instead, the ads most remembered were several that skewered Trump. I thought they did an excellent job of that and, if asked before the election, I would have thought they were damning for Trump.

In retrospect, I think this was like Corzine vs Christie. NJ is a Democratic state, but Corzine had a very low favorable score. His campaign decided that the way to win was to run a very negative election. Looking back, while Clinton did have position papers on everything, in the debates and in the ads, she spent at least half her time defining Trump as unacceptable. This and the deplorable gaffe did not help her likability. I know that Comey, Russia etc did not help, but one statistical result from the exit polls showed that of people who disliked both, far over half voted for Trump.

Ads, like the Bernie ones, with their positive, uplifting, happy tone might have made people see HRC is a softer kinder light.