If Obama did a good job as President, why did Hillary lose? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by William Murphy, Professor of American History, on Quora:

I’ve been working on some stuff about the election that I haven’t finished fleshing out yet, and this question is ultimately asking why Clinton lost, which is the same thing as asking why Trump won, and both of those are complex questions that take a lot of time to answer. I hope to be able to offer my thoughts on this, in detail, for those who want to read it at some point in the future, if I can ever get it all down in a way that makes sense.

So this question is tying Obama to Clinton, and asking why Clinton lost if Obama was a good president. The implication here seems to be that if Obama was a good president, Clinton would have won. And yet I don’t think those two questions are specifically related, for many reasons. In no particular order I’m going to list some of the reasons why, as I believe, Clinton’s performance in the election was not a reflection of Obama’s job performance as President.

In general, it is difficult for one party to hold on to the presidency for more than two terms in modern times. I will confess that before the election I was skeptical about this bit of conventional political wisdom, and expressed my skepticism in some answers I wrote about the campaign. But, since the adoption of term limits on the Presidency in the early 1950s, the same party has won three consecutive terms exactly once: the Republicans in 1980, 1984, and 1988. That’s it. Now, before the election, I thought the data on this was a little thin, and that there were too many events that could lead us to such a conclusion but might have been short-term aberrations. These irregularities would result in one party losing control of the White House when it otherwise might have retained it. Examples include the Democrats and the Vietnam War (1968) causing them to lose the presidency after two terms; Republicans and the legacy of Watergate in 1976, causing them to lose the presidency after two terms. In short, I thought there weren’t enough “normal” elections to prove this point, which is that voters tend not to keep the same party in power for more than two terms, even when the incumbent president is popular. Bill Clinton left office with a 60% approval rating, but his successor was a Republican (even if we allow for the madness of the 2000 election being an unusual circumstance, the polling results should not have occurred considering Clinton’s popularity.) This election seems to me to be another convincing point of evidence behind the argument that winning three terms in a row is a tough proposition in modern American politics. Clinton was a unique candidate with outstanding liabilities. Most of the time, presidential candidates begin as largely unknown figures. Very few people had known much about Obama before he declared his candidacy in 2007. That’s the way it typically works; Americans get to know their candidates during the campaign. This campaign was different because both Clinton and Trump were extremely well known well before they ran. Clinton had been in the public spotlight for much of the last 30 years. She was a deeply polarizing figure for whom many Americans had adamant feelings since well before this last campaign. So voters on both sides were strongly influenced by their pre-existing feelings about Clinton. The election was not so much about how voters felt about Obama (as it might have been if the Democratic candidate wasn't initially well known) and more about how they felt about Clinton. Clinton’s email scandal was a weight around her candidacy unlike anything we’ve seen in recent American politics. That Democrats had to make arguments against the indictment of their candidate is the clearest evidence that Clinton’s personal liabilities influenced the election in ways that went well beyond Obama’s record as President. There were a lot of people who believed that Clinton’s email scandal revealed a pattern of bad judgment, a sense of entitlement, and a willingness by the Clintons to ignore the rules or act as though they did not apply to them. I had a conversation with one of my students just before the election who made exactly this argument to me, that Clinton was someone who acted like she was above the law, and the email scandal was just the worst example. I’m neither validating nor contradicting this argument; the point is that a lot of people were looking at Clinton in ways they probably would not have looked upon another candidate. Clinton’s campaign strategy was to focus on Trump’s unfitness for office, rather than on what she or the Democratic party could do for the country. She didn’t run on Obama’s record. She ran on not being Donald Trump. Given her own liabilities, this was a less effective strategy than she probably hoped.

And with all that, she still won the popular vote by about 3 million votes. There are a lot — and I mean A LOT — of other reasons we could point to in order to explain the outcome of the election. I haven’t even begun to mention the things Trump did right, and he did do some important things that contributed to his win. The question here is focused on whether Clinton’s defeat is a repudiation of Obama. I’d argue there were enough factors working against Clinton (some of which were absolutely her fault) that had nothing to do with Obama that can provide a clear explanation of her defeat. So Clinton’s loss is not an effective measure of Obama’s success or failure as a President.

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