Yes. I want a female candidate.

[karynnj]

8. Nicely said

I think Democrats are ready to consider male and female candidates fairly at this point. I do not think Clinton lost the 2008 nomination because she was a woman. It was a struggle between two wings of the Democratic party - and the liberal Kennedy/Kerry wing had in Obama one of the most charismatic candidates (and potential first lady) in recent history. Had Hillary Clinton won that nomination, she would have become President in January 2009. Anyone reviewing that primary would realize with the huge SuperTuesday firewall, the powers in the Democratic party had made it near impossible for any new person to gain enough momentum not to hit that wall.

It may well have been that 2016 was always going to be tougher than the MSM's and our (DU) perception that we were very favored. As to our nomination, Clinton won it very easily. To me, it is more significant that O'Malley never got any traction than that Sanders did, while never getting enough to ever really throw the nomination into question. If the probem was that HRC was a woman, it would seem that many voters would have flocked to the only more mainstream O'Malley, who entered the race months before Sanders.

As to the voters that Sanders captured, possibly representing the left/progressive part of the party and in some states the unaligned voters, polls showed that Elizabeth Warren would have more support than Sanders. This suggests that - even as HRC's platform was very progressive, many people looked their long formed perception of her. That perception, reinforced by the secret Goldman Sachs speeches, defined her as a left leaning centrist. Note that HRC, a left leaning centrist, beat the left/progressive Sanders easily in the primary.

As to the general election, note that had her team been more sensitive to what was happening in WI, MI, and PA, she would have won the election AND it would have been seen as not close because she did get 3 million more votes. We now know that Russia was behind the social media targetting to gain votes for Trump and to discourage people (especially African Americans) who otherwise intended to vote for HRC.

There were AFTER THE ELECTION accounts that some local volunteers saw things shifting and pushed up requests for help and the campaign not responding. For me, it is an eye opening reason why the canvasing and phone banking is important. Having done it for years when I lived in a Republican area of NJ, which just elected a Democrat to the House, I often wondered why anyone would reconsider their vote or voting at all because a stranger called or came to their door. Previously, I thought it's value was in guiding the GOTV effort on and around election day. If the accounts were more than just after the fact blame shifting, this identifies the mundane local efforts are a real connection to what is happening in each area that should be carefully watched.

Getting back to the topic at hand, a woman won the Democratic primary in 2016 and came very very close to winning in the general election. It is interesting that there are also threads that a white man nominated by our party can not win - noting that Bill Clinton was the last to do so. In both cases, there are far too few data points (only one for women, two for white men - with all three close and all three subject to claims of Republican cheating) and far too many extraneous variables to draw a generic conclusion.

The primaries will show which candidates - white, hispanic, African American, male, female - capture the votes and interest of people. I am not convinced that the person able to win the primaries is not the most likely person of those who run in the primaries to win the general election.