In 2000 Al Gore probably won the Presidential election, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 majority stopped the vote counting in Florida, handing Bush the presidency. Bush would be reelected in 2004 which is how John Roberts and Alito got onto the Supreme Court. This was one opportunity to create a liberal majority that was lost.
In 2016 Hillary Clinton also probably beat Donald Trump, based on numerous reports of voting irregularities in counties that saw large swings toward Trump in swing states. But regardless, enough people felt she wasn’t “good enough” to get their votes, so they voted third party, and Trump became President. it would have taken fewer than 100,000 extra votes each in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for her to have become President. On top of this, there were leaks of her emails on Wikileaks which people used to say that the DNC was biased against Bernie, and so a large number of people didn’t vote. At the core of the problem, Hillary Clinton’s speeches veered too far to the right in a nation that is moving to the left, making her unappealing to many voters. Clinton and the DNC didn’t campaign in the right places and didn’t pay attention to counteract Republican campaigning in key states with Republican governors. The DNC and Obama administration didn’t do enough to bring states to court for voter disenfranchisement. The number of missed opportunities by all Democratic leadership is immense. But none of this is an excuse for people who didn’t see that Trump was as dangerous as he was and chose to clutch their laurels and not vote for the better candidate. We don’t have ranked voting, voting third party is not an option.
At the end of the day, Clinton’s vote total was within 100,000 votes of Obama in 2012, and Trump got 2 million more than Romney did in 2012. Clinton won the popular vote, but there were large declines in the Democratic vote total in Michigan (300,000), Wisconsin (300,0000) for the Democrats, and a surge of votes for Trump in Pennsylvania, which gave Trump the victory by very narrow margins. They abandoned the 50-state strategy, and people didn’t vote for them.
The consequence of this election is that Trump became president despite losing the popular vote by 2.9 million votes. This was the fifth time in history that a candidate who lost the popular vote became President.
Hillary Clinton is a relatively moderate Democrat, she always has been. But, she was never as conservative as Donald Trump is today. She would not have rolled back progress from the Obama administration, and she would have never appointed a conservative to the Supreme Court. Her husband nominated both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, two of the most liberal Supreme Court justices we have had in the last 50 years and served under Obama when both Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayer were appointed to the Supreme Court. She was clearly better than Trump.
The consequence of not electing Hillary Clinton is simple. Abortion is about to be outlawed in almost every state. Only 4 states have laws that make it so abortion is legal on request. Those states are Washington, New York, Alaska, and Hawaii. Abortion is illegal in some if not all cases in every other state. Even states like Illinois, Vermont, and Minnesota have laws that make abortion illegal. The repeal of Roe v Wade is imminent, and it will impact almost every person in this country.
So, with abortion being illegal on the horizon, we know how we got here. We got here because Clinton didn’t become President.
So what can we do in the future?
The answer is painfully obvious. We need to vote. We can legalize abortion nationwide through congress and pack the Supreme Court to nullify Trump’s appointees next year.
We need to keep the House, and we need two more seats in the Senate to nullify all Republicans, including Manchin and Sinema, and then we can make abortion legal nationwide through US Code.
We can also legalize gay marriage at the same time, and by packing the courts we can make it so that the Republican Party cannot legislate through the courts.
The alternative to this plan is we do not win the Senate, we don’t campaign like hell in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. We don’t defend Senators in Georgia, and Arizona. The alternative is we go back to tried and failed party policies which chose which races are forgone lost, not based on any real evidence, and we surrender our country to Republican extremists.
For the average citizen, what we can do to codify abortion is to vote, donate money if possible, phone bank for candidates if possible, and then win two more seats in the Senate and then codify abortion access in January.
But most importantly, no matter where you live, you need to vote in every election.