How Would Hillary Clinton Have Done?

Nate Silver of 538 writes about Hillary hypotheticals, regarding how she may have performed in the general election. The article was spurred by an analysis of exit polls by CBS, which determined that Hillary would've won by an 11-point margin (as opposed to Obama's 7-point margin).



Nate points out that this metric is flawed, as Hillary was not put through the election trials that Obama was put through. He specifically points out the following:

Pros

• She would've handled the economic crisis just as well as Obama.


• She would've done at least as well as Obama in the debates, and probably better.


• She probably would've won Missouri and West Virginia, which Obama lost.

Neutral

• Attacking her on Bill Clinton and Kazakhstan may or may not have been more effective than attacking Obama on Ayers.


• McCain may have run his campaign with a less negative, more bipartisan tone.

Cons

• Her campaign probably wouldn't have managed the media as well as Obama's campaign did.


• She wouldn't have raised as much money as Obama did.


• She wouldn't have had as strong a ground game as Obama did.


• Her campaign probably would've overreacted to McCain's convention bounce, and likely harmed themselves in the process.


• Her convention speech would've paled in comparison to Obama's.


• She wouldn't have elicited nearly as strong an African-American voter turnout.


• McCain wouldn't have picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

These are great points. But I think it leaves out the biggest one of them all: Bosnia. In my opinion, this would've killed her. Obama wasn't able to fully attack the Bosnia lies, because he himself has very little foreign policy experience. But McCain would've succeeded in making her look horrible. The comparison between the two would've been as follows: John McCain served well, enduring almost six years of isolation and torture to protect his country. What did Hillary do? Make up a story about being shot at.

In my opinion, this would've been huge. I'm not saying she would've lost; Obama effectively used the economic meltdown to avoid talking about his lack of foreign policy experience, and Hillary may have been able to do something similar. But if she did lose, I think this, more than any of the negatives that Nate pointed out, would've been the cause.