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There was much more involved in the election than healthcare alone. There were cultural concerns(people in big cities worry about very different things than the rest of the country), economic concerns(outsourcing and illegal immigration have brought down wages for the lower and middle classes) and even democratic concerns(the DNC suppressed Sanders from being the Democratic candidate). Those are all legitimate concerns, and on top of that you've got to consider gerrymandering and the emotional aspect of voting that isn't rational. Trump recognized a large part of the country that wasn't acknowledged by Hillary, and that boosted the Republican party as a whole.


Your post is weakened by including some popular tropes which are unsupported by the evidence.

The DNC didn't suppress Bernie – he has a great run for someone who wasn't even a member of the party but he was going against the best known name in the party who wasn't the outgoing president.

Similarly, Hillary had the same message – and a far more detailed plan to get there – but a variety of factors (Comey, propaganda, a 3 decade smear campaign, the media obsession with keeping the email story on the front page despite lack of an actual story, etc.) led more Democrats to stay home than Republicans. Both candidates had a small amount of crossover votes but by and large more registered Republicans showed up to vote.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/e...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/registered-voters-who-s...


The DNC did suppress Sanders and showed massive bias towards Clinton, the email leaks showed it. Clinton's campaign got debate questions early. They got preferential treatment in the media. Then when Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair at the time, was kicked out because the collusion became public knowledge, the Clinton campaign _immediately_ hired her. If there wasn't massive collusion, then there was at very least an image problem, which Clinton did nothing to help by hiring the very person forced to resign.

Also, the message sent by the two were not identical at all. Sure, if you tallied them all up and compared them by existence they would be very similar, but the difference was in the focus. Sanders' campaign focused on socioeconomic inequality which would have resonated more in rural America, while Clinton's campaign focused more on social issues, which matters more in the urban centers where the economy is less of an issue.




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