Comey Confirms That Hillary Clinton’s Inevitability Was Her Undoing

Of all the endlessly competing theories for the shocking outcome of the 2016 presidential election, two have always struck me as the most credible. The first is that general overconfidence in a Clinton victory led her campaign to make a series of strategic errors (e.g, putting resources into states like Arizona and Georgia while shirking the “Clinton firewall” states that eventually swung the electoral college to Donald Trump) while convincing many of her potential voters that it was safe to stay home on Election Day. The second is that James Comey’s highly public insertion of the Clinton email issue into the media bloodstream on two occasions late in the contest hurt her decisively among swing voters and obscured the Hollywood Access scandal that had put the spotlight on Trump in a very damaging way.