Was Hillary Clinton a terrible candidate?

As much as Donald Trump was hailed by Republicans for winning the White House in 2016, Democrats blamed their loss squarely on Hillary Clinton and her campaign. A closer look confirms that she underperformed a typical Democrat in key states in the race for president, even as she overperformed elsewhere.

On the surface, Clinton could be viewed as a more valuable candidate to Democrats than Trump was to Republicans, according to Inside Elections’ Vote Above Replacement metric. She overperformed a typical Democrat in 19 states while Trump overperformed a typical Republican in 15 states.

VAR measures the strength of a political candidate relative to a typical candidate from her or his party by comparing the percentage of a candidate’s vote to the party’s Baseline. Baseline is the trimmed mean of each party’s performance in partisan, contested statewide elections over the four most recent general election cycles.