"The reason I voted for Trump last time was because I couldn't stand Hillary Clinton." One of the fascinating things about the 2020 race is how it's been shaped by a failure to fully grasp how much some 2016 voters viscerally disliked Hillary . https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1282777626323689485

Bernie overestimated how easy getting the nomination would be in 2020 because he underestimated how much he'd benefited from anti-Hillary sentiment. Warren, doing the same, thought the party's center had shifted left, and that she had to run to the left to win.

Many Dem voters, in turn, concluded that Warren couldn't win in part because she was a woman, based on a misreading of 2016. (Hillary hatred was unquestionably misogynistic, but it also reflected a dislike of her personally.) So they wrote her off as a viable contender.

Most important, of course, Trump and the GOP generally have massively overestimated his popularity, and ignored how much of his success in 2016 was the result of who he was running against.

There are many reasons why the GOP seems lost when it comes to messaging (Exhibit A being yesterday's bizarre supposed attack tweet featuring a sweet photo of Biden with his little boys). But one of the biggest is that without Hillary, they don't have a readymade target.

So, to sum up, Martin O'Malley would have won in a walk.

I don't think Republicans have ever grappled with the reality that Trump got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Romney did, even though Romney was running against one of the most popular presidential candidates ever and Trump was running against one of the least.