“Somebody is going to get elected,” says Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who worked for Marco Rubio this cycle. “You could have pretty negative ratings, but if your opponent has more negative ratings, relatively, you’re the winner.” But it is entirely possible to be the winner and still not get much of a mandate—to enter office as a kind of default president who gets in because no other candidate is electable but who doesn’t have the faith and loyalty of a large portion of the nation. Clinton is selling “realism” to a electorate that is, judging from the polls, deeply unhappy with its current reality. Her steady-as-she-goes brand of politics, and her “one from column A and two from column B” ideas are out of sync with the mood of the electorate in this three-sheets-to-the-wind age. To invert the columnist Murray Kempton’s famous maxim about Mayor John Lindsay of New York, she is tired and everyone else is fresh.
Source: How Hillary Could Win the Election—and Lose the Country – POLITICO Magazine