Longtime Hillary Clinton Adviser Says No One Except Obama Could Have Beat Trump in 2016

REINES: "I think you have to break it down for the larger strategic question of going back to 2015, early 2015, when she decided to run and what that would look like, and tactical decisions in 2016. This third bucket of external factors. In no particular order, if there’s something I could do differently, I would have waited outside Jim Comey's car on July 5 before his infamous press conference and tackled him until someone with a sense was able to say this is very inappropriate which are about to do. Strategically, I don’t know. In hindsight there were some very big problems that would have affected any Democrat. I’m also going to be, let me just say it up front, I don’t think any Democrat would have beaten Donald Trump aside from President Obama. And I think that because, and I will come back to that, but because if you look at the polling, I think one out of every five voters came out is that they voted for Donald Trump. They voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and they continued to approve of the job Barack Obama was doing last year. That’s pretty interesting. I think it’s been hard for people to grasp that, but the reason that that is important is, if you had replaced Hillary Clinton with Joe Biden, Joe Biden, whom I love and I hope if he runs, best of luck to knocking Donald Trump out, metaphorically, although I think they did challenged each other too. He would have been bogged down by ObamaCare, he would’ve been bogged down by trade, he would have been bogged down by being in Washington for decades, and those things alone were probably dis-positive, and I think the other point is everyone assumes when they say X would have one, they assume X would have gotten what Hillary Clinton got and added some and I think that’s a really silly way to look at it. Other people would not have gotten what she got, either with specific demographics or subgroups, so strategic question is pretty hard to answer. It was just such a lunacy."