Hillary Clinton is the Luckiest Candidate

If you look at all of the candidates who ran to be President of the United States this year, it is clear none was as lucky as Hillary Clinton.

Why? Well, despite all her negatives, despite how easily she could have been defeated electorally, she probably won't be. Because the opposing party nominated the one thing she can quite easily slay.

Start on the Democratic primaries. Only four other candidates decided to run, three of whom just weren't inspiring enough to come close to beating Clinton and probably did it for some recognition (it didn't work). The last, Bernie Sanders, had a message that resonated enough to look challenging, but didn't hold enough appeal to groups beyond young whites. And I know that is painting broadly, but Clinton did a complete sweep of the southern states (whose Democratic primary voters are nearly all minorities), so he clearly did something wrong.

But why didn't someone more appealing run? Joe Biden thought about it, but chickened out. And he probably did because Hillary has been planning on running since 2012, and has the money to make any real fight really, really challenging. The irony was that Sanders showed Joe Biden might have actually beaten her, and that her campaign cash wasn't as insurmountable as was believed.

So, she got lucky in the Democratic primaries. But that 'aint nothin' when it comes to the Republicans.

Firstly, a lot of those guys could have beaten her. Probably not Ted Cruz, who happens to be disliked by pretty much everyone but staunch Republicans, but most of them. Others, like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie could probably eke out a win, by focusing on economics and foreign policy (and Jeb's Spanish). And Marco Rubio would have absolutely creamed Clinton's clock.

But that wasn't made to be. Every establishment candidate knew they could beat Clinton, and therefore decided the way to become President was to first eliminate the other establishment candidates. Bush devoted his cash to taking down Marco Rubio. Marco and Cruz duelled over immigration. Chris attacked Marco on repeating talking points. Kasich didn't attack anyone, but reserved his own slice of voters who don't like attacking.

So when it turned out that Trump voters were 40% of primary voters, they easily smashed everyone else to bits. No one was left to unite that 60%, and Clinton was handed the gift of facing Donald Trump.

And Trump is a gift. Clinton has a talking point for nearly every demographic and why Trump wants to destroy their lives. Swing voters are quite happy to dump the Trump and head for the hills. It doesn't matter how bad Trump is, because Trump is worse.

Now, she can still lose. There are about 90 days left, and anything can happen. But right now Trump is predicting that the election is going to be rigged. It won't be, but after he loses he can claim it was.