> I've concluded that women are weak candidates for president based on the fact that no woman has ever won the presidency in over two centuries.
Concluding that weak general election candidates on that basis would be making the same mistake, with a different time window, as Clinton boosters: mistaking strength in the nomination process with strength in the general election process. As general election candidates, well, there's little data, and, as alreayd explained, it’s easily explaibed by non-gender factors.
And, assessing nominating contest strength in the basis of the whole history of the US ignores that women didn’t generally have the vote for more than a century of that time, that the nominating contest was overtly controlled by party elites from shortly after the emergence of parties until 1972, and both parties even when shifting to primaries as the predominant nonination tool stacked the system to favor party elites in different ways.
> And I really don't think Trump is all that weak a candidate.
He was, as a general election candidate, in 2016, but Clinton was similar (and, in the end, worse as a candidate.)
And in 2020, he lost with the advantages of incumbency, so, there’s that.
> didn't he get the 2nd most votes of any presidential candidate ever in 2020?
Almost like there was a widespread state-level election policy change in 2020 that boosted turnout.
> And now he's cruising to presumably his third major party nomination.
Nominating contest strengths are, again, a different thing than general election strength, and imagined nominating contest strength several months before the first primary is still a different thing yet.
And that’s even for candidates who haven’t been indicted with further court process in the case to occur before the first primary, and facing multiple other active criminal investigations.
