“But wait,” say the Clinton boosters. “She actually beat Trump in the popular vote by 2.8 million, those briefly ill-behaved Midwestern states have come back into the fold, and the American people now finally know just how bad Trump is. Put it all together and we have the makings of a landslide. Especially once we unveil the new, improved, and more lefty Hillary 4.0.”

To which the proper response is: You can’t be serious. Trump will have all the usual advantages of incumbency, the medium-sized Democratic wave in the midterms tells us very little about what will happen two years from now (Republicans took 63 House seats from the Democrats in 2010 and failed to beat Barack Obama in 2012), and Clinton is viewed unfavorably by huge numbers of Republican, independent, and Democratic voters.

Yes, even by lots of Democrats — some for losing to Trump, others for her manifest lack of charisma, and still others for beating out Sanders for the 2016 nomination. Young Democrats, in particular, desperately want the party to move leftward and leave behind the ideological corner-cutting and aura of inauthenticity, establishmentarian self-dealing, and entitlement that surrounds both Clintons.

What worked magic in the 1990s is fast becoming electoral poison today.