But aren't there any that would be able to produce a contest that wasn't so close against Donald Trump?
the short answer to this is no.
Someone as unpopular as Trump should be easy to beat, yet the Democrats have put up a corrupt pathological liar with apparent heath issues who is extremely unpopular. Seems like a dumb idea
see, you're making the mistake here of thinking that 'popular' or 'qualified' or any other sort of tangible metric actually related to the candidate has any bearing on US presidential elections, when the reality is that functionally speaking they do not.
in the US presidential elections break down pretty simply when you just look at the total number of people who will or do actually vote, in a hypothetical where every single one of them do so:
45% will vote for the democrat no matter who it is.
45% will vote for the republican no matter who it is.
10% will throw away their vote on 3rd party or write-ins or whatever.
elections are decided by which party's 45% is fired up enough to bother getting out and voting, and what decides that is a lot of factors having to do with how the country is doing economically and socially with a relatively small modifier to that being the potential for enthusiasm (or the lack thereof) for a given candidate.
as a general rule, this results in a back-and-forth cyclical presidential pattern, where you get one or two terms of one party doing their thing before the other side's electorate gets all fired up and pissed off about the state the country is in because of that and comes out in force to change things, and/or the other party's electorate suffers a lack of enthusiasm either because the candidate sucks (like for example with romney or mccain) or because the voting public are idiots (like for example with clinton or gore).
in terms of politics and policy clinton is a reasonable (and uninspired) candidate, a middle-of-the-road soft rightest who wouldn't go extremist on policy or appointments, but who's enough of a chickenhawk exceptionalist to keep the national pride morons happy. if you looked at her in a vacuum where only her politics were considered she's a mixed bag both parties should be grudgingly fine with, all the objections to her are purely idealistic.
trump on the other hand is simply the distilled essence of the republican voter base, so his closeness in polls makes perfect sense, but his chances of actually winning the election really come down to democrat voter apathy.
if they're stupid enough to peter out come voting time or to blow their votes on non-clinton candidates, trump could easily fail his way to winning.
