A really great interview.
ow, the Trump phenomenon has a lot of really good stuff in it, the anti-elitism, the concern for America’s economy in the Rust Belt, the desire to see better days for the country. That’s all great stuff. Some of that stuff is Bernie Sanders stuff. The problem is that it’s marbled through with xenophobia and misogyny and bigotry. The problem that we have in the country now is, some people only see the positive stuff and wave off the toxic stuff, and some people only see the toxic stuff and wave off the positive stuff. You can’t have an honest conversation.
For the past 30 years, elites in both political parties signed off on trade, deregulating the banks, building all these prisons, getting into these dumb wars, et cetera. Both parties. When somebody comes along and says, “I think Washington, DC, sucks,” that’s not wrong. The problem is that in Trump’s case, he also demagogued around racial issues. Now I think liberals have gone from underreacting to Trump and saying that Trump is just a clown and a buffoon, and that Hillary Clinton’s going to kick his ass, to now overreacting, and saying, “Oh my God, 60 million people consciously endorsed a white supremacist for president.”
This is the right diagnosis – and I think it explains why Clinton lost so many former Obama voters who make under 30K:
But this idea that 60 million people all want to join the Klan and now have absolute control of all three branches of government and that America’s over is just ridiculous.
CJ: Sure, we can’t think all Trump supporters want to join the Klan–it’s much more complicated. Some might be really drawn to the messages of bigotry, but for most it’s probably just that…
VJ: Those kinds of comments were not disqualifying for a lot of voters who were basing their vote on other reasons.
That last line I think is dead right. That is surely disappointing.
I think this is the mistake the Clinton people made. They thought that showing the awful stuff Trump said would win.
But that meant that they never put the concerns of the white working class at the core of the campaign. Politico mentions Bill Clinton being dismissed about this.
I think it is fair to say the Clinton people didn’t see the level of defections that occurred.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/van-jones-donald-trump-sanders-clinton-racism
I have long thought that Van Jones is highly perceptive and authentically cares about people. And it disturbed me when the Obama admin threw him under the bus.
This comment is good, but falls somewhat short in not delineating when and how Trump captured voters with his various appeals. My take is that his bigotry, misogyny, and xenophobia wasn’t so much marbled through his other appeals as it was the bedrock appeal for that sort of voter faction. If we look back to summer and early fall of 2015, his support was approximately 35% of GOP primary voters and almost exclusively based on bigotry. Extrapolating from that to the general electorate, that’s about the same faction that voted for Wallace in ’68. And outside of racism, etc. Wallace was a New Deal Democrat and I’m not willing to concede that his support was based on anything other than racism, etc. So, yes, blatant racism is how to get in the GOP primary game, but it’s not enough to win the nomination and certainly not enough to win a general election if it’s marbled into a bunch of other seemingly “good stuff.”
What he did, and really not that effectively or he would have won the popular vote, was tell different factions what they wanted to hear and well enough that they couldn’t hear or could dismiss what they weren’t interested in hearing. It’s not new, merely an upended version of what Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes did before. Upended by necessity as Trump didn’t begin with the backing of the GOP elites that could capture the bigots, etc. with dog-whistles throughout the campaign instead of at the beginning. All of them claimed outsider status, in opposition to the liberal, smarty-pants intellectual elites, and only they stood with the hard-working, god-fearing common man and woman.
Trump could junk the “god-fearing” part because it’s now fully embedded in the pores of those GOP voters, and it has become a drag on their general election prospects. Trump, whether he ascribes to the alt-right notions or it was just a part of his schtick, will have them to contend with instead of the god-botherers. To deliver on almost all his vague promises, it will subvert one or more of his other promises and that will mean some unhappy campers because there is no overall integrity to his promises.
Democrats are similarly hampered by a lack of integrity in the proposals they’ve been making for the past couple of decades. But more debt and more debt has been used as a panacea for both parties to mask the integrity that’s AWOL. Thus, in the short run, it might be best to keep it simple in confronting Trump by leaving the hot-button social issues on the side of the road where they may flame out for lack of fuel, and sticking to “How you going to pay for that Mr. President, “Who benefits and who is hurt from that, Mr. President,” etc.
Guess the FEAR twitch is not as reliable as it used to be…that was HC’s whole ad campaign towards the end, from what I am reading. Did not even work on her base it appears. Whereas with lefties, HC and her hawkery was a problem.
I suspect it is gonna be embarrassing how many headless ballots were cast in this election. The undervote alone explains some states going the way they did:
87,810: Number of [Michigan] voters this election who cast a ballot but did not cast a vote for president. That compares to 49,840 undervotes for president in 2012.
My calculator shows that Clinton lost MI by a little more than 13,000 votes. (Comments at NC)
MI is yet to be called. The D party elites chose to dismiss Democratic primary voters in a few states. As if those voters weren’t serious. Didn’t matter in states like IN, OK, and WV that were never going to be blue in the general election. But the same was true for her primary firewall states. (How the hell did she manage to do worse in AR than Obama had?)
Was there nobody on her team that could foresee that where she lost primaries could prove difficult to win in the general regardless of getting Bernie’s endorsement and his stumping for her, continued trashing of “BernieBros,” and highlighting Trump the groper and Putin, Putin, Putin? (Seriously, was there a worse candidate to go after Trump for boorish sexual harassment than Hillary, regardless if one believes or not the accusations against Bill?)
Arkansas remembers her.
Now, now, let’s try to be nice. As they solidly backed Bill in ’92 and ’96, they really liked him when they best knew him. So, what are they remembering today that was of no importance to them back then?
You don’t understand the corrosive effect of years of Fox And Rush. A person can be a functional Republican after a few years of that diet of infotainment and then snap over to a ditto head overnight. It has been 2 decades since he last ran, and all the whispering about his affairs have been confirmed at least in their minds. Flowers was still an allegation in 1996.
Happens on the Left as well with too much MSNBC and liberal bubble blogs. Look at how Ryan Grimm got all nasty towards Nate Silver over the election forecasts. Even Sam Wang took Silver’s case and they are not besties. Not sure why Grimm was so adamant about their forecast when he has no statistical background.
The Dems have just written off swaths of the country, and too many live in their own bubble to have a clue how to get us out of this ditch. Or is it a cliff?
Suggestion, check your snark meter when your first impulse to a short comment is “how can she/he be so ignorant and/or clueless.” Some of us do engage in lighthearted banter to disagree when responding to a comment of someone that we know will get it.
Grimm and others are just lashing out at whatever moving target they think they can hit and absolve themselves of blowing an easy win. Decades of doing postmortems on business failures, some small and some quite large, compels me to apply some of what I know to electoral losses. And to be fair to what all parties could have and should have been able to perceive and recognize along the way as well as not dunning any party for anything what couldn’t have been known or giving any party credit for nothing other than a purely lucky guess. It also works in analyzing success stories, but less so because “we suck less” can be a successful outcome by default.
The GOP lucked out this time with no party game plan and a most ridiculous and implausible nominee with a ludicrous campaign operation. Democrats failed to appreciate the high bar for a third WH term, dismissed the midterm losses (both 2010 and 2014), and went with “it’s her turn.” As if “it’s his/her turn” has a high probability of success when the precedents point out just the opposite.
And right on time — yet another scapegoat is offered up for Hillary’s loss. The Guardian — It’s Nate Silver’s fault (Not the actual title of the article generically cites election probability forecasters, but the text names Silver.) The operating assumption in blaming Nate is that such optimistic forecasts depressed Democratic turnout. A bit of a stretch because the less 2012 rosy projections for Obama led to lower turnout than in 2008. Benenson’s real beef might be that the projected blow-out for Hillary didn’t depress GOP turnout.
Nate was actually pretty clear that Trump had a chance.
The others – in particular Sam Wang have less of a defense.
I think there might be something to it in Wisconsin where no one thought the state was close.
In a race this close it all matters. Comey. Stein. 538. Clinton’s themes.
Your last sentence may be the right one though.
Most of us have an excuse. We simply didn’t look beyond the numbers in many states that a bit of logic told us we should look at.
We could see early on that Trump would carry IA and OH and by polling margins that we could see were larger than expected from a flip from ’12 with Obama won OH by three points and IA by almost seven points. Something had set into both of those states — was it the same or something similar or more local in character?
I honestly never looked at either MI or WI. Which in retrospect was dumb because Hillary had lost both primaries and Republicans for statewide offices have fared well in recent elections. But PA? She easily won that primary and Democrats have won recently.
Does anything knit this all together? That wouldn’t be obvious to outsiders viewing it from a macro-level perspective or even conscious in the minds of swing or opt out voters? I keep coming back to why Bernie won MI and WI and yet, liberal Feingold lost his comeback race. What I don’t know is traditionally how similar the Democratic primary voters are to Democrat and lead D voters are in the general election. NH is easy because of it’s high primary voter turnout; so, the primary and GE voters are fairly similar. A blowout for Bernie in the primary and a very narrow win for Hillary in the GE. Whereas in neighboring MA, the primary was essentially a tie and Hillary ever so slightly exceeded Obama’s ’12 performance.
I think I’ve got it but need to ponder it some more.
Surprisingly, I see a common thread in coal. Illinois was an exception to the (D) rout, but how much was due to TWO females running for top office and the City/downstate population ratio?
Back to coal, Trump’s highest margins in Illinois were in coal country. That condescending insult seems minor but apparently wasn’t to them. In analogy, I shrug off someone calling me “Boy” even though I don’t like it, but it burns in my black friends.
I’m sure that McCain and Romney also got high margins in natural resources states and counties.
Some claim that blue-blue is getting bluer and red-red is getting redder. Some evidence to support that, but red-red is also getting older and the comparative population is shrinking because there is no job growth in those areas/regions.
The thing is that all the usual suspects, racism/bigotry, religion, militarism were baked into the 2012 cake. Trump’s current nationwide total is now approx 400 thousand less than Mitt’s. Some of that difference could have gone L, but if were more than a smidge, Trump brought out new voters to replace the GOP “defectors.” I sort of think that might be the case, but if so, it would be state by state because it’s not evident in the national numbers and while small there were some voters that shifted from Obama to Trump.
I’m still pondering this.
Trump brought out new voters to replace the GOP “defectors”…
I think that happened, too.
But the missing millions…there were an additional 18M eligibles between 2012 and 2016.
Pew – the net new number of eligible voters in 2016 over 2012 was 10.7 million. Still a very large number. Nominating a old candidate that didn’t excite more than a handful under the age of forty and didn’t excite a majority over that age of forty sure looks like a really dumb idea. So much for the “wisdom” of Super-delegates.
I see Pew has 16M as the number of newly eligibles. And that about 3/4 of the mortality that yields the net 10M is made up of non-Hispanic white voters.
Yes, it made the 2016 EV pool larger, younger, and less white. Demographically that should have increased the percentage of <30 voters, but it didn’t. 19% in 2012 and 2016.
The larger change for that age group was:
Clinton 55% — 37%
Obama 60% —36%
Not as much support for Clinton and only changing a point up for Trump from Mitt.
I’m also reading that there was a record FEW ballot splitters.
That will vary by state but it does appear to have been limited and spotty. Eyeballing a few, it appears not to have hurt Clinton as much as it did Trump.
Over here in the Chicago suburbs it looks like a goodly number of the ticket splitters were defectors to Johnson.
That seems odd. Here’s what I’ve got — (votes in thousands) — IL:
Clinton: 2,977
Trump: 2,118
Other: 279
Senate:
Duckworth: 2,908
Kirk: 2,150
other: 286
Understandable that a small number of Clinton voters didn’t vote down ballot and an equally small number of POTUS HRC or Johnson POTUS voters went with Kirk.
Here is one of the precincts I was responsible
President Clinton 1429
Trump 926
Johnson 117
Stein 25
Gov
Van ostern 1441
Sununu 991
Senate
Hassan 1442
Ayotte 991
Pretty minor differences. Same thing in every precinct I was responsible for.
You can argue Johnson pretty clearly hurt Trump.
I haven’t drilled down anywhere to the precinct level (other than the NH midnight voter hamlets that aren’t precincts), but in the states with Senate races, I’m seeing the same pattern as the precinct results you’ve presented.
IMO, Johnson’s presence in the race understated the preference (electorate mood) for a Republican President in this election. Not totally across the board because NH and IL Senate seats did flip. However, considering the headstart Hassan had over Ayotte in NH and her mere 700+ vote winning margin, that preference was present in her race.
Looking specifically at Cook County and they may not have been final results. Would early voters be more likely to vote Third Party.
I have no idea. And doubt that information is captured and reported by election boards. There used to be a way to get at least a sense of it if one were familiar with the order of the ballot counting and reporting and recorded those results.
For example in CA, the first counts/reports were absentee ballots. They predictably skewed GOP. So, liberals/Democrats didn’t get too exercised over the early returns. OTOH, citizens watching the early returns didn’t record and preserve them for comparison with the early returns in the next election cycle. Therefore, were clueless as to whether the early returns in this election were better, the same, or worse than than in the last election.
It was one reason why I enjoyed taking a look at Dixville Notch, etc. in this election. I could do those comparisons and surprisingly (at least to me), those few votes projected the outcome in NH of the Presidential, Senate, and Gubernatorial races.
Official results as of today:
2016
2012
More votes in 2016 than 2012, More (D) votes than in 2012. Fewer votes for Trump than Romney. Substantially the same for (R) and (L) combined in both years. Johnson went from 0.82% in 2012 to 3.17% in 2016. Write-ins (probably Sanders)went from 0.17% to 1.18%. I say probably Sanders because Illinois does not report write-ins unless they are “accredited write-ins” which means that an affidavit of candidacy has to be filed. To be listed on the ballot, both the affidavit and a petition are needed. Minority parties need substantially more than the two major parties.
I’d say Johnson took ten percent of Trump’s votes away.
Cook County Suburbs does not mean white suburbs. There are several large black suburbs in the South.
I’ll try to find DuPage County comparisons. That’s rich, white and Henry Hyde country.
Intuitively, in line with a rational projection. I started to make some logical inferences from the Cook County ’12 and ’16 results, but decided to check those with the ’08 results. The shifts were in the direction I expected but the numbers are quite small.
Cook County is sort of like ObamaLand. Mitt only captured 9,000 more votes than McCain did. The 53 thousand drop-off for Obama in ’12 is likely and almost exclusively because the outcome in Cook and IL wasn’t in doubt.
Sure looks as if Johnson ate into GOP voters and any Dem loss to Stein was made up by new voters. Obama ’08 and HRC ’16 were essentially the same. But with Obama out there with “protect my legacy” through HRC, not unexpected that it would carry more weight in Cook than other places. At the statewide level, can’t see anywhere other than GA where it may have been operational.
Dupage County website still unofficial and totally blank. Election? What Election?
Du Page official
Chicago 2016 Trump 12.44% Johnson 2.24% An even bigger bite than in the suburbs.
Chicago 2012 Romney 14.59% Johnson 0.75%
Stein doubled from 0.66% to 1.61% Chicago did not report write-ins.
Here is another.
Guns.
And I think that’s it. It fits with all the curiosities in the election results and fits with the primary results.
And so very easy for liberals to miss because it didn’t figure into the national reports on the presidential general election. Wasn’t a factor in the GOP primary because there’s no differences among them. It did surface in the second Dem debate and NY primary with Hillary using it to beat Sanders. Because it’s both simple to articulate and their differences are real.
Thinking back to the last two presidential elections it only got attention from Palin. McCain, Obama, Biden, Romney, and Ryan had no obvious or inherent advantage in elevating the issue. It might have helped Mitt, but it would have been unseemly to raise it so shortly after Giffords’ had been shot. And could have cost him AZ where Obama did reduce the margin of his ’08 loss.
Of course, the rabid gun-nuts have been screaming since 2007 that Obama would take their guns away from them. But in two presidential elections he skirted the issue. When he did tackle it after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, it was an unsuccessful effort (in part because the proposal wouldn’t have prevented that massacre) and may not have been dropped soon enough not to impact the ’14 election.
That picture of Trump’s kids posing as big game hunters that horrified environmentalists, animal lovers, and non-gun owners may have symbolically comforted gun owners or supporters — “at least we know that father of those two doofuses isn’t going to take our guns away.”
Pondering this last night I checked on Feingold’s position on guns. Oops. He mushed it and ended up closer to Hillary on this one.
The correlation between where Bernie did best and guns as an issue is high. Yet another one some of us tried to point out to “liberals” that made Sanders the stronger GE candidate.
yes, and for this you should follow your own advice and talk with actual people. it’s not about checking off boxes on a questionnaire, it’s about how the candidates are discussed. as a “naive paranoid rube compensating for feelings of inadequacy”, as Marie put it, a couple days ago, no way I’ll post on this topic here.
And I liked that you advised talking with actual people
Are you a single issue voter? Always vote for the candidate closest to the NRA position and nothing else matters? If not, then I wasn’t describing you. Never know how to apologize to someone that is offended by a generic opinion comment that wasn’t intended as an insult towards any single individual either here or not here.
There’s probably nothing you can tell me about guns that I don’t already know and from which I’ve formed my opinions and political positions on them and the issues. I don’t want to engage on the topic. You won! Be a gracious winner. And I’ll continue to be emotionally numb with every report of a mass shooting massacre, a family murdered by one of their own, and random everyday shootings and shooting accidents.
I don’t believe those murders/deaths were what Thomas Jefferson had in mind with The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. But maybe symbolically it is for some.
everyone is opposed to kids going into a school or movie theater and killing ppl. note that those are suburban kids from affluent families.