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| Mary Altaffer AP |
New 2016 Autopsies: 99 WAYS TO LOSE YOUR ELECTION.
NEW YORK
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On Monday, a group of Democratic strategists released the findings of a months-long investigation into Hillary Clinton’s political demise. Here’s what they concluded, per McClatchy:
Obama-Trump voters … effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters … His firm’s conclusion is shared broadly by other Democrats who have examined the data, including senior members of Clinton’s campaign and officials at the Democratic data and analytics firm Catalist.That same day, the Democratic super-PAC Priorities USA published the results of its focus groups and polls of Obama-Trump voters. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent rounded up group’s most striking findings:
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50 percent of Obama-Trump voters said their incomes are falling behind the cost of living, and another 31 percent said their incomes are merely keeping pace with the cost of living.
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
•A sizable chunk of Obama-Trump voters — 30 percent — said their vote for Trump was more a vote against Clinton than a vote for Trump. Remember, these voters backed Obama four years earlier.
•42 percent of Obama-Trump voters said congressional Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy, vs. only 21 percent of them who said the same about Trump. (Forty percent say that about congressional Republicans.) A total of 77 percent of Obama-Trump voters said Trump’s policies will favor some mix of all other classes (middle class, poor, all equally), while a total of 58 percent said that about congressional Democrats.
So: It was the Obama-Trump voters, in the Rust Belt, with the economic anxiety. Disaffected workers in deindustrialized America, who believed that Trump was a genuine populist — and sympathized with Bernie Sanders’s critique of the Democratic Party — cost Clinton the election.
But then, so did insufficient Democratic turnout. Here’s McClatchy again:
Democrats are quick to acknowledge that even if voters switching allegiance had been Clinton’s biggest problem, in such a close election she still could have defeated Trump with better turnout. She could have won, for instance, if African-American turnout in Michigan and Florida matched 2012 levels.
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| (AP Photo / Matt Rourke) Cf, The Nation : sharply polarized along lines of racial tolerance |
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And so did white America’s discomfort with the anti-racist, multicultural vision of our country that the Clinton campaign embraced. Analyses of postelection survey data have revealed that in 2016, the American electorate was more sharply polarized along lines of racial tolerance than it had been at any time in recent memory — and that “individuals with high levels of racial resentment were more likely to switch from Obama to Trump.”
And Clinton’s defeat was also, probably, caused by James Comey, as she herself claimed; and by the candidate’s own fatal combination of oratorical weakness and a (fair or unfair) reputation for coziness with malign special interests; and sexism; and her campaign’s distaste for deep canvassing; and its neglect of the Rust Belt.
When an election is decided by 80,000 votes, a plausible case can be made for the decisive impact of a wide variety of individual factors. And there is some evidence to support virtually every popular narrative for Clinton’s defeat.
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[Elizabeth Drew, NY Review of Books:
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| Why did Trump win? New research by Democrats offers a worrisome answer. cf: Greg Sargent, Washington Post |
[Elizabeth Drew, NY Review of Books:
Many were surprised to learn that the majority of white women voted for Trump and helped him to victory. Trump won 53% of white women, despite many onlookers predicting women would be repulsed by a recording of Trump bragging about making unwanted sexual advances on women, and enthused by the prospect of electing the first female president. The Guardian spoke with women who voted for Trump, who explained that economics and dislike for Clinton meant they were willing to overlook Trump’s rhetoric.
Then there was the effect of the third parties. According to exit polls, as was feared by the Clinton campaign, nearly 10 percent of millennials voted for third-party candidates. (Bernie Sanders’s efforts to persuade the millennials to vote for Clinton, after having painted her for months as a corrupt creature of Wall Street, weren’t successful enough.) On the reasonable assumption that by far most of those who voted for the third-party candidates would have otherwise gone for Clinton, Gary Johnson, the odd-duck Libertarian, with 3.2 percent of the popular vote, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party, receiving just 1 percent, damaged and perhaps destroyed Clinton’s chances. (Ah, not-so-sweet memories of Florida 2000.) Together they appear to have cost her critical states, though it was Johnson who made the principal difference. The national contest was nearly tied 47.7 percent to 47.4 percent, so Johnson’s and Stein’s combined just over 4 percent tipped the Electoral College Trump’s way.
In Pennsylvania, Trump beat Clinton by a mere 67,902 votes, while Johnson got 142,608. In Michigan, Johnson drew more than fourteen times the number of votes that Trump beat Clinton by. And in Wisconsin, the result was 47.9 percent to 46.9 percent in Trump’s favor, while Johnson pulled 3 percent of the vote; Stein also received more votes than the margin of difference between the two main candidates. A CBS News exit poll found that if those who voted for Johnson or Stein had had to choose only between Clinton and Trump they would have supported Clinton by nearly two to one. It’s not a stretch to conclude that, absent the third-party candidates, Hillary Clinton would have won the election.-----In an important change from four years ago, only 26 percent of rural voters went for Clinton, in contrast with the 40 percent of them who supported Obama in 2012. Clinton came across to them as an creature from another, urban, world—a wealthy woman who liked big government and didn’t understand them. Her husband knew how to talk to them; he’d grown up around them and he spoke in their idiom.--Elizabeth Drew, NY Review of Books
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| Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos |
That said, there appears to be a growing consensus that Obama-Trump voters were a much bigger problem for Clinton than superior Republican turnout: Global Strategy Group’s research actually found that Clinton won a majority of new voters in Ohio, even as she lost the state by eight points.
But when one focuses on the fact that roughly 40 percent of eligible voters didn’t turn out in 2012 and 2016 — and that this enormous, nonvoting population looks demographically and ideologically favorable for Democrats — putting outreach to Obama-Trump voters above efforts to expand the electorate can seem myopic. Particularly when one considers the large communities of unregistered Latino voters in Texas’s cities — and all the Electoral College problems they could one day solve for Team Blue.
Happily, the imperatives of persuasion and mobilization are in no way mutually exclusive. Priorities USA’s focus groups with “drop-off voters” — those who pulled the lever for Obama in 2012 and then stayed at home in 2016 — suggest they have much in common with “soft” Obama-Trump voters. Specifically, many in both groups feel that their incomes aren’t keeping pace with the cost of living, and oppose cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare.
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| Hillary Clinton, right, with her aide Huma Abedin talking on her campaign plane in October 2016. Cf, 'fatal combination,' NY Times Doug Mills/The New York Times |
Tying Trump to the GOP’s regressive agenda — and stoking the class resentments of white workers in the Midwest — does not preclude efforts to increase black and Hispanic turnout in the Sun Belt. Pushing for state legislatures to expand automatic voter registration and expand early voting does not undermine attempts to craft an economic platform and message that will resonate in Kenosha County.
And, at least theoretically, you can do these things while also using Team Blue’s commitment to rationality and professionalism to make inroads with the moderate, college-educated white voters who find themselves discomfited by the know-nothing ethno-nationalists and far-right theocrats who have consumed America’s “center-right” party.
Of course, there will be some tension between these efforts. A sharp class message pitched at cautious Obama-Trump voters could alienate parts of “Panera land.” And energizing nonvoting blacks and Latinos may require bold stances on immigration and policing that could theoretically alienate otherwise reachable whites from Youngstown to the Atlanta suburbs. If nothing else, the party’s finite resources will force it to prioritize courting some voters over others, a fact that this year’s special elections have already highlighted.
But a glance across the aisle shows that it is possible for a major party to make few ideological compromises on the federal level, while also cultivating disparate regional identities to remain competitive in hostile states. In recent years, even as their national party became evermore radically reactionary, Republican candidates won gubernatorial races in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Illinois; last fall, the GOP put a far-right demagogue in the White House — and a Republican in Vermont’s governor’s mansion.
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| There are no easy answers to right-wing populism – but left-wing populism may be the best we’ve got. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images cf: a surefire prophylactic against white nativist backlash, New York |
But we’d all be well-served by resisting the temptation to project the certainty of our moral convictions onto empirical questions of political reality. Doing so makes us susceptible to ignoring inconvenient but potentially useful insights, like the fact that Trump really did dramatically outperform the typical Republican candidate with low-income voters — or that social democratic polices have not been a surefire prophylactic against white nativist backlash in other Western nations.
Progressives should relentlessly defend their visions of what should be; but maintain an open mind about what is, and what has been.