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What just happened?
Posted at: Nov/21/2016 : Posted by: mel
Related Category: Politics & Gov,
The 2016 Presidential Election wrapped up a couple of days ago and the American people have chosen. Despite 18 months of campaigning and a winnowing from 20+ candidates to one winner we are blessed with protests claiming “Not my President.” The real surprise in this election was not who won, but how misguided and out of touch the pollsters, pundits and experts appear to have been. The final count for the Electoral College was 232 to 306 with Trump coming out on top. Even Trump’s own team of pollsters and experts thought that “if” they won, it would be by a much narrower margin. Somehow, for 18 months no one seemed to really grasp what this election was about. Traditionally, U.S. Presidential elections are about finding the best qualified candidate to represent the agenda of their particular political party. Optimistically this means that both candidates are capable of being president and it is more about the agenda each speaks for. In this model, even when your candidate loses, you have some confidence the other is capable of being presidential. But this was not a traditional election. There is a lot of blame being pointed at computer hackers, Kremlin conspiracies, Clinton dynasty restorations, James Comey and the FBI timing of email investigations. Of course, we also had an ego maniacal reality TV tycoon who can’t seem to keep his hands off women, an imposing socialist revolution and Twitter trolls gone crazy. This is the kind of fodder you would expect only in a television comedy, no wonder Saturday Night Live has been doing so well for the past few months. But this is not a Descartes style dream, this is politics in the era of social media and the 24 hour news cycle. In June of 2015 when this election cycle was just beginning, the experts foresaw a contest between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. After serving as first lady, New York senator and U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was considered the unchallenged heir to the Democratic nomination. Jeb Bush is the former Florida governor whose family suffers from an apparent hereditary affliction that drives them to seek the White House every eight years. Much like the race in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore: we were expecting two bland candidates with similar world views funded by their cocktail party friends. This would all manifest itself in boring debates focused on who loves America and their mother the most. By 2000 standards, these were great candidates with their long resumes of public service, their boring style of speaking and their unending respect for each other. They were everything their party bosses could hope for. Nevertheless, times have changed. In the last 15-16 years we have had a great recession, and a rise of instant access 24 hour streaming media. America now has a two tiered economy with high skilled, high paying jobs at the top and service sector at the bottom. Most manufacturing has migrated overseas where labor is cheaper and regulations far less of a burden. With the rise of terrorism, bombings, a lack of security is no longer just an issues that concern people elsewhere in the world. All this is compounded by a government that spends more time blaming others than actually accomplishing meaningful change. Despite the desires of party leadership, the Republicans put forward more than a dozen ambitious up-and-comers elected in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. In contrast, the Democrats suffered from a much more depleted bench and came up with a “Socialist Democrat” as their option to the generic Clinton’s candidacy. Only in America could we produce so many baggage-laden nominees and not also have a military coup. The ultimate Republican candidate alleged often that in the midst of all this chaos, that the election was “rigged.” To a certain extent, he was right. Hacked emails show that top Democratic operatives elevated Clinton early tying up party support and money at the expense Senator Bernie Sanders and the popular sitting vice President. Clearly, the fix was in, but only on the Democratic side. Despite Trumps complaints, the Republican side with 17 candidates soon became more like a NASCAR multi-car pileup well beyond the ability of any party bosses to control. From the chaos of this wreck Trump emerged, not because he was a better politician, but because he was not playing to the same rules everyone else was. Once the conventions were over, the country was left with two uniquely different choices. On one side was Clinton. She had never gotten charged with any crime for her foundation activity or email security abuse. Most probes into her conduct withered for lack of sustenance, though the rumors persisted. It’s also clear that her decades steeped in Washington beltway culture left her with some questionable habits including the accepting large sums of money while chatting amicably with the heads of major financial firms or arranging meetings with officials from authoritarian regimes. In contrast, Donald Trump was everything you would expect when the amateur hour contestant gets to be on stage with the professionals. He brashly said whatever he wanted with disregard for his speech writers and handlers. He ignored political correctness and abused ethnic stereotypes. Despite his wealth, he went out of his way to claim he was just like the rest of the guys. All this from the man who tried to license the phrase “you’re fired.” Clearly, neither candidate was faced with the day-to-day challenges that the rest of America faces. One of the most interesting authors of the last century was the late sociologist James Q. Wilson. Wilson is best remembered now as a 1980’s theorist of “broken windows”, which proposes a direct link between civil disorder and the development of serious crime. In the 1960’s Wilson published a book called ‘The Amateur Democrat’. The ‘Amateur Democrat’ studies organized politics in 3 major U.S. cities and draws some not too surprising conclusions. Wilson states that the two political parties had been more pragmatic than ideological. They exist primarily to win elections, secondarily to connect their constituents with jobs and government services and lastly to operate local clubs where people seeking those jobs and services could meet. Winning elections guaranteed access to public goods, which kept people coming to the clubhouses, which kept everybody voting loyally down the party line. Wilson’s politicians therefore stayed in office by offering constituents what Wilson called “material incentives,” not “intangible” ones like commitment to a particular dogma. It was a “politics of interest” rather than a “politics of principle.” Elected officials therefore cared little about being doctrinaire “conservatives” or “progressives,” and would often change their positions in response to shifting winds. Even if a reform movement manifested, the new debate was to measure who was the purer ideologue. Clearly, Wilson had a concise insight into the evolution of American politics and his insights align with what is now apparent at the national level. For the average voter measuring ideology does not answer the question “what are you going to do to help me?” By most media standards, the Republican Party is considered the political party most out of touch with society. Despite the aforementioned notion the 2010 and 2014 elections brought a number of The Tea Party based candidates to the Capitol building. This new crop of Senators and representatives rose to prominence independent of the party machine. Once seated, they continued their independence by ignoring the tutelage of their GOP elders. In some cases these “Tea-Partiers“ even showed that they had no qualms about humiliating their own speaker and potentially bringing government to a standstill. As this strange stew of American politics slowly simmered the 2016 election came to the forefront. CNN, NBC and even FOX began reporting on the issues and analyzing how the candidates performed in each of the successive debates. The braggadocios businessman, Donald Trump was obviously not taken seriously by the liberal media, even the conservative FOX News failed to recognize his appeal. Trump did not speak to the conventional conservative ideology, instead he railed on the need to build a wall on the Mexican border and stem the tide of offshoring job with retaliatory tariffs. It really didn’t matter that his own brand was inundated with products fabricated overseas. Trump may have needed a loan from his dad to get established in real estate, but in politics he was the ultimate self-starter. He leveraged three decades of name recognition and a hit prime time television show in which he flaunted his supposed power and business acumen. With each successive debate or public faux pas the pundits and pollsters continued to predict Trump’s demise, yet he persisted. He had no need for the Republican Party except as a platform to launch himself toward Washington. His fame and Twitter venting meant he could dominate the media cycle at will, without any of the usual party intermediaries. When the convention season came, the experts, pundits and the Republican Party leadership all seemed to be stuttering. Nothing made sense. The party leadership were distancing themselves from Trump as they accepted the notion that Hillary would win the White House; every poll told them this so it must be true. Trump evidently knew what the experts didn’t, that voters were frustrated and wanted wholesale change. A huge swath of America was feeling really bad and Trump’s version of stirring nationalism, empathy for the victimhood, and assurances of a return to glory made them feel good. These hard working Americans showed up at the polls without the help of the party-powered get-out-to-vote machine such as the Democrats put together. As the final 4 months of the Presidential race wound down the media continued to ask issue based questions at the debates and the polls continued to show Hillary Clinton as the de facto winner. Even Trump’s own statisticians on the day before the election predicted that his win would be by the narrowest of margins. 306 to 232 is historically not a narrow margin of victory. Even days after the election, the experts struggled to understand what had just happened. In a typically common approach to politics, the experts believed they knew more than the voting public, but the pollsters failed to really understand the national anxiety. In war, it is unfortunately very common for America to show up ready to use the tactics and weapons of the previous war; this was clearly the infirmity that the experts suffered from. Much like the previous Presidential campaigns, the media and the pollsters focused on a list of issues. This election was different, as James Wilson had predicted, government had devolved into a nebulous entity that only served itself while speaking to an ideological agenda. The 2016 Presidential race was not about issues or political ideology, it was a referendum on government. Hillary Clinton was the candidate who represented government as usual. With her long government resume and known insider connections, it would be hard to cast her in any other light. Donald Trump with his politically incorrect rants, avoidance of mainstream party support and no government experience represented wholesale change. As an acquaintance who works for a major polling firm told me, “we asked the wrong questions and saw only what we wanted to see.” There is even room to contend that the polling industry owns some of the responsibility for the outcome of the race. Nearly 8 million fewer democrats showed up at the polls to vote than 4 years earlier. After months of hearing that Clinton was the pre-determined winner, many of those 8 million likely stayed home feeling their vote was not needed. In 2008 Barrack Obama campaigned on a general theme of “Hope”, clearly a vague target that nevertheless appealed to many voters. In 2016 Donald Trump’s main theme was “make America great again”, another cloudy, but optimistic theme. In a climate where there was a lot of frustration with government, an optimistic theme was more meaningful than fixed responses to a list of issues. As protests across the country wane, so too will the message “not my president” fade from the front page. It is difficult to imagine Trump managing to coordinate any substantial agenda with Congress, but that is based on conventional criteria and historical norms; clearly Mr. Trump has shown that he is anything but conventional by political standards. As a populist candidate, Trump’s success should surprise no one. Most polls show conservative voters to be much more moderate than the planks of their party platform, but that could just be another misguided poll. Regardless of whether you like the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election or not, there is no doubt that the media, pollsters and mainstream political leadership were totally out of touch with America and its frustrations. Ignoring issues, Trump tapped into our desire for an end to business-as-usual. Whether Donald Trump has either the interest or attention span to truly accomplish anything within the labyrinth of our Government is something only time can answer. If nothing good does happen, we can try again in another four years….hail Caesar!
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