This is part 2 of a 2 part postmortem of the 2016 presidential election. Part 1 can be found here.
The 2016 election was a shitshow, top to bottom. The candidates failed, the media failed, the federal government failed, state and local governments failed, polling aggregators failed, the DNC failed, DKos failed. We all failed, and we have an orange proto-fascist as our reward. And judging by the factions and fights among liberals, we are all still failing. The reason is simple, we never paused to figure out how and why we failed. Almost everyone here has the exact same convictions and political calculations they had a year ago. Like members of a millennial cult, our failures have made us more certain of our convictions rather than less.
Ever since the election, I have been arguing that we need a real postmortem—that we all need to look at, and consider, how we failed. What seems like a grim metaphor of a postmortem is actually not nearly grim enough to describe the pain of what we all must do. A postmortem concerns the dead, but we are very much alive. I say we need a postmortem to blunt the horror of what we are really doing—a vivisection on ourselves. If we do this right, its gonna hurt, its gonna hurt real bad.
So let me begin with my own prior convictions. If, as I say, we all need to face up to our failings, I must be clear about mine. In the most abstract sense, I hope to make the United States into a nation that resembles Norway, less the whale killings and petrodollars but better able to deal social diversity than Norway. I know that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. From the start of the election in 2016, I expected I would vote for Bernie in the primary, and when he lost, vote for Hillary in the general. I expected that Bernie would get about 30% of the primary vote, and I thought Hillary would win the general election with about the same margin as Obama in 2012.
On the republican side I thought the primary would be between Ted Cruz and one of the “mainstream” candidates—Bush, Rubio, Kasich. I considered it possible that Rand Paul might get enough votes, and Cruz and the establishment candidate would be balanced enough so that the republicans might have a contested convention, with Rand Paul the kingmaker. I thought Trump was a laughably awful candidate, and I was smug in my predictions of his demise. Once Trump won the primary, I was confident that the eventual democratic nominee would wipe the floor with him, with the potential of an Obama 2008 level blowout. So, lets just say my predictions about the republicans were a touch off.
I had a lot to say about all of this. For that reason, I published it in two parts. The second, today, focuses on the 2016 general election for president.
A Postmortem of the 2016 General Election for President
My predictions that the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, would wipe the floor with Trump was wrong. Though Hillary won the popular vote 48.2% to Trump’s 46.1%, she lost the electoral college. It was a very close election, with a few tens of thousands of votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania the difference between an electoral college defeat and victory. The closeness of the race makes it difficult to explain Hillary’s loss. Its not that we don’t have good explanations, rather we have too many of them. Since the election was so close, even small factors could have swung the election. So, was it Comey—yes. Was it Russian Hacking—sure. Was it poor campaigning by Clinton—you bet. Was it the constant negative drumbeat of some Bernie supporters tamping down liberal enthusiasm—yup. Was it the media’s fixation and false equivalency about Hillary’s emails and Benghazi—Uh-huh. Was it a ton of random things I am forgetting right now—yeah.
It seems to me that many are pointing to one of these factors as the cause of Hillary’s defeat, usually the one that best serves their own political ends. I will not do that. Any one of these factor could have swung the election and given us the orange proto-fascist. I am not picky on which one it was. My view on this is that rather than try to figure out which of these individual issues are more or less important, we need to step back and figure out why the election was close enough in the first place that any one of these issues could have swung it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for addressing those smaller factors, at least those that were not one offs (e.g., Comey and Hillary just not being a good campaigner). Let’s work to make sure the Russians don’t hack the next election, let’s keep calling the MSM for their bullshit and false equivalence. But what I want to discuss are those issues that, I believe, allowed those issues to matter in the first place—(1) why too many democrats were unenthused about the election and (2) why the hell did so many people vote for Trump?
As to the the Democratic enthusiasm question, that is more or less covered in the first part of this two part diary. We need to bring together, as equals, the economic justice and social justice factions of the liberal coalition, and use that coalition get our voters to the polls. For that, we need candidates who can more effectively speak to both factions, and have a long-standing relationship with both factions prior to running for office. That is all I will say about this here. If you are interested, you can read my first diary to get the gist of my perspective.
This leaves the question of why so many people voted for Trump. Much of the discussion of late has consisted of debates as to whether Trump voters were driven by economic anxiety or a combination of racism, sexism and xenophobia. Luckily, we have some good empirical analysis that can actually answer this question.
These charts were created and published by three political scientists using data collected by YouGov during the 2016 election (YouGov predicted that Hillary would win the popular vote by 3%, pretty close the the actual number of 2.1%). You can read about the study, and get a link to the paper at Vox. The gist of this study is that the best predictors of whether voters preferred Trump was high scores on related tests of “Hostile Sexism” and “Acknowledgement of Racism” (The right two figures). “Economic dissatisfaction” was also correlated with voters preferring Trump, but less so than sexism and racism (figure on the left).
To be clear, all of these figures employ some pretty complex methodologies, its worth reading about them to get at the nuances of what they mean. But one of the key points is that the correlation for sexism was specifically for “hostile sexism”, and the racism metric was also measuring active, intentional racism. The point here is that what this data suggests is that the best predictors for voters who preferred Trump are people who think that n*gg*rs, b*tch*s, k*k*s, f*gg*ts, and r*gh**ds are the problem. Only to a lower degree did these voters take economic anxiety into account. For most Trump voters, their racism and sexism led them to vote against their own economic interests—which is pretty damn depressing.
So, what the hell do we do? Given that racism and sexism are the primary drivers, we start by combating racism and sexism. How do we do that? I don’t know—but I know people who do. The most successful civil rights campaign of the last 30 years was for LGBT rights. Through a combination of aggressive, in-your-face protesting (Act Up), legal challenges at the state and local level, and staggeringly effective public campaigning, the LGBT folks convinced the majority of American that “Love is Love.” If anyone knows how to effectively combat prejudice in contemporary America, the LGBT rights folks do. Let’s all go to town on studying their tactics and strategies.
But that is not the only thing we should do. Based on the charts above, Trump voters are influenced by economic anxieties. They know their houses have been needing a new paint job going on ten years and that they don’t have the time or money to do it. They know the center of town has been run-down for 20 years. They may not know who Thomas Pickety is, but they know damn well that their parents had a better way of life than they do. And they are pissed about it.
I am not saying that they are racists because they have been fucked by wage stagnation and economic inequality. Let’s face it, many of these folks are the southern democrats who jumped ship when the Voting Rights Act passed. Racism and sexism comes first for most of these people, to the degree that they will vote for someone like Trump against their own economic interests. Never-the-less, just as democrats need to re-embrace economic justice to strengthen the liberal coalition, it will also help with Trump voters. For the racist/sexist first Trump voters (the majority), it will be like steering a large ship with a very small rudder (Doing anti-racism/sexism stuff would be more effective). But working on economic inequality might still help, think of it as working on racism and sexism two steps removed.
But more importantly, while most Trump supporters are primarily driven by racism and sexism, not all of them are. Even if we say 75% of Trump voters are primarily driven by racism and sexism, that means 25% aren’t. Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 by 2.1%. In 2008, Obama won the popular vote by 7.2% for a crushing win. In 2012, Obama won the popular vote by 3.9% for a solid win. In order for the liberal coalition to win future elections, we only need to pick up a few percentage points. Given that, a combination of LGBT inspired anti-racism/anti-sexist action and an emphasis on economic justice is more than enough to sway future elections.
My Mistakes
1. Going into the 2016 election I did not fully appreciate the depths of out-and-out racism/sexism in the United States. Don’t get me wrong—I knew there were bigots/misogynists, I knew that there was institutional racism/sexism all over, I knew that there was unconscious bias, racial/gender blind spots. I knew it was bad, just not this bad. I thought the more blatant forms of racism/sexism were a thing of the past—that republicans were stuck using dog whistles forever. That is why I thought Trump didn’t have a chance, he was a throwback that could not survive in the modern era. I was wrong, way wrong.
2. I also believed that the source of racism/sexism was mostly economic, or maybe 50/50. Based on the last election and subsequent analyses, I now know I was wrong about that too. For most Trump supporters, the racism/sexism comes first—though there is still a minority of Trump voters who may have allowed their economic anxieties to bloom into racism and sexism, and an even smaller number who aren’t racist or sexist, but are just stupid enough to think that Trump actually gives a shit about the working class.
Moving Forward
In the previous part of the this two part diary, I argued that the solution to the factionalism and infighting in the democratic party was to reforge a liberal coalition centered on economic and social justice—with both being number one, and neither reducible to the other. As luck would have it, this is exactly the same thing we need to do to win general elections. We need to adopt the strategies and tactics of the LGBT rights movement to combat racism and sexism (yeah, I know they took their strategies from the earlier civil rights movements, but they refined them for a new era). Second, we need to fight for economic justice with the same vigor—even though I accept that it has less leverage on most Trump voters than anti-racism/anti-sexism actions. The reasons to place equal emphasis on economic justice is that it is necessary to rally our own coalition to the polls and will also help get that minority of non-racist/sexist Trump voters who idiotically voted for Trump against their own economic interests. But more than anything, we need to champion economic and social justice equally because its the right thing to do. I mean seriously, why the fuck wouldn’t we?