Democrats who are having trouble moving on from the first stage of grief — denial — over Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump still defend the loss by saying, "but Clinton won by 2,864,974 votes nationwide, even if she did lose the electoral college vote." But a critical look at the numbers reveals a national problem for Clinton, and Democrats in general.
Clinton’s 2.86 million-vote edge came from but 489 of our 3,144 counties.
In 2016,
209 of the 676 counties that cast majorities for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 backed Trump, many in the Midwest. The space between is best measured by economics. The 16 percent of counties supporting Clinton account for 65 percent of our GNP, and their median home price is 60 percent higher than in counties carried by Trump.
It was Obama’s voters who didn't turn out to vote in 2016, or who voted for Trump, who put Trump over the top in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. If Trump produces, they’ll reward him with a second term. If he doesn’t — and he needs to create lots of high-paying jobs in the face of automation and a global economy moving in other directions — then they’ll be ripe to come home to the Democratic Party — if Democrats give them an
appealing nominee.
While Clinton earned 900,000 more votes than Obama in California in 2012, and almost 600,000 more in Texas, she underperformed him in the swing states, and particularly Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Voter turnout, key to both of Obama’s victories, fell to its
lowest level in two decades, with Black voter turnout
dropping sharply after twenty years of steady rises.
The Pew Research Center conducted an unusually robust
survey of the 2016 electorate. In addition to having asked people how they voted, Pew’s team verified that they did, giving us a picture not only of the electorate but also of those who didn’t vote. There are a number of interesting details that emerge from that research, including a breakdown of President Trump’s support that confirms much of his base has backed him enthusiastically since the Republican primaries. The data also makes another point very clear: Those who didn’t vote are as responsible for the outcome of the election as those who did. Ninety percent of Bernie Sanders’ primary supporters did vote, and they voted for Hillary Clinton. In contrast, only 75 percent of Clinton’s 2008 primary supporters voted for Barack Obama in the general election. The 2015 non-voter group includes a larger than typical block of long time Democratic voters who were not motivated to voter for Clinton.
Donald Trump owes his victory in the Electoral College to three states he won by the smallest number of votes: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So it's fair to say that the 2016 presidential election was decided by about 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast. According to the final tallies, Trump won Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points (44,292 votes), Wisconsin by 0.7 points (22,748 votes), Michigan by 0.2 points (10,704 votes). If Clinton had won all three states, she would have won the Electoral College 278 to 260.
Trump's victory in these three states was a big shift from 2012, when Obama won Michigan by 9.5 points, Wisconsin by 6.7 points, and Pennsylvania by 5.2 points. Although the national vote swung only about 3 points toward GOP in 2016 (leaving Hillary Clinton as the narrow winner of the popular vote), these three states swung by 6 to 10 points toward the Republican presidential nominee.
So what accounts for the swing? A close look at the
exit polls reveals a slightly different story in each state, but most of the change is due to the fact that Clinton performed much worse than Obama did among middle- and low-income voters.
In Pennsylvania, overall turnout was up from 2012 (from 5.6 million to 6 million), but the racial composition of the electorate was significantly different. Clinton won 92 percent of African-Americans and Obama won 93 percent of African-Americans. But in 2012, black voters made up 13 percent of the electorate; in 2016, they comprised just 10 percent of the electorate.
In terms of raw votes, that means roughly 130,000 fewer African-Americans voted in Pennsylvania in 2016 than voted in 2012. If those voters had shown up on Tuesday, that alone would've been enough for Clinton to hold Pennsylvania by a razor-thin margin.
Clinton lost white voters by 16 points (40 percent to 56 percent); in 2012, Obama lost white Pennsylvania voters by 15 points (42 percent to 57 percent). But white voters accounted for 81 percent of of the 2016 electorate and 78 percent of the 2012 electorate.
The big shift in Pennsylvania occurred among to lower- and middle-income voters. Among those earning less than $50,000, Clinton won by 12 points (54 percent to 42 percent); in 2012, Obama won this group by 36 points (67 percent to 31 percent). Clinton and Obama won the same percentage of voters earning between $50,000 and $100,000 (41 percent) and the same percentage of those earning more than $100,000 (45 percent).
In Wisconsin, turnout was down slightly (from 3.06 million in 2012 to 2.95 million in 2016), but the racial composition of the electorate was the same, according to the exit polls: 86 percent white, 7 percent black, and 4 percent Latino.
In the last two presidential elections in Wisconsin, the Democrat won almost the same percentage of black voters (94 percent in 2012 and 92 percent in 2016). But Clinton lost white Wisconsin voters by 11 points (42 percent to 53 percent), whereas Obama lost white voters by only 3 points in 2012 (48 to 51).
The biggest swing was among voters earning less than $50,000. Clinton won that group by 4 points (49 percent to 45 percent); Obama won that group by 25 points (62 percent to 37 percent). Clinton lost those earning $50,000 to $100,000 by 6 points, but Obama lost them by just 1 point.
There was also a big swing among Wisconsin voters earning $100,000 or more: Clinton edged out Trump among this group by 2 points (48 percent to 46 percent), but Obama lost that group by 20 points in 2012 (39 percent to 59 percent).
In Michigan, turnout was only up slightly (from 4.72 million to 4.79 million ballots cast). The white share of the electorate shrunk from 77 percent to 75 percent, while the black share was down from 16 percent to 15 percent, and the Latino share was up from 3 percent to 5 percent. Obama and Clinton won close to the same percentage of minority voters, but Clinton lost white voters by 21 points; Obama lost them by 11 points.
The big shift, again, came among voters earning less than $50,000. (Median household income is $49,000 in Michigan and about $53,000 in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania).
Clinton won Michiganders earning less than $50,000 by 11 points (53 percent to 42 percent); Obama won them 26 points (62 to 36 percent). Obama lost those earning $50,000 to $100,000 by 1 point (49 percent to 50 percent); Clinton lost them by 8 points (43 percent to 51 percent). Among those earning $100,000 or more, Clinton lost by 8 points (43 percent to 51 percent); Obama lost them by 4 points (48 percent to 52 percent).
As the election results sink in, anyone who wants to attribute Trump's victory to racism will need to account for the fact that it was white Obama voters who provided Trump with his margin of victory in the three states that decided the election.
The state that gave Trump his largest margin of victory was Texas, where he beat Clinton by only 807,179 votes out of 8,969,226 total votes cast. While Trump won 30 states, his margin of victory ranged from less than 100,000 votes up to just over five hundred thousand votes, state by state, except for Texas and his 642,000 vote margin in Tennessee.
Clinton won 21 states, including DC, but her margin of victory in the states she won was not as good as Trump's victory margin, in the states he won.
Ave. margin of victory in winning states:
Trump: 56%
Clinton: 53.5%
_________________
Trump: + 2.5 points
Clinton's national vote lead comes from seven states where she won very out-sized victories over Trump. These seven states, topped by California, allowed Clinton to run up her popular vote victory by 2,864,974 votes. In fact, Clinton loses by 1.4 million votes when California's vote tallies aren't included as part of the national aggregate of votes.
| State |
Clinton | Trump |
Win
Margin |
| CA |
8,753,788 |
4,483,810 |
4,269,978 |
| NY |
4,547,218 |
2,814,346 |
1,732,872 |
| IL |
3,090,729 |
2,146,015 |
944,714 |
| MA |
1,995,196 |
1,090,893 |
904,303 |
| MD |
1,677,928 |
943,169 |
734,759 |
| NJ |
2,148,278 |
1,601,933 |
546,345 |
| WA |
1,742,718 |
1,221,747 |
520,971 |
California is the only state where Clinton's margin of victory was bigger than President Obama's in 2012 — 61.5% vs. Obama's 60%. Clinton got 6% more votes than Obama did In 2008, but the number of registered Democrats in the state climbed by 13% over those years.
What's more telling is the GOP won almost all of the swing state Senate elections, including a robust showing in the diverse swing state of Florida, and a blowout in crucial Ohio.
In the U.S House distributed national aggregate of votes, Republicans topped Democrats by more than 2.7 million votes, nearly equaling Hillary Clinton's national popular vote total
— not because more people voted Republican, but because fewer Democrats turned out to vote for Clinton, so they didn’t vote for their House, or Senate, Democratic candidates.
An astonishing spectacle of the election aftermath is the false account of why Trump won.
The accepted wisdom is that Trump succeeded in awakening a popular movement of anger and frustration among white, blue-collar, less educated, mostly male, voters, particularly in non-urban areas. Trump promised them jobs, safe borders, and dignity, and they responded by turning out in masses at his pre-election rallies and eventually at the ballots, carrying him to victory.
This story is mostly wrong. Trump did not win because he was more attractive to this base of white voters. He won because Hillary Clinton was less attractive to the traditional Democratic base of urban, minorities, and more educated voters. This is a profound fact, because Democratic voters were so extraordinarily repelled by Trump that they were supposed to have the extra motivation to turn out. Running against Trump, any Democratic candidate should have ridden a wave of anti-Trump sentiment among these voters. It therefore took a strong distaste for Hillary Clinton among the Democratic base to not only undo this wave, but to lose many additional liberal votes.
Take Michigan for example. A state that Obama won in 2012 by 350,000 votes, Clinton lost by
roughly 10,000. Why? She received 300,000 votes less than Obama did in 2012. Detroit and Wayne County should kick themselves because of the 595,253 votes they gave Obama in 2012, only 518,000 voted for Clinton in 2016. More than 75,000 Motown Obama voters did not bother to vote for Clinton. They did not become Trump voters – Trump received only 10,000 votes more than Romney did in this county. They simply stayed at home. If even a fraction of these lethargic Democrats had turned out to vote, Michigan would have stayed blue.
Wisconsin tells the same numbers story, even more dramatically. Trump got no new votes. He received exactly
the same number of votes in America’s Dairyland as Romney did in 2012. Both received 1,409,000 votes. But Clinton again could not spark many Obama voters to turn out for her: she tallied 230,000 votes less than Obama did in 2012. This is how a 200,000-vote victory margin for Obama in the Badger State became a 30,000-vote defeat for Clinton.
This pattern is national. Clinton’s black voter turnout dropped more than 11 percent compared to 2012. The support for Clinton among active black voters was still exceedingly high (87 percent, versus 93 percent for Obama), but the big difference was the turnout.
Almost two million black votes cast for Obama in 2012 did not turn out for Clinton. According to
one plausible calculation, if in North Carolina blacks had turned out for Clinton as they had for Obama, she would have won the state.
Whatever Trump successfully stirred among GOP voters was not enough to win the election. Trump won despite being flawed in many ways, because Hillary Clinton was deemed even more flawed by her own base.
It is remarkable and surprising that the elections were decided by Democrats distaste for Clinton and not Trump’s ability to reach expand the Republican vote. Think back to the weeks leading to the elections. There was a shared sense that the Republican party was losing and even disintegrating because it was unable to clamp down on a renegade candidate, having allowed populism to prevail in the primaries. The Democratic party, by contrast, was thought to be on the verge of victory and even a sweep of the Senate because it was cold calculated, using its ironfisted internal machination to discard the populist candidate and to present the then-thought more “electable” Clinton. How wrong that perception turned out to be!
Clinton's 2016 loss culminates a trend of losses for Democrats over multiple election cycles. Democrats lost another net 43 seats in legislatures across the country in 2016, after previously losing 910 seats during Obama's administration. Republicans added to their historic 2014 gains in the nation’s state legislatures with the addition of five state House chambers and two state Senate chambers in 2016.
Democratic Decline Down Ballot
The economically ascendant counties Clinton won, largely urban and suburban, are geographically isolated. Democrats occupy archipelagos — islands of the relatively privileged surrounded by what has become, to them, an unknown largely rural land, in which less educated and more aggrieved voters dog paddle to survive.
The counties that switched their votes from voting twice for Obama to Trump were far smaller, whiter, and slower-growing than the rest of the Obama coalition. The population of counties that flipped to Trump was 78% white. But individual voters in those counties that flipped didn't switch from Obama to Trump, for the most part they just didn't vote for Clinton or they voted for a third party presidential candidate.
The growing economic disparity among voters aggravates a growing “despair gap” of in equality. A study by the Center for American Progress found a direct correlation between the percentage of “underwater” homes and counties that voted for Trump. Similarly, a sociology professor at Penn State found Trump fared better in counties where the mortality rates caused by drugs, alcohol, and suicide were highest. What issued from Trump’s America was a desperate and angry cry for economic help.
After the 2016 election, Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, more than twice the number (31) in which Democrats have a majority, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Republicans hold more total state legislative seats in the nation, well over 4,100 of the 7,383, than they have since 1920. Democrats now have total control of just 13 state legislatures.
States With Unified Party Control
Republicans dominate state legislatures to gerrymander political power in America.
Republicans gained 2 more states' governor-ships in 2016, after already gaining 12 over the last 8 years, increasing its total to 33, a record high last seen in 1922. Democrats had also lost 69 US House seats and 13 US Senate seats since 2009 and barely managed to stem further losses in 2016, with only a net two seat gain in the U.S. Senate resulting in a 52-48 Republican majority, and net six seat gain in the U.S. House, resulting in a 241-194 Republican majority.
Number of electoral votes won:
Trump: 306
Clinton: 232
_________________
Trump: + 68
Popular vote total:
Trump: 62,958,211
Clinton: 65,818,318
_________________
Clinton: + 2.8 million
Popular vote total outside California:
Trump: 58,474,401
Clinton: 57,064,530
_________________
Trump: + 1.4 million
Some blame
James Comey and the FBI. Some blame
voter suppressionand racism. Some blame
Bernie or bust and misogyny. Some blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.
But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: centrist neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by
Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party – is no match for right wing extremism. The choice to follow the neoliberal centrist policy strategy is what sealed our fate to losing more than 1,000 elected office seats to Republicans. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal centrist policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.
At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.
For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.
Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.
Trump’s message was: “All is hell.” Clinton answered: “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.
Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.
It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.
People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.
Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called
The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.
Bernie Sanders’ amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential. Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.
That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From
Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are “leaderful”, as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.
So let’s get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let’s set aside whatever is keeping us apart and start right now.
The Democratic Party has been obliterated. Hillary Clinton's narrow loss to Donald Trump was the shock felt 'round the world, but there's been an even deeper decline in the Democratic Party at the state and local level. The Obama administration has overseen the loss of
roughly a tenth of the party's Senate seats, a fifth of its House and state legislative seats, and a third of its governorships, something which hasn't been seen since the repeated routs of Republicans in the 1930s.
There are unquestionably many factors behind this result. But I want to focus on the biggest one that was completely under Democrats' control. It is the same thing that killed the Republicans of Hoover's generation: gross mishandling of an economic crisis. Democrats had the full run of the federal government from 2009-10, during the worst economic disaster in 80 years, and they did not fully fix mass unemployment, nor the associated foreclosure crisis. That is just about the most guaranteed route to electoral death there is.
In the 1970s, the Democrats gradually embraced the neoliberal ideology of markets and deregulation, setting the stage for later disasters. One under-noticed corollary of this was forgetting the previous generation's economic wisdom. More and more, Democrats embraced the ideas that markets were self-regulating, that unions were not worth defending, that monopolies were
nothing to get worked up over, and that large deficits were by definition bad.
A similar process of forgetting had been happening within the profession of economics, and so outside of a small minority of heterodox critics, the 2008 Great Recession struck economists unawares. The ones who hadn't forgotten their Keynes and Minsky, like Paul Krugman, quickly regrouped and presented the Democrats with the policy that solved the Great Depression: huge fiscal and monetary stimulus. When there is a self-fulfilling collapse in spending, the government must step in as the spender of last resort, as it did during the New Deal and World War II.
In the early months of the Obama administration, when it seemed like the world was falling apart, this logic gained much purchase, leading to the passage of the Recovery Act stimulus package. But even then Krugman and company ran headlong into a problem of ideology. Centrist Democratic senators insisted, for
no reason other than sticker shock, that the stimulus could only be
so big — not even close to the estimated size of the economic hole left by the collapse. Krugman's arguments that it should be
massively larger than that estimate — in order to hedge against an underestimation of the size of the collapse, which was
prescient indeed — fell on deaf ears.
And after the first stimulus failed to restore full employment, the ideology problem got much worse. The D.C. political and media elite, including President Obama and most other Democratic big shots, became absolutely
obsessed with cutting the deficit. The ensuing austerity (much of it caused by post-2010 Republican obstruction, to be fair) dramatically slowed the recovery. It is only in the last year that unemployment has declined to a reasonably good level, and the
fraction of prime working-age people with a job is still worse than the bottom of the previous two recessions. What's more, the fruits of the recovery have been highly unequal, with much of the income
flowing to the top 1 percent, and
most rural places left out. (
Sound familiar?)
The problem was that the party never really internalized the logic of Keynesianism, and as a result was incapable of thinking strategically about their political position. Neoliberalism had become hegemonic ideology, which takes serious effort to lever out of someone's head, and nobody was in a position to do it. Practically the whole party — and indeed the "nonpartisan" media as well — had been raised on the idea that deficits are bad for their entire lives (cemented in place by hundreds of millions of dollars in
agitprop spending from Wall Street ideologues). Keynesianism — which implies things like "you can fix a recession by
printing money and handing it to people" — sounded extreme and suspect. Media budget coverage to this day is usually written with an implicit presumption that deficit cutting is the ultimate good in budget policy.
That's how the party ended up with its most vulnerable members — centrist Blue Dogs in the South —
hawking austerity during the worst mass unemployment crisis in 80 years.
Almost all of them lost in 2010. That loss, in turn, paved the way for many of the other major problems Democrats are having. That was a census year, and huge Republican victories allowed them to control the subsequent redistricting process, in which they gerrymandered themselves a 7-point handicap in the House of Representatives and in many state legislatures.
That brings me to the foreclosure crisis, the handling of which was even worse. Instead of partially ameliorating it as with employment, the Obama administration helped it happen. As David Dayen writes in
Chain of Title, the financial products underpinning the subprime mortgage boom were riddled with errors, and in order to be able to foreclose on people who had defaulted, they had to commit
systematic document fraud. This epic crime spree gave the White House tremendous leverage to negotiate a settlement to keep people in their homes, but instead the administration co-opted a lawsuit from state attorneys general and turned it into a slap on the wrist that reinvigorated the foreclosure machine. There was also $75 billion in the Recovery Act to arrest foreclosures, but the administration's effort at this, HAMP, was
such a complete disasterthat they only spent about 16 percent of the money and enabled thousands of foreclosures in the process.
As a direct result, the homeownership rate has
plummeted to levels not seen since the 1960s.
This disaster is somewhat harder to explain, because it seems so nuts. Why on Earth would anyone do this? Once again I think the problem is ideology. Neoliberal-inspired deregulation hugely empowered the financial sector, and finance — fueled by impressive-sounding and complicated products developed by the some of the smartest people in the country — came to occupy a
disproportionate portion of total economic output and an even larger fraction of corporate profits. From thence it became a major source of campaign contributions. As Washington became saturated with the money and ideology of bankers,
assisted by partisans of the "self-regulating market" like Alan Greenspan, it came to seem that the main task of banking policy was keeping an increasingly bloated and unstable Wall Street on its feet.
So when the crisis happened, the main thing the political system managed to do was
fling money at bankers until the financial sector was stabilized. Afterwards, the idea that bankers might have committed crimes — might in fact have had
whole floors of people committing crimes all day long — was simply too big to swallow. So Democrats — many of whom no doubt had plush consulting gigs in the back of their mind — basically looked the other way. No bankers went to jail, and
over nine million people lost their homes.
This is not to absolve Republicans of their obstruction in Congress or President-elect Donald Trump or anything else. But the fact of the matter is that Democrats had two golden years to fix the depression, restore the housing market, hold Wall Street to account, and cement a new generation of loyal Democrats, and they bobbled it.
President Obama's spectacular charisma — and his
savvy campaign against a filthy rich vulture capitalist in 2012 — papered over these problems to some extent. But for most of his presidency America has basically ceased to function for a huge fraction of the population. Fair or not, the party perceived to be responsible for that situation is going to be punished at the polls.
Hillary Clinton was an extraordinarily terrible candidate for the Democrats to run in 2016.
Donald Trump's approval rating is
38 percent. President Obama's just bumped up to
57 percent. No amount of
furious dissembling from humiliated Clinton partisans will convince me that Obama — and
very probably Bernie Sanders — wouldn't have beaten Trump handily.
So what gives?
Let me start by noting that the
overallpolls were off, but not by that much. They predicted a Clinton victory by about about
3 points. And in the popular vote, that prediction was reasonably close.
What tipped the election was about 100,000 votes spread across just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Here's where the polls did seriously botch things. Trump won these states by 1, 0.3, and 1.2 points respectively (assuming the close result in Michigan holds). The poll averages showed Clinton winning these states by roughly 6 points, 3 to 7 points, and 2 to 5 points respectively,
depending on who you ask.
Some people did correctly point to this outcome being a possibility. Remarkably, most of them relied heavily on gut-check analysis.
Zach Carter and Ryan Grim wrote way back in February that Trump could win by peeling off Rust Belt states, based on little more than intuitions about trade and general voting patterns. Michael Moore
hypothesized something similar.
Nathan J. Robinson wrote around the same timethat Clinton would lose because she is a wooden, uninspiring campaigner who was almost uniquely vulnerable to Trump-style attacks on character and integrity.
Van Jones was perhaps most prescient of all. In June, he argued that Trump would not gaffe himself out of the election, because outrageous statements help him get attention on social media; that tut-tutting about his lack of realistic policy would not work, because voters neither know nor care about that; and that he could potentially win over Rust Belt whites attracted to Trump's anti-trade messaging, because "we're not paying attention to a big chunk of America that is hurting — that would accept any change, the bigger the better."
With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can add a couple more factors to the pile. First is the self-deception of the Clinton campaign and its media sycophants. She did not visit Wisconsin at all between April and the election, and
largely abandoned Obama's
working-class message from 2012 in favor of portraying Trump as a dangerous, woman-hating maniac.
They were enabled in this by pro-Clinton publications, which churned out endless slavish portrayals of Clinton as some kind of
wizard of politics and policy, whose grasp of fine detail would surely deliver the electoral goods. In fact, it turned out that her vaunted algorithm-driven turnout machine was
contacting tons of Trump voters. Paul Romer points to the problem of "
mathiness" in economics, where complicated and intimidating theoretical symbolism is built up without establishing clear linkages to the real world. Lots of computers, theories, and datasets might be the most sophisticated way to attack voter turnout, or it might be a way to simply
appear sophisticated while
dismissing people whose ideas don't come packaged with a science-y veneer. (Something similar seems to have happened to the wonky election-simulator people.)
Then there is the Clintons' omnipresent aura of scandal and corruption, which is about 50 percent unfair double standard and 50 percent totally their fault. The political media has been obsessed with the Clintons for 20 years to a
frankly psychotic degree, particularly given how much worse
the stories about Trumpwere. On the other hand, the Clintons enable that coverage with a paranoid and secretive attitude, and an obvious hatred of the press. The Clinton Foundation coverage was unfair compared to the much worse Trump Foundation, but then again, there was some
genuinely skeezy stuff in there. There's a good chance that FBI Director James Comey's vague letter about emails to congressional Republicans, which led to an extremely ill-timed media firestorm, tipped the election to Trump. But then again, she might have avoided the whole story by
following the dang rules in the first place.
I always assumed that if Clinton were nominated for president, the race would be dominated by some weird quasi-scandal that dragged on for month after month. It's not fair, but it is simply the reality of the Clintons. At some point, one simply has to take that into account.
That brings me to a final point: Clinton's general political affect. She is not a great campaigner (
by her own admission), a rather robotic speaker, and most of all, a dynasty politician who very obviously got the nomination because the party elite
cleared the decks for her. Given how the party has evolved, her political history was filled with
devastating indictments of her judgment and priorities. Even after getting a reasonably good party platform (after just barely beating back about the most unlikely primary challenger imaginable), she was a non-credible vehicle for it. Without Obama's mesmerizing charisma and political energy, her image was defined by things like taking
millions of dollars for secret speeches to Wall Street banks and refusing to release the transcripts. She simply was not a good fit for the party, and a terrible avatar of the party in a country furious at self-dealing elite institutions of all kinds.
Hillary Clinton was a heavily compromised candidate and bad campaigner who grossly misjudged the political terrain, and thus bled just enough of the Obama coalition to let Trump sneak past. If we
ever get to vote again, let's hope the party learns from this epic disaster.
And that, now, is the key question: Where do the Democrats go from here?
The Democratic Party is a smoking crater. Despite winning more votes at the national level, and more votes for the House of Representatives, the party has
lost the presidency, Congress, 69 percent of state legislatures, and 33 governorships. Republicans are only a handful of state houses away from being able to amend the Constitution on a party line vote.
What is to be done? A mood of despair permeates the many liberals I know who are talking and writing about the result. Hillary Clinton was a decent candidate running against a deranged, racist maniac who lied constantly and endlessly about everything. Perhaps the thing to do is hope that after four years of Trump looting the country, America
will have wised up to the con.
That is a luxury we can't afford, at least if we care about trying to preserve the world biosphere and civilization in anything like its current state. I suggest that the only reasonably promising route forward for the Democrats is full-throated social democracy, with the full complement of race, gender, and LGBT-specific protections. It's the only way to restore enough of the working-class white votes won by Obama without losing margins among black and brown voters.
Clinton's loss was extremely narrow, resting on only a handful of votes in three Rust Belt states. Many factors could have plausibly tipped the balance: FBI Director James Comey's letter, Republican vote suppression, Clinton's
stunningly incompetent tactics and uninspiring campaign, and her lack of appeal to the working class of all races. Remove any one of those and Trump probably wouldn't have made it over the top.
Now, I should admit that I did predict a Clinton win. I blindly trusted the poll aggregators, and that made for some really
bad calls. Just about everyone in political writing (with a few exceptions) needs to eat some crow, and I'm no exception.
However,
back in April 2015, I also argued that Clinton was disastrously misjudging the politics of the presidential race. I suspected she would pitch her campaign largely to the money seats, and run on fiddly little tax credits instead of strong, simple, universal social programs. I thought she would do this out of some combination of not wanting to alienate the donor class and genuine ideological commitment.
That prediction panned out unfortunately well. But in hindsight, the argument against running such a campaign is even stronger than it appeared. Back then, I argued that Clinton might take a hit in fundraising, but that it wouldn't be a big deal because political spending isn't worth nearly as much during presidential campaigns. But Bernie Sanders' campaign shows that with a credible social-democratic agenda, you can raise staggering sums from millions of small donors. He was quite competitive with Clinton money-wise, and indeed
surpassed her in some periods.
Conversely, Clinton's insider ties to Big Finance deeply harmed her.
Taking millions of dollars to give secret speeches to banks, then refusing to release the transcripts, looks (and probably is) horrendously corrupt. Democrats' coziness with big corporations, especially the Wall Street swindlers who wrecked the economy, is hurting them coming and going.
What Democrats need is a set of policies and personalities that will mobilize a hard core of committed activists. And again, if the Sanders campaign is any indication, strong, universal benefits — tuition-free college for
everyone, single-payer coverage (or the nearest thing to it) for
everyone, retirement security for
everyone, and so on — coupled to an anti-corruption message, cricket-bat regulation of Wall Street, all sold by a credible candidate, inspires fervent enthusiasm.
People like benefits that are simple, guaranteed, and easy to access. Conversely, ObamaCare is disliked in part because its most visible part, the exchange system, is an
obnoxious pain in the neck. Means testing is bad policy and worse politics; the way to make sure billionaires don't benefit unduly from social programs is by hiking their taxes.
As part of this, Dems should also shed their preening "wonky" self-presentation. Hillary Clinton had a whole office stuffed full of policy experts
churning out papers on everything under the sun, and it was all for naught. Remember that the point of campaigns is to
set values and priorities, not lay out hugely complicated policies that do little but flatter the campaign's sense of its own expertise. How many people were swayed by Clinton's last-minute plan to make the Child Tax Credit
somewhat more refundable for certain parents? I'd wager it was in the triple digits at best.
That's not to say that realistic ideas are bad, or that one should be deliberately dishonest, but that the time for drilling down on the minute details is after the election is won.
Genuine, credible populism will also help Democrats with some of their other problems. Vote suppression, for example, often works by making voting a huge pain in the neck, not explicitly illegal. Democrats need real enthusiasm and institutional structures like unions (which will be addressed in the final entry in this series) and pro-democracy nonprofits to help people turn out in the face of these headwinds.
Finally, there is the issue of specific concerns around race, gender, religion and so on. I have not dwelt on this much because I take it as axiomatic that Democrats cannot abandon these constituencies. Some have suggested that perhaps Democrats should ditch identity concerns so as to better pursue white voters, like Bill Clinton did when he
attacked a black female rapper and oversaw the execution of a
mentally disabled black person in 1992. But not only would it be morally monstrous to abandon minorities at this time (Trump surrogates are already defending a proposed
registry of Muslim immigrantsby referencing Japanese internment camps during World War II), the country is far more diverse now than it was 24 years ago. Any capitulation to social conservatism risks bleeding off non-white votes the party cannot afford to lose — and besides, all you need to win the presidency at least is a handful of white voters in a few key states. Democrats must abandon neoliberalism, not social justice.
Therefore, the new party leadership, both formally and in the figurehead sense, should be diverse and committed to left populism. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and especially Keith Ellison (who looks to be a lock as chair of the DNC) are excellent choices. They are the most credible populist voices that simultaneously demonstrate that the party has a place for everyone, even white men. Indeed, they are where the party's coalescing center of gravity already is now that the Clintonite wing has completely discredited itself.
The best place to start is by a scorched-earth opposition against the building Republican plan to
destroy Medicare and replace it with some sort of voucher system. It's probably impossible to save ObamaCare at this point, but Medicare is immensely popular, and old people vote more than any other age demographic. Trump, by contrast, is already
horrendously unpopular. Once it becomes clear that his "Make America Great Again" shtick is a complete fraud, Democrats should be able to do extremely well promising to protect and expand social insurance.
For all her generally terrible electoral performance, Hillary Clinton did do well in some unusual places. Broadly speaking, these were rich areas — like
Orange County, California, which went Democratic for the first time since 1936, and the
Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is chock-a-block with financiers. Of course, it didn't compensate for Clinton falling far behind Barack Obama's margins with the working class,
both black and white.
But one place where Clinton
managed to hold on was Nevada, where
tremendous effort from unusually strong local unions managed to win her the state — and preserve a Senate seat for the Democrats as well. As Democrats think about how to rebuild their shattered party, there is no way around labor unions.
For decades now, America's few remaining strong unions have been locked in something of a codependent relationship with the Democratic Party. As
union density has eroded from a third of all workers down to about a 10th, and a mere 7 percent in the private sector, unions have spent tons and tons of money trying to elect Democrats. As of late October, unions had spent
well over $100 million on the 2016 election— an increase of nearly 40 percent compared to 2012.
Unions do this out of fear of Republicans, who loathe unions and smash them whenever possible, and out of a desire to remain influential in the Democratic Party. This latter strategy was particularly noteworthy in the Democratic primary, where most of the big,
left-leaning unions lined up behind Hillary Clinton despite the undeniable fact that Bernie Sanders was the more pro-labor candidate. (Just examine
who was on the picket lines.) The union leadership judged that Clinton was going to win, and got in line so as to preserve their status among the party elite, particularly the notoriously grudge-prone Clintons.
This is a good example of when operational conservatism slides into mere timidity. Sometimes the less risky move is also the bolder, more aggressive one. It was reasonably clear even by the spring that Clinton was an extraordinarily weak candidate and nominating her was a terrific gamble. Had the big unions thrown their weight behind Sanders, he might have won the primary, and quite possibly would be president-elect now — the greatest political victory for labor in decades. At least he could not have done any worse than Clinton.
But more fundamentally, in terms of positive, pro-labor policy, unions have little to show for their loyalty. Since 1976 Democrats have repeatedly sold out the working class with
deliberately vicious recessions,
trade deals that led to massive outsourcing and job losses, and weak at best domestic policy. In 2009, when Democrats had super-majorities in both chambers of Congress, they barely even tried to pass a
card checklaw which would have made it easier to organize a workplace. Both moderate Democrats and the Obama administration
basically gave up on that without a fight.
The calculation seemed to be that since unions can't possibly get behind Republicans, then Democrats can just take them for granted. That way they can cater to big business and Wall Street as well. But they failed to understand that the decline of unions is undermining the party's political strength. Unions are what turn alienated working people into energized political actors and voters.
Both the union leadership and the Democratic Party elites have their priorities skewed. Unions ought to be concentrating almost all their efforts on organizing more people. Spending tens of millions of dollars to elect a candidate who barely cares about unions, who then proceeded to lose to the most unpopular presidential nominee in the history of polling, was a mind-boggling waste of money. They didn't even manage to deliver their own members, who
only went to Clinton by 8 points.
In return, Democrats must understand that without unions, there is no prayer of restoring the party's broad competitiveness. Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote, but at the state and local level the party has been
virtually annihilated. Without an organized core of support, they simply cannot contest the right-wing advantage in money and their associated army of ideologues. And when it comes to bedrock left-wing institutions, it doesn't get any more foundational than unions. For centuries they have been the
signature way the working class makes its political presence felt.
So Democrats should do what unions want without asking. They should understand that unions' job is to organize, and
their job is to make it easier for unions to organize, with credible promises to pass card check, repeal
Taft-Hartley, and update the labor law framework, when they get the chance. They must become a labor party, and quick, because the hour is late. National anti-union legislation and legal harassment is probably coming, and public sector unions are going to be hit hard. It will take a furious effort to simply keep labor from being rolled back, much less expanded.
But there are few other places to turn for Democrats, and none with the proven track record of labor. This will mean, of course, losing some of the rich votes Clinton rolled up in Orange County and the Acela corridor. But luckily, there aren't that many rich people, and Trump's pose as a defender of the working class looks for all the world to be a
complete sham. Trump is already
deeply unpopular, and will become even more so when his presidency sinks into
corruption. It should be easy enough to win back most of those union voters who did go for Trump. More important but more difficult, if the party and organizers can help each other to create tens of millions of new union members, they can start winning back political power at every level of government.
More:
Daily Kos Federal and State District Returns by State
