[Epistemic status: mostly contrarian listing or ideas I don't consider myself to have any particular expertise in determining the real answers.
Came out a bit more sarcastic than I had intended. But seriously what else can you do.]
I started writing a post called something like “5 narratives you will see about this election” last week, but didn’t have the energy for snark so gave up half way through. It seems that since then the media has settled on the narrative that they/the democrats/the general “liberal elite” didn’t listen enough to white working class Trump voter’s concerns. No-one seems very clear exactly what those were, but they are definitely very important and legitimate. And definitely not racist.
We should be a teeny bit sceptical of the self diagnosis of a commentary system that until last week was absolutely certain of the opposite of what happened. Particularly when it ties into the existing “globalisation bad” contrarian narrative the media has been tossing around for a while, conveniently meshes with the popular Bernie remnants belief that he would have done better, and conveniently refocuses the narrative on white people, or “real Americans”. (Weird how often the American media talks about “the working class” as if the non-white people don’t count).
None of us know the actual reasons Trump won. Some political scientist will probably get their PHD explaining it in a few years time. But by then the narrative will have been long settled anyway. So for the sake of ideological diversity/contrarianism heres a few things that I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about.
Emails emails emails, or the FBI/Russia/Wikileaks
Knowing nothing else, it seems like a presidential candidate who had the FBI announce an investigation into their emails 5 minutes before an election would be in trouble. Nevermind that the new set of emails discovered from Anthony Weiner’s laptop turned out to be unimportant, facts have always been an afterthought in the crooked Hillary narrative. I’m genuinely surprised that the American left hasn’t torn into the FBI director in the aftermath of the election for going against long standing FBI protocol, and the advice of the attorney general, to announce a reopening of the emails investigation long after it was finished. Keep in mind the FBI doesn’t normally make anouncements about prosecutions where they have actual evidence, even at the lowest level of elected office, in the run up to elections, for fear of seeming biased. There have been some unsourced reports of strong anti-Clinton feeling in the FBI, I’m not sure how seriously to take those, but the overall impression is a little troubling.
A technically separate, but narratively related issue, is the massive leak of Clinton campaign emails. Depending whether you believe the claims that wikileaks has been subverted by Russian security agencies this is, at best, a non-state actor actively intervening in an election via illegal means, or a foreign state intervening in an election at a scale not seem since the cold war. Nevermind that despite concerted digging through the emails Trump supporters have failed to find anything of note, other than weird pizza and child molestation conspiracy theories, (that’s sadly not a joke), it continued to reinforce the “Crooked Hillary” narrative. A potential foreign hijacking of a presidential election seems like kind of a big deal.
The disappearance of the “Obama coalition”, or where did the minority voters go.
The overall number of voters in this election as significantly lower than in 2008 or 2012, and it seems like lot of that came from a reduced turnout in the democrats who had voted for Obama, predominantly the young and minorities.
Two possible explanations:
Since the last election the Supreme Court overturned part of the Voting Rights Act, and many states have put into effect strict voter ID laws, to combat the scourge of voter fraud. Which, by utter coincidence, seem to make it more difficult for ethnic minorities, and other traditional democratic voters, to vote. Also the number of available polling places in certain areas has mysteriously decreased.
Other explanation, Obama was uniquely charismatic or Hillary was uniquely uncharismatic.
A large part of the electorate never votes, for lots of legitimate and sensible reasons, since it is a very inefficient use of your time as an individual, but something something collective action problems, and when you don’t vote you get screwed.
Short of compulsory voting, making election day a national holiday, or making voting less of an unnecessarily complex pain in the ass, none of which are particularly likely in the American status quo, you need an exceptionally charismatic individual or narrative to overcome that collective action problem and make people turn out. For whatever reason Barack Obama was that in spades, Hillary Clinton wasn’t. Personally I like pragmatists who know huge amount of policy minutiae, but the electorate seems to disagree. Obama is an extremely charismatic speaker, and his message seemed to work a lot better than Hillary’s.
[There’s probably a useful discussion to be had here about the gendered nature of our expectations of ‘charisma’, but other people have done that better than me.]
Possible takeaway for democrats: Individual charisma matters a million times more than any other factor, including competence, select future candidates accordingly.
Systemic factors meant no democrat could win.
It’s incredibly rare for a party to get 3 presidential terms in a row, so the democrats were fighting an uphill battle to begin with in this election. The public always wants a change from the status quo, so any democratic candidate would have been in trouble. Hillary particularly was seen as a continuation of the status quo, and didn’t particularly differentiate herself from Obama.
The electoral college map is skewed against democrats, so you need a large najority to win. It’s a stupid system but its not going away any time soon.
There’s probably also a narrative to be had in the economy, job growth, unemployment, inflation, etc. Things are better than they were at the end of GW’s term, but they are still not great. Campaigning for slow gradual improvement is never easy.
Trump is literally a wizard.
Or more boringly: Trump’s candidacy was a weird anomaly that no one could have predicted or countered. Even with perfect play you sometimes lose by sheer dumb luck. We should continue as normal and not rip up all accumulated experience over this one case.
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| Gif unrelated, but cathartic. |
