- Candidates matter. I must admit, I had begun to buy into the idea that candidates didn't matter much. In an era of demographics telling us more about a voter than anything else, we found out that voters are still people, and computers don't make the votes for us. Hillary Clinton's extremely high negatives among the electorate were a disqualifier, even among some Democrats.
- The Polling Actually Wasn't Bad. So, all we've heard since election night was how bad the polling was, how we got "Brexit'ed." We didn't. Hillary Clinton lead in the final RCP average by 3.3% in the polls. Her current popular vote lead is a little shy of two-million votes, and she will probably end up with 2-2.5 million votes in her popular vote margin, or roughly a 2% win. Remember, her 3.3% lead was in national polling, not in state polling, and her victory of 2% nationally is right in line with that, comfortably within margin of error. If you look at the state polling, it showed a very tight race in many of the swing states, and that was backed up by the results. Trump could add up his margin of victory in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio, and not have near two million votes to spare. Again though, they are swing states, they are closer by nature, and the polling showed that would be the result.
- Demographics aren't the destiny that Democrats thought. Well, Hillary Clinton got waxed among white voters, perhaps even worse than expected. The other dirty little truth is that President Obama's vote share among Latinos and African-Americans was not sustained by Hillary Clinton, despite every effort to do so. Donald Trump improved the Republicans' share among both of those groups, and that was a huge part of why he won.
- Republicans have won the popular vote once since the Cold War. This is kind of amazing, and not really debatable. From the 1992 Election forward, the GOP has won the popular vote exactly once, 2004. This obviously begs many other questions, but the reality here is that California and New York are really disenfranchised by this system.
- Voters don't care about issues and plans. Hillary Clinton put out plans and issue papers all the time. Donald Trump just told us his plans "would be great." It didn't matter a bit. Voters don't understand policy, and they don't care about it. Voters vote thematically, and we'd be smart to learn that.
- Donald Trump did drown out his negative coverage. Donald Trump figured something out- more noise is good. He would drown out one scandal with another, he'd start a new fight when he was in danger, and eventually the public couldn't follow any more. The man is a brilliant marketer.
- Our media is broken. E-Mails. No, really, e-mails. We heard a year and a half of e-mail talk, which amounted to what? Not even a charge against Hillary Clinton. We heard "questions" about the Clinton Foundation, a highly rated non-profit by the watchdogs too. Any charges there? No. Meanwhile, Donald Trump actually was working with the Kremlin, actually won't step down as the head of his company, actually had to settle his fraud case from Trump University, and actually has a foundation that is under investigation. "Balance" has drowned out truth in our media.
- You don't get to pick your swing states. Remember how Georgia was the new battleground? Yeah, me too. I also remember Hillary not visiting Wisconsin in the final week. Yes, Democrats usually win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, but taking them for granted is stupid. I bet the 2020 nominee won't skip out on visiting them lots. The truth is that while there's much to malign about white working-class voters, they are still people, with votes, and insulting them is not a strategy that will win the White House.
- Both sides will learn the wrong lessons from this. Go the Bernie route? No thanks, Democrats. Trump won because he didn't have a ground game? Yeah, not quite. When Democrats won in 2012, they wrote the post-mortem in the way they wanted, not the way it actually went. The truth is that President Obama's tough attacks on Mitt Romney's business record and taxes prevented the working class voters from falling in love with him like they did Trump, and kept many of them with President Obama. The way the story was written, it was every other group of voters that drove him to victory. I'm going to bet that the GOP will convince themselves of the story they want out of 2016, not the one that happened.
- No, Bernie wouldn't have "absolutely" won. Ok, Bernie Sanders did win white working-class voters in the primary. Does that mean he would have pulled more of those voters away from Trump in the general election? Not much more. If he had done that, there's still the issue of minority turnout, which dropped in 2016, and within which Trump made progress. Bernie lost those voters in the primary by wide margins. There's no reason to believe he would have held onto these votes, even as well as Hillary did. Beyond all of that, Bernie was not hit very hard in the primaries, and he would have been hit quite hard by Donald Trump. That would have changed things, a lot.
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Lessons From Election 2016
The 2016 Election is over, thank God. With the election now two weeks in the past, we can begin to take a look back, and see what actually happened. What are some things that we can learn from this election:
Labels:
2016 Election
Location:
Washington, DC, USA
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