Well, I put forth one explanation - that Trump does very well in economic sectors that are, dare I say it, insecure. One of the most common and striking thematic divisions was that “Things are getting worse” with Trump voters, and among Clinton voters, “Things are getting better”.
This strongly speaks to the fact that Trump did well with areas that are starting to die, but aren’t quite dead yet (where he actually did surprisingly poorly with the latter!).
Urban areas are growing, rural areas are shrinking, and the vast majority of rural jobs are heavily automated: agro, mining, petro, etc. The few remaining jobs in those sectors are compensated quite well, but the people working in them see their friends occasionally get laid off and having trouble getting employed again because, well, we don’t need that many people doing heavily automated jobs.
And that scares the hell out of people. And people vote on fear.
Except, there’s lots of windows, many different battles on many different fronts, and everybody was so assured that their particular window was the righteous battle of the future that nobody stopped to appreciate how far the party was actually moving and celebrate that fact. It would be dark comedy if it wasn’t a literal repeat of an election 16 years prior where a bunch of comfortable edgelords over-played their hand in the same exact way. Now it’s just stupid.
The Vanguard: “Bernie wants a $15 minimum wage!”
Hillary Clinton: “We invited Bernie and Cornel and Keith to draft the platform, and we agree”
The Vanguard: “Yeah, but we only like it when Bernie makes us politically unfeasible promises, hearing it come out of your mouth reminds us how hard it will be.”
If the Democrats weren’t left enough, how do you explain HRC out-performing standard-bearer candidates like Russ Feingold and Zephyr Teachout in 2016?
Yeah, no. I don’t think so. Jackson ran on his history of genocide for example. Everyone knew he was an “Indian killer” and voted for him in part for that. The democratic candidates in the 1860 election, with people like Breckenridge taking the “state’s rights” position, which is the pro-slavery position.
Also, let’s not forget more recently, Nixon and Reagan running on pretty obvious dog whistling campaigns. Trump is a return to normality for white supremacy in presidential elections, not a aberration from it.
Dude, it’s one thing to quietly duct-tape something to your platform, and it’s entirely another to get out there and shout your core message from the rooftops day in and day out.
For all his many, many, MANY failings, Trump was good at one thing: finding a resonant message and screaming it at the top of his lungs to anyone that would listen.
Hillary, by comparison… Can anyone identify her primary messaging? …Bueller? Anyone? “I have a vagina, and I’m not Donald Trump” are the only ones that come to mind. Killer branding there, bro.
Well, agree with her or not, her website actually had some policy plans with some detail, so there was that. She was generally able to answer complex policy questions, so there’s that. She had a pretty coherent set of ideas about how to proceed forward. Just because it wasn’t easily boiled down to a sound bite doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
Maybe, just maybe, this whole mess we’re in is partially our fault, for not doing more to push back against the simplification of politics into a three ring circus or a steel cage match with a “good” guy and a “bad” guy. Maybe we’re partial responsible for not demanding MORE from our candidates.
Go review the vote totals from 2012. Trump did about the same as Romney overall. If anything he picked up Latino and black votes (the first Trump voter I met was a young Latino Lyft driver). The reason he won was because people did not show up for Clinton, not because of some racist surge.
My point is not that Trump is not a racist, he obviously is. My point is that this - his final message to the electorates before they elected him - is primarily about economics, and this is.why voters responded to him.
I think the economic/security themes allowed his voters to deny their racism, even to themselves. But I agree that it was an underlying theme. On another forum in 2016, all the racists were gung-ho for Trump, while all the Trump supporters were denying his racism.
Nonsense. We didn’t hear about it because “activists” pocket those policy wins and went back to moaning about how if the Democratic party really cared, they would have gone ever farther left. You can’t keep your activist cred if you take a deal before the election even happens, right? So many people were so sure that Clinton was going to win that they kept their antagonistic stance against her and the party so that they could credibly push for even more territory after the win. And it backfired. Again.
Hey, I’m not disagreeing that Hillary was good at discussing policy or that she was probably more progressive than the visible portion of her platform and campaigning would suggest.
But the inherent problem there is that she was running for POTUS as someone who is really, really bad at messaging and managing public discourse, which is about a 100% guarantee of getting your ass kicked in a general election… And TBH, about a 99.9% guarantee that even if you get elected, you’re going to get skunked on all of your policy proposals because you can’t whip up support for them.
I don’t think it’s fair to argue that “You just didn’t, like, get her, man…”. When it comes to an executive office, about 100% of your job is being a figurehead and a voice of leadership and direction. All I ever hear from Hillary supporters is why it’s totally cool that she was objectively terrible at both of those things, because of reasons.
In a lot of ways, the electoral process for POTUS is actually a great filter for the primary responsibilities of the job, in ways that most elections are not. If you can’t capture public consciousness and harness it, you’re going to be a failure as President. Hillary has literally never been able to do that in an effective manner. Shit, her main campaign strategy was actually to stay out of the limelight and try to use her godawful “micromessaging” (AKA social media botting, on which she got roundly destroyed by the Russian agitprop teams, because they’re much better at it) to do the job for her.
