In an extremely tight race, no one explanation can tell you “why.” One must examine the many factors that drove the votes to each candidate and the many factors which drove vote away from each candidate and the many factors that prevented or discouraged people from voting at all. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania gave Trump the margin in 2016; as soon as Democrats knew that Biden won them by similarly small amounts in 2020 (larger in Michigan), a huge sigh of relief wafted over the land.
Why did Trump win them in 2016? Cultural insecurity and economic insecurity certainly drove voters. Beyond those factors (which are not singularities but leave that be), some analysts noted a hidden variable. Without Obama on the ticket, black voters stayed home. In fact, in each state the margin was close enough that if black voters had turned out the way they did for Obama and voted Democratic in the same proportions, Clinton would have won those states.
Did black voters lose the election for Clinton? Going by the premise that any one factor answers the question “why” you could say yes. The better answer is that many factors tugged the voters and fail-to-voters in different directions and only the net difference at the end of the day produced a winner.
After-the-fact analysis is crucial to understanding. Necessarily, this whole thread is full of sweeping statements and assertions about a staggering array of multi-decade global forces, which makes them at best approaches toward guiding thinking and at worst too muddled to contribute. A superior approach would be a regression analysis trying to parse out the effects of multiple factors. I’m certain that academics have written long dissertations on every operational word descriptor used. And that other academics have written longer dissertations disproving every word. The 2016 election has been diced like a carrot in a Ronco ad. This is not the place for regression analysis. I wouldn’t contribute if I thought my generalizations and those of others weren’t worth reading.
Nevertheless, explaining the 2016 election with a single “why” may be a satisfying conclusion to a column by a columnist, but not one that stands up to any scrutiny.
Do you mean to say that globalization gave impetus to a recent increase in populism? That’s not really the same thing.
Or, if you really want to say that any one factor led to Trump’s election, you could put it specifically on any other factor that caused people to vote for Trump. Again, the statistics show that race and religion were both more major factors than economic issues.
Was globalization one of the issues that contributed to the fractional difference that caused Trump to take the electoral college, not because globalization caused a majority of economically insecure people to vote for Trump (which they didn’t), but because it caused a slightly larger minority to do so? Quite possibly. But to blame his victory purely or even primarily on globalization, when other factors made a larger difference, seems unreasonable to me. And it can appear to be a refusal to look at those other factors.
It’s obviously true that in anything as vast and complicated as a U.S. presidential election, you can find a million reasons why somebody did or didn’t win. However, if you want to draw any useful lessons - and why bother studying these things otherwise? - you have to winnow out the factors the candidates couldn’t do anything about and focus on the ones they arguably could have. You may recall Nate Silver writing that Clinton lost because Comey issued a damaging announcement about the investigation into her email server a few days before the election. He may be right, but the announcement was the kind of unpredictable event a candidate can’t do much about. Likewise, it may be the case that Clinton lost because Obama wasn’t on the ticket and she wasn’t Black, but that’s not something she could have changed.
In the OP, I argued that Clinton lost because neoliberalism > free trade > catastrophic job losses > economically insecure voters in key states say FU to the party in power. That wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t the whole story either, and I got rightly hammered for it. Once I read Margalit’s piece, I realized I’d neglected the cultural insecurity argument, which had greater explanatory power. In hindsight, Clinton lost because she didn’t, and maybe couldn’t, make voters realize she felt their pain, the kind of thing that came naturally to her husband. Biden, it’s fair to say, is determined not to make that same mistake, and so far it seems to be working out for him.
Is that the last word on the subject? Of course not. But, as we used to say back in the day, it ain’t bad for a free newspaper column that isn’t even in a free newspaper any more. If you’ve got a better explanation, have at it.
Columnists gotta column. That’s the boiled down version of what I said and of what you said. I wasn’t necessarily disagreeing with you but expressing my annoyance at the forms and limitations of a political column.
I don’t think that’s a useful lesson unless you state explicitly that you’re ignoring larger factors because you want to concentrate on factors that appear more changeable, and you think Clinton could have done more to alleviate this one.
Just saying that globalization was the factor that gave us Trump doesn’t get that across it all – what it appears to be saying is that globalization was the primary factor overall.
(Whether Clinton actually could have could have moved that factor – which I’m glad you’re now acknowledging is more about cultural insecurity than about economic security – isn’t clear to me. The Republicans had been demonizing Clinton for twenty years; I don’t think most of the people who’d been listening to that relentless drumbeat were paying any attention to what Clinton was actually saying, or how she was saying it. They heard about the “deplorables” bit because the Republicans jumped on it; but that doesn’t mean they paid attention to anything else that she said.
And she could have moved – in fact, removed – that particular business with Comey. Not that late in the process, of course – but much earlier, by not using that private server. It wasn’t anywhere near the deal it was made out to be – but it was something under her control. Though I suppose her detractors would just have hammered on something else – but I remember watching those polls drop at that point, with an awful sinking feeling in my own guts.)
I didn’t, and don’t, think the point you make needed spelling out. I meant the increase in populism over the past 30 years, which I’d referred to in the previous paragraph.
Of course. You’re making the cultural insecurity argument, which I’ve acknowledged was important.
Again, I acknowledge the answer I gave in the OP was incomplete, and said as much in my long post this morning.
We could go around on this all day. The lesson of the email server was, don’t do obviously stupid shit that’s going to come back to bite you. When I open my campaign consulting firm, I’ll stencil this on the foreheads of all my clients in mirror image so they’ll see it every morning. They’ll still do stupid shit. I’ve already addressed the other points you raise.
I think you would find a profound overlap between the economically insecure blaming this on cultural factors. Blaming job losses on free trade ignores an awful lot of other long-term trends (emphasizing cost over local pride, technology causing huge changes in many industries, increasing competition, deemphasizing less efficient energy, environmental law, incentives, taxation policies, monopoly power, unionization, agricultural policy, etc.).
Clinton wasn’t the best campaigner (affecting key states as much as anything) and was not good at vocalizing voter difficulties despite understanding policy. She was hardly the only politician not to use good e-mail practices. Trump was and is very effective at reading the electorate (and better than the media in many cases) and did a good job of vocalizing the anger many apparently possess, without actually feeling or caring about anything not directly affecting him or his immediate family or funding.
There’s less overlap than you might think. One of the paradoxes of politics is that people get riled up about issues that have nothing to do with them personally. Immigration is a classic example. Anti-immigrant sentiment is strongest in areas that have few if any immigrants. It’s milder or nonexistent in areas that have lots of immigrants, such as big cities like the one I live in. Look at the 2020 electoral map. Of the four states bordering Mexico, three voted blue, and the fourth, Texas, went red by a much narrower margin (52.1 to 46.5) than interior states such as fricking Wyoming (69.6 to 26.6).
Fair enough. There is some peer pressure in politics and voting and some use it to foster a feeling of belonging. I would argue this is particularly so in smaller towns. Demagogues are very good at playing to emotions even if what they say may be untrue or irrelevant; they know how to push the right buttons.
There is no particular reason a Conservative could not, say, personally feel that nature conservation is important. The unfortunate American trend to accept a slate of views on various issues and judge politicians by their fealty to dogma does affect things. Fortunately this trend is currently much less prevalent in Canada.
It leads to more extreme candidates with views further outside how many voters actually feel, which might be masked by the bubble and feedback from the core constituency. Trump will win over his base but alienate many independent voters and his party’s views on abortion may prove unpopular in some places and with some voters. He has been helped in the short-term by pursuit of a legal case which seems (to me) thin gruel, although I am inexpert and there seems more substance to other accusations. My point is that feeling one way about economic troubles might lead you down the road of social insecurity since one accepts or rejects a slate of opinions, as do one’s peers.