The Trump Election

I was in a daze the day after Donald Trump won the 2016 election for President of the United States. How could this have happened? Hillary Clinton was ahead in virtually all the polls. I’ve read and listened to many analyses of what happened. I’m sure the analyzing will go on for many more years. Here’s my take on what happened.

I think Donald Trump won the electoral college vote because of convergence of a number of different groups voting for him. Initially I thought of using the word “coalition” instead of “convergence’. But I decided to not use that term because I don’t think he established a coalition. I think different groups decided to vote for him for their own particular reasons and the sum of all these groups together brought him enough votes to win the election. One group included white nationalists, Americans who believe we should be a nation controlled by white men. These people cheered his condemnation of Mexican immigrants, his call for a ban on Muslim immigration, his promise to deport all illegal immigrants, and his denunciation of a judge of Mexican descent as not able to be objective in hearing a lawsuit against Trump.

Another group that supported him are white evangelical Christians. More than 80% of those who voted from this group went for Trump. You would think that the many things that came out during the campaign about his crude language and behavior would have led to them rejecting Trump. But, apparently, his pro-life position and his pledge to appoint only pro-life justices to the Supreme Court trumped all the rest (pun intended).

Trump also got the votes of the die-hard Republican voters. He got the endorsements of many Republican elected officials, even those he disparaged and told lies about (e.g., Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan).

Finally, he got the votes of many working class Americans who believe the system is not working for them. These folks came out in big numbers to give Trump wins in states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In some of these states, Republicans had not won the popular vote for President in many years. In many states, working class people who don’t usually vote came out and voted for Trump. He hit the right chord with these folks. He called for change and this was very appealing for working class people whose real wages have gone down considerably over the past few decades. For some, their wages have gone down because manufacturing jobs, which paid good money, have now been replaced by service jobs with much lower wages. For some, the issue goes beyond the replacement of high-paying jobs with low-paying jobs.

In the September/October issue of Mother Jones magazine, Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote an article about Donald Trump’s appeal to working class voters. Hochschild’s article is based on interviewing and spending time with 60 people in Louisiana over a period of 5 years, in an attempt to understand supporters of the tea party. One paragraph struck me as providing a good insight into his appeal.

She says that the “deep story of the right goes like this: You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black – beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.” Hochschild says she checked this story with the people she interviewed for her article and they agreed it was their story.

You may read the description above and say that it’s not an accurate portrayal of what’s going on in America. Whether it is or not, it’s an accurate description of how some Americans see their situation. We can’t just dismiss it out-of-hand. We have to acknowledge it. The failure to recognize what’s happening to the working class and lower middle class may be what caused Clinton to lose the election.

Here are some additional thoughts about the election:

American voters wanted a change. Hillary Clinton got almost 17 million votes during the Democratic primaries. Donald Trump got over 14 million votes in the Republican primaries. He beat out 16 other candidates (mostly career politicians). But we should not forget that Bernie Sanders also got more than 13 million votes in the Democratic primaries – these were also votes for change. In the general election, Clinton was seen as supporting the political status quo; while Trump was seen as an outsider and an advocate for major change in Washington. During the primaries, polls generally showed Bernie Sanders doing better against Trump than Clinton against Trump. We’ll never know whether he would have beaten Trump. But I believe his outsider/change message would have appealed to many of the working-class voters who went for Trump.

Also, Donald Trump lied. At times, he said one thing and then later said the opposite. At other times, he asserted things that were contradicted by facts (e.g., that President Obama was not born in the United States, that Ford was taking jobs from the US and sending them to Mexico, that the murder rate in our big cities has increased). He frequently denied that he said certain things that audio or video tapes could prove that he had indeed said. My wife, Pat, read an interesting analysis of this. The author believed that Donald Trump was not concerned with whether the things he said were true or false. The most important thing to him is winning. He emphasized during his campaigns that he is a winner and would make America a winner (we would win so much that we will get bored of winning). Thus, he said things he believed would help him win. Truth or falsehood was beside the point. Based on what I saw and read during the primary and general election campaigns, I think this is a pretty good analysis of how Trump operates. And now that he has won he is moderating many positions that probably played a big part in convincing people to vote for him (e.g., a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary, repealing Obamacare).

We also cannot overlook the voter suppression effort that Republicans have engaged in over the past half-decade. Under the guise of fighting voter fraud, Republican legislatures in a large number of states have enacted laws that have made it more difficult for traditionally Democratic voters to cast their votes. One Pennsylvania legislator admitted on camera that the purpose of that state’s voting fraud law was to help Republicans win elections. In Alabama, the new law required a voter ID. The state then closed more than 30 Motor Vehicle offices (where the IDs could be obtained) mostly in rural, majority-black counties. In Wisconsin, a federal judge ordered the state to provide voter ID to applicants within 6 days of receiving the appropriate documentation. But Motor Vehicle agencies in the state did not comply with the order. These voter ID laws were enacted despite the fact that actual fraud at the voting place is almost non-existent. A study by Prof. Justin Levitt at Loyola University found that from 2000 to 2014 there were only 31 instances of voter impersonation fraud out of one billion votes. The Nation magazine described voter suppression as the most under-reported story of 2016. Ari Berman’s article describes the results of these voter ID laws.

OK. We have to face facts. Donald Trump won the election. He didn’t get the most votes in the general election. But he did get the most electoral college votes. And that’s the way our system currently works. We have to live with him being our president for the next four years.

I have two take-aways from this election. One, there are a lot of people who are saying and writing that we have to give him a chance, we have to wait and see how he will govern. I agree with that. But, I also believe that we have to be vigilant. We can’t allow him and the Republican Congress to enact laws that violate human rights, foster discrimination, or violate the Constitution and say “Let’s wait to see how these laws play out.” We need to act quickly if these things occur and make our voices heard through letter writing, protests, etc. Two, the Democratic party abandoned the working class, which used to provide the base of its support. Bernie Sanders recognized this and there are other prominent Democratic politicians who also understand it (e.g., Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Keith Ellison). The Democratic party has given lip-service to addressing the plight of the working class; but it has not translated into meaningful action. In order to win future elections, the Democrats must return to their roots.