There are two reasons I have waited so long to post about the recent Presidential election. The first is that my first couple of attempts devolved into strings of expletives punctuated by the occasional statistic. And I don’t want that to be what I do here. The second and more demanding reason is that these results are not really all that clear. There are a number of dynamics going on here, pushing in different ways and it takes time pouring over data to really come to meaningful conclusions. Its good for views to come out with ‘why this happened’ immediately, but if you are telling the story before all the numbers come in you are by definition doing it without the complete facts. Perhaps you have enough, but if the recent result has taught us anything I think it should be to scrutinize  prior assumptions more intensely rather than trot them out as early as you can bang out a thousand words.

So this isn’t going to be exhaustive. I’m going to do a number of posts over the next few days about the results. This one will mostly be devoted to critiquing what I think are wrong or incomplete explanations of the Trump victory.

So what just happened?

Trump won the election. The short  answer is that Trump got some new voters to turn out and persuaded previously Democratic, largely white voters in the industrial mid-west to support him while Clinton failed to turn out enough of the ‘Obama Coalition’ in key areas. And that was the whole ball-game.

First off, I was wrong. Mia culpa.  But I don’t feel terribly selfconscious about that fact to be honest. I am, after all, in fairly good company. The more interesting question is why this happened, because I have serious reservations about the analysis being bandied about online in particular. Events this complex almost never have singular, neatly identifiable causes. You should be extremely suspicious of anyone telling you that there is one factor that explains Trump’s victory, or indeed Clinton’s defeat.

So lets go through a few of the arguments being made, and the explanations currently being offered.

Angry, Poor, Racist White Men

This seems to be the most common explanation right now. And it is based on something true: Trump violently over-performed previous Republican nominees in less affluent and more rural areas of the country. Without this he could not have won. But the main part of this thesis is based not on this fact but why it occurred. The argument runs something like this: Trump’s dog-whistle, race-baiting rhetoric appealed to the prejudices of a previously politically disengaged cohort of  white, working class and largely male voters. Now there is some truth to this. But while that may be a necessary it is not a sufficient cause. Voters who hold negative views of other racial groups were overwhelmingly more likely to vote for Trump. That is a fact. But the problem is that there are simply not enough of them. The electorate just didn’t change sufficiently to account for a huge influx of new, racist voters.

The counties where Trump swung the contest were counties that Obama won, often by large margins. So a lot of the crucial Trump voters supported Obama. Twice. It is very difficult for me to believe that someone who is a committed racist would vote for the first African-American president. But that is an essential part of this prognosis. Michigan didn’t suddenly import an entirely new electorate. Detroit was not suddenly  repopulated. If that city had gone to Clinton by the same numbers as it went to Obama, she would have won the state of Michigan.  So the idea that Trump was carried to office on a wave of racist hatred from the American working class is not terribly plausible to me.

There is also a problem with the identification of his supporters as working-class. The median household income in the United States is $56,000, whereas the median household income of Trump voters was $72,000. You see where I am going here. This was not the working-class revolution from the downtrodden that many pundits and news outlets would have you believe.

Its easy to understand why this is such a seductive fiction. To someone like me who was utterly dismayed and disgusted by the elevation of this vapid, ignorant bully it is very comforting to simply blame the racism or stupidity of your opponents. But its important not to fall victim to this oversimplification. Because it leads you to the wrong conclusion.

Knowing who you lost, and who lost you the election, is vital. It informs future behavior, future campaigns and future policies. And while there are many bigots who voted for Trump they were not the crucial voters who swung in behind him. The bitter, hard to swallow truth of it is that these are not by nature bad people. They are not Klan members, they are not white-supremacists, they are not bigoted against other races to any meaningful degree.

They are votes that could  and should have voted for a progressive platform much more aligned to their economic self-interest than the regressive supply-side economics and protectionism of Trump. These are not ‘deplorables’ who could never have been brought on board. To pretend otherwise is to let ourselves off the hook far too easily.

Sun Tzu said that if an order is not followed, it is the fault of the soldier. But if an order is not understood, it is the fault of the general. That dichotomy is instructive in this case. Because these people were lost to the left not because they became suddenly insane and self-loathing, but because the message, intention and policy of the progressive movement in America was not understood or was articulated in an ineffective way. The order never got through. And that is the fault of the general, not the troops. It is the job of a leader to get their followers to follow, not the job of followers to follow the leader. To blame them for not seeing how great Clinton was and flocking to her banners is asinine. The campaign failed, not the voters. That fact is painful, but it really must land in a meaningful way or else this result will be comprehensively misunderstood.

This isn’t a different America to the one that voted for Obama, or that elected a Democratic Congress and Senate. We should be disappointed , particularly in ourselves, that this happened. But we should also be heartened, because it means that Trump’s victory can indeed be rolled back. It is a matter of organisation, argument, persuasion and determination, as ever it was. It was not a consequence of the moral and ethical bankruptcy of the American working class, as many would have you believe.

So why did white voters in the mid-west desert Clinton on the one hand, and flock to Trump on the other? That really is the crucial question. Its complex, deeply linked to both recent and more distant history and requires far more time than I can dedicate to it in this post. But boiling it down to racism and poverty is not sufficient.

Sexism

Books will be written about the failure of the first serious Female contender for the chief magistracy by people far more learned in gender politics and the history of female candidates in America than I. On that basis I’m loathe to pontificate. I will however say I think there is some role for sexism in explaining this result, but in my opinion it was latent rather than blatant. The problem was not that people couldn’t vote for a female candidate. The problem was, as I have been saying all along, Hillary Clinton is uniquely disliked even amongst female politicians. Accusations were leveled at her that I don’t think would have been leveled against another female candidate. More importantly, facts about her were interpreted in the most uncharitable possible way to an extent I find it hard to believe would be universal for candidates of that gender. Prejudice against Clinton was a much greater motivator than prejudice against Women in general. In a way that is more sad to me because I have always admired her, but to think this result is a repudiation of the concept of a female president is to learn the wrong lesson.

I’m also sympathetic to the idea that she was viewed so negatively because of the interplay of gender stereotypes and attitudes. But my feeling is that this is bigger than that. She was held to a double standard not just by comparison to male candiates, but by comparison to political candidates in general. I realize this view will rile some who will always be convinced she was an ethically repugnant individual, but there seems to me no other way of interpreting the data.

For instance, Clinton lost white women. She lost the demographic to which she herself belongs. That says to me that if there is a role for sexism in this calculation its more complex and nuanced than just ‘American voters don’t like women’.

Millennials Stayed Home

Young voters did not go for Clinton in anything like the numbers they went for Obama. They didn’t go for Trump. They stayed home. You can blame Sanders, Clinton, the Media or generational apathy. But the fact remains that they didn’t come out to support the contender from the Blue corner.

Clinton was a Terrible Candidate

This is another analysis that drives me crazy. Its very trendy right now to say ‘Of course Shillary lost. How could anyone vote for her?’. It makes you sound like the kind of informed guy too woke to be deluded by the siren song of the corporate elite. But its also nonsense. Terrible candidates do not win the popular vote. Terrible candidates do not win all the Presidential debates. Terrible candidates do not sweep the field of all primary challengers.

The measure of a Presidential candidate’s  strength is proximity to victory, not fulfillment of some arbitrary list of ethical and political shibboleths dictated by Reddit. And Clinton came achingly, hauntingly close. Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were all won by Trump with a margin of 1% or less. And it seems very likely she will win the popular vote by between 1.5% an 2% .

The problem for her is the fact that too much of that vote comes from running up historic margins in big, blue states like California and New York where she will beat Obama’s numbers. She also did much better than any Democrat since her husband in places like Texas and Georgia. Change the national popular vote by less than one percent in her favor and we would not be talking about how bad a campaign she ran but about how clever and canny were her operatives. To pretend this campaign was always doomed to failure is misleading, and usually done for some purpose other than to inform.

Republicans Came Home

For my money this is the crucial precondition of Trump’s victory. Clinton’s team always knew they couldn’t rely on all the parts of the Obama coalition turning out in her favor as they had for the preceding Democratic nominee. The plan was to balance this deficit and the likely over-performance of Trump with white voters without college degrees by getting the votes of voters with college degrees. People who had previously voted reliably Republican, but who Trump had alienated. And while she did a lot better than Obama had with this demographic, she failed to do well enough. They caved and backed Trump, leaving Clinton at the altar with no way forward.

I say it is the necessary precondition because Clinton could have won with the level of the vote she ended up getting if Trump didn’t end up getting the support of the overwhelming majority of Republican voters. Both candidates were widely disliked by the public, although Trump’s unfavorable numbers were always worse. But one side held their nose and took the plunge anyway. The other side held back. So if you want to blame one single thing, the weakness of the ‘Never Trump’ movement and the capacity of Republican elites to rationalize Trump’s statements so that they wouldn’t have to vote for Hillary would be my pick.

All the levers at once..

But in truth, it was all these things to some extent. The reason I felt Trump would not win was because he required all the pieces to fall in line just so, and Clinton’s loss required all her pieces to fall in line exactly wrong. Trump needed big turnout from the non-college educated, staunch the bleeding from college-graduates, keep minority turnout down, keep millennials at home, get the lions share of the late-breaking undecideds and be the beneficiary of a polling error. And that is unlikely. Sadly though it seems it was not unlikely enough.