Lessons Learned, 2016

I strongly suspect that we’re going to be treated to a lot of musing on the lessons learned in the 2016 presidential campaign, much of it phrased as recriminations or even accusations.

The polls were wrong. Hillary Clinton did not have a three point advantage in the popular vote. She had a miniscule or non-existent advantage. Spending money on pollsters is a waste.

Early returns suggest that more blacks and Hispanics voted for Donald Trump than did for Mitt Romney. I can’t prove it but I suspect it’s because blacks and Hispanics already discount a certain amount of racism among whites as women other than elite women discount the crude sort of sexism of which Mr. Trump has been accused. The question is less whether he’s a racist or sexist but what’s in it for them?

The “ground game” is officially useless. Money spent on it is wasted, words that will bring existential fear to the hearts of many political operatives. It can help a bit but it can’t bring you victory. Mr. Trump had no organization and he didn’t even have offices in a lot of districts. He won anyway and came close to victory in states that he had, apparently, written off.

If you cry wolf, people eventually tune you out.

You can’t toss a quarter of the electorate into a “basket of deplorables” and expect to be elected president. Ordinary people are aware of the disdain that elites hold for them but elites usually have the good grace not to say so.

Registering people to vote doesn’t necessarily motivate them to vote.

Live in the present not the future.

Money isn’t nearly as important as people have been saying. The Clinton campaign and her supporters outspent Donald Trump and his supporters 2 to 1. She lost anyway.

Finally, we have learned that there is a path to the presidency other than serving in public office, building a campaign warchest, and creating an organization. Whether that can be imitated I have no idea.

20 comments… add one
  • CStanley Link

    Really the polls weren’t wrong as they had this possibility within the spread. I think mainly the pundits interpreting those polls were the ones who blew it. I find it interesting too, wondering how much the polls (and those interpretations which get broadcast) influence the outcome when the voters feel more motivated.

    Your penultimate paragraph is one of the biggest bright spots…although to be fair, Trump’s path involved being born into wealth, leveraging it to an absurd degree in his real estate career, AND having a brash, bigger than life personality that had made him a successful reality TV star before he launched this campaign. Not exactly replicable, so it remains to be seen if a different non-political path is possible.

  • One of the biggest ongoing stories of the last couple of decades is, one after another, gatekeepers losing control.

  • PD Shaw Link

    @CStanley, I agree that the outcome was within the margin of error, but independent polls were consistently showing Clinton ahead, albeit with Trump within the margin of error. That suggests to me some sort of problem, otherwise you would have Trump ahead in more polls w/ Clinton within the margin of error.

    Could be large undecideds/third-party supporters broke heavily for Trump at the end. Could be the oxymoronic shy-Trump supporter. I’m thinking the sampling model was based upon more traditional elections, whereas this election uniquely had a subset of Democrats that was going to vote for Trump and a subset of Republicans that was never going to vote for Trump. This would play out differently in different states, and there was probably insufficient polling in the upper-Midwest.

  • CStanley Link

    Could be large undecideds/third-party supporters broke heavily for Trump at the end.

    Anecdotally, I’m a member of that group. I had planned to abstain from voting for POTUS and only began considering a Trump vote in the last week or so. My decision (not made with certainty until yesterday morning) was influenced by the scope of corruption surrounding HRC that had become evident, and seeing that she had a slight edge to win the whole thing, andseeing that my state of GA though likely to go for Trump as not a sure thing.

    So I’m seeing that in close elections, there’s something almost like a Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work because when the polling shows one candidate eking out a close win, the other side’s leaners are affected by that observation.

  • ... Link

    Trump proved money was over-rated when he schlonged El Jeffe Jeb in the primaries, along with the rest of the Republican field.

    That said, I don’t think either money or a ground game are useless. Without both Hillary wouldn’t have even been the nominee, or she would have lost by bigger margins.

  • Trump proved money was over-rated when he schlonged El Jeffe Jeb in the primaries, along with the rest of the Republican field.

    Only among Republicans. Now we know it’s more generally true.

    When you start looking at the results down at the county level, you see a few things. The first is that Democrats won a tiny number of counties and that number actually shrank this election compared with 2012. The second is that even in counties that Democrats won Hillary Clinton only beat Trump by 2:1 rather than the 3:1 or 4:1 that she needed. That’s why I say that polling and the “ground game” are pining for the fjords.

    I think that Hillary Clinton did the best that could be done with those and it wasn’t enough.

  • CStanley Link

    “….it’s more generally true.”

    Probably wouldn’t generalize to more normal times. This really did turn out to be an overwhelming change election. I’m reminded of that one prognosticator whose model predicted this- it’s those conditions that made the money and grounds game irrelevant.

  • ... Link

    Yes, but Hillary did poorly not because of money or ground game, but because she was an epicly horrible candidate & campaigner.

  • Money, ground game, and demographics can’t remedy a poor candidate.

    As I pointed out over a year ago, the fundamentals favored a Republican candidate’s winning this year. Look at the economy, presidential approval rating, and what happens to the president’s party after a president has served two terms. Ray Fair’s model has won again.

    To most of us, including to many Republicans, it looked as though the Republicans had squandered those advantages by nominating the only candidate who could lose in a year in which Republicans were favored to win.

    Ha, ha, ha. The joke’s on us.

    I agree with at least one point that Michael made: the Democratic Party is now in terrible, terrible trouble. They’re in their weakest state since Roosevelt took office. And it may not get better in the midterms. Go back and look at the black and Hispanic turnout in 2010 and 2014.

  • PD Shaw Link

    @Dave, I don’t if you saw this county-by-county comparison of Illinois voting in 2008 and 2016:

    http://capitolfax.com/2016/11/09/todays-map-7/

    While I’m not 100% confident that the color coding is consistent, it does look like just about every “blue” county became less blue or became red. The “red” counties generally stayed red, though some became more red and others less red.

  • TastyBits Link

    The Republicans nominated the only candidate that could have stood up to the shit thrown at them by the Clinton machine, Democrats, and the media. Sen. McCain and Mitt Romney were Boy Scouts, but they were portrayed as Satan and Lucifer. (Remember McCain’s alleged affair or Romney’s “binders full of women”?)

    Then, Bill Maher decided that maybe they were wrong to have lied about their characterizations of those two, but this time they were telling the truth. Hey Bill, f*ck you.

    Democrat elites are in trouble, but their peons and unwashed masses have a chance to begin the journey to nominating their own Trump. Hopefully, today’s Trumpsters see it for what it is. They will be like you but on the other side of the aisle. You should be pulling for them. Remember what it was like when everybody was shitting on you? They have feelings too, but you would never know it by the way their elites treat them.

  • Mike Ritchey Link

    Trump convinced rural counties that their votes counted and mobilized them to vote. Blue collar voters also got sick and tired waiting for Democrats to deliver on their promises. They also were tired of being ignored. Unemployment is much worse than official numbers. And power was not listening to them.

  • Steve Link

    The Democrats nominated the only candidate Trump could beat. The GOP nominated the only one Clinton could beat. So we got a very close election, but as I thought, Trump got better turnout.

    What I think we learned about the path to POTUS I’d that really rich people don’t need to stay in the background and run the country anymore. They can just come out and run it directly.

    Steve

  • As I noted above when you break through the fog of war the econometric models got it right while the pundits got it wrong. It might be just as simple as that.

  • PD Shaw Link

    @steve, so your theory is that when a resistible force meets a movable object, something has to give?

    It appears that unlike yesterday’s reports, turnout may have been down. I think after 8 years, Obama leaves office with a great deal of personal popularity that has not shown itself to be transferable to any other Democrat.

  • steve Link

    PD- Pretty much, and one of those two just had fewer enthusiastic supporters. Dave’s idea about the basics supporting the GOP and that just played out has some truth to it I think, but mostly it was just that Clinton supporters didn’t really have much reason to go out and vote, while Trump supporters had reasons other than Trump pushing them to vote.

    They couldn’t call the race until 3 in the morning. The Trump people will, as the winners always do, act like they had a big sweep and now they have a mandate. No lessons will be learned by our politicians.

    Steve

  • ... Link

    The Democrats decided Hillary would be their candidate several years ago. That was that. Bernie threw a small wrench into the works, but he’s not really beholden to the party. Speaking of other candidates is pointless – it was never in the cards.

    And TB is correct, any of the other Republicans would have folded like a cheap suit. You really think Rubio would have stood us to the Worse Than Hitler ™ treatment? Ted Cruz? It’s funny to see Dems claiming, as TB notes, that they were lying about how awful MCCAIN & Romney were (and Bush, and Dole, and so on), but THIS time they really mean it!

    This is their standard campaign now. They’ve got nothing else. Besides wanting more wars, what was Hillary actually _for_? Smears are all they’ve got.

    #MAGA #SHADILAY

    May Kek’s bl3551ng5 be upon us.

  • steve Link

    “And TB is correct, any of the other Republicans would have folded like a cheap suit. ”

    LOL. Any other leading Republican, maybe not Cruz, would have creamed her.

    Steve

  • TastyBits Link

    With the pathetic economic conditions at the time, Mitt Romney should have easily beaten President Obama, but he was made out to be worse than Satan. “Binders full of women”, elevator for his car (in the house on the side of a hill), murdering cancer victims, etc. were some of the heinous acts that the Democrats fortunately discovered (or fabricated) to prove he was unfit for office.

    Anybody who buys this dumb assed shit is a dumb ass, and like I said somewhere else, the heat was not hot enough. If you lied once (Rathergate), twice (McCain affair), thrice (binders bullshit), you are an unrepentant and irredeemable liar, and anything you say should be assumed to be a lie.

    That game is over. The new game is the “boo-hoo, go f*ck yourself” game. As a certain someone said. “I won.”

    “Tough titty said the kitty, but the milk’s still good.”

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