Over the next four years and maybe over the next century the results of the last election will be endlessly thrashed out, argued over, and complained about. The explanation presently being preferred is that while white working class voters turned out for Trump but black voters didn’t turn out for Clinton. I wonder whether that’s actually what happened and I’m going to suggest an alternative explanation.

The graph above illustrates the change in Chicago’s population over the period of the last 25 years. The Chicago Tribune noted:

By almost every metric, Illinois’ population is sharply declining, largely because residents are fleeing the state. The Tribune surveyed dozens of former residents who’ve left within the last five years, and each offered their own list of reasons for doing so. Common reasons include high taxes, the state budget stalemate, crime, the unemployment rate and the weather. Census data released Thursday suggest the root of the problem is in the Chicago metropolitan area, which in 2015 saw its first population decline since at least 1990.

Chicago’s metropolitan statistical area, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, includes the city and suburbs and extends into Wisconsin and Indiana.

The Chicago area lost an estimated 6,263 residents in 2015 — the greatest loss of any metropolitan area in the country. That puts the region’s population at 9.5 million.

While the numbers fell overall, there were some bright spots in the Chicago area: Will, Kane, McHenry and Kendall counties saw growth spurts, according to census data.

The Chicago region’s decline extended to the state. In fact, Illinois was one of just seven states to see a population dip in 2015, and had the second-greatest decline rate last year after West Virginia, census data show. While the state’s population dropped by 7,391 people in 2014, the number more than tripled in 2015, to 22,194.

Illinois’s total population is believed to have declined over the last few years.

In addition the black and white birth rate have been about the same for years while the black death rate is substantially higher.

I can’t help but wonder if the actual number of black voters in the North, particularly in the Midwest states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin isn’t a lot lower than we think it is.

When he failed to secure re-election to the House of Representatives, Davy Crockett famously said “You can all go to hell; I’m going to Texas”. It may be that black voters have said the same thing to northern cities in favor of the more favorable economic conditions not only in Texas but in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Illinois isn’t alone. California leads the nation in net domestic outmigration. If it weren’t for Asian immigration, California would actually have lost population.

However, in Illinois’s case the actual decline in population has been matched by a decline in median incomes:

The emphasis by the Democrats who control Illinois’s legislature has been on the need for more revenue. Declining population and declining real incomes translate into less total income in the state.

There are only a handful of possible remedies. Either Illinois must cut spending to match revenues or the state must take an ever-larger slice of people’s incomes. That in turn will result in decreased private sector economic activity. It’s a positive feedback loop.

I think there’s got to be a balance of spending cuts with revenue increases. That’s something that the Illinois Democratic leadership has refused to do.

If you want an explanation for why Speaker Madigan’s lost his Illinois House supermajority, you don’t need to look any farther.

In journalistic parlance “reporting” means going out, witnessing events, interviewing people, doing research, and writing up the results in a coherent whole. Fashions in journalistic writing have changed over the years. A half century the “5Ws” (who, what, when, where, why) prevailed in the writing of a lead paragraph. It’s a style that goes back thousands of years and ultimately derives from classical rhetoric.

More recently stories must be told from a point-of-view. The 5Ws have been supplanted with an account of how one or more people feel about the events being reported.

Opinion writers have relied on reporters following best practice, feeling free to quote reporters’ stories uncritically.

“Re-reporting” means going back over a reporter’s work, re-interviewing people and doing your own research. Opinion writers have generally not been obligated to re-report the stories that form the foundation of their writing.

It used to be that opinion was confined to the editorial page and the front page held reported news stories. That’s no longer the case.

What happens when opinion writers must re-report every story? I think it’s not going to happen. They’ll just continue to cite the bad stories over and over again.

I’ve stumbled across a hidden gem—a blog I’ve never visited before, Bumming With Bobcat. Here’s his post on Thunderbird from a few months ago:

Ladies and gentlemen…what’s the word? Thunderbird!

In my opinion, I rank the Night Train Express and Thunderbird as #1 and #1A in the bum wine world. Both are made by Gallo wines, even though they don’t want to admit it. These guys are sitting on a goldmine and just don’t realize how to promote these fine wines to the masses. I’m telling you that with the proper promotion, I believe we can get these wines back into the mainstream.

Out of the top 5 bum wines, this one was the final piece of the puzzle for me and was very difficult to get my hands on. It wasn’t until one faithful day almost a year ago that I received a text message with a picture of a bottle of Thunderbird that I knew my life would change forever.

Read the whole thing. It’s delightful. Fully illustrated!

I found this post at Billy Penn, a group blog about Philadelphia, on what happened in the 2016 election in Pennsylvania very interesting:

For the first time since 1988, Pennsylvania has elected a Republican presidential candidate despite a Democratic voter registration advantage of nearly a million people. With more than 99 percent of returns in, Trump has carried the state by about a percentage point and more than 60,000 votes.

Why? There are a few reasons — the main one being that the places in Pennsylvania that have historically mattered just didn’t this year. The Philadelphia suburbs were not the difference-maker. Instead, it was Trump’s utter clean-up in southwest Pennsylvania and his ability to flip several counties that went blue in 2012.

I can’t help but wonder whether we’re going to be shocked at the results of the 2020 decennial census.

I think that Dan Balz has it about right in his remarks at the Washington Post:

Republicans spent months encouraging Trump to “pivot” to a more presidential style. He resisted, believing that what got him the nomination and would get him the presidency was to knock his rivals as hard as possible and to be as provocative as he could at his campaign rallies. That was the role he adopted to win. No one has a clue as to how he envisions the role of president — how he will address the American people, how he will interact with members of Congress, how he will deal with allies and adversaries.

Trump ran as the outsider who would shake up the capital. By doing that, he became the tribune of the aggrieved, the left out, the people who have little regard for the views of Washington’s elites. But he is a lifelong dealmaker, and Washington is the ultimate dealmaking town. But dealmaking connotes backrooms dominated by insiders making compromises. Do Trump’s core followers want Washington to work better, or do they expect him to be more disruptive, a president who puts the establishment in its place?

and I concur with this:

One early indicator of that thinking will be the selection of a White House chief of staff. From various reports, the competitors include Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, a true insider and the favorite of GOP congressional leaders, and Steve Bannon, the architect of Breitbart News, a keeper of the alt-right flame and one of the key strategists for Trump in the final few months of the campaign.

When President-Elect Obama appointed Rahm Emanuel as his White House Chief of Staff on November 7, 2008, just days after he had been elected president, he effectively hoisted the Jolly Roger. It was a signal that his administration would be highly partisan and there would be no conciliation with Republicans.

If President-Elect Trump names Reince Priebus his Chief of Staff, he’ll be putting the lie to his campaign as an outsider. If he appoints Steve Bannon, it will be a declaration of war both against the Democrats (“the left”) and against the Republican leadership.

However, this is even more highly problematic:

A third issue is playing out daily as the president-elect begins to populate the government he will take over in January. He promised in the closing weeks of the campaign to “drain the swamp” in Washington. That is the rallying cry for a populist movement — Trump’s movement. Inevitably, well-connected political insiders — lobbyists, lawyers, think tank experts and members of the foreign policy establishment — will populate his transition. Who really will control a Trump government, the 45th president or those who could surround and smother him?

I doubt that Trump’s supporters voted for him so he could stock the swamp with alligators. If he does so, the “political insiders” may be his only supporters. As I’ve said before, I don’t envy him his situation. As Samuel Gallu put in Truman’s mouth, if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.

I have a question. Would the Democratic Party be better off by moving towards the Sanders/Warren left side of the party or by reaffirming a more Third Way approach?

I think they need to root out the Goldman-Sachs wing of the party but move towards more centrist policies with an emphasis on working people. Dump the Clintonistas. Union rank and file rather than union bosses. That will be a very hard trick and it can’t be done overnight.

Depending on the black, Hispanic, and youth vote didn’t work for Hillary Clinton. And there’s a funny thing about the young. Either they get older or they die and no longer participate in politics. Except in Chicago, of course.

There’ve been studies of this stuff. Major life changes affect your politics. It’s not true that if you’re a Democrat by the time you’re 21 you’ll be a Democrat for life.

There have been numerous stories of hate incidents following Donald Trump’s election, a number of which are proving to have been hoaxes. I cited one of them here yesterday which explains why this is an analysis blog rather than a news blog. As Sam Clemens said, a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

At Reason, no friend of Donald Trump’s, Elizabeth Nolan Brown catalogues some of them:

The first one to really go viral involved a Muslim female student at the University of Louisiana who claimed to have had her hijab ripped off and her wallet stolen the day after Trump’s election by two white men wearing Trump hats. But on Thursday, local police announced that the young woman had admitted she fabricated the story. “This incident is no longer under investigation,” the Lafayette Police Department said in a press release.

In another incident, this one in San Diego, a young Muslim woman’s purse and car were stolen by one white male and one Hispanic male. While the men allegedly made negative comments about Muslims, it seems car stealing was more their motivation than harassment or intimidation—which is obviously shitty, but not necessarily a Trump-inspired act of bigotry.

And an alleged incident of a gay man named Chris Ball getting beaten up by Trump supporters in Santa Monica on election night seems to have not happened the way it was initially recounted, if the incident even happened at all. The Santa Monica Police Department posted a message to Facebook Thursday saying that neither the department nor city officials had “received any information indicating this crime occurred in the City of Santa Monica” and “a check of local hospitals revealed there was no victim of any such incident admitted or treated.”

Other instances of “Trump inspired” violence and vandalism have also turned out to be hoaxes or misinterpretations. An alleged Ku Klux Klan rally in honor of Trump’s victory turned out to be an old photo of conservatives carrying U.S., Gadsden, and Christian flags that were billowing out in a manner mistaken in a grainy photo for Klan robes. There were no Southern Illinois University students posting blackface selfies to social media after Trump’s win.

A Nazi flag that went up over a home in San Francisco Wednesday wasn’t a show of support for anti-Jewish sentiment but “a comment on our new president-elect,” according to the anti-Trump resident who put it up. “I am hoping people get that this is a political statement, and that I’m not a Nazi supporter.”

I think that Donald Trump’s obnoxious over-the-top rhetoric is repellent. It’s one of the many reasons I didn’t vote for him. I think it’s darned hard to be a president for all of the people when you’re slamming a good portion of them in a way that’s at best offensive and at worst hateful.

We need to start reflecting on just who is creating a climate of hatred and fear? Is it Donald Trump and his supporters, his opponents who lie about attacks on them or both?

I think I disagree with Sean Trende’s defense of the polls at RealClearPolitics:

There is a fast-building meme that Donald Trump’s surprising win on Tuesday reflected a failure of the polls. This is wrong. The story of 2016 is not one of poll failure. It is a story of interpretive failure and a media environment that made it almost taboo to even suggest that Donald Trump had a real chance to win the election.

I think the polls and the pundits failed and those were a consequence of some combination of herd behavior and systematic bias. For example:

The final RCP Four-Way National Poll Average showed Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by 3.3 points. She will probably win the popular vote by a point or so, which would equate to an error of around two points.

and yet as of this writing Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by .2%. Based on what we know now the RCP Four-Way was off by 3.1 points and that’s too much. Clearly something else was at work in the polls.

And this:

Sometimes polls are a little more favorable to toward Democrats, while other times they are more favorable toward Republicans.

If some polls are more favorable to Democrats while others are more favorable to Democrats, that’s one thing. When most of the polls are favorable to one party or the other all of the time, that’s systematic bias.

I think the polls and the pundits were both wrong and that will be hashed out endlessly for the next century.

My favorite comment about the 2016 election to date comes from Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, in the Guardian:

Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

BTW, here’s his summary of Sec. Clinton’s media support:

With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:

• Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
• Her scandals weren’t real.
• The economy was doing well / America was already great.
• Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
• And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.

I sincerely hope Democrats start considering some of those things as they reflect on the 2016 election. Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook not so good”.