Myth #1: This Election Was About Elitists vs. Working-Class People
Trump supporters are people too, they're entitled to their opinions, and no one should hate them-- or anyone else, for that matter. However, let's please jettison this narrative about Trump supporters being downtrodden, out-of-work folks who were screwed over by an elitist-controlled system. His supporters make, on average, more money in a given year than most Americans. They make, on average, a lot more than I do, and a lot more than teachers or police officers or fire fighters make. Yes, there are some people who voted for Obama and also voted for Trump, so white nationalist fervor cannot fully explain this election. Yes, some Trump supporters genuinely were screwed over by the corrupt system, and they saw Hillary as a product of that system. They weren't wrong, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that that was the sole-- or even the primary-- reason behind this. Many Clinton supporters were screwed over by the same system. They simply didn't buy into the argument that a billionaire hotelier was any less of an elitist and an influence peddler than she was. They trusted her more to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reverse Citizens United. At the end of the day, we have allowed money to become so deeply entrenched in our political process that you either have to kiss the ass of filthy rich people in order to win an election, or you have to yourself be filthy rich. So the choice was between someone who was the product of a corrupt system and someone who promised to bring his own personal brand of corruption into that system. When given that unenviable choice, things like qualifications and temperament can tip the scale.Myth #2: Bernie Could Have Won
We. Just. Don't. Know. Yes, the DNC was in the tank for her, but they were also in the tank for her during the early days of the 2008 primary. Obama turned the tables rather quickly, and he became the darling of the DNC overnight. Nothing prevented Bernie from doing likewise, other than the fact that he was unable to build a "rainbow coalition" of voters. Hillary was able to do this in part because she learned from the 2008 campaign. At the end of the day, she walked away with 3.5 million more votes than Bernie did, and no advantage the DNC gave her could have accounted for that. What did account for it is the fact that this wasn't her first rodeo.Bernie supporters are latching onto a hypothetical match-up poll from early June that said that he would have beaten Trump by ten points, and another poll from the same time frame that seemed to predict exactly the horse race that we got between Clinton and Trump. But the first thing one should notice about these polls is that the hypothetical Sanders/Trump match-up left 11% undecided, and the hypothetical Clinton/Trump match-up left a whopping 14% undecided. Hypothetical match-up polls are not really predictive. A hell of a lot has happened since June. In a parallel universe, one in which Bernie took the nomination, a hell of a lot would have happened in the months between that point and this point. Having a self-described socialist in the race could have energized the Republican base just as much as having a Clinton in the race (if you don't believe that, just look at the example of Jeremy Corbyn.) And no, I don't really believe Bernie is a socialist or even a democratic socialist. He's a textbook social democrat, actually. His argument for socialism is a nuanced argument. It's an argument that says: no, we're not trying to turn the U.S. into a socialist nation, but a truly free country requires a balance between collectivism and corporatism. If we embrace too much collectivism, then we create a nation whose over-reaching regulatory framework can stifle innovation and make it difficult to run a business. However, if we embrace too much corporatism, then we create a nation in which big corporations are unfairly advantaged relative to small businesses and individuals. Too much government control decreases competition and stifles innovation, but too much corporate control does likewise. Those who use "socialist" as a dirty word need to understand that the opposite of socialism isn't capitalism. The opposite of socialism is fascism. The American Dream lies somewhere in the middle. Bernie's argument, an argument with which I wholly agree, is that we've allowed our nation to move too far toward the corporatist end of the spectrum, and dialing it back requires injecting more socialism into the mix. But this is a nuanced argument that did not fully resonate with primary voters, particularly people of color, and that is precisely why Bernie was unable to turn the tables on Clinton like Obama did in 2008. The people who turned out in record numbers to elect our first President of Color supported Clinton in the primary because she represented a third Obama term.
But, but, super-delegates. Sure, super-delegates are an elitist construct. But the flip side of that coin is that, if the Republican Party had some super-delegates of its own, Trump wouldn't be President. Super-delegates have existed in the DNC since the early 1970's. They existed when Obama turned the tables on Clinton in 2008. She (barely) won the 2008 popular vote, but Obama won the primary because of super-delegates, so any argument that the 2016 primary was "stolen" from Bernie must also conclude that the 2008 primary was "stolen" from Clinton. However, this argument rests on a false assumption that primaries can be "stolen" at all. Primaries are not elections. The purpose of those contests is to gauge the relative electability of particular candidates, and the parties are not legally bound by their results. But, again, she won by 3.5 million votes. Did the DNC put its finger on the scale for Clinton? Yes, but I doubt that it was a 3.5-million-vote finger.
Not everyone who voted for Trump did so because of white nationalism, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that that wasn't a major factor in this election. White nationalism is emerging as a movement in Europe as well, despite the fact that most of those countries have comprehensive Bernie Sanders-style social welfare programs. So don't fool yourself into thinking that Bernie's promise of free college and universal healthcare would have quieted the Trumpist movement. There is definitely an argument to be made that Bernie could have done better than Clinton in the Rust Belt, but he could very well have lost some other states-- particularly Virginia, which went 65/35 in favor of Clinton during the primary.
Myth #3: The Left/The Media Could Have Predicted This, If Only They Had Listened
In the days since the election, a lot of people are trotting out Peter Thiel's line that the media took Trump literally but not seriously, whereas his supporters took him seriously but not literally. I can only hope that Thiel is right, because that means that President-Elect Trump doesn't actually believe some of the awful things he said during the campaign. But there are ways of quantifying how often a candidate lies, and Trump's propensity for telling bald-faced lies was quantifiably much higher than Clinton's (her rating was, in fact, similar to Bernie's.)We can argue about media bias until we're blue (or red) in the face, but at the end of the day, everyone is biased. Everyone. That's why we, as a species, have developed methods (including the Scientific Method and traditional journalistic codes of ethics) to work around these biases. That doesn't mean that scientists or hard journalists get it right all the time, but it does mean that someone who has spent a lot of time researching something is more likely to get it right than someone who hasn't. It means that, if a supposition has undergone rigorous scrutiny-- particularly by people who have no vested interest in agreeing with it-- it's more likely to be true than one that hasn't. Even if the journalists who work for a traditional media outlet have baked-in biases (see above-- everyone has baked-in biases), they're still going to have a pretty good chance of getting it right if they follow traditional journalistic codes of ethics, including focusing on research and clearly delineating objective facts from subjective opinions. This is first-year journalism stuff, which is why I am saddened that so few modern journalists seem to practice it. I'm equally saddened by the fact that we, as a nation, seem to have developed more trust in social media and the blogosphere than in hard journalism. I mean, yeah, some newspapers are liberally biased, but some aren't, and some of the conservative papers were just as vocal in their opposition to Trump as the liberal ones. I don't know the answer to this, but I do know that the answer is not to increase our reliance on media sources that are, by their very nature, unreliable.
So what was the media supposed to do? Ostensibly the purpose of journalism is to seek the truth, but when one candidate is clearly and measurably lying a lot more often than the other, how are people on the other "side" supposed to "listen" to this? How is it their fault for not believing the lies that Trump told to his supporters in order to get elected? It isn't that the media is a bunch of anti-populist, elitist snobs who look down on Real America from their ivory towers in New York City. You have to remember that many local papers didn't endorse Trump, either. The average journalist makes less money than the average Trump supporter, actually. The media did the best it could with the information it had to work with. Trump's "shock jock" approach to his campaign may have been cleverly designed to get as much media attention as possible, or he may have really meant the things he said. There was no way for anyone outside of his immediate sphere to know which it was, and it's clear that at least some of his supporters did take him both literally and seriously. The media went with what it knew, which is that he was lying more than telling the truth, and Clinton was telling the truth more than lying. This is what lawyers would call the "preponderance of the evidence."
Pollsters will be studying this election for years to come, with the hope of predicting similar phenomena in the future, but this year, they did the best they could with the information and methods they had available. Pollsters were listening to Trump supporters, but not all Trump supporters were talking. It's impossible for polls to work correctly when a significant number of respondents aren't willing to own their choices. That being said, I do think that some members of the media and some pollsters made the same error that Bernie supporters made when they assigned too much importance to the hypothetical match-up polls: they ignored the margins. Even the latest Trump/Clinton poll prior to the election left nearly 6% of the vote unaccounted for. Trump's victory came from within that 6%. Trump has been defying pollsters throughout this election cycle for basically that same reason. Most people outside of Trump's campaign (even Republicans and conservative media outlets) made the same error, but at least give Nate Silver some credit for having included the aforementioned polling uncertainty in his models, which were always a lot more bullish on Trump than most. His last assessment gave Trump about a 30% chance. Fair enough.
Myth #4: Third Parties Cost Clinton the Election
It's unclear whether Johnson culled more centrist Democrats from the herd or more centrist Republicans, but I strongly suspect the latter more than the former. I mean, he and Weld are former Republican governors, after all. So let's look at Stein. Assuming that all of her voters in Wisconsin had voted for Clinton instead, Clinton would have taken that state by the slimmest of margins (~4000 votes.) Assuming that all of her voters in Michigan had voted for Clinton instead, Clinton would have taken that state by a much larger margin (~39,000 votes.) However, if all of Stein's voters in Pennsylvania had voted for Clinton, Trump still would have taken Pennsylvania by ~19,000 votes-- and, with it, the election. Florida? Nope. Still not even close, even if you assign all of Stein's votes to Clinton. North Carolina? Stein wasn't even on the ballot.No, I think there were ultimately two things that cost Clinton the election:
1. The Electoral College (duh)
The EC was originally meant as a check and balance on the "tyranny of the majority." It was originally an elitist institution meant to bridge the gap between the uneducated masses and the educated polity. That's why it's somewhat ironic-- in the O. Henry rather than the Alanis Morissette sense of the word-- that this election, which was ostensibly about elitism vs. the plight of the working class, was decided by this arcane, elitist institution.Originally, one elector was elected by popular vote from each congressional district, but the electors were more or less free to "vote their conscience" when choosing the President and Vice President. The idea was that electors were educated people who had the necessary knowledge of the U.S. system of government to make informed decisions regarding who should lead it. However, they also had strong ties to local communities and could earn the trust of the people within their districts. The candidate with the most number of electoral votes became President, and the second-place candidate became veep. I'll refer you to this Wikipedia article for a list of some of the problems that this caused in our early nation. For instance, you may not have been aware of the fact that, because of the Electoral College, Thomas Jefferson didn't actually win the 1800 election. He was appointed by the House.
Over time, the EC evolved into its modern form, whereby electors are-- for the most part-- no longer elected. Most states have a winner-take-all system in which each party chooses a complete set of electors (sometimes during the primary, but often without any direct input from the electorate), and the set of electors from the party that wins the presidential popular vote in a given state are allowed to cast all of that state's electoral votes. Many states have laws against "faithless electors", so there is very little that an elector can do in most cases other than cast a vote for his/her party's candidate. That is obviously not the system that our Founding Fathers intended.
One of the arguments you most often hear in favor of the EC is that it forces candidates to pay attention to "flyover country." As the argument goes, without the EC, a candidate could theoretically focus just on California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and New Jersey and still win an election. OK, but in this campaign, Trump won by focusing on about half that many states. Speaking as someone who lives in a very populous state that is always a foregone conclusion, it would be nice to have a presidential candidate focus on us for a change.
The National Popular Vote project seeks to forge an interstate compact whereby the electoral votes from all participating states would be assigned to the winner of the nationwide popular vote. They make a compelling argument that this would not, in reality, disenfranchise voters in low-population areas. If true, then this would be an excellent stopgap measure, since it wouldn't require amending the Constitution, but I personally believe that ranked voting, AKA an "Australian" or "automatic runoff" ballot, is a better long-term solution. Under this system, every voter is required to rank every candidate in order from most to least favorite. If no candidate gets a majority of votes by counting all of the first-choice votes, then the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes is eliminated, and the second-choice votes from those voters are counted instead. This process is repeated (hence the name "automatic runoff"), eliminating the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes each time, until only one candidate emerges with a majority. There are numerous advantages to such a system. For starters, it eliminates any danger of voting for a third party, because if (when) that third-party candidate is eliminated in the first round, anyone who voted for that candidate will have their second-choice votes counted instead. It encourages more informed voting choices, because any vote that does not rank all of the candidates is discarded. Thus, if there were four candidates on the ballot, then there would be an impetus for voters to find out what all four of those candidates stood for, in order to rank them intelligently.
Finally, the advantage of ranked voting is that it provides further assurances that candidates will not ignore "flyover country". Under a ranked voting system, a candidate could not simply appeal only to the most populous areas of the nation, because there would be a significant political advantage to becoming the second choice for voters in less populous areas rather than the last choice. Potentially, such a system could even eliminate primaries to some extent. There would have to be some sort of qualifying round in order to prevent a "clown car" situation akin to the 2016 Republican primary, but this qualifying round need not necessary be intra-party. It could simply be a preliminary round, during which anyone who chose to do the research would be allowed the opportunity to rank 25 candidates in order, and the five winners of that round would advance to the general election. If applied retroactively to this election, that would have resulted in a final ballot with Bernie, Hillary, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich, with no third parties. But we also have to realize that switching to a ranked voting system would fundamentally change the role of parties in the election, so it's impossible to say how the Libertarians and the Greens would change their game to accommodate the new system. Overall, it would give those voters more choices and more chances of finding a candidate that is at least somewhat aligned with their views, even if the actual candidates from their parties were eliminated in the first round. Whereas Hillary, Cruz, and Trump could have garnered a lot of first-choice votes on a ranked ballot, they would have also garnered a lot of last-choice votes, so it is likely that either Bernie or Kasich would have won in the balance. Per Duverger's Law, a two-party system will naturally emerge from a plurality-rule voting system, so eliminating the EC and switching to ranked voting would create a much more fertile environment for third parties.
2. Turnout (or Lack Thereof)
You can argue that the lack of enthusiasm for Clinton kept Democratic voters at home, but there's more to it than that. It is clear that many states, particularly in the South, made it more difficult to vote in this election by restricting early voting, closing polling places, etc. The North Carolina GOP even bragged about how turnout among African Americans was decreasing relative to 2012. I don't know that they were necessarily bragging about voter suppression efforts, but decreased turnout always favors Republicans, and of course the partisans at the state level know this. The Voting Rights Act ensured that, in prior elections, these actions on the part of states could not unfairly disadvantage areas of the state in which people of color live. That is, if Black people had to stand in long lines, then (at least in theory) white people had to as well. Shelby County v. Holder changed that in 2013, and there are certainly a lot of cases being made that that decision was a factor in Florida and North Carolina.But let's put that aside for a moment and ask ourselves-- why do we allow partisans to control our elections at all? We talk about congressional term limits, but why do we allow partisan state legislatures to redraw congressional districts in such a way that many of our elected U.S. representatives run unopposed or without any credible opposition? That is, as much as anything, why congressional representatives stay in office for as long as they do. Term limits would be one solution, but an end to partisan gerrymandering would be another. Furthermore, why do we not recognize that letting partisans control electoral rules at the state level creates a fundamental conflict of interest? Of course these partisans are going to try to unfairly advantage their party in any way that the law allows.
The EC unfortunately exacerbates this. Without it, there would be much less impetus for state-appointed partisans to try to advantage the election in their party's favor, because no one state could swing the whole election. It is no coincidence that most of the dirty dealings you hear about vis-a-vis secretaries of state for elections occur in places like Florida or Ohio or North Carolina.
Myth #5: Misogyny, Xenophobia, and Racism Won This Election
No, actually more people than not voted to elect a female President. Misogyny, xenophobia, and racism only won on a technicality.So What Now?
To me at least, the narrative of Trump as a "change candidate" is hollow. He cannot credibly be the bringer of change when he fought tooth-and-nail against change while a Black President was attempting to bring it (see "birtherism.") Congressional Republicans cannot credibly be the bringers of national unity when they tried their best not to give Obama a single legislative victory, even on policies with which they agreed. So forgive me if I'm not ready to make nice with any of these people just yet. If Trump turns out to be much more of an Arnold Schwarzenegger-style Republican, if he is truly concerned about doing what most Americans want instead of just what his party wants, then there is hope. But if, however, he caters only to the people who elected him, then I fear for our nation, because a sizeable chunk of those people seem to just want to burn it all down. I'm not saying that they don't have legitimate beefs with government. They do, and so do I, but I also don't think that chaos is going to improve anyone's financial situation.What we have to come to terms with is the fact that this election was a referendum not just on government elitism but also on America's readiness to embrace an equal-opportunity society. It is the result of an entire class of people (working-class whites) who feel that they've been cut out of the political process. My first reaction to that would be: yeah, and now they know a little bit about how it feels to be Black, or Latino, or a woman ... except that they don't, because they ultimately won, and a rich white man ultimately ended up in the White House, per usual. We dismissed these voters at our peril, because democracy says that everyone has a voice, even if the loudest voices are coming from angry white men who want to blame "others" for their problems. However, we also have to ask ourselves whether this election represents exactly the "tyranny of the majority" that Mr. Hamilton warned us about.
