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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » How Clinton apathy delivered the presidency for Trump
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » How Clinton apathy delivered the presidency for Trump
Keiran Pedley looks at some initial numbers suggesting a lack of enthusiasm for Clinton handed Trump the White House on Tuesday.
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So who ? Hillary wasn't unbeatable in the primary. Obama did it in the '08 ones. This time there was no Obama. With respect to Bernie he is no Obama. maybe the biggest historic criticism of Clinton will be that like Brown here she simply waited too long for the top job and killed off all credible successors in the process to the detriment of her party.
If you want an inspiring Change candidate who looks very different to Obama/Biden then it's harder to see, but I'm not sure you can run a Change candidate when you're running for a party's third term.
The other way to square the circle would have been Elizabeth Warren. She would certainly have motivated the left and had a good story to tell the rust-belt about standing up to Big Something, and may have been able to keep a chunk of the centre too, but it's possible she'd have had the same problem you mention for Bernie.
So I'm splitting in two opposing directions. On the one hand I'm giving up and accepting I don't understand the world anymore and should stop trying. On the other I'm doubling down on my analysis. This is late decadence. There has never been a better time to be alive and there has never been a better place to live than the West. That's why immigration is such a problem. Our societies have coped with far worse in the past with much less instability. familiarity has bred contempt. We've forgotten how exceptional post war prosperity was and now think it's a right. It's not a right. It was earned and earned in a historical context that's ended and is never coming back.
So I get the revolutionary aspect of the current storm. I'd like a revolution as well. What I find inexplicable is the belief you can press the pause button let alone the rewind button on History. It's not Trump's or Brexit's natavism I don't understand. It's the lack of a plan and the fact both were establishment projects in their own way? how do people fall for it ?
I actually feel quite nostalgic now for the Reagan/Thatcher era. What ever I thought of them they had an analysis of what was wrong, a plan for putting it right then executed it. Now we seem to want cultural tranquillisers to just make the pain stop and no more.
If you think the problem is *unemployment* then it doesn't make sense, but there's not much evidence for this. Unemployment is only loosely correlated with Brexitism/Trumpery, and if you ask them what their problem is they don't say unemployment, they say immigration.
Hillary 48%
IMO well worth reading them with an open mind.
The bigger issue IMHO is that we're heading toward 9 Billion people on the planet by mid century. Low wage labour doesn't need to immigrate here to undercut western wages. If western consumers feel too poor how is large scale onshoring of jobs via protectionist tariffs going to help ?
Once upon a time the Green Left told us our lifestyles were unsustainable and the product of western historical priviledge. Now they tell us any drop in western living standards is " Austerity " and a needless policy choice.
Once upon a time the New Right told us the world didn't owe us a living. Now they tell us the world does owe us a living. that one epochs living standards are a right.
Curiously both the Green Left and the New Right have both changed positions at precisely the moment that history has vindicated them. it seems they'd rather be popular than proved correct.
Regardless of what one thinks of Thatcher and Regan, they at least had a coherent ideology, and a genuine belief that what they were doing was right. Thatcher's ideology was one of progress and hope (even if I don't agree with the methods), not one of hate. Trump is a total megalomaniac whose ideology is more rooted in the hatred of others than solutions to the problems America faces. It's like for those who believe that solving the problem of race relations in America simply comes down to telling African-Americans to shut up, after all how would they know if they were facing racism? The Trump and Farages of the world emerge when people's sense of security and position in the world feels under threat. White America, through immigration and the increasing questioning of white supremacy through campaigns such as BLM, feels that their position in the world is under threat. With the rise of Islamic extremism, and Russia and China as emerging great powers, this reinforces their sense of insecurity. Trump is the candidate who plays on their fears of minorities having more influence and say on America's future, and their desires to return to a 'past', where America's position as top dog in the world is more secure. Under the Obama presidency, race relations have taken a turn for the worse. That is not a coincidence - the rise of a Black man to the highest office in America threatens a system designed for only white men to monopolise positions of power. The resentment that social mobility may be something all demographics in America have access to, has partly birthed many of these Trump voters.
Farage, likewise plays in people's fears and anxieties of the 'other', with assistance from a right-wing press owned by Conservative megalomaniacs such as Murdoch. As Matthew Parris pointed out in his article on Brexit some months ago, many of those complaining about immigration don't even live near immigrants. Many live in middle-class home countries, FGS. And for the record, I actually live near immigrants - we have Eastern European immigrants next door, and Muslim immigrants across the road from us - my family haven't had our world end because of it. Brexit was also rooted in anti-immigrant sentiment and the idea that less immigration will prove as a panacea to Britain's woes. I know because my Brexit voting dad is a prime example of this type of voter. He genuinely believes that Eastern European migrants are threat to my, and my siblings future. He genuinely feels that getting out of the EU will by itself solve all of Britain's woes. He doesn't realise that actually negotiating a type of Brexit that suits this country is in itself a huge task, a problem.
What happened this time was that the incumbent party was trying to represent hope, which is already a hard thing to pull off, and the candidate wasn't very good at it.
I think one of the key points in the campaign was the late intervention by the FBI. Clinton never recovered even when she was "cleared". America had 8 years of investigations, Special Prosecutors, deep suspicions and vast amount of smoke if not fire during Bill's Presidency. I think that a lot of people just could not face the idea of going into that again.
My concern is that we are getting into self indulgent gesture politics. Its enough to kick the man, looking for serious and credible alternatives is too much work. I don't like the phrase post-truth politics but there is something in it.
One of the best bits of analysis I read which sort of explains Trump was that the median wage in the US has not increased since 1991. The US economy has grown a lot in those 25 years but the fruits of that growth have been exclusively taken by the upper quartile. Trickle down economics has, unfortunately, failed to deliver for the majority. And the majority is increasingly annoyed about it.
Good article Mr Padley, thanks. – Clinton was simply a turn off for over 6 million Obama voters, that should have been apparent in 2008 when she was rejected as the Democrat nominee in favour of Obama and that, quite honestly, is when she should have given up on her presidential ambitions.
An indication of the turnout figures for the swing states, and the votes for the third party candidates, would have added to the analysis.
It is striking how many of these states are actually close to being evenly divided, even where they have a history of tending to vote one way, Translating these states to a UK context, in percentage terms the margins of victory across all the years would make them highly marginal. It is also remarkable that in four different elections with different candidates all round, the swings bewteeen the parties are incredibly modest - much lower than we would see in any four UK elections.
As a consequence of the above, a candidate doesn't need to excite a tide of mass enthusiasm to win; they just need a small swing to win. Ohio is the classic example - the "modest increase for Trump" referred to in the article actually gives him more than 50% of the vote. If you have more than half the votes it doesn't matter what happened to support for your various rivals; you win.
Yet with the states listed above, Hillary would have won, right?
So the question is - which states that Hillary won would Sanders or Warren have risked losing? Otherwise either of them could have got elected for sure.
The scary part of this is that it creates the politics of the deaf. Trying to find the traditional middle ground does not work. Everything is about getting out your base and boosting their enthusiasm. Trump did that and he won.
I don't see anywhere Hillary would have out-performed Biden; He'd simply have been a better candidate.
Warren, not sure.
https://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=8t9x_y3vFic
The extent to which "seen to fail" is any consolation does rather depend upon what failure looks like.
Yet reading the posts around here, negativity and even fear dominates. Is that because the Internet makes distant events seem close (there is no longer a "far away country between people of whom we know nothing")? Is it because it is easy to hang peoples' prejudices on fear? Or is it because negativity and fear is an easier state to be in that positivity?
This does not mean we should be complacent. The UK isn't in a bad place, but we could still improve. I just don't understand the reasons behind the constant negativity and fear that sometimes produces.
People need to perform their own risk analyses.
Good posts: I agree with much of what you are saying.
I think however that there are a few factors that should have a greater bearing on your analysis. Firstly, there is a massive problem with inequality and resentment created by the 'meritocratic' ideology of the current system whereby a sizeably minority of people do very well out of the system but vast amounts of people are left behind. I live in a medium sized town in the south east and I would say that I have one of the best jobs going in so far as the local economy is concerned and earn slightly above the national average wage. But most people are in a 'precariat' like position in terms of employment with unstable, low paid employment or precarious self employment. This is a town of over 100,000 people and there are no large employers outside the public sector. For anyone under 30 the idea of owning a house is very diffifult and the employment people are in cannot provide that stability. There is therefore massive underlying resentment towards the status quo and the current economic system. It is easy enough for me or you to hear these people talking about their planned trip to Eurodisney or their purchase of a second hand audi and think to ourselves 'fucking morons, spolit brats, don't know how lucky they are, no comprehension of how they have benefitted from the postwar liberal economic order' etc etc but this overlooks the greater underlying problem of economic insecurity. Aside from the NHS, the tory reforms mean that now there is essentially no welfare system if you drop through the net, you are in some kind of Kafkaesque brutal administrative hell to get £70 a week or whatever and it is not difficult to see how you would conclude your interests are better served by low level acquisitive crime. And then if you are homeless, or whatever, the local authority can't help you unless you have some kind of vulnerability or there are children involved, because there is no statutory responsibility in this regard, and local authorities have no money.
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And at the same time, 50 miles away in London you have people swimming around earning 100,000s of thousands of pounds a month who just sneer at everyone else and everything that is going on in the country, wanting a 'bracing and thatcherite' brexit to save ourselves and make ourselves more economically internationally competitive. Many of these people don't do any productive work, they benefit from investments in property (possibly luck rather than judgement) or simply are there at the right time at the right place whilst crumbs fall off the high table of the gilded economic system.
Given that - post new labour - politicians in all three main parties have not found a way of making the system work to the benefit of everyone - in fact it keeps getting worse - it's not hard to conclude that this system and all who benefit from it is absolutely unsustainable and long overdue a thorough kicking. And, that is exactly what is happening at the moment. At the bottom of everything is the fact that people just want all the things that existed in the past - decent jobs, stable employment, stability, but the trade off if these things are going to be delivered is that the extravagancies of the current system (cheap air travel, foreign holidays, unlimited free healthcare for any problem ever) will need to be curtailed.
The tragedy for labour is that it is the populist right who are more in tune with what people think, than the left, which is why they keep winning.
But for both parties in America they have soul searching to do.
The GOP wanted to stop the Tea Party faction (Cruz) and run their own Anointed One (Bush). Instead they got a maverick independent who for all the talk of "The GOP have the White House and the Hill" is elected on a platform that many leading GOP people despise - big government spending programmes, an assault on their Wall Street donors, an end to crony capitalism, the kind of job protection that unions have fought for years to get. The Trump White House will have its uses to a Republican Congress but I expect many serious arguments too.
The DNC didn't even pretend this wasn't a fix. Their own Anointed One, with an even grander sense of self-entitlement than Bush, was steamrollered through the process regardless of all the polls showing a result vs Trump of exactly this. People won't vote Trump because we are Right and he is Wrong. Nope. And commentary through election night of union leaders backing Clinton and their members backing Trump - you can't patronise your way to office.
Where do they go now? Much will depend on how successful - and on who's measure - Trump is. The real risk for both parties is that in their judgement the Trump "experiment" is a failure and run candidates and campaigns against him accordingly, with voters fundamentally disagreeing with that analysis.
Interesting times....
As other posters have pointed out, Sanders would have done no better and you can create a case that the latent Republican vote was much higher this cycle (just look at those votes for Johnson) and that Trump won despite himself, it's just Hillary was even worse.
Short version: Americans were probably more pre-disposed to the Republicans this time round. A non-Trump Republican that had paid due attention to the mid-West would have probably outperformed Bush in those same swing states this time round.
Its the economy, stupid
the established parties have no real solutions either.
their approach is simply to suppress views they dont like and keep doing what they are doing.
it's time for all parties to go back to the drawing board and have a rethink
The cause, I suggest, is that development in both the second and third worlds has proceeded sufficiently to give people access to global media to 'see over the fence' (and understand a little of what is on the other side, including language), and access to cheap and easy travel and sufficient disposable capital in their economies to make the journey (both mentally and physically), but not so far that there is sufficient economic attraction in staying at home.
As someone who has visited Eastern Europe periodically since communist times, I see the transformation of those economies and societies as one of the miracles of our time. I don't think it will be too many years before immigration stops, because there will be no need for it - just as Geordie builders no longer flock to Germany; when the economic disparity resolves itself, people stop coming.
For the world outside the EU, it will take much much longer - but all of these societies (notably China, India, Brazil and even parts of Africa) are now developing at an astounding pace, nevertheless.
One query with Kierens analysis: we see the Republican vote stayed more or less constant, but are they the same people? Up with blue collar America but down else where, netting out much the same.
Some good analysis on here this AM, after the histrionics of previous weeks. Good to see Ms Apocalypse back too.
But labour are hopeless (as are the democrats in the US). Both wings of the party, and the problem currently is that they are to bound up in bonkers and insane identity politics, human rights, and fucking absolutely clueless about how to manage immigration as a political issue.
My guess is that Trump gains WWC votes in the rust belt and lost them to Johnson in the OC and other locations where it didn't matter.
If Trump is relatively sensible for 4 years those votes could come back for him (or Pence) so the popular vote is less significant than you might think.
Local government is not popular, as I said, and I think it does a whole bunch of things it doesn't need to, but while the public do t object to cuts to local government, they will grow increasingly annoyed as services stop being provided as well. And that before the potential of councils going the equivalent of bankrupt and power being taken from their elected members and given to their finance directors, to do what needs doing.
I will say on welfare that you say the administration means there is none if you drop through the net, but it's still, I believe, by far the 2nd largest part of expenditure, and even the Tories backed off the last proposal to cut. I for one think we do need to eliminate the deficit, but even the Tories gave up on that since they won't touch health and are unable to truly cut welfare. Every election I've ever seen plays on fears. If it's not fear of immigrants it's fear of Tories, or the elite, etc
I think some on the left know that many on the liberal-left live in a little bubble sheltered from the real world. Some of the people I follow feel that things will have to get worse before they start getting better.
It's actually much better for Trump that he did not get to the Oval Office on the back of a lot of new voters. He is going to let a lot of people down over the coming years, so has a much better chance if his support is based on tribal Republican voters. They will give him a lot more leeway.
The US has around three hundred million citizens, and the Democratic Party (from memory) a few tens of millions of members. The idea that the *best* candidate for the job from that massive pool is the wife of an ex-president with virtually no political experience is fantasy.
I said the same about Hilary before the vote; except she had at least been *in* politics for a long period, including in high office.
My unspoken response is "that's correct. If only you had had that insight twenty years ago..."
Donald Turnip will make your lot beg.
How enthused is the Tory base by the performance of Mrs May and her government?
Cameron could do this to a far greater extent, because he posed as a liberal conservative, and he had the gloss from a relatively successful time in coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
But I have the feeling that nobody is feeling inspired by Mrs May. The Tories failed to get their base inspired in the recent Witney byelection, and they lost 20,000 votes, and almost lost the seat. If Clinton was a poor choice for the Democrats, then May is an equally poor choice for our Conservatives. They don`t have anybody else either.
(There are other ways of getting income from companies you own aside from salary, but the general principle stands).
I didn't predict a Trump win, but I did say a few months ago that he stood a small chance because people were fired up both for and against him, but relatively few were enthusiastic about Clinton.
Morley, Telford and Gower were not won because Cameron was a 'liberal conservative'.
I will be watching the locals in the SW with interest. My personal theory is part of the reason the Tories swept up so well was by being a liberal conservative what I term blue liberals voted Tory and the difference from many LD losses to wipeout. If the liberals stage a recovery, we'll se, my theory is without evidence at present. I don't think it applies everywhere in any case.
And of course so e say may is not really diverting much from the Cameroonian position, but she has definitely wanted it to look that way.
This isn't just apathy towards Clinton, it is also a verdict on Obama's achievements.
If his policies had been a resounding success then more people would have voted for his party.
https://angusmacneilsnp.com/2016/11/09/uk-government-betrays-scotlands-islands-on-renewables/
The one BIG exception is the economy (or, more correctly, the financial system, since we remain prosperous). Global economies hang over a precipice of debt and are being sustained by financial jiggery-pokery that even the most qualified experts simply don't understand. No-one knows the way out and no-one knows how things will end. The likes of ZIRP and QE have no historical precedents and Japan shows that you can keep them going for 25 years and things simply get worse.
People don't understand much of this, of course, but the sense that our prosperity is build on sand is pervasive and, I suggest, underlies much of the political febrility we see around us.
As for housing.....
I'm no washington watcher but Michelle O strikes me as a real likeable person but not one who wants to go through the dirty process of a presidential election.
"Pollster.com’s Charles Franklin was a little ahead of the curve Sunday morning when he pointed out that President Obama’s approval rating right now is among the highest Election-Day approval ratings in recent history."
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/after-nearly-eight-years-obama-reaches-unexpected-popularity
What a huge pity. I've Sky on mute - it's all sneering and little smiles when they find something negative to say about the Right of any description. Why would I want to endure that?
They've cooked they own goose AFAIC.
He comes across as a likeable person, and if he'd been standing again he would have won vs Trump. But he wasn't, so his only contribution could be how successful he had been for his party in office. His likeability would not transfer to Clinton.
Globalisation has changed that - wealth can now trickle out and the lower parts of the economy have grown in size through immigration meaning the wealth their is spread more thinly.