Were all those people voting for Trump because of they were upset that the establishment figures weren’t “delivering effective governance”? Were they all convinced that Trump could deliver “effective governance” better than any of those other establishment figures? Um, no. That’s not what happened, and that’s not what people were thinking or complaining about.
Instead, most of them were extremely frustrated at the establishment conformity to the elite consensus that was so stiflingly uniform that no one would vigorously articulate support for what they wanted except for a brash showman outsider.
They [Niskanen Center moderates] have learned the wrong lesson from that experience. This is the “normative political science” version of the “normative economics” analysis of the [financial crisis of 2008], in which the narrative one tells always conveniently ends up implicating policies that happen to align with one’s political preferences.
Indeed, your first concern upon reading any sort of social analysis is whether the writer is articulating the desired causal model or actually has compelling empirical evidence for that model. Very often, it is not possible to definitively confirm or refute any particular causal narrative.
In terms of Trump’s 2016 win, I put these ideas out there:
1) There has always been a desire by many voters to see the government run like a business and Trump was able to campaign on his business success to make ‘Deals’ to improve the effectiveness of government.
2) On November 2016, Trump was thought to be more centrist than HRC and most voters know a HRC Presidency would be endless scandals and more political bickering. Otherwise, HRC was a terrible campaigner as well.
3) Trump was thought to be consider the man of the people and would help the working classes unlike Romney 2012. (I suspect being a Real Estate investor is a lot easier to sell to working classes than a Private Equity firm.)
4) I think there was fair of voters that wanted to tell minority and feminist to Shut Up.
#1. I think that explains his win in the primaries over career politicians like Rubio, Bush, and Cruz.
Clinton “beat” him in votes. About 3,000,000. But roughly 70,000 in a few states cost her the election. Some of her base staying home for whatever reason, a few white guys voting for Trump because of “economic anxiety”, increased turnout in rural counties. All these are more likely explanations. As for the fundamentals 2016 looked a lot like the models for someone running in the “third term” election. Except she did better than the models but lost anyway.
True HRC did beat in votes and it really does seem smug on conservatives to act like Trump is very popular. Note the Midterms went heavily D in 2018 because of turnout not because Republican voters stayed home. Lots of them voted. There were R House votes in 2018 (50M) compared to 2014 (40+M). However, it was an amazing to think how he did win pulling off an inside straight on the electoral college if you think about. (Makes you wonder if Perot run a primary against Bush Sr. in 1992, he might have won the Presidency.)
Frankly, I don’t why HRC or Republicans Primary just did not run ads of Trump business stiffing small businesses millions of dollars over the last several decades. We all knew he was a terrible person but small business is almost universally popular and Trump Organization underpaid them millions.
1) Trump does not care for the average person.
2) Was really terrible business person outside a great ability to market himself.
“Frankly, I don’t why HRC or Republicans Primary just did not run ads of Trump business stiffing small businesses millions of dollars over the last several decades.”
If I saw one such ad and such story, I saw a hundred.
When I talked to a trump voter about such stories(particularly one concerning a personal friend),
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Philly-cabinetmaker-We-went-broke-after-Trump-stiffed-us.html
I was told that just shows Trump is a smart businessman.
That is a dangerous attitude. Capitalism works because people respect each other’s property–respect it so much that you can only take someone else’s property as part of an agreement with that person (a contract). If you willfully don’t hold up your end of the contract, you are stealing.
Agreed, it is a horrible attitude.
But that response goes right along with “shooting someone on fifth avenue”.
Simply incredible.
Its very dangerous to assume Clinton would win a true popular vote. I live in California. I didn’t need to vote at all. If we had a truly popular vote, everyone’s campaign would be very different. (Although, HRC supposedly tried to a more popular vote strategy on the assumption she’d easily win.)
I’m not assuming that at all. Just noting that the margin of victory was very, very, very small, and it was not a popular vote victory. The meme is that people were so disgusted they threw caution to the wind en masse and elected a reality show star. Well, maybe a couple people did, but after the primary was over the election followed pretty much all the old models.
One factor I don’t hear discussed is the third party votes.
The Libertarians reliably get 1.5 m votes in a pres. run; in 2016 they got 4.5 m, and their own polling showed the extra 3 m would have gone R otherwise. 2016 seemed like a year to indulge a third party vote, since HRC seemed to have the election locked up otherwise. These 3 m make the election a dead heat, popular vote wise, and if it was seen as a close election, the rest of the conservative third partiers could well have switched enough to make the difference.
And yes, HRC would have gotten more of the Green vote, but they were 1.5 m vs. the 2.5 m on the other side.
The phrase “delivering effective governance” tells me that someone is trying to talk about politics without mentioning politics. A more honest writer would specify – delivering effective what to exactly whom over whose objections?
Right.
Imagine going to a restaurant. There’s a big difference between being disappointed because they didn’t prepare your meal well, and being upset because they didn’t bring you what you ordered, at all.
Maybe the first restaurant overcooked your steak, while the second restaurant dropped a plate of broccoli on your table, saying “Hey, we know the fact it says ‘steakhouse’ on the storefront probably brought you in here hoping for some red meat, but we feel like going vegan today, and lately, almost every day. We should probably change that sign, but we’re reluctant to do so, because it brings in so many suckers, er, I mean, customers.”
The Niskanen folks are spinning a narrative that says that most people want the one, true, correct meal, and, unfortunately, the two big restaurants in town are really incompetent at preparing that meal well, because they are stuck with old dogmas. That leaves the country in bad shape, the people hurting, and confidence in political elites and establishment institutions collapsing.
So, maybe the Democrats undercook your steak, because they are rationing the use of grill charcoal via central planning according to bureaucrat micromanagers, which makes grilling a properly cooked steak impossible, instead of instituting a reasonable carbon tax that would only make it slightly more expensive, and compensate for the negative externalities besides.
And the Republicans leave one side of your steak cold and raw, while burning the other side to a crisp, because they simply don’t believe in intervening and flipping to ensure more equal heat distribution.
The Libertarians claim they have the absolute perfect steak recipe, and theoretically they are correct. But the beef must come from those infamous spherical cows and it requires three years of sous vide treatment in zero gravity. Which is totally unrealistic and why they have never actually opened a restaurant.
So, in that story, everybody wants steak, but they can’t get good steak from either party, because those people are all terrible cooks. And they are terrible cooks because their are relying on silly cooking dogmas, instead of empirically proven culinary arts. That’s like choosing to use medieval medicine instead of modern medicine.
And that pisses everyone off. Every time they have a terrible meal at one restaurant, they storm out and try the other one, but again, it’s another terrible meal! Can’t anyone cook a damn decent steak anymore? Frankly, they’re starting to sour on the whole restaurant experience, and have lost faith, thinking all chefs are lousy.
Well, in that case, the Niskanen folks have got the fix for you! They’ve got the better recipe, which is to start with mainstream progressivism (globalist, open borders, social justice, socially liberal, big redistributive welfare state, etc.), but replace the central planning sauce with some free market seasoning. And if anyone tries it out in the kitchen, not only will there be delicious steaks, but people will believe in going to restaurants again.
And all that might be true, if government were mostly about delivering certain common services for which there are mostly noncontroversial best practices, like, say, garbage collection, or traffic light timing. But it’s not.
So, what if, in reality, no one actually wants ‘steak’? What if half the country wants pulled pork and the other half wants fried chicken, and all they keep getting is different types of poorly-prepared steak? Sure, sometimes it’s braised bad steak served with Carolina mustard BBQ sauce – which is more like pulled pork – and other times it’s breaded and sauteed bad steak – which is kind of like fried chicken. No one really likes their bad steak version of what they really want, though they still prefer it to the bad steak version of what they definitely don’t want.
But what people want are not slightly different versions of the same, objective thing, (i.e., ‘effective governance’ and consumption-level preservation) but entirely different, incompatible, and inescapably ideological things regarding the type of society in which they want to live.
The former is amenable to the politics of discovering mutually acceptable compromises, while the latter has no zone of possible agreement and is a matter of dominate or be dominated. That is the point where ‘deliberative democracy’ breaks down.
The point is, this is the kind of problem you can’t fix with some kind of better steak recipe (i.e., if only we had bought globalism’s losers off with some more generous welfare checks, surely they wouldn’t have been so upset and willing to elect that horrible man).
The Niskanen folks are openly anti-fried chicken, but its not useful to them – as a matter of the kind of marketing that could send a thrill up the leg of David Brooks – to simply admit that Trump won because large numbers of American voters want fried chicken. So, like Procrustes, they stretch the actual history of recent events into a narrative in which his election was merely a symptom of frustration and pain deriving from the real disease of all that badly cooked steak.
But that’s not what actually happened in the 2016 election, and especially not in Trump’s winning the GOP candidacy. What actually happened was that practically the entire, vast GOP field could not bring themselves to say, clearly, consistently, and credibly, that if elected they would serve up the real fried chicken, and it would be their number one priority once in office. And by failing to do so, they left that infamous twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk, for someone with the right qualities to come along and pick up.
Likewise and meanwhile, Democrat voters are starting to dump senior incumbents because non-establishment types have the nerve, temerity, and audacity to promise real pulled pork.
The real problem with democracy is that is creates these awful opportunities for non-establishment outsiders to win elections by, get this, promising to give the voters what they actually want when establishment types won’t do it. It’s no use concocting more elaborate, apolitical explanations just so one can market a purportedly trans-ideological approach, that is, “to talk about politics without mentioning politics.”
Awesome comment. Stealing the restaurant analogy (and especially libertarian zero-gravity cooking) for use at some future dinner party!
What if there are 80% political centrist with an array of different issues that voters focus? I am very Left Center economics but a huge peacenik and mostly open on social issues. (I protested Iraq War 1 in 1991!) And look at Immigration in which most Americans are for increased border control, ~1M legal immigrants and protection of DACA. Your mileage may vary but most Americans would have fine with $5B for the Wall and legal protection of DACA months ago. So it is not steak or different ways of cooking it.
The true narrative was that this was a close election in a republic, that is, not quite proportional voting. Trump lost the popular vote. So the starting narrative is the Null hypothesis, within the expected margin error, we have a normal election.
The unusual part is that Trump won the Republican primary. That is the issue, why and how?
Well, Trump sure did get a lot of free media from people who now claim to hate him. Its almost as if a biased media was trying to set up an election where HRC would dunk on the weakest GOP candidate possible.
He won the Republican primary by running on a Democrats platform. For one, what does that say about the popularity of the Republican Party platform? So in the general, why not vote for him – he won’t tough my Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, and he will replace Obamacare with something that covers more people, costs less, has lower deductibles and copays, and is actually better! Or that was the promise, anyway. Will it work in 2020?
He won the primary by being the only one of 19 candidates to address immigration.
Yes. And saying he would not touch middle class welfare.
Seriously? Two years down the road and people still debating why trump won the primary?
He took GOP racism out of the closet and wore it on his chest. That’s why he won.
End of story. Well, the 2106 story. Coming to you since 1965. And getting more intense every election.
Keep telling yourself that. You are a morally superior person.
Nah, not at all. I can just read and do the math.
You really think build that wall is about immigration policies?
Yes, I do. I thought I could read and do math but I suppose you have powers I don’t.
Hopefully, some day voters will realize most of their gripes are really not with ideology. The disgust is with how the sausage is made.
Whether or not Clinton would win a true popular vote is, luckily, not the way US elections are run. When CA and/or NY decide to give their electoral votes in a proportionate way, then we might see a lot more Rep voters in both states; or not.
What makes me angry is junk platitudes (p2 Niskanen) like:
” Americans have now elevated an extravagantly unfit demagogue ”
“grave risks … brought about by bluster and miscalculation.”
Where is the evidence, other than Fake News?
Did Trump lose sex harassment suits? Are women claiming he raped them? Did he perjure himself about adulterous sex while President? No, no, no — but Hillary’s husband did.
What makes Trump unfit? He’s more fit than Clinton.
We’ve had two years, where were Trump’s big miscalculations?
Trump promised: repeal Obamacare, close the border, more jobs for Americans, wind down the wars (troops back home), conservative judges, “lock her up”. His worst performance on these promises was his quick willingness to NOT lock her up — even tho she clearly violated the law with her server, broke secrecy laws, and lied to the FBI, then lied again, then lied again. But Dem Deep Staters let her break the law.
“Rule of law” means criminals are punished, even if they’re President, or Sec. of State, or lying FBI Directors. Trump’s been weakest here, because … he delegates, like he should, but in the first case choose an early supporter but still more GOPe Sessions.
Conservative judges — by itself, a reason enough to be against Hillary and the rulers claiming judicial fiat based on implied rights and any desired penumbras of such rights. Heritage gave a great 25 member list. Big conservative win to get 2 so far — “Kavanaugh Derangement Syndrome” shows that it is the elected Dems who are demagogues.
Trump was ready for repeal of Obamacare … but where is the Niskanen or other GOP plan that all the GOP is ready to vote for? That’s a conservative boat cruise think tank failure, and it’s not Trump so much.
Close the border – Trump is talking and acting here. Let’s see who blinks first; I’m pretty sure Trump will be getting more cash for the border wall construction. Looks like Trump being very fit.
Trump did use forceful bombing, and bigger support for allies, and now is bringing troops back home. That’s what we voted for, and unlike the Dems running away from Iraq, Trump pulling out of Syria with the Saudis putting more into it seems a good move; perhaps a bit risky for US mid east allies, but it’s not clear how strong any of those allies are. Except Israel; who now has a US embassy in Jerusalem, and multiple other Presidents promised but were … “unfit” to deliver.
Jobs, Jobs, and more Jobs — Trump’s econ boom is so good Obama wants to claim it.
Doesn’t seem worth my time to read the whole thing, for the reasons noted.
Sure does look like ONLY Trump was serious about a Wall, and stopping the illegals. What America needs are more elites who get on board with what normal people really want, and to promote Trump when he does well. I’m glad Rand Paul criticized him when he spends too much, but praises him for the troop pull-down based on Libertarian less-imperialism.
“Spending less” was not on the menu, and might not be again, for a few elections.
This comment is a true work of art.
A Jackson Pollock, perhaps.
Tom G’s comments seemed a lot more like Trump’s hair to me. He combed it very, very carefully using a sweeping circular logic pattern, and locked it down it in place with an old can of Clinton revulsion hairspray.
It looks a little crazy, but it admittedly does an impressive job of covering up all the bald spots.
So if we selectively pick certain Trump promises, avoid any meaningful analysis of supposed successes, and blame any failures on Congress, Trump looks good. Got it.
Steve
How to be moderate on abortion? Some limits. Like the Ohio “hearbeat” bill, ending abortions after the heart starts beating (20-23 weeks):
https://pjmedia.com/trending/ohio-heartbeat-bill-goes-down-in-flames-after-gops-side-with-kasich-planned-parenthood-and-democrats/
But some Reps are against restricting abortions.
Most pro-life voters have been exiled from the Dem Party, even socialists & other big-gov’t types. If they vote, they vote Rep, who claim to be pro-life.
The pro-life minority remains one of the largest “single issue” minority groups in America.