Some More Post-Election Analysis

All the usual recriminations are coming out after this admittedly devastating loss for the Democrats last Tuesday. Hillary was a terrible candidate, the DNC misallocated resources, Bernie would have done better, we ignored the working and middle class, and so on. And, to some degree, some of these probably contributed to an incredibly narrow loss while for others it is impossible to know. But there were also larger issues at play in this election that are beyond the control of our candidate and the DNC.

Early exit polls are notoriously unreliable but they always seem to set up the narrative for analyzing the election. And one of the prime narratives that has emerged is that Democrats insulted and ignored the working class. The problem with this narrative it is contradicted by other early exit data. Hillary won among all voters who make under $50,000 which is hard to square with the argument the working class was turned off by the Democratic message. As John Legend pointed out on Maher, the problem for Hillary was not the working class but the white working class and the operative word there is “white”. In addition, one of Hillary’s economic themes was growing the economy from the middle out and it was backed up by numerous policies that are designed to support the working and middle class. You can possibly argue that Hillary did not pound these themes home hard enough but it was almost impossible when the media totally ignored policy and focused on Trump’s daily atrocities and Hillary’s emails and the Clinton Foundation. You can say that the message did not get heard but that does not mean Democrats weren’t trying to send it. Other data from the exit polls showed Trump’s greatest strength in counties where there were virtually no minorities. The more diverse a county was, the less strength Trump had. That is more suggestive of a problem that is less to do with economic anxiety than race. That is also suggested by Trump’s winning the majority of votes of white women.

This is not to deny that economic anxiety and the declining standard of living for many non-urban communities is real. And I don’t think any Democrat denies that reality. It just so happens that, in this election, the empty promise that someone will bring back the jobs that have been lost combined with a bigoted, racist message that “other people” were responsible for the decline in their communities won just enough votes to allow Trump to win. For many of us, that choice is quite shocking. But the reality is that neither party really has a plan that can bring the jobs that have been lost back to these communities. Globalization inflicted near-mortal wounds on the industries in these towns and now automation is finishing them off. For example, some steel mills have actually re-opened in the last decade or so but these new, automated mills only employ about one-tenth of the labor that mills used in the past. Democrats have policies that will reduce the pain for these communities and possibly create a path forward. Republicans only have empty promises and possibly protectionism and even that will not bring the jobs back.  But neither party has a plan for real recovery. So far, no one in the Western industrialized world does.

I have already written about how Democrats underestimated the difficulties facing Hillary in this election. It is always hard to win an election after a two-term President and Hillary faced other obstacles, such as sexism and Comey, that made it even more difficult. And she came up short by 100,000 votes across three states. She will win the popular vote convincingly. These facts hardly seem to indicate that the Democratic party’s message is not resonating with a large part of the electorate and that the party needs to change its entire direction. Rather, I think it means Democrats need to continue to pound away with their message and wait for the probable Republican overreach and be fully prepared to take advantage of it. Yes, that is not the greatest game plan but it’s the best one we’ve got.

Democrats also need to understand that there are huge structural, anti-democratic barriers facing the party as well that make it incredibly difficult for Democrats to actually govern. The structure of the Senate gives inordinate power to smaller, rural states. California, with nearly 40 million people, has the same voting power in the Senate as Wyoming, with around half a million people. The Electoral College is similarly skewed. California only has 18 times more electoral votes than Wyoming with nearly 80 times the population. Now people will say that those are the rules and Democrats need to learn how to win by those rules. And that can not be denied. But Hillary will win the popular vote by close to 1.5% this year. Al Gore won it in 2000 and also lost. As the country continues to divide between the urban and the rural, the chances that Democrats will continue to win the popular vote and lose the election will become increasingly more likely and increasingly more common. And that will not be a healthy situation for a country that calls itself a “democracy”. So part of being prepared for the next chance to govern means that the Democrats should work on cobbling together a plan to reduce these structural barriers that are antithetical to democracy.