How Hillary Clinton managed to lose
an election to a candidate as divisive and unpopular as Donald Trump will
baffle observers and agonise Democrats for years to come. Once the shockwave
passes, some glimpses of rational explanation may become visible.
Incumbent parties rarely hold on to power after eight years
in office. George HW Bush, following Reagan, was an exception, but politics has
become steadily more polarised since and pendulums have a habit of swinging.
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Trump’s defiance of expectations has itself also become
somewhat of a golden rule in American politics in 2016. Written off repeatedly
during the Republican primary, and only rarely taken seriously during the
general election, he nonetheless epitomises the same anti-establishment mood
that led Britain to vote to leave the European Union and Democrats in 22 US
states to nominate Bernie Sanders. Fairly or not, it is an establishment with
which Clinton could not have been more closely aligned in the minds of many
voters if she tried.
The economy
“It’s the economy, stupid” was a phrase coined by her
husband’s adviser James Carville in the 1992 election and, in many ways, it
ought to have helped Democrats again in 2016. Barack Obama helped rescue the US
from the financial crash and presided over a record series of consecutive
quarters of job growth.
Unfortunately for Clinton, many Americans simply did not
feel as positive. Stagnant wage levels and soaring inequality were symptoms of
the malaise felt by many voters. Trump successfully convinced them to believe
this was caused by bad trade deals and a rigged economy.
Despite being pushed in this direction by Sanders in the
Democratic primary, Clinton never really found a satisfactory response. Her
volte-face on trade sounded – and was later proved by leaked
emails – unconvincing at best; deeply cynical at worst.
Neither socialism nor the proto-fascist homilies of Trump
offered much in the way of coherent alternatives either, but the bottom line
was that Clinton simply failed to articulate a convincing defence of modern
American capitalism.
Trust
One big problem which undermined many otherwise plausible
policy positions was a lack of trust. Paid speeches
to Goldman Sachs and a murky web of business connections to the family
charity left many Americans doubting Clinton’s sincerity on matters of money
and much else.
That the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating
the Democratic candidate until just two days before voting with a view to bring
possible criminal charges for her flouting of data security laws was just the
most extreme manifestation of the issue.
It was damaging not just that the FBI bungled its timing of
what ultimately proved to be a dead-end
investigation but because it played into the notion that the Clintons
behaved as if the law did not apply to them.
Message vacuum
It also did not help that what Clinton was selling was
mainly herself. The campaign’s strongest message was that she was uniquely
qualified to become president. This was largely true, especially when compared
with the grotesquely inexperienced Donald Trump, but big ideas took a backstage
role.
There was a cast of a thousand policy prescriptions, from
tweaks to the healthcare system to a watered-down version of the Sanders
college debt proposals. Few were memorable, even among supporters.
Campaign slogans are notoriously vacuous. Obama’s “hope and
change” turned out to be more of the former than the latter. Yet Clinton’s
“stronger together” only really began to take shape in response to Trump’s divisiveness.
It was attractive to many Democrats as a symbol of what they felt the campaign
was about but it ensured the battle was fought on Trump’s terms.
Broken polls
How we got here: a complete timeline of 2016's historic
US election
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Amid the recriminations, special attention is likely to be
reserved for the pollsters,
who showed Clinton clinging to a comfortable three- or four-point lead in
national opinion polls going into the election. Granted, some, such as Nate
Silver’s 538 website, flagged up the risk of an upset in key swing states, but
even he had downgraded expectations of a Trump win to less than 30% on the eve
of polling.
The failure partly reflects a broken industry. Reaching a
vast audience no longer using landlines, or even mobile voice calls much, with
a 20th-century modeling of statistical sampling has produced dangerously misleading
results in elections around the world of late.
But the US fortune tellers were particularly confused by the
scrambled demographics of the 2016 election. Trump in many ways ran to
Clinton’s left on some economic issues, with a populist appeal to a growing
group of unaffiliated independent-minded voters, and yet analysts continued to
assume that if registered Democrats were voting early, or telling pollsters
they were going to vote, it meant a vote for Clinton.
That all changed in 2016, a ground zero for a political
bombshell that will mean the US electoral map never looks the same again.
Kehinde Oladele sends this piece from the US.
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