It's Not Hard to Figure Out

When my grandfather, a devoted Reganite, was approaching the end of his life, someone asked him about up and coming candidates who he’d like to see carry on the Reagan agenda.

“I kind of like that fellow Jesse Jackson,” he said.

What tha? From Ronald Reagan to Jesse Jackson? It made no sense.

Until you get underneath the real reason why most people vote for a presidential candidate. It has little to do with position papers, platforms, even parties. It even has less to do with ideology, liberal or conservative.

Like most independent swing voters – the people who largely decide presidential elections – my grandfather, more than anything else, wanted someone to go to Washington and shake things up, to disrupt the state-quo and do things differently. He was tired of all the empty promises politicians had made over the years – promises of more jobs, better schools, cheaper health care – and yet nothing had changed, and in fact things had gotten worse. So, a candidate promising to upend the normal way of doing things, to challenge the Washington establishment, and speak in a language he understood, looked mighty attractive. Gramps was voting with his heart, not his head, and for those reasons Reagan and Jackson offered a lot in common.

Now when we read that according to polling data, 12% of voters who favored Bernie Sanders in the primaries ended up voting for Trump and possibly cost Clinton the general election, we again think, “What tha?” But it’s the same thing. It’s emotion over intellect, the desire for change over more of the same.

Think about where my grandfather lived, Livermore Falls, an aging mill town on the banks of the Androscoggin River in central Maine. For much of his life – and my childhood – Livermore Falls was a bustling community with a vibrant downtown. Hardware stores, furniture stores, drugstores, ice cream shops. We even had a town band that played Wednesday nights at the gazebo in the park (my grandfather was the conductor). When I tell people about growing up there, it sounds like a distant era, something out of a Thornton Wilder play, charming, bucolic, and deeply American.

Then it all went to hell.

Anger and cynicism in rural America

Livermore Falls today is a shell of its former self. The paper mills that sustained its economy for decades have retrenched or closed. Downtown looks deserted with boarded up windows and empty parking lots where department stores once stood. There’s a grocery store, but ever since the advent of cheap gas and good roads, most people find it more convenient to drive miles away to the malls in Farmington or Lewiston, leaving local businesses in the lurch.

Time has not been good to Livermore Falls and most of rural Maine, or rural anywhere in the US. It’s as if the people in charge, the town councils, state officials and politicians all gave up a long time ago, abandoned their sworn duty to provide for the general welfare. Add to that decades of government failure and mistrust – Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, President Clinton’s impeachment, runaway deficits, rising health care costs – is it any wonder that a large portion of the electorate is angry, cynical and desperate for someone, anyone, to come in and just throw a wrench into the workings of government and see what happens? What could possibly be worse?

That’s why Trump won. Reporters and editors who are now traipsing around small towns in the Midwest trying to figure out what they missed need look no further. The reasons Trump won are the same reasons most presidents win. Jimmy Carter was the breath of fresh air after the scandal of Watergate. Hard to believe now, but Reagan at the time was the insurgent Republican candidate who most party hacks didn’t believe had a chance of winning (sound familiar?). But his down-home appeal to average voters over the technocrat Carter earned him the nod.

It’s harder to explain the success of Bush 41 and 43 than it is to explain Trump’s victory, except that both Bushes had the luxury of running against opponents who were even more invested in the government status quo than they were.

Clinton was certainly a change candidate. Remember the sign in his campaign office: “Change vs. more of the same, it’s the economy stupid, and don’t forget health care.” Is there a better summation of a campaign’s goals than that? It didn’t matter that Clinton’s opponent – a former congressman, CIA director, US ambassador, vice president and incumbent president – had tons more experience than the governor from Dogpatch, USA. In fact, all that DC experience worked against Bush, Sr. Voters were hungry for something new and different, from someone who seemed much more down to earth than the elite senior Bush.

Obama’s “hope and change” campaign? Same thing.

So then came Donald Trump, speaking in that crude language of everybody’s eccentric uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, offering 140-character solutions to every complicated issue facing the US. Immigration? Build a wall. Isis? Bomb the shit out of them. Coal jobs disappearing? We’ll bring them back. Taxes? We’ll cut them.

Like a lot of educated eastern liberals – and I proudly count myself as one – I saw Trump as a phony blowhard, a modern PT Barnum who was saying anything to stir emotions and get elected, not that he believed any of it. How could people not see what I saw? It seemed obvious to me that he was acting the role of a populist candidate, like he acted the role of Chairman of the Board on his TV show (and I still believe it will become obvious eventually to even his most die-hard supporters, and may be starting now).

But Trump connected with voters on an emotional level, and elections are decided on emotions, not issues. Take Trump’s position on health care. It went something like this: “We’re going to repeal and replace the disastrous Obamacare with something so much better. Everyone will be covered and it will be cheaper and better than ever before, I can tell you that.”

That’s it. That was his plan for health care. I was astonished during the campaign that reporters didn’t really challenge him on it. Where’s your actual plan? How much will it cost? Who will pay for it? How will it work? No one cared.

Clinton’s position on health care, which no one today can remember, probably went something like this. “We need to retain the individual mandate….shrink the donut hole…stabilize the insurance markets….ensure coverage for preexisting conditions….blah blah blah.“

So which candidate would you vote for? For the millions of low-interest voters – people who vote but don’t really follow the ins and outs of politics – it was an easy choice. In Maine, these same fed-up voters elected an independent governor in 1975 (Jim Longley) and again in 1994 (Angus King), and have helped fuel the two terms of outlandish Republican Gov. Paul LePage (Trump-lite).

OK, There were a few other factors

Of course, there were other factors in Trump’s victory, not the least of which was Clinton herself. She just was not very likable, unable to connect to voters on a gut level. And she was no match for Trump’s expert branding skills. By the end of the campaign, could anyone say the word “Hillary” without putting (or thinking) the word “crooked” in front of it? Trump successfully turned Hillary into a shady, corrupt, dirty dealing politician. Plenty of voters became convinced she was crooked, even though they couldn’t articulate a single crooked thing she had done. That’s the way branding works.

Clinton is now being criticized for raising the impact of “misogyny” for her loss. But how else do you explain the vicious hatred she endured? I didn’t think a president would ever face as much anger and vitriol from the right as Obama faced for 8 years – until Clinton’s candidacy. It’s telling that a man from the race of slavery 150 years ago rose to become president of the United States before a white woman did.

And then of course there’s the impact of Russian interference, which is becoming more and more prominent as the days go by. My bet is it will become even more prominent as the various investigations proceed, even to the point that it will become crystal clear that Russia’s active measures (fake news and social media bots) really did affect the outcome of the election.

But if the Democrats have any hope of winning in 2020, they need a candidate outside of Washington who can speak to these disaffected voters in plain English and appeal to their gut emotions. It’s really that simple (almost).

NOTE TO FANS: I've been away from my blog for awhile, doing things like moving to DC, getting my master's degree from GWU, and doing some work for a big federal agency. Which is why this post is a bit behind the times. Just getting caught up. But I'm back. Stay tuned for more.

Why Trump Won

Dennis Bailey