On November 8, 2016, the United States of America elected the Republican Party nominee Donald J. Trump as its 45th President. This election result came as a rude shock to many Americans who were expecting the Democratic Party nominee Hillary R. Clinton to win the Presidency. As with any election, the media spent the days post November 8th analyzing these results. What should have been an objective exercise to deliberate on where the Democrats faltered instead became a game of hatching theories, putting the blame on everyone but the Democrats and Mrs. Clinton.
In this post, I will be analyzing some of the bizarre arguments that were put forth post elections while interpreting verdict 2016. The reason for this analysis is to fix the responsibility for this debacle such that corrective measures can be taken by the Democrats, something that’ll happen only when they resort to honest introspection rather than pointing accusatory fingers in all directions.
Before I begin and given the nature of this post, it would be pertinent for me to shed some light on my political leanings should any of my biases inadvertently find their way into this post: I am and will always be supportive of the Democratic Party. The Republican Taliban’s archaic and draconian views on women, children and the society in general don’t sit well with me, not to mention the absence of the logic gene from their DNA and their propensity to hide this severe handicap by parroting religious texts. Samuel Johnson’s famous words sums them up quite well: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’.
Analysis of Post-Election Analysis
In this section, I’ll point out the fallacies in the arguments that were cited as reasons for Hillary Clinton’s loss.
‘Russians did it’
If I defraud an individual of their life’s savings and a few years down the line the said individual extracts their revenge from me by burning down my house, wouldn’t it be ironic, not to mention hypocritical of me to go running around town crying foul over the treatment meted out to me, all this while displaying a blatant lack of conscience and conveniently ignoring my villainous past? In regard to elections 2016, the prospect of a Russian involvement is not as important as the irony that the United States, of all the countries is crying foul over a foreign country’s involvement in its private affairs. Are Americans aware that Bill Clinton meddled in the Russian elections in 1996 during his Presidency and helped Boris Yeltsin get elected, who was contesting against Vladimir Putin backed Gennady Zyuganov? This article provides a detailed explanation of the entire U.S. involvement in those elections. So if Russia indeed influenced the 2016 elections, shouldn’t it be seen as Putin’s revenge for what the United States did to him and the candidate he backed 20 years ago instead of viewing it as an unprovoked act of aggression by him? Moreover, what about the reports in the not so recent past exposing the U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) antics of snooping over heads of countries friendly to the U.S. like Germany, Brazil and India? Does the U.S. then have any moral ground to complain about Russian interference in its election process when it itself meddles in the affairs of other countries with impunity? Even if the Russians indeed interfered in these elections, it’s important to note that their involvement was limited to hacking the Democratic National Committee server and damaging Clinton’s prospects by spreading fake news about her, not tampering with the voting machines themselves. Bottom line: people didn’t vote for her. If an outsider can successfully turn you against your own, then you only have yourself to blame for being so vulnerable, not the enemy.
‘This was a Whitelash’
Van Jones, CNN’s political commentator coined the now famous term ‘Whitelash’ in this video to summarize elections 2016, blaming the whites for voting against the Presidency of America’s first black President Barack Obama because of his race. After hearing him speak, there were so many questions that propped up in my head leaving me bewildered as to how he’s even qualified to appear on national television. Doesn’t Faux Fox News spout enough absurdities already that we now have CNN jumping into the fray too to compete with them?
Let’s analyze the fallacies in Jones’s argument:
- According to wikipedia, non-Hispanic Whites constituted 62.06% of the total U.S. population as per the 2014 census, 77.35% if one also includes the Hispanics identifying as white. America voted Barack Obama twice to the office of the President. So if all of white America was indeed racist, I’m curious as to what it was thinking during the 2008 elections when Barack Obama first contested and won? Did they not vote at all assuming a black can never win the U.S. Presidency? And what about 2012? I’m sure they must have said to themselves, ‘America is not that egalitarian to elect a black person twice as its President, so no point exercising our franchise this time as well’. However in 2016, when Obama was actually on his way out and would have anyway been replaced by a white irrespective of who won out of the two, that’s when the whites got angry and voted against Clinton to elect Trump? The reason was simple: Trump is whiter than Clinton! What else could it be? People like this woman are examples of the hatred the whites harbored towards Obama. By the way, questions on the lines of how was it even possible for Obama to win the Presidency twice had it not been for America’s largest demographic, the whites, supporting him must be ignored here.
- Now let’s go over some other figures related to the non-white demographic. According to this article, Trump won the white voters by the same margin as Mitt Romney did in 2012, so Clinton was not at a disadvantage with the whites as Jones suggested. On the other hand, Clinton did not appeal to the non-white voters as much as Obama did in 2012 as per this article. For instance, she got 50,000 less votes in Detroit’s Wayne County than Obama did in 2012. We know that Trump won Michigan by a margin of around 10,000 votes, and that’s the story of just one county of one of the states he won. So all white-Americans who voted Trump are racists, but what about the non-whites who had to choose between the two whites? They cannot be racist, so they must be sexist. I mean, it has to be either of the two because Clinton was such an exceptional candidate, wasn’t she? And what about this brown skinned Muslim immigrant? Why did she vote for Trump even after he continuously berated her ilk throughout the course of his campaign? Searching for more {race, sex, …} isms or finally ready to entertain the possibility that America was not with her?
Now, what do the aforementioned fallacies tell us about the tenets of the ‘Van Jones Racist/Non-Racist Certification Authority’:
- white and voted Republican: racist.
- white and voted Democrat: non-racist.
- person of color and voted Republican or Democrat/not voted at all: never ever ever ever racist, ever!
- There is a core Republican base that is white, ultra-conservative and rural. They have a fixed voting pattern and it’s silly to be shocked every time they vote Republican. How many times can one be surprised by the same event taking place over and over again? Are the voters to blame here or these harebrained liberals who are taken aback by the same outcome every four years?
- All rural whites are NOT racists/anti-immigrant/ignorant/Republicans. Implying this is ignoring and insulting people like Nic Smith. Watch the following two videos to understand what I’m getting at here:
‘It was Trump’s Rhetoric’
One can blame Trump all they want for running a divisive campaign, but the important question to ask here is, where did he find the audience for his rhetoric from i.e. why did his message resonate with the people? Again, we’re not talking about the core Republican base here, though it’ll be interesting to ponder over how people abiding by strict tenets of Christianity and harping on family values vote for a twice divorced sexual predator, but we’ll save that discussion for another day. For now, let’s concentrate on the reasons how Trump won despite the way he ran his campaign, and the next section ‘Why did Clinton really lose?’ will try to find answers to this very question.
Why did Clinton really lose?
In this section, I’ll be contrasting Clinton’s and Trump’s messaging on some of the issues that in my opinion led to the former’s loss.
Clinton’s Baggage
Many liberals expressed shock as to how can anybody in their right mind could vote for a sexual predator like Trump, especially after the pussygate scandal. The same liberals conveniently forgave Bill Clinton for his own lecherous past by defending him using the following two arguments:
- he’s not running for office.
- his shenanigans were all consensual in nature.
Trump would respond to the above arguments with a ‘WRONG’, and I would agree with him here. If Trump was seen as a sexual deviant, wasn’t Hillary seen as condoning her husband’s actions by defending him against every accusation? If she doesn’t have beef with her husband’s philandering, on what grounds was she attacking Trump? Whether Bill Clinton was running for office or not was immaterial here; Hillary’s stand on the issue wasn’t. The argument that his involvement with those women was consensual was rubbished when Trump paraded them in front of the media, including the one whose rapist Hillary defended in court in the 70s. Again, whether these women were telling the truth or not wasn’t important. Optics matter a lot in politics and when it came to voting, undecided voters ignored Trump’s pussygate scandal given the near equal culpability of both sides in their attitude towards women.
Bernie Sander’s year long campaign against Clinton calling her Wall Street’s stooge also left a negative impression on voter psyche when compared to the ‘outsider’ Trump who promised to ‘drain the swamp’. Add to it the allegations against the Clinton Foundation, her alleged involvement in Benghazi and the email server controversy to name a few, and people soon realized that Clinton might have too much baggage to be elected President.
Double Standards and Political Correctness
I’ve had this conversation on more occasions than one with Democrats asking them about KKK, and apt comes the reply, “It’s a white supremacist organization”. Ask them another question, “Why hasn’t Obama ever used the term Islamic terrorism?”, and that’s when the music (read pure noise) starts: “We cannot use the terms Islam and terrorism together as that is tantamount to maligning the entire Muslim community”, “What about Christian crusades hundred of years back?”, “All Muslims are not terrorists”, etc. To summarize the Democrat logic, using the term ‘Islam’ with ‘Terror’ is an insult to all the Muslims of the world, but using ‘White’ and ‘Supremacist’ together is simply describing KKK and cannot be construed as an insult to the entire white race. Either I get blank expressions when I point out this fallacy in their argument to them or a ‘I never thought of it that way’ remark. Do Democrats seriously consider people that simple-minded to not see through their double standards? If they indeed did, verdict 2016 should set the record straight on this matter. Read one of my previous articles shedding more light on this topic.
With terror attacks on the rise globally, is it too hard for people to understand why Trump’s tough message against ‘Islamic Terrorism’ stuck with the audience as opposed to the soft approach that Hillary took, like calling for greater gun control after the attack in Orlando, Florida? Politeness and courtesy can never tackle this menace of terrorism. If it could, Germany and its Chancellor Angela Merkel wouldn’t be in a soup today.
Revolt of the rust belt
Clean energy is a noble initiative, but people will never vote for a candidate whose policies would translate into them losing their livelihood. It was Clinton’s Democratic Party that championed the cause of environmentally friendly fuels. Stricter policies enforced on the coal industry by the Obama administration had a direct bearing on people associated with it. If this wasn’t enough, Clinton committed political suicide when she said in one of CNN Town Halls in March 2016, “I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?” Of course, she followed this statement up with her plans to provide alternate employment to people who will lose their job as a result, but the damage was already done. The already suffering coal miners read her statement as a sign that she’d continue with the same policies that led to their downfall. Promises of providing alternate employment sounded hollow, made for the sole purpose of getting votes in an election year.
Trump, on the other hand, denied climate change all together and repeatedly made promises to the coal industry that he would get their jobs back. When your livelihood is at stake, would you vote for a candidate who promised to protect it or would their character and conduct form the basis of your choice? Not sure about you, but I’d definitely go with the former.
Democrats didn’t vote
As shocking as it may sound, the truth remains that the surest way to clinch an election in favor of your candidate is to actually go out and vote, a fact that Democrats have a hard time wrapping their heads around for some reason. According to this article, Hillary Clinton lost because she polled roughly 10 million and 15 million fewer votes than Obama in 2012 and 2008 respectively. Wasting energy in protesting the election results with slogans like ‘We reject the President-elect’ wouldn’t have been required had the importance of ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ been understood earlier.
Way Ahead
What can the Democrats do to get back into the game? Here are a few pointers:
- Because of their purported intellectual superiority over the conservatives that the liberals pride themselves with, there were voices among them urging people to move to the deep red states in order to ‘educate’ the youth instead of leaving the country all together in the wake of Trump’s victory. It is this holier–than–thou image that has to be shed first. Get off your high horses liberals! Begin by connecting with the working class, understand their problems and put forth the message that the Democratic Party is not just a party of the A-listers but of the man on the street as well.
- Concentrate on holding onto your existing bastions and getting the erstwhile blue states back into your kitty. Travel to the areas that did not vote for Clinton and get a first hand report on the reasons for her loss. The mainstream media is out of touch with the ground reality, or else they would have sensed the direction in which this election was going way before November 8th.
- More importantly, don’t forget that all communities deserve equal respect and attention. When the ‘We are inclusive of all sections of the society’ narrative translates into being exclusive to just the minorities on the ground, that’s when you create a conducive environment for the cancer of the alt right to metastasize and infect the entire society. Selective appeasement is worse than no appeasement, and the sooner you understand this fact, the better it will be for you, the United States and the world in general.
If the Democrats play their cards right, they can exploit their star campaigner to its full potential and Mission 2020 should very well be within their reach. Which star campaigner you might ask, Bernie, Ms. Warren or someone else? Neither! Think bigly, I’m talking about President-elect Donald J. Trump.
