Why Did Hillary “Lose”?

The most important, and the ugliest, thing to happen in 2016 was the decision of 46 percent of the American electorate to vote for the worst major party presidential candidate in American history. The second most important was the decision of 48 percent to vote for Hillary Clinton. So why did Hillary “lose”?

It is “arguable”—I know it is, because I have argued it many times myself—that the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. Though they constantly proclaim how much they love America’s “great” middle class, they don’t. Democrats want to help people they feel sorry for, and they don’t feel sorry for the middle class. They want to help people they perceive as belonging to “out groups”—the poor, and particularly blacks and Hispanics, not to mention homosexuals and the current “it” group, transexuals.¹ ObamaCare epitomized Democratic “values”—cutting middle-class Medicare benefits and taxing “Cadillac” health care plans enjoyed by many union members and other better off than average folks, in order to subsidize the poor.

At the same time, Democrats want to please the folks who pay the bills—the rich, which can include themselves, since the Democratic elite is about 90% 10%—upper middle class and above. The Clinton years convinced them that capitalism “works”—they made money too—and also convinced them that a Democrat with Wall Street cash couldn’t lose. To please his Wall Street buddies, Obama labored endlessly to “rein in” future Social Security and Medicare costs, to promote business “confidence”—confidence among billionaires that their precious billions wouldn’t be taxed to finance ordinary folks’ retirements.

Yes, but Obama did all of that in his first term, and still beat poor old Mitt Romney like a drum in 2012. And four years later, the economy was in much better shape than in 2012. Yet in 2016, supposedly “racist” whites in the big Rust Belt swing states, who voted for Obama in appreciable numbers, declined to vote for Hillary, costing her Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. And in Florida, the biggest swing state of them all, which seemed to be “tending” Democratic, Hillary lost by 100,000 votes—less than 2% of Florida’s massive total, but still pretty embarrassing, since Obama had won by over 70,000 in 2012.

Since the election was so close in the big four Rust Belt states—a shift of about 100,000 votes would have put Hillary in—there are any number of factors that could “explain” Hillary’s defeat. Jim Comey’s disgustingly corrupt behavior; Hillary Clinton’s endless, and endlessly stupid, mishandling of the email server “issue”, which she both created and bungled in classic Clintonian style; beyond all that was her mega- mega-blunder of pushing for our disastrous, “smart power” invasion of Libya—ultimately Obama’s responsibility, of course, but it’s very unlikely that it would have happened without Clinton’s aggressive sponsorship. One thing Hillary has never outgrown is her unceasing appetite for virtuous intervention. She’s going to keep on killing innocent people until she gets it right.

Well, the purpose of this post was not to vent on Hillary, but to figure out why she lost. My favorite of the many “in-depth” takes floating around the internet is “How Trump Won: The South” by Sean Trende and David Byler over at RealClearPolitics, the first of a four-part, near book length series, with the “lessons” encapsulated here.

Briefly, Democrats are getting killed in rural areas, and beaten in semi-rural areas, while crushing it in the big cities. Since rural populations are shrinking, and urban ones are expanding, that sounds like good news for the Democrats. The problem is, as Trende and Byler point out, the urban mega-populations are concentrated in a few big states, so that in the presidential elections, Democrats roll up “useless” majorities in California, New York, and Illinois (and DC) and lose everywhere else. It’s even worse in both the Senate, because 18 states have virtually no “big city” vote, and in the House of Representatives, because in most states the Democratic vote is crammed into a handful of counties that 1) invite gerrymandering and 2) even make it hard to draw “balanced” districts in the first place.

To my mind, Democrats’ problems really started with Obama’s huge win in 2008, which terrified a lot of seriously rich folks, like the Koch boys. For whatever reason, the thought that universal health care, proposed by Harry Truman way back in 1948², might become a reality terrified the big money folks in the flyover states.³ Obama, of course, played right into their hands, as I’ve endlessly complained, by passing the Affordable Care Act, pushing through a national health insurance program that would take benefits away from people who had them—the folks on Medicare, primarily—and force many people to pay for health insurance that they did not want—or at least did not want to pay for—to help a relatively small population of poor people who did not vote that often and who, when they did vote, voted Democratic already. When you’ve got both the money and the masses against you, you’re going to take a beating, and the Democrats did, suffering horrible losses at the state level almost across the board.

All across the “capitalist” world, the parties in power during the Great Recession paid the price of incumbency. The massive countercyclical payments to the jobless, which were both necessary and effective in preventing the crisis from unraveling the world economy completely, infuriated the “good people” and precipitated a bitter reaction against “government”. Democrats were on the receiving end of this in Congress, but they were also vulnerable at the state level, because in virtually every state the Democratic Party is very closely linked to public employee unions. When times are hard, people don’t resist the urge to take out their frustrations on lazy, overpaid bureaucrats.⁴ Perhaps worst of all, an ever-increasing number of bureaucrats were retiring, on frequently over-generous pensions all pushed through by Democratic politicians in years past.

An increasingly “urban” party, tied to a hated bureaucracy, often given a racial, if not racist, tinge in northern states like Wisconsin and Michigan and southern states like North Carolina? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, and so it proved. At the same time, this is a movie we Democrats have seen before: in 1978 and 1994: a young Democrat comes into office, a “post-partisan problem-solver” who bases all his decisions on fact rather than fancy, only to discover that his generous gestures—pardoning Vietnam War draft dodgers, allowing gays in the military, and “bringing us all together” with the gift of universal health insurance—prove stunningly divisive.

Yet Obama won going away against Romney in 2012, despite a full four years of the harshest economy that 90% of the population could remember, an economy that was still only slowly improving when the votes were counted. But, in retrospect, we can see that plant-closin’, dollar bill-wearin’ Mitt, the businessman’s friend, and sworn enemy of the 47%, was exactly the wrong choice to pull away angry working class whites from Obama, as Trump would do to stunning effect to Hillary four years later.

Obama followed his easy win over Mitt with a tougher victory, triumphing in yet another budget shut down with hysterical House Republicans. It looked like Democrats were on a roll, but then the wheels came off, repeatedly. ObamaCare had a disastrous rollout, a disgraceful failure on the part of the administration and the president personally. The big bets the administration had placed on the “Arab Spring” led to one Mid East disaster after another, Benghazi being the most spectacular, and most awkward, particularly for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, although almost no one blamed for her real sin of pushing for the Libyan invasion in the first place. ISIS appeared out of nowhere and nothing to demolish Obama’s proud claim to have brought peace in Iraq. Putin claimed the Crimea and began “destabilization” in eastern Ukraine, and suddenly it was manly versus metrosexual. The Ebola virus scare was the last nail in the Democrats’ coffin, an “everything go wrong” touch reminiscent to George Bush’s 2006 nightmare election. But probably the real story for the Democrats was the continued shrinkage of the rural and semi-rural vote, which gave the Republicans a stunning advantage in state legislatures and governorships.

The steady decline of the Democratic Party in Congress and at the state level helps explain why there was no real alternative to the drearily battle-scarred Hillary Clinton in 2016, although at the start of the primary season no one would have guessed how “anti-globalist” the country had become. Ever since Vietnam and Watergate, American voters, when they aren’t re-electing a president, are looking for an “outsider”, and never was that mood so strong as in 2016.

So how can the Democrats come back? The notion that there is a natural Democratic majority—that we just have to invigorate the base (by adopting the policies of whoever is making the argument) is tempting. After all, Hillary “won” by almost three million votes. But as the county maps show, the Democratic base isn’t deployed strategically. We have millions of “extra” Democrats in states like New York and California, where we don’t need them, and millions more in solidly “anti-liberal” (i.e., anti-black) states like Mississippi and Alabama, where it’s impossible for the “black party” to win a state-wide election. Hillary worked hard to ramp up the base, and didn’t do too badly, except that, as Trende and Byler point out, the Democrats continue to spiral downwardly in the rural vote (the rural white vote), which is deployed strategically, in a majority of the states, all across the country, except the coastal areas. Furthermore, I suspect that the “turncoat” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the more we Democrats ramp up our base, the more we ramp up the Republican base of “excluded” whites, as has long been the case in the South.

Democrats need to study how and why we lost Florida, and North Carolina, two states that would have given Hillary a victory. Florida is almost the ballgame for the Democrats, and at the state level the party is painfully weak there, despite Obama’s two wins. I am, by temperament, an “Above all, no zeal” kind of guy, but if you got no zeal, you got no politics. Money may be the mother’s milk of politics⁵, but emotion is its life’s blood. Channeling Democratic emotion, and outrage, over Donald Trump’s constant grossness, in a manner that will restore the Democratic Party’s level of acceptance in rural areas to possibly pre-Al Gore levels is the task before us.⁶

Yeah, so how do we do that? First of all, forget about gun control, easy to say but hard to do, because millions of party loyalists/activists feel “passionate” about this issue, given added salience, in liberal minds, by the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando, which quite possibly cost Clinton the election. Eliminate the guns, eliminate the attacks. Simple, right?

I’m sorry, but gun control has never worked. It failed, and is failing, to stop violence in inner city neighborhoods, and it won’t stop terrorist attacks. There are virtually no legal guns in France, and the attacks there probably cost Clinton almost as many votes as the attacks here. And back in the seventies and eighties, European “no gun” policies didn’t prevent significant terrorist attacks throughout those decades. Liberals shouldn’t let their personal revulsion at the idea of owning a deadly weapon, and their disgust those who delight in them,⁷ from making the smart choice and dropping gun control.

Liberals should also, as I’ve said perhaps a million times before, detune their enthusiasm for the environment. If Elon Musk is going to save us all, well, fine. We’ll be saved. Otherwise, let’s let the 22nd century do most of the heavy lifting on this one. We don’t have to solve their problems.⁸

Liberals should not let Trump’s success in obtaining the support of working class whites convince them that they can appeal to these voters by outbidding Trump with an expanded welfare state. These people do not want welfare, of any kind. They want “good jobs”, which frankly they are more likely to get by moving. However, Democrats do have a real opportunity to hammer Trump to make good on his “trillion dollar infrastructure plan”, insisting that he put infrastructure before tax cuts for the rich, which of course no living Republican wants to do. If Republicans are so passionate for the middle class, let them do something for them other than reducing their bosses’ taxes.⁹

It’s also becoming more and more likely that ObamaCare will prove to be as tough a nut for Republicans as it was for Democrats—Obama’s last laugh, one might say. How’s that ‘repeal and replace’ thing workin’ out for you, Paulie? Instead of bold action, we’re getting an orgy of Republican foot shifting.

There are plenty of Democrats, who, I’m sure, can name every county that Hillary carried in 2016. Here’s hoping that they can direct the party to go beyond them.

Afterwords
Dream on, neoliberal, one might say, while looking at my recommendations. The two great pillars of the Democratic Party today are California and New York, where environmentally correct and politically correct liberals are firmly in command. Their own success teaches them that their brand of liberalism works, and there’s no need to change, so nags like me can just go blow.¹⁰ Well, the 2018 elections may teach a needed lesson, and may not. The Republicans may blow themselves up, and they may not. We’ve never had such an unstable president. Trump, obviously, is a gambler, but he’s a gambler who can clean himself up when he has to, or at least when he wants to. He’s now swinging rather desperately at Obama to distract attention from the “Russian Connection,” which may have legs—in particular, the extent to which Trump, Inc. has been dependent on Russian money. We’ll just have to wait and see.