There is but little satisfaction for the
old Bloviator in having been no wrong-er than the best of them in his
projections and expectations for November 8. No small part of his chagrin may
be traced to the smart-assy skepticism evinced in this jewel from his
pre-election pontification right here on this very site:
The Republican ranks
may also hold a number of "silent voters" too embarrassed to tell a
pollster that they actually plan to cast their lot with The Donald on November
8, but while their boy may fare well enough in the popular tally to sorely
discomfit the Left, Middle, and even some on the Right, it appears at this juncture at least that
these resolutely mute voters will suddenly have to let loose with one hell of a
bellow to affect the actual outcome.
Well bellow they did by golly! Political
number cruncher extraordinaire Sam Wang, who vowed to eat a bug if Donald Trump got more than 240 electoral
votes--and thus learned on national television that crickets do not in fact
taste like chicken--may have come as close as anybody will to explaining why so
many of the pollsters got it wrong. Wang suggests that "we retire the
concept of the undecided voter. Based on cognitive science, so-called
'undecided' voters might be mentally committed to a choice, but either can't
verbalize it or want to keep it to themselves." This would be all the more
likely, needless to say, when the national media and a big chunk of the
interweb are awash in depictions of one candidate as one or two evolutionary
cycles behind a pig, and those inclined to hold their noses and support the pig are not interested
in revealing a position they might then be forced to defend.
At any rate, one of the most striking things to the O. B. about the campaign and its aftermath was the readiness of journalists, commentators and Internet photoshoppers alike to file so much of the blame, first for the stubbornly persistent viability of Trump's candidacy, and then for the knee- buckling shock of his election, on the ignorant, knuckle-dragging bigots who continue to rally to the symbol of the Confederate flag.
Trump enthusiasts have been seen waving the Rebel banner in Traverse City, Durango, and a slew of other decidedly northern outposts. Yet the media and blogosphere's visual fixation the flag seem all too suggestive of an impulse to stretch the regrettably enduring, self-delusional nonsense about the "Southernization of America" into a suitably uncomplicated explanation for an unthinkable national debacle. For some two generations now, way too many American liberals have been beguiled by this facile trope, which blames the nation's shift to the right since the 1960s on the South's rapid political, economic, and cultural ascent. If early takes on the 2016 presidential election, which chalk up Trump's upset triumph to the "revenge" of the rural white voter in traditionally blue northern states and essentially leave it at that, are any indication, we may soon see "ruralization" supplant "Southernization" as the primary threat to political liberalism in this country.
(Dare
we undermine so simple and straightforward a take on so complex and unexpected
an occurrence by asking just how severe this threat could be in light of the
ongoing, and in some cases dramatic, shrinkage of the rural white population?
As Kinky Friedman would most assuredly say, "Why the Hell, Not?" )
There is surely no denying that ardor for Mr. Trump burned
hottest and sometimes manifested itself most frightfully among nonmetropolitan
whites whose turnout figures exceeded all expectations this year, most notably
in the Clinton camp, where supreme confidence in the strength of urban support
appeared to make rural a marginal consideration. Still, there are fundamental flaws in the
rush to lay Trump's victory off on the hicks in the sticks. The most obvious of
these lies in the raw numbers showing that, with half of the population now
clustered in just 146 of the nation's largest counties, rural America supplied
but 17 percent of the votes cast this year. In Wisconsin, for example, Donald
Trump carried rural Florence County by 71 percent compared to Mitt Romney's 63
percent in 2012, but this amounted to a grand total of 252 additional votes.
Fond du Lac County is larger, but Trump's 2+ percent margin over Romney still
adds up to only 699 votes. On the other hand, Ms. Clinton trailed Barack
Obama's 2012 total by 58,000 in Milwaukee alone on her way to losing Wisconsin
by just over 24,000 votes, and her vote in metro Detroit counties fell some
83,000 short of Obama's in a state that she came up scarcely 13,000 ballots
short. In Pennsylvania meanwhile, the estimated 130,000 African American
no-shows roughly doubled Ms. Clinton's margin of loss, but it isn't simply
that, as some writers for Politico observed, "black voters in Philadelphia
didn't love Clinton more than the displaced steelworkers hated the people like
her who dealt away their jobs to foreign countries," it's that countervailing white and black Democratic
turnout in numbers even approaching those of 2012 failed to materialize in the
largest urban/metro centers in three states that, rural and small town white
outrage notwithstanding, could otherwise have made Hillary Clinton president.
In 2016, as in so many elections, the significance of one trend was dependent
on another, as high rural white turnout coincided with slumping urban black
turnout.
On the national scale, there is no denying that Trump cashed
in heavily among whites without college degrees, but that should not obscure
his victory with college-educated white men and his 45 percent tally with white
women with college degrees. Likewise, writing off his election to the success of his
"populistic" appeal to the anger and paranoia of economically and culturally
imperiled whites amounts to making unlikely populists of voters with incomes
exceeding $100,000 in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina
with whom he bested not only Ms. Clinton, but his Republican predecessor in
2012.
It seems more comforting to many commentators to rationalize
this election as a distressingly powerful affirmation of Donald Trump by
increasingly marginalized rural whites than to entertain the prospect, her millionish popular vote plurality aside (She was running against Donald Trump, for God's sake!), of a potentially more telling
rejection of his opponent across a broad spectrum of the electorate.. The decidedly underwhelming general
enthusiasm for Ms. Clinton that had been almost palpable throughout the
campaign became a crushing reality on election day, even within her own party.
Where Donald Trump claimed the votes of 91 percent of white Republicans,
Hillary Clinton won the support of only 84 percent of whites in her party. It
was anticipated that she would run behind President Obama in the black vote
nationally, but perhaps not by a full five points, which hurt all the worse in
light of a general slippage in black turnout.
In an interesting slant, a Pew Foundation survey shows Ms. Clinton ran behind Barack Obama in 2012
with Americans of every Protestant and Roman Catholic demographic, most notably
coming up 8 points shy with Hispanic Catholics and trailing by 2 percent among
the "religiously unaffiliated." Overall, once again, even presumed outrage over
Trump's promised wall and mass deportations, failed to yield enough of a
Hispanic/Latino "surge" to be of much help to Ms. Clinton, who actually trailed
Obama's 2012 performance with this group by 6 points.
Beyond the brutal, but ultimately legitimate question of
whether Hillary Clinton is "likable enough" to be president, she clearly did
herself no favors in rejecting advice to pay more attention to blue collar
voters instead of running what seemed to many outside her little bubble as an
aloof, glam-besotted, utterly tone deaf campaign typified all too well by the
$250,000-a ticket gala where Barbara Streisand provided the entertainment, but
HRC made the wrong kind of headlines by dismissing half of Trump's supporters
as loathsome, bigoted "deplorables."
It is easy enough to see why not only rural whites acutely sensitive to
slights, but a good many others in the suburbs and elsewhere may have jumped
off the fence on Trump's side at that very point.
None of this is to suggest that Ms. Clinton did not face
serious opposition rooted in racial and sexual bigotry, not to mention the
economic and cultural anxiety so ruthlessly and recklessly exploited by her
opponent. Nor is there reason to dispute that these pathologies seem more
readily and menacingly apparent in some rural areas than elsewhere. Yet, it
would only compound the tragedy that so many Americans already see in this
election to consign these insidious traits and attitudes solely to those who
lack the sophistication to conceal them or, sadder still, merely see nothing to
gain by trying. If anything, though, it would be even more unfortunate to
overlook a clearly substantial, much more influential and advantaged segment of
the electorate who might deplore such hatred and blind anger publicly right up
until they close the curtain in the voting booth where, upon rethinking, these
sentiments, however regrettable, suddenly become a tolerable means of
furthering their own class and political ends.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is a big-time Hillary devotee who proudly casts himself as a representative of
the "educated, socially progressive, Hollywood" crowd, even as he is cast by
others as the embodiment of "why people hate liberals." Sorkin was not
necessarily incorrect, however, in telling his daughters in a livid
morning-after rant published in Vanity Fair (Where else?) that "the Klan won last night. White
nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons." His mistake, and a most egregious
one at that, lay in implying that they or others of their ilk could have pulled
it off without a lot of help, some of it admittedly inadvertent, from a great
many others who scarcely fit the conveniently narrow and villainous "Trumpster"
profile he had constructed, including, ironically enough, the likes of Sorkin
himself.
A less expansive version of this rant appeared over yonder on LiketheDew.com.
http://likethedew.com/2016/11/16/hicks-in-the-sticks-shouldnt-be-the-pundits-quick-fix/#.WC3rK9UrKn9
