Kotkin: Why Trump won Why did Donald Trump win? He filled a vacuum that was vacated by both Democratic and Republican parties, says Joel Kotkin. Kotkin is one of a small handful of writers who highlighted the role of Silicon Valley's oligarchs in American society. No fan of The Donald ("a horror" is how he described him back in June when we talked …
My feeling from the beginning was that a Clinton Saunders campaign would have swept the board but the Democrats (and the Republicans too, it's a universal failure) have become the "elites" and are unwilling to share power without getting a payback. Therefore Trumps victory was inevitable.
All societies seem to go through a big change like this after 100 years to so - my hope is that some good will come out of this eventually. The only thing that's certain at this point is that Trump will probably disappoint both supporters in parties - relax, it's just reality TV writ on a larger stage.
That's debatable (and of course impossible to prove one way or the other). Sanders was pretty divisive as well, and many of his policies would have been very difficult to swallow for the same kinds of people who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Hillary either.
Agreed.
Below is a smoking gun email from 1/2/15 proving that the Clinton Campaign was in collusion with the DNC from the start. "Coronation" doesn't begin to describe this... but the 3rd bullet point is particularly telling. Notice also that the White House was involved.
It must have scared the hell out of HRC that Sanders picked up so much momentum. But of course, THIS is precisely the reason why people supported him over HRC.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/40823
Absolutely, after all it's clear that someone that can't even deal his own party would have made a great president.
Given how much the Republican establishment hates Trump I'm really not seeing your point here.
Honestly I think Bernie would've buried Trump. Once you get outside of the far left Hillary has a reputation for corruption that's second to none in American politics, which no doubt helped Trump achieve victory. Whether it's been earned or not is irrelevant. What matters is that the average American just doesn't trust the woman. And even with that Trump barely won. In fact he actually LOST the popular vote by almost half a million votes. Bernie, on the other hand and like Trump, has a reputation for being brutally honest, a rarity for professional politicians. Whether they agree with his politics or not most people feel they can believe what he's telling them, which would have counted for a lot against Trump.
Now me, personally, I think we're going to find out that Trump did a lot of telling people what they wanted to hear. For example, I don't believe for a moment that the man is stupid enough to build a $300 billion wall that will, at best, serve as a minor obstacle to something like 25-30% of illegal immigrants coming into this country. Nor do I believe he's actually dumb enough to think he can get Mexico to pay for it. It makes a great speaking point when you're dealing with people who haven't seen any immigration statistics, but anyone who's actually looked at the numbers knows that the entire idea is laughable at best and utterly insane at worst. Trump's a lot of things, but idiotic isn't one of them.
My sense of Trump and Sanders was they both realized there were large numbers of Americans being tossed into the landfill by the "elites". The hinterlands have been hammered economically for years and the residents have been accused by ignoramuses of being just this side of Hitler for years that they got fed up.
Yes it is, like Brexit, a protest vote. The problem is that, if the <bien pensant</I> soft-left luvvies want to know what's being protested against, they really need to look in the mirror.
It's the "We know what's best, you should vote how we tell you to vote because it's the right choice because we say it is" types who the hate is for. The big problem here is that these idiots just can't understand....because they're right....obviously. The reason that they can't understand why people voted the way they did is that, in fact, they just don't understand people, even if they like to think that everyone is just like them. The fact is that, actually, most people have far more in common with bankers and industry captains that with, say, Michael Moore.
I reckon that it's pretty much the whole press and all the "right-on" types saying how horrific Trump would be that gave him the win.
Yeah, it was "political correctness", wasn't it. *cough*
If that was the case, I suspect that was as much a representative proxy issue for the voter base that feels abandoned and unrepresented by the Washington establishment.
Not an American here, so correct me if I'm wrong. But I got the impression that the Democrats started to *really* sell out and become beholden to coporate interests from the election of Bill Clinton in the early 1990s onwards; i.e. following policies that they needed to have to get elected rather than those which reflected their principles. (A la Tony Blair over here a few years later).
And that it was that abandonment of their principles, and becoming just a different flavour of corporate-pandering party to the Republicans, that isolated them from the voter base that they took for granted until it finally snapped.
If they were still to the left of the Republicans (because, of course they are), the "centre" (sorry, "center") ground of US politics has undoubtedly shifted right- at least in the pro-business sense- in recent years. It's been observed that many of Nixon's policies would be practically "socialist" by modern US standards.
Anyway, at the risk of saying "I told you so", I knew damn well Barack Obama wasn't going to deliver half of what people expected of him in 2008, because he was still a product of the political establishment and beholden to the same capture by corporate interests that the rest of the Democratic Party was.
Hillary Clinton may have been the lesser of two evils, and I'd much rather have seen her elected for that reason, but she was utterly establishment and too associated with the 25-year-old status quo to have come across as anything other than uninspiring.
I was surprised that Bernie Sanders got as much traction as he did, given that he defined himself in terms that included the word "socialist" (normal to most of the world, but in America pretty much read as "COMMUNIST!!!!11111") and you have to wonder what would happen if he *had* been chosen.
Would he have run into the "socialist = COMMUNIST!!!!!11111" unelectability brick wall once he had to appeal beyond his existing support base, or would Americans have finally got over the stigma and stopped knee-jerking against their own self interest?
Or at least, that's how I see it- but I'm not American, and I've long known that it's a mistake to assume (that just because they speak a form of the same language) that Americans think the same way that I do. Especially the non-coastal types in the "flyover" states- this is a mistake that many people in Britain make; they think that they know America better than they do from watching Hollywood and American TV series.
But those are not as representative of America as a whole as some people think. Do not be fooled by the apparent familiarity- Americans are more alien than they first appear.
Anyway, good article at covering why Trump got elected without coming across as excusing or endorsing him, nor as a blatantly partisan attack on Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, the Left is really starting to piss off the moderates (not right nor left) with their "we know what is best" attitude. If Trump had not won, would there be protest marches, would California be wanting to leave the US? I don't think so, if Trump had lost the right would have said "fix!" and got on with their lives for the next 4 years. When the Left doesn't get things their way they try to work out ways in which their own views is the correct one and everyone who didn't agree with them was wrong.
Brexit? Left's stance is "well, X amount of people didn't/couldn't vote so NO BREXIT!" Now it's "I didn't vote for Trump so he's NOT MY PRESIDENT!", not really sure they quite understand how an election works.
Trump won, lets just get through the next 4 years and see how bad a job he does, then the next president can come in on a "Make America Better Again, With Patches, America 3.0!!"
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The Right didn't have Texas proposing the secede the last two elections after Obama won?
The Right didn't have 3% militias claiming they are ready to go to Washington to "take our country back" training in the woods with live fire exercises as recently as last week ?
You never heard "you Lie" at a State of the Union speech (which was a blatant disregard of protocol)?
Enjoy your victory lap.. but enough of the lies from the right pretending they are reasonable, Trump has told enough lies for everyone.
The "You Lie" though was perfectly accurate and very well deserved. Obama is simply a more glib liar, but a constant and deliberate liar all the same. His disrespecting the Supreme Court justices was even worse, a complete disregard for protocol, and one barely criticized at all.
No, we'll all be very well rid of the worst president ever.
> "The Right didn't have Texas proposing the secede the last two elections after Obama won?"
Dude, that's just Texas. What country you living in?
> "The Right didn't have 3% militias claiming they are ready to go to Washington to "take our country back" training in the woods with live fire exercises as recently as last week?"
Yeah, the "Right" has this big standing army locked and loaded, ready to spring into action. Doesn't everyone know that? They're poised to swoop down on Washington DC and surgically delete Congress and the Supreme Court the moment Trump gives the word.
As for the "You Lie" thing, Obama was junk talking those congress critters, and one of them decided he'd had enough for one president. You got a problem with speaking truth to power?
"Enjoy your victory lap.. but enough of the lies from the right pretending they are reasonable, Trump has told enough lies for everyone."
Yep. But it's quite bewildering to those of not in the US how moderate Trump suddenly sounds compared to ranting and, what seemed to me, outright slander he uttered during the campaign. Compare his campaign trail comments about Obama with the comments he made after meeting him at the Whitehoue today. Likewise his recent post-win comments about Hillary Clinton.
It's a bit like a couple of boxers beating the shit out of each other and then going for a pint together afterwards.
It does make us outsiders wonder just what happened and what might happen once he's sworn in.
"Trump won, lets just get through the next 4 years and see how bad a job he does,"
Might not actually be that bad.
He's angered the head Republicans, and outraged the Democrats during his campaign, so expect lots of fireworks in the media, but little action in the Belt line as every move he proposes gets blocked, and every thing the House and Senate propose gets shot down by him.
So noisy, and popcorn worthy, but little gets done, and most damage averted.
"It's the "We know what's best, you should vote how we tell you to vote because it's the right choice because we say it is" types who the hate is for."
And I fear some people will never understand, they truly seem to be living in a fantasy world of their own without any ties to the real world. You see the same thing happening in Europe right now. A lot of politicians are "shocked" but there's no reason to change their policies.
And this lack of insight manifests itself on many levels. Has anyone noticed how often all the polls get it wrong these days? I'm not talking incidents, I'm talking repeated massive mistakes. The Brexit was never going to happen, bzzzt. Clinton would win easily, bzzzzt. And that's only 2 obvious examples.
I think the people behind those polls are often just as alienated from the world as those politicians are. Yet too stubborn to realize or admit to this. And the media where they sent their poll results too are often just as bad because most journalists don't bother to check their sources these days. Resulting in incidents where total nonsense can make the front page.
And when the deed is done everybody is so "shocked" and "surprised". Yeah...
>soft-left luvvies want to know what's being protested against, they really need to look in the mirror.
No, that's bullshit. I don't know a single "soft-left luvvie" who is a fan of crony capitalism or the banks or billionaires or Wall St.
Not one.
This conflation of the Wall St money machine with people who have a degree and work in the media or the arts is one of the most dangerous things happening at the moment. It's classic divide and conquer.
The reality is that the aims of the "soft-left" and the working classes have more in common than not. But the Wall St and Washington machinery - the billionaires, the real elites, and their political collaborators on both nominal sides - are desperate to prevent that becoming obvious, because then they'd have a real revolution on their hands.
So instead we get pretendy populists like Farage and Trump who misdirect the justified rage away from where it belongs, guaranteeing that no matter what happens, the money, like spice, continues to flow.
First, let's remember that Trump appears to have LOST the popular vote by a slight margin (counting is not yet 100% complete). Given that a Presidential election depends on the summation of the results in the various States, Trump's win resulted from nothing more than a series of razor-thin margins, many of them so close as to be statistical dead heats. Reading anything more into it than that the country is exactly 50-50 split along ideological lines would be folly.
Finally, the fact is that he HASN'T won UNTIL the electors chosen to the Electoral College have their individual meetings in their respective States on December 19, cast their actual votes, the results are transmitted to the President of the Senate and certain other authorities by December 28, and a joint session of Congress meets January 6 to count the electoral votes and certify the results.
How many US citizens (let alone people in the world) actually understand this process?
And your point is?
I do not recall a single case when the electoral college has voted against what they were elected to vote for.
While the US system of indirect election is somewhat arcane, it does do what it says on the tin. Electors are elected to represent their state, they vote as elected.
"While the US system of indirect election is somewhat arcane, it does do what it says on the tin."
correct. it ALSO gives a bit more clout to non-populous states. Many of the compromises ca 1787 regarding the framing of the U.S. Constitution were compromises between people who wanted each state to have equal representation, and who wanted individual people to be equally represented.
The electoral college basically rubber stamps the individual state's election results. It can work both for or against a candidate. but in MANY ways it more equally represents what's going on across the entire nation. So it stays, because it works, and because 'tradition'.
It also forces candidates to campaign OUTSIDE OF MAJOR POPULATION AREAS. That's a GOOD thing. Otherwise, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, and New York City would decide EVERY presidential election. Yeah, don't go there...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
That was interesting. As an outside it seems pointless bother with the electoral college at all, at least for those states which enforce voting only for the pledged candidate.
My reading of the process and the background for why the EC exists seems to be a safety valve put in place in case an outright corrupt nutjob "wins" and so can be rejected by "the great and the good" but the system itself has been subverted into a rubber stamp "tradition" process. Probably by a lack "great and good" people.
Yes, that is how the system works and, while only a few states specifically have laws that say that their electoral college reps have to follow the popular vote, the changes of the electors going against the popular vote and putting in Clinton is vanishingly small.
Somehow denying Donald the election is not going to happen:
1) When you put your "X" next to the Donald's name, you are actually choosing his slate of electors to represent your state in the college. Donald names his slate of electors for each state. Who are the most rabid Donald supporters in your state?--you'll find a good number of them by looking at the Donald's slate of electors.
2) Congress is controlled by Republicans and is going to wave the results out of the Electoral College through. Donald won the Presidency, and while a lot of Republicans in Congress would have preferred Jeb Bush or Ben Carson or somebody else, if they wave the Donald through they get to pass bills out of Congress and Donald will pretty much sign all of them. The only check on this is if the Dems can hold together a filibuster in the Senate. If Congress fails to validate the results out of the college, then they lose President Trump, his campaign and his more vociferous supporters, split the Republican Party, and look like loons bringing on constitutional chaos.
Meanwhile there is still Hillary Clinton in the wings with support of a tiny majority of the American electorate, much of big business and wall street and all of the media and entertainment industries. Congressional Republicans who think they can deny the Donald and put one of their own in the Oval Office would be playing right into the Democrat's hands
I heard this after every election - are you in California and sampling the local weed now it's legal?
Just kidding - I feel your pain, but the result is inevitable unless Trump takes his oath of office on a cold, wet and rainy day and forgets his hat and overcoat.
Here's the problem... voter fraud exists and it has an impact.
There were some major issues like 100's of ballots being sent to a single house of an old woman.
People who cannot vote, registering to vote and voting. This includes illegal aliens and convicted felons who have lost their right to vote. The issue is that they are being (self policed) which is like saying to a convicted felon... go ahead and vote. The odds are you'll never be caught and if you are... its unlikely you'll serve any jail time...
The larger issue... is automatic voter registration. You get a drivers license, you're eligible and registered to vote. It sounds good, but when you allow illegal aliens or even green card holders to get a drivers license, they are then being registered to vote. (The devil is in the details.)
Sorry, but both sides play games and if you're in Chicago... even the dead can vote. And vote often.
;-)
The larger issue... is automatic voter registration. You get a drivers license, you're eligible and registered to vote. It sounds good, but when you allow illegal aliens or even green card holders to get a drivers license, they are then being registered to vote. (The devil is in the details.)
Err... no. I got an American driver's license in 1984. At the time I did NOT have a green card. I was not registered to vote, no doubt because the people at the license place knew damn well that I was not eligible as I waved my Irish diver's license and passport at them when I got the license. Even when I got the green card and went to renew the license, I was not automatically registered to vote. I was not registered to vote until after I got US citizenship... and I had to join a line to do that. It was NOT automatic.
The rules have changed since I got my license; I was a 'student' and was in the process of getting a master's degree at a fine American university in north west Indiana. An obscure place with a French name and perhaps 10,000 undergrads, you probably may never have heard of it. It is now much, much, MUCH harder to get an American driver's license. Thank you so much, Mohamed Atta.
I consider felons losing their right to vote an atrocity and not worthy a nation that once view itself as the beacon of freedom.
I'm OK with not being able to run for an office while you're incarcerated - but these people should still be able to vote.
I think there's an irrational fear that because there are so many incarcerated people (per capita, US is no 1, I think) they could all unite and vote for one guy ;-)
Personally, because the candidates are usually interchangeable and there are so many voters, I consider it to be game of "large numbers". If you throw the dime often enough, you'll settle for a 50-50 distribution, which is what happens during most elections.
But due to gerrymandering and the winner-takes-it-all principle, you end up with stable majorities anyway.
Have look here at felons and voting. Many, if not most, states do allow felons to vote either after serving their time or after a period time after release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement
https://exoffenders.net/felon-voting-rights/ This site further breaks down the various state rules.
Could not agree more with your comments. I think the biggest thing people do not realize is this is a big FU to the career politicians regardless of parties. We have a Constitution that should be followed but most citizens do not know what it even says. Another thing that almost everyone gets wrong is that they say the US is s a Democracy which is dead wrong. The US is a Republic. What is the difference? It is one small but drastically big difference. A Republic is the sovereignty in the individual person while the Democracy is the sovereignty of the group. This is why we have all these protest going on because these kids were never taught what the US actually is or what the Constitution says.
Kurt
A variety of techniques have been alleged in the past to deter or otherwise create a barrier to a citizen voting. That it is blatant gerrymandering based upon an exaggeration of the actual amount of voter fraud is the issue.
There also did use to be a law that meant that States with a history of gerrymandering through voter registration (poll taxes, see Harman v. Forssenius for instance, or literacy tests) had make extra effort to counter such practices. (the Voting Rights Act of 1965)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_States
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