Soul Searching And The 2016 Election
The 2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath have led millions of Americans to think hard about the future of our country and engage in serious soul searching.
I’ve always cared more about politics and public policy than most people. When I was in high school I was nominated to attend Boys State in Albany, NY and the National Young Leaders Conference in Washington, DC. During my college years at University of Virginia I became a big fan of Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers and ended up just one course short of a bachelor’s degree in American Government. My filing cabinets are full of old news clippings from the past 30 years about balanced budgets, the war on poverty and cost benefit analyses of various policies.
On some weekends, somewhat embarrassingly, I actually watch all four political talk shows — Meet The Press, Face The Nation, This Week and Fox News Sunday.
Now that the electors have cast their 538 votes, and the election is officially finished, I’ve decided that I have to write down my thoughts and do my soul searching aloud in order to come to peace with the results of this election and what comes next. Since I am publishing this to a broad audience of smart people who use Medium, I care deeply about your own opinions and thoughts, and I greatly welcome any feedback or comments you have back.
We’re A Partisan Country, But 42% Of Us Are Independents
In the past seven Presidential elections, I’ve voted for the Republican candidate twice and the Democratic candidate five times. I’m a registered Democrat now, but I consider myself independent and in the past I was a registered Independent for many years. According to Gallup, 42% of Americans think likewise, preferring to identify as Independent as opposed to allying themselves to one party or the other. This is the highest level of Independent affiliation in the past thirty years that Gallup has asked this question.
If you’re a politically concerned Independent or Center Democrat like me, that doesn’t mean you don’t care about politics. Most of us actually care a lot, we just don’t vote blindly for one party or the other and I think we listen with an open mind to arguments from both sides of the coin. Sometimes we agree with Republicans (for example, on the importance of smaller/efficient government and free markets) and sometimes we agree with Democrats (for example, on opposing racism, sexism and intergenerational poverty).
My biggest realization of this election was that neither party really spoke for me. Donald Trump was spouting anti-immigrant, anti-trade rhetoric that I don’t agree with, and Hillary Clinton was talking about growing jobs by increasing the size of government. Neither of these appeals were particularly attractive to me.
I see every day how hard working immigrants make our country stronger, and I know my American history that we’ve been a nation of immigrants since the beginning. Many of my best friends, and even my wife, are hard working immigrants and I firmly believe that legal immigrants make America great. Likewise, I understand that the private sector is economic engine of America, accounting for more than 110 million jobs, and that small and medium “entrepreneurial firms” account for the majority of job growth. Growing government and increasing taxes is the least effective way to enable startups to thrive and grow an economy. My life’s work is helping small, innovative startups succeed and grow and I see viscerally, every day, how our entrepreneurial sector needs lower taxes, less red tape and more flexibility to leverage new technologies and the gig economy.
In this year’s Presidential election, 90% of registered Republicans voted for Trump and 89% of Democrats voted for Hillary Clinton. If you’ve always voted for the same party, you’re probably not my “target audience” because you’re probably somewhat closed off to the reality that (1) Both candidates were extremely flawed; (2) Sometimes the other side is right, on one issue or another; and (3) We’re in a completely new era now, where we need a completely different set of policies designed for the 21st century. However, if you consider yourself even somewhat Independent and you’ve ever voted for a candidate of the other party, then I’d love for you to keep reading and help me soul search this out, because I think we need to design a completely new political movement.
It’s the Economy Stupid
I voted for Bill Clinton twice in the 1990s and he was right — “it’s the economy stupid”.
As you’ve probably seen from all the great articles and analyses over the past month, Donald Trump rode this theme to victory with his populist economical appeal to rural disenfranchised voters especially in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Its true that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote overall by 3 million votes, but if you look closely at the popular vote in the ten battleground states where the majority of the election was fought, Trump won the popular vote in those states (many of which have voted for Democrats in the past).
I’m not going to get sidetracked into the argument of whether James Comey or the Russians helped tilt the election to Trump because it just causes partisans on both sides to get all worked up, but I will say that foreign interference in our elections must be investigated and I’m glad to see a bipartisan consensus to investigate. I’m also not going to get pulled into the debate about whether Trump’s election means we’re a racist country — because I’m positive that the vast majority of Americans are not. In the last two elections, millions of Trump supporters voted for Barack Obama and if you look at where Trump got more votes than Romney (in the upper Midwest) most of these people who flipped from Obama to Trump did so for economic reasons.
So back to the economy. The unemployment rate is 4.8% nationally, but wages have stagnated and inequality has grown tremendously over the past two decades. If there’s one thing I know for sure — its that the American economy in the 21st century is going to be very different than the 20th century. Over the past sixty years, manufacturing and energy jobs were the “engine” of the economy and America’s growth was driven by carmakers in Detroit (GM, Ford, Chrysler), manufacturing conglomerates like General Electric, and energy companies like Exxon, Mobil and Texaco. Take a look at this list of the biggest companies in 1960 by revenue and think about what you see:
These are “Old Economy” companies, and they’re the brand names that Donald Trump and his core supporters are thinking about when they talk about “Making America Great Again”. These are the companies that voters in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are remembering when they get nostalgic about the old $22/hour jobs that they or their parents used to have.
What about today? Well, these are the largest companies in 2016 by market cap:
What do you notice? Well, Exxon Mobil is still up there (although partly by merging two of the world’s largest oil companies together), but, much more striking is the realization that 5 of the top 7 companies are Internet/software companies — Apple, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.
All around us, so many of us are now using smartphones, Internet search, e-commerce and social networks that we’ve almost become oblivious to how fast this change has happened. Back in 2005, less than 1% of Americans owned a smartphone. Now, 200 million Americans own smartphones and use them for hours a day. In 2000, online commerce accounted for less than 1% of transactions. In 2016, e-commerce is on track to reach $1.9 trillion in sales — but this is still only 8.4% of retail transactions.
In other words, we vaguely recognize that the world is being transformed by software, the Internet and information technology — and we’re right. But what most people don’t realize is that we’re still just at the beginning of this trend.
You’ve probably read the stories about how today’s smartphone has more intellectual horsepower than the Apollo 11 “supercomputer” that took men to the moon in 1969. But actually the iPhone is already 120 million times more powerful, and computers are getting more powerful every month. Watson, anyone?
Right now, artificial intelligence, driverless cars and virtual reality are just nascent technologies with less than 1% market share, kind of like smart phones in 2005. At some point in the relatively near future — 2025? 2030? — AI, driverless cars, virtual reality and other extremely promising innovations in biotechnology, genetics and solar energy will find ways to improve their cost effectiveness and eventually become as widespread as smartphones are today.
In a very real sense, software is eating the world and jobs are evolving at an increasing rate. The ten fastest growing new job titles are all in technology (e.g. data scientist, cyber security engineer, UX developer). In addition, according to Upwork, more than 53 million Americans now work as freelancers in some way, as part of the gig economy. Most of these people are information workers or technology assistance workers, doing jobs that use computers but also require some type of human assist. Don’t just think “coders”, think Uber drivers, Airbnb landlords and the millions of bloggers out there like myself. Almost everyone’s job is now “tech enabled” in some way.
This is the “New Economy” we need to recognize, understand and re-tool our laws and our government to support and acknowledge 21st century business, labor and life.
If you’re politically Independent and Donald Trump’s plan to take us back to the 1960s didn’t appeal to you…or you liked the “idea of Hillary Clinton” as the first woman President, but you didn’t think her plan to just keep growing 50-year old government programs was the right plan… then you’re probably involved (in one way or another) in the software/gig economy revolution that’s happening all around us… whether as a political activist, a software programmer, or an employee in a small, New Economy company. By my estimate more than 60 million of us are.
If you generally favor Democratic policies on social issues and Republicans on economic issues, but overall just have a sense that our politics and policies are built for an entirely different era, and need a serious 21st century update, then you’re the like-minded friends I’ve been soul searching about.
And I hope that I’ve gotten your attention…
What Policies Do We Need For The 21st Century Economy?
