Nobody Likes Shitting the Bed
The duo behind Carl Diggler, CAFE’s Beltway Insider Hack, explain what the hell happened to the virtuoso prognosticator on Election Day
Hello, everybody. We’re Felix and Virgil, Carl Diggler’s assistants. Carl has not been heard from since election day, and we presume he ran away again or drank himself to death, we don’t particularly care.
Like many people on Tuesday, we completely fucking blew our calls. Given our previous success, we were pretty surprised. To make matters worse, the Dig’s bete noire Nate Silver — who himself miscalled five states — was at least somewhat vindicated for insisting on the possibility of a Trump win.
Where exactly did we mess up? Pretty much everywhere. Take Ohio, where we thought Hillary Clinton would win by just an eyelash and ended up taking a thorough ass kicking. Looking at reputable polls, talking to people on the ground, and reading as much as we possibly could about both campaign’s ground operations, we thought that Hillary’s team of organized type-A volunteers would mobilize masses of unenthusiastic but active voters. After all, Trump’s team was feuding with the state GOP, and Governor/vagrant John Kasich (who won the state’s primary by a handsome margin) refused to endorse the nominee. The firsthand accounts of Trump volunteer canvassers portrayed a gang that while incredibly excited, was operating a ramshackle turnout apparatus and had no idea who was a likely voter or who wasn’t.
Obviously, none of that crap mattered. Trump’s people came out, and Clinton lost in places that Barack Obama won in 2012 and 2016. This same story played out in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and nearly in Minnesota.
In Florida and Nevada, we thought big registrations and huge Latino turnout in early voting would make both states a total lock for the former Secretary of State. In North Carolina, we almost picked Trump, but reasoned that they were just too disorganized and that health industry and finance professionals in the big cities would break for Hillary like they broke for Mitt Romney four years prior.
What happened? Was there a massive populist wave? Did the Russians tamper with our honored institution as their devious nature informs them to? Did we all just fail Our Lady Hillary?
Nope, large swaths of people taken for granted to vote for Hillary Clinton at the same rate that they voted for Barack Obama simply did not.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats expected to run up the score so much in Philadelphia that it made returns from rural Trump supporting parts of the state meaningless. Well, that just didn’t happen. I can imagine that many would like to blame the SEPTA strike, but Lyft and Uber offered free rides to the polls, and most were within walking distance for voters anyhow. Besides, that same story played out all over Midwestern urban centers. MSNBC host and one-time Digcast guest Steve Kornacki lays it out very well.
Hillary Clinton did not once visit Wisconsin during this campaign. In Ohio, she had plenty of starpower, but it wasn’t enough. In North Carolina, she brought Jon Bon Jovi and did that absolutely bizarre halting speech shit she does, but lo and behold, she lost by two points.
To add insult to injury, Clinton won the popular vote while losing the election for the second time in her bid for the presidency (she got slightly more votes than then-senator Obama in the 2008 primary season). That’s pretty goddamn hard to do, but she twice found a way.
All the stars, early voting drives, and strangely-worded jokes in the world were not enough to sufficiently sell people on another Clinton as president. Politics in America is sales. It’s hard to get people to buy a product defined by how it isn’t the other product. It reeks of entitlement, the kind of entitlement Clinton had to think she’d replicate Barack Obama’s exact margins with black voters, that enough Latinos would carry her over the top.
The type of backbiting freaks that have run the DNC into the ground see the electoral politics as a more competitive version of LinkedIn. They thought that Hillary’s resume mostly spoke for itself. Every campaign event was just a reminder that she wasn’t a racially inflammatory game show host, as if voters didn’t realize that. What those who stayed home instead of voting for her saw was compromising baggage, years of evidence that they couldn’t trust her. To the Podestas of this earth, those were the little bullet points on her CV.
The way it all came crashing down in the Javits Center was a tragically perfect end to Clintonism as a viable path to the presidency. Just like millions who have been laid off in America since the Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, Hillary’s diehards weren’t given the honor of the head honcho telling them it was all over. Instead, they were given John Podesta, who told them they would fight on. In the back, Hillary knew that too many pieces of the Obama coalition stayed home for that to be possible, though. Left to his own devices, Podesta did what came naturally; he told them encouraging bullshit through several layers of managerial disconnect, knowing he’d never face any real consequence for blowing the election to such a detested candidate and then lying about it.
But fuck us! We didn’t know this was going to happen, and it made us feel dumber than dog shit or Mark Penn (whichever is closest).
We derived pleasure making fun of those, like Carl, who live in a bubble and think the entire world thinks as they do, failing upwards in their careers as they leave a path of hysterically wrong predictions in their path. When we correctly predicted all those primaries, we used what we knew about what kinds of people we thought were voting, how each candidate looked to those outside our New York media bubble, and the reality of people’s lives.
When it came time for the big one, we were ultimately just as myopic as everyone we made fun of.
We thought that enough of the country would think, like so many that we knew, that Hillary Clinton had odious qualities but that they’d be able to plug their nose and vote for her… instead of the complete unknown and volatile element of Trump.
