2016 Election Postmortem: Analysis and Perspective
What happened? And what’s next for conservatives?
When Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, losing the White House to Hillary Clinton became almost a foregone conclusion.
Trump’s campaign was marked by embarrassing scandals, frequent staff shake-ups, underwhelming debate performances, and sagging poll performances both nationally and across every key battleground state. He spent almost no money on advertising or ground game compared to Clinton. As Clinton dealt with her own missteps and scandalous revelations, polling would fluctuate somewhat, but would never show Trump with a consistent, let alone decisive, lead over the former Secretary of State. In the lead up to Election Day, it seemed as if Trump’s massive ego and political incompetence had cost conservatives and Republicans this crucial election.
Then, he did it. Trump pulled off the biggest upset in recent American political history.
As the results were being tallied on Election Night 2016, it became clear that Clinton was seriously underperforming—and underperforming where it mattered most.
The biggest takeaway from the Election Night results is not the meme of a great “#Whitelash” against President Barack Obama — who, by the way, was not actually on ballot — but the fact that Obama’s own coalition of voters from the 2008 and 2012 elections did not show up for Clinton in 2016. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times observed, Clinton suffered her most debilitating electoral abandonment in places where Obama performed strongest with white voters in the 2008 and 2012 elections.
Let’s take a look at Wisconsin. No Republican presidential candidate has won Wisconsin since President Ronald Reagan in 1984. Mitt Romney and his Wisconsinite running mate Paul Ryan fought hard for the state in 2012, earning a total of 1,410,966 votes, yet went on to lose Wisconsin by about 7% to Obama. Trump earned a total of 1,407,401 votes— about 3,000 fewer than Romney — and won the state by about 1%.
How is this possible? Although Trump earned fewer votes than Romney, Clinton managed to turn out an astounding 240,000 fewer votes in Wisconsin than Obama in 2012.
This kind of steep drop-off is shocking not only given the Republican Party’s decades-long losing streak in Wisconsin, but also because scientific polls consistently showed Clinton comfortably ahead there. In fact, her campaign felt so comfortable with her lead that Clinton never once set foot in Wisconsin during her general election campaign. The final results in the other battleground states are similar and confirm the fact that Clinton lost these states and this election because millions of people who voted for Obama in 2012 did not show up for her.
According to exit polls, although Clinton was viewed unfavorably by 54% of voters, a whopping 60% of voters viewed Trump unfavorably. What this means is that a significant amount of people held their noses and voted for Trump fully acknowledging his toxicity.
These results mean that Trump’s skeptics turned out to be right in some respects regarding his electoral viability: if Trump was the Republican nominee, he would have difficulty expanding upon Romney’s support and would be viewed even more unfavorably than Clinton.
However, Trump’s skeptics were very wrong in how severe the drop off from Obama’s 2012 coalition to Clinton’s 2016 coalition would be. We assumed that Trump’s toxicity would drive Democrats to turnout against him and that his boorishness and political insensitivity would enable the media to prop up even an old, corrupt, unfavorable, and uninspiring political figure like Clinton.
We were wrong.
In the end, it was Clinton who could not overcome her liabilities even while running against one of the worst and most exploitable major party political candidates in history.
Of course, although Clinton dramatically underperformed and Trump decisively won in the Electoral College, the popular vote total was essentially a tie (the difference was less than 1%), and the states that largely decided the election — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida — were all decided by less than 1.5%.
As Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight observed, had that very small percentage gone the other way, Clinton would have won the Electoral College and the Presidency with a tied popular vote.
During the Republican primaries, I opposed Donald Trump for three main reasons: he lacks conservative conviction, he lacks moral character, and his toxicity would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Republicans to win the general election against Hillary Clinton.
His election obviously puts to rest the concern regarding electability. But the fact that Trump beat Clinton in the general election changes nothing with respect to his lack of conservative conviction and lack of moral character.
Nevertheless, regardless of any riots or protestations to the contrary, the reality is that Trump will be taking the oath of office come January 20, 2017, and he will get his chance to lead. The election is over. What matters now are conservative results.
This is not the time for conservatives to start drinking the Kool-Aid en masse, becoming apologists for every single thing Trump does or says, or worshiping him like a cult leader as so many have done throughout this election season. That is idolatry. Conservatives rightly opposed the cult of personality that developed under Obama; we should oppose the cult of personality of Trump as well.
When he gets conservative results, by all means give credit where credit is due. I will be the first to celebrate conservative results, regardless of where they come from. But if he breaks his promises and cuts bad deals with Democrats or the big government Washington Establishment, we need to speak up. Our task as conservatives is to hold Trump’s feet to the fire.
So, what can we expect Trump’s agenda to be once he is sworn in?
Late last month, Trump laid out his plan for his first 100 days as President and dubbed it Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter.
Here are some key highlights:
- Reforms regarding corruption and special interest collusion, such as a Constitutional Amendment for term limits on members of Congress, lobbyist reforms, and regulatory reform.
- Reforms regarding trade, such as renegotiating trade deals and cracking down on foreign trade abuses.
- Reforms regarding constitutionalism, such as rescinding Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders and appointing a conservative Supreme Court Justice from this list.
- Broader legislative initiatives such as tax reform, repealing and replacing Obamacare, school choice, infrastructure, border security, and more.
Many of the reforms and initiatives from Trump’s 100-day plan—such as tax reform, repealing Obamacare, border security, and school choice — are much needed and would definitely constitute great conservative victories if actually realized.
Other items on the agenda have the danger of producing non-conservative results, such as instituting protectionist trade policies or massive infrastructure spending. I suspect the first few items on Trump’s agenda at the beginning of 2017 would be naming his Supreme Court pick to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, an infrastructure bill, passing legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, and a border security/immigration reform bill.
Given that Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White house, those of us who are conservatives have no reason whatsoever to tolerate excuses or broken promises from Trump and congressional Republicans, who now have a mandate from the people and have accordingly been given control of the levers of power. If they break their promises, moderate their positions, focus on passing liberal policies such as stimulus spending, expanding entitlements, etc., they cannot hide behind the fig leaf of divided government.
My suspicion is that President Trump will be, at best, a mixed bag in terms of producing real conservative results, and the way he ran his campaign taking all sides on almost every issue suggests that this will be the case. Speaking to the press, Obama, the outgoing president, sized up Trump, the incoming president, and described him as “pragmatic,” not “ideological.”
As a conservative, I would love for Obama and I to be completely wrong on this and see Trump embrace a fully conservative vision for America, and perhaps become the greatest conservative president since Reagan in terms of results. I doubt that will happen, but Trump has certainly defied our expectations before, so we will have to wait and see how he actually governs.
The country is watching, and it’s time for Trump to deliver.
