Issue 7: Election Post-Mortem, Part 3 of 3

Dear Runners,

Happy New Year, and welcome to my third and final post-election analysis letter! A reminder that Part 1 and Part 2 are available for those of you who haven’t read them. Today I’m going to wrap everything up by tying together what I’ve discussed so far and showing that racial issues and economic issues are intertwined. I’m also going to discuss the problem of messaging, which for me is a much broader character than just words but has more to do with the attitudes and policies the Democratic party stands for. Up to this point, I’ve discussed the data showing that panic over losing the white working class is overblown and that racism and sexism were major factors in this election, as well as ways to discuss racism in the election as an ally. I’ve also kept a running theme up of saying that no matter how careful we are, no matter how much data backs up our conclusions, we are likely to be wrong. Instead of paralyzing us, I think that can give us some freedom to keep doing what we’re doing and not overthink it too much. If you are committed to a cause right now, any cause — reproductive rights, civil rights, education, criminal justice reform — anything, don’t let anyone tell you that cause no longer matters, or that you now need to split your focus between that cause and Cause X that made progressives lose this election. One person only has so much bandwidth, and we could argue all day about whether your cause or their cause is more important and it won’t help. In short, let me borrow from a Vox headline yet again:

When I first started writing this, I felt the urgency of stopping Liberal panic from taking over very strongly. In the month since then, I do think people have calmed down a bit and made a commitment to stick to progressive principles despite such a devastating and horrifying loss. But we do need to work harder to message them in a succinct and inclusive way. In Part 1 I linked to an article which pointed out that HIllary Clinton, though she did in fact have many plans for economic growth, several of which targeted blue collar workers and many of which targeted the poor, that her messaging on the subject wasn’t very succinct:

“Only 9 percent of the Democratic nominee’s appeals in paid advertisements referenced jobs or the economy — compared with 34 percent of Trump’s…Clinton put far more weight on [Trump’s] incompetence and hatefulness, than she did on the inferiority of his economic agenda relative to her own.

Even when Clinton addressed economic issues, she tended to do so in a piecemeal, technocratic way. She offered voters much more substance on economic policy than her opponent did, but far less clarity and concision.”

That last sentence is of course a subjective judgment, but Hillary Clinton has always been a bit of a wonk and I think it’s probably fair to say that there wasn’t a lot of pith to her economic messaging. I think we can package our ideas better in the future without actually changing our views and goals. The same policy platforms that Hillary Clinton had would probably have worked in any other election. But this was not a normal election. It really wasn’t, and I can’t say that enough. To sit here and say that the main reason Hillary Clinton was defeated is because she didn’t have a tight enough economic message would be completely false. While I have said that technically ANY single factor might have shifted such a close election to be in our favor, I have also been trying to say that these factors are all tied together. So I’m here to explain that while HRC perhaps should have had tighter messaging on the economy, and perhaps Dems coming after her should learn from that, that it is, as usual, much more complicated than that.

2016 was, in many ways, one of the best economic years in recent memory. No, seriously. Unemployment was low; wage growth was high; consumer confidence was up; stock markets were booming. 2016 was better by several economic markers than the “boom times” of the 1990s. Median household income rose for the first time since 2007. So how is it that a candidate espousing economic pessimism was able to win? Could it really be ONLY because of Hillary Clinton’s, and other Democrats’, failure to talk about the economy correctly? I think here are actually two other very strong factors at play here.

1. The recovery has been uneven regionally
2. Peoples’ beliefs about their economic circumstances are partisan and “ism”-istic (a word I just invented meaning based on racism, sexism, and other “isms”….so, yeah)

​1. The Uneven Recovery

According to Gallup polling, how you feel about the recovery of the economy is hugely dependent on where you live. Job and wage growth in big cities has far outpaced that in rural areas. In fact in many rural areas, unemployment is worse now than it was in 2007. The national numbers obscure these trends. So knowing that these numbers about economic optimism by place aren’t that shocking:

The places where the economy is objectively doing better — big cities, especially San Francisco and New York — college towns and suburbs, are places Clinton won handily. But essentially, the kinds of places where the economy has been doing the worst, are also the places with the most political power. According to this excellent Atlantic piece:

“Democrats are sorting into higher-productivity, higher-growth, higher-inequality areas that are more racially diverse — and hold less weight in the Electoral College. Republicans are sorting into lower-productivity, lower-growth, lower-inequality areas that are whiter — and hold more weight.”

We’ve all learned this year, if we didn’t already know, that rural states such as South Dakota and Wyoming have outsized political power compared to more populous states such as New York and California. The divergence between economic and political power has been discussed at length this election. It is often argued back and forth ad naseum that urban areas couldn’t survive without the food grown in the heartland and on the flip side urbanites argue that the GDP growth, economic surplus, and technological advances that we largely generate are what keeps rural areas going. There’s no doubt some truth to both sides, but the fact is that rural areas were able to wield outsized power in this election and turn a year where the message could have been one of economic prosperity into one of economic hardship. (That doesn’t mean economic hardship isn’t many peoples’ reality, of course.) Both the liberal and conservative “bubbles” are growing, and have been for a while, and regional economics are going to become just as important, if not more so, than “identity” economics. It is going to become commonplace to refer to how much a person in St. Louis makes on the dollar compared to a person in New York City. The recovery has had an exaggerated impact on certain regions and that is not easily fixed. It also may have cost us the election. Trump is the first Republican since Reagan to win basically the entire Midwest, and the Midwest is an area where economic recovery has not been great.

2. People’s beliefs about the economy are partisan and racist &tc.

The actual condition of the economy isn’t nearly as important to how people vote as how people believe the economy is doing, and more importantly what they believe about their own economic suffering. Now there is a large overlap between people who feel their economic situation is bad and people whose economic situation actually is bad. When I focus on how people feel, I’m not therefore saying that economic hardship doesn’t exist. But take a look at these Gallup numbers, for example:

From one week to the next consecutive week, the percentage of Republicans saying the economy is getting better went from 16 to 49…in one week! And the number saying it was getting worse dropped from a whopping 81% down to 44%. That’s a 70 point swing in the index. Even among Democrats there was a 27 point swing. People’s economic circumstances did not change drastically in one week. What happened is that people polled were feeling more (or less) optimistic based on who won, so they answered the same questions differently despite their circumstances remaining the same.

White voters in particular also compare their economic circumstances to minority groups. So again, not to say that there are not poor white people, but it’s useful to point out that white people in the same level of poverty feel more poor in different circumstances, namely when other groups are doing better than they are. Going back to the Atlantic article:

“Race and ethnicity play into the geography of the recovery too: Black and Hispanic families are more likely to live in urban areas than white families, and their representation in the workforce has grown through the recovery. As of 2015, there were 66 million white prime-age workers with full-time jobs, down from 72 million in 2007… More than half of the job gains since late 2007 have gone to Hispanics, who make up 14 percent of the labor force; 29 percent of the job gains went to Asians, who make up 5 percent of the labor force; and 25 percent of the job gains went to blacks, who make up 11 percent of the labor force…

This hardly means that black and Hispanic workers have come out ahead of white workers in the recovery. By all accounts, white Americans continue to enjoy far better economic conditions than do Americans of color. The unemployment rate for prime-age white workers is just 3.7 percent. For black workers, it is 7.8 percent, and for Hispanic or Latino workers, 5.3 percent. Moreover, the racial wealth gap sits at its worst level in a generation…”

So overall, workers of color are still doing quite a bit worse than their white counterparts, but it might feel as if they’re “line-cutting” or taking their recovery at the expense of the white working class. (I hope I don’t have to caveat that I don’t agree with this thinking, but I will anyway just to be safe.) This belief, that workers of color are taking more than their fair share, is born out in research. For example, in a YouGov poll conducted by the Huffington Post, they asked respondents to agree or disagree with the following two statements: 1. “Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve,” and 2. “Over the past few years, average Americans have gotten less than they deserve.” Previous psychological research, they point out, has shown that “average Americans” is implicitly synonymous in people’s minds with “white Americans” (ugh). Here’s what they found:

Only 12% of Trump voters think Black Americans have gotten less than they deserve. Also startling is the divide on this question between Clinton and Trump voters. The difference between the two groups on the “average Americans” question isn’t that stark, but 45% more Clinton voters believe Black Americans have ALSO gotten less than they deserve. Attitudes like this show up among Trump voters in survey after survey, some of which you can read about in Part 2. So combine racial animus, especially a belief that people of color are being over-rewarded, are “gaming the system”, etc, with your own very real economic woes and suddnely those woes become magnified.

In the first two parts I said the election wasn’t about economic hardship and that it was a lot about racism and sexism, respectively, and now I’m saying they are inextricably tied together. Maybe you saw that coming all along. Racial resentment and economic anxiety, in a year where the economy is actually doing well overall but racial justice has been a huge issue, cannot be separated. Peoples’ beliefs about their own economic circumstances are often racially coded. And saying this race was about “economic anxiety” without addressing race ignores the economic anxiety of people of color and is guilty of the same sin as the assumption that “average Americans” means white ones. In Part 1, when I argued the economy wasn’t the main factor in deciding this election, I pointed out that people who said the economy was their most important issue voted for Hillary, even in the Rust Belt, so it may sound like I’m contradicting myself now. But while it’s true that people who actually showed up to the polls did indeed say that, it’s very possible that many of the people who stayed home also viewed the economy as their most important issue. On top of that, if you buy that race and the economy are actually kin problems, you might remember that people who said immigration was the most important issue facing the country voted for Trump, and we all know that anti-immigrant sentiment is often presented at least in the guise of economic anxiety.

So we have to address both economic issues and issues of identity. Choosing one or the other is not an option. We’d better figure out how to sell a combined message and do it now. One thing we might want to start pointing out is that Trump and the GOP are using racial animus as a spur to make the white working class and middle class vote for them, while at the same time working constantly, actively, and knowingly to harm the economic status of those same middle and lower class groups. Put another way:

“[Trump] was the first Republican in decades to compellingly speak to the economic concerns of at least some workers, though he did so by making heartbreakingly impossible promises and with a plan no economist, in a recent survey of experts, believes will help the middle class.”

Maybe pointing out Trump’s racism didn’t work so well for us, but discussing his bait-and-switch routine — pitting poor workers of different races against each other to the benefit of billionaires — might.

A Note on Messaging…

Messaging was a problem for Democrats in 2016, no doubt about it. Again not just the words we said but the way we were perceived, the way our attitudes and policies came across. Democrats DO have to say things better and more often and in the right way, but messaging also requires a certain amount of media cooperation. Negative perceptions of Hillary Clinton and her policies weren’t all because of her. I know this is becoming trite, but political journalists, with a few exceptions, and major news outlets did the American people a huge disservice this election. Remember those Gallup word clouds from Part 1? Here they are again:

These represent what polled Americans recalled hearing or reading about Trump and Clinton, respectively, in the days just before being polled. The size of the word “email” is no joke. And the email story wasn’t the only way the media almost gleefully latched onto Clinton character flaws and minor scandals (and non-scandals) while ignoring Trump’s. A study from Harvard University shows that throughout the full campaign, Clinton actually received more negative coverage than Trump:

This media also gave Trump pretty much unprecedented coverage for free because he was good entertainment. Thrgouh February he received almost three times as much coverage in terms of dollar amounts as Clinton and nearly six times as much as the next Republican primary candidate. Cable networks were particularly egregious, according to reports, giving Trump concessions such as the following:

​”Trump’s dominance on cable and broadcast news shows also came about because those programs allowed him to make regular appearances by phone, rather than appearing in person or by satellite. Media ethicists panned this unprecedented practice because it granted Trump a number of unusual benefits — he could steamroll through tough questions while tightly controlling his own image, and doing the interviews by phone allowed him to easily flood the airwaves in the morning and thus dictate what reporters covered for the rest of the day.”

So how exactly can messaging combat such huge deficits in coverage? How can we be expected to speak if no one is hearing it? I don’t actually have answers for these questions, I really want to but I don’t. Political journalists by and large were not quick enough to adjust to Trump’s overwhelming style of campaigning. They treated his scandals and Clinton’s “scandals” as the same because they were still treating the election as one among equals; between candidates with different political ideas who were still fundamentally of the same mold of American Democracy and decency. They were wrong. And Trump is going to be the candidate again in four years so we might very well face similar problems. According to Matt Gertz at Media Matters (and you guys should really really read that whole article):

​”[T]he political press was unable to adapt its methods and practices to a dramatically different election season. In typical elections, news outlets often treat both major presidential candidates as relatively similar — comparing their flaws, scrutinizing their respective scandals, and framing the vote as a choice between two comparable options.

But this was not a normal election between two comparable choices. That sort of equivalency could not hope to provide viewers and readers with an accurate picture of this unusual race. And on balance, the press did not rise to this unique challenge.”

I don’t want to come out of this election saying Democrats didn’t make any mistakes. We clearly did. And I’ve largely been focusing on the presidential race, so I’m sure there were many more mistakes at the state level as well. But we were facing really long odds here guys. I haven’t even touched the Voting Rights Act, the FBI, Russia; haven’t even mentioned Michigan’s voting machine errors which have caused up to 59% of reporting precincts in Detroit to be inaccurate. And we still won the popular vote. We gained seats in both the House and the Senate, and we made a net gain of one (still a net gain!) in State legislatures. I mean, speaking of messaging, can we emphasize that more often? Can we tell the Republicans every day that we were *this* close to kicking their asses instead of acting like kicked puppies all the time? What have we got to lose? Because ultimately the mistakes we made were normal political mistakes, the kind of mistakes every party and every candidate makes from time to time but they FEEL bigger because of who won because of them. Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate, is a flawed person, but I am so tired of having to concede that as if it weren’t true of literally every candidate ever. I’ve been tired of it for ten years. Now I think it’s time to stop analyzing and conceding and start fighting.

We do not need to become a more moderate party. I firmly believe that. And to top it off, basically all of the analysis over the last decade telling either the GOP or the Dems to move to the center has been spectacularly wrong. That’s what I said at the very beginning of Part 1, if you’ll recall, when I noted the GOP’s own 2012 post-mortem saying they needed to tone down the anti-immigrant language and become more moderate and broadly appealing. Then Trump came along and smashed all of that. But the Democrats have been similarly guilty of overly self-moderating:

“In 2004, the last time that Democrats comprehensively lost a national election, an argument broke out about how the party should reform. John F. Kerry had been just one state — Ohio — away from victory. Democrats had lost Senate seats in red states, but held their own in the House and in state legislatures. (Republicans netted three seats, but would have lost a net of two seats but for mid-decade gerrymandering in Texas.) Hillary Clinton loomed as the favorite for the party’s 2008 presidential nomination, but it was clear to many pundits that the party needed someone else. No, not Barack Obama. Clearly, the party needed a moderate nominee from red America.”

A moderate from red America they said, and what we got was a Black guy from Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama. Note both the similarities to the debate we’re having now and how just….WRONG Democrats were to advocate a center-based strategy. Obama wasn’t actually the most liberal candidate by every measure, but he certainly didn’t espouse the move toward the political milquetoast that analysts were grasping for. We can win on progressive values. We can! And, on top of that, we have no choice. We will be in a position of clawing, fighting, day-in and day-out resistance to a conservative agenda for at least the next four years and if we DO actually fight then we are going to look like Super Liberals(TM) whether we want to or not, just by comparison. We might as well own it. When we vote for the next DNC chair and other party leadership, when we choose our next presidential candidate, when we look to our messaging for special elections and 2018, let’s be liberals. Let’s talk about anything other than how badly we lost.

Good Night and Good Luck

-On Monday night, the House GOP met completely in secret and voted off the record to largely curtail the investigative power of the Office of Congressional Ethics by putting it under House control. This would mean that Ethics investigations are no longer headed by an independent body, but instead are headed by the very people being investigated for ethics violations. There are also other proposed changes including that information can no longer be released to the public on who is being investigated and why. The plan was tabled Tuesday morning thanks for massive public backlash.

-Last week I failed to mention the House’s other new proposal to fine members for taking photos or video on the House floor. This move is in direct retaliation for the time six months ago when House Democrats staged a sit-in to protest the the lack of a vote on gun control. When the House cameras were shut off, many House Dems filmed the continuing sit-in on their personal phones and posted it to Facebook.

-A Federal judge has temporarily blocked the North Carolina GOP’s attempt to strip the incoming Democratic Governor of some of his legislative powers. The NC GOP is now suing.

-The NAACP held a sit-in in Jeff Sessions’ office in Alabama to protest his nomination for Attorney General. They were later arrested for it. Jeff Sessions’ confirmation will be one of the first to go before the Senate on January 11. Better get that Rep phone book back out and call them until then.

-Obamacare is in the news again this week as both Republican and Democratic leadership gear up for a fight. You can read my take on Obamacare and the Republicans’ “repeal and delay” strategy in my third newsletter

And that’s it folks! Thanks for sticking with me through this multi-parter. Next week I will get back into a more activist activities-focused newsletter. In the meantime, I encourage you to download this very well-designed action planner with space to write in your Reps’ phone numbers and your weekly action goals. Organization is key. I welcome feedback, positive or negative, or any thoughts of your own on everything I’ve been discussing. As usual, check out my Pinterest board for links to most of my articles, and my Medium page if you’d prefer a blogged version of this newsletter. Sometimes I post mid-week tidbits on there as well. Fill out my anonymous Google feedback form to suggest a topic or send me inapparopriate emojis. Follow me on Twitter at @speaknojessica. Subscribe to The ForeRunner at http://tinyletter.com/theforerunner or read my back issues, all of which are public, at http://tinyletter.com/theforerunner/archive. Tell your friends to sign up, because every time you get someone to subscribe, someone gives Donald Trump the finger, and we all need all the fingering we can get….

In solidarity,
JM

My dog, Maple, next to a painting of Maple = double the Maple

Event link round up (local to DC unless otherwise noted):

January 6–7, 8, and 9 (Arlington/Lynchburg, VA): Help take back the Virginia State Senate by Canvassing for the Democratic Candidate or making calls, hosted by Arlington Young Democrats
January 10: Healing from Toxic Whiteness, an online program for white people committed to racial justice hosted by Everyday Feminism Magazine (costs $, several events over several months, all online)
January 10 (Arlington, VA): Arlington Dems Open House for New Volunteers, hosted by Arlington County Democratic Committee
January 10: Healing Event hosted by Standing Up for Racial Justice — DC
January 12: Organizing for Non-Organizers in the Face of Trump hosted by Good Guys DC (this is an excellent training and it will fill up so watch out for the RSVP link; you need to do this training in order to get invited to their more “advanced” trainings so I highly recommend it)