Further Thoughts

Some days ago we wrote that if Hillary loses, she will be the last white candidate nominated for the presidency by the Democrats. Upon further reflection, that is merely a continuation of a trend that arguably began eight years ago.

John Kerry was not only the last white male the Democrats nominated but very likely the last straight white male they will nominate going forward. As a collection of "victim groups," the Democrats will gravitate toward nominating a member of one (or more) of their groups. Perhaps their ideal candidate would be a gay minority single mother.

We live in interesting times.

Clinton Last White Democrat Nominee?

Writing in The New York Times, Nate Cohn argues America's highly touted demographic changes aren't much helping Hillary Clinton. He believes demographics is only one of three factors helping Democrats, the other two being support and turnout. And the last two are more important than the first, in his view.

His article is okay, much of what he writes is unobjectionable. Reading it, I'm going out on a limb to predict that if Hillary Clinton loses, she will be the last white presidential candidate nominated by Democrats.

Doing their version of the famous Republican 2012 loss post-mortem, Democrats will conclude that only a nonwhite candidate can turn out sufficiently large numbers of their base to elect a president. If Clinton loses in 2016, beginning in 2020 all Democrat nominees will be Black or Hispanic, or less likely Asian.

The tribalization of American politics proceeds as predicted.

Instant Analysis

Okay, I freely admit to being pleasantly surprised after all. We got the notice stuff out of the way in the post below.

For sure pollsters blew the prediction badly, as they did with Brexit in the U.K. Populist nationalism is alive and well here as well as in England.

Now, how did this unexpected election win occur? Trump got the overwhelming support of white non-college grads everyone said he'd get. Exit polls are said to have shown that substantially more white college grads voted for Trump than were expected to do so by the pundit class.

College grads knew they were supposed to support Clinton and lied about favoring Trump: they either told pollsters they were undecided or supported her. This was the real "shy Trump vote" people speculated about. The other DrC suggests a sort of non-racial "Bradley effect" operating, and I concur.

COTTonLINE first mentioned the emergence of tribal politics in March of 2014 and has returned to the topic several times. It was likely white bloc voting would become routine.

I've predicted that if Clinton lost, she will prove to be the last white candidate nominated by the Democrats for at least the next several presidential cycles. I stand by that prediction.

I expect a more fine-grained analysis of voting trends in the coming weeks will determine that African-Americans didn't turn out in nearly the numbers who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Perhaps millennials - many of whom favored Bernie Sanders - will be shown to have underperformed as well. And once again the likely Latino vote was apparently overestimated.

Political Potpourri

Have you seen the articles that claim a senior Obama economic advisor contacted the Canadian government to tell them not to worry about B.O.'s Ohio attacks on NAFTA? That Obama didn't mean any of it and to treat it as purely campaign rhetoric? Of course, when it became known, B.O. denied it ever happened. Our unimaginative friends to the north are unlikely to have made up this story, chances are it truly happened. However, now that he's been called on it, B.O. will have to act like he meant it all along.

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I've been ruminating about the irony confronting the Clintons in this election cycle. For most of the last decade and a half the Clintons have been wildly popular with African-Americans. The hyperbole included calling Bubba Bill "the first black President." More concretely, when Bill C. left the White House he moved his base of operations to an office in Harlem where he was received like the prodigal son.

African-Americans are certainly one of the major core voting groups supporting Democrats, clearly the most reliable. So...if you were to hypothetically imagine a candidate who could beat a Clinton for the Democrat nomination for President, you would have to think of a candidate who could lure this core group away from the Clintons. Logically, you would conclude that person would need to be even more attractive to African-Americans than the Clintons are, while not being so hard-edged that liberal white voters were driven away.

What amazing bad luck for the Clintons that the exact person you would have hypothetically imagined actually existed in the person of a very junior Senator from Illinois, one B. Hussein Obama. Here was a quite literal "African-American," son of an African father and an American mother, who was raised by whites and fits in comfortably in white society. The fabled Clinton electoral operation must feel like they have encountered the perfect storm. Perhaps the long primary marathon will be over Tuesday night; I think I'm about ready for it to settle down into the head-to-head battle for the Presidency.

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I was chatting politics with my brother-in-law yesterday. Each of us votes our clear-eyed self-interest and neither apologizes for doing so. He votes Democratic most of the time, as I vote Republican most of the time. It was an interesting, entirely civil discussion which revealed that we hold dissimilar world views - no surprise there. We agree that the country should work much harder to control illegal immigration, but that view will not much influence his vote in November.

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The last two presidents who have come from Texas have had a tough time of it. Democrat Lyndon Johnson didn't run for reelection as a result of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and his identification in the popular mind with that conflict. Republican George W. Bush was reelected but ended up in his second term almost as unpopular with his own party as he was with Democrats. Republicans running for the party's nomination for President have studiously avoided being identified with W.

Two other Texans who have thought to run for the Presidency - Phil Gramm, Lloyd Bentsen - have had little luck. Is there something about being a Texan that creates problems for politicians at the presidential level?

Dems' White Male Problem

Salena Zito writes politics for the Pittsburgh Tribune. Here she riffs on the Democrats' difficulties in winning the votes of white males.

White male voters haven't felt that the Democratic Party has their best interests at heart since Lyndon Johnson, the last Democrat to win a majority of their presidential votes. The further left the party pulls, the more each successive candidate or president loses white male support.

That is particularly true in the industrial Midwest, South and West. The only white males whom Democrats tend to attract are elites in urban areas — and, of course, in Hollywood.

All you need to know: Dems are the "mommy party," GOP is the "daddy party." Democrats say, "Oh, you poor thing," Republicans say, "Stand on your own two feet."

Black Turnout Down

The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog reports a major reason Clinton lost, and Trump won: voter turnout. The graphic there shows white turnout was up 2.4% for 2016 over 2012, while black turnout was down 4.7%.

It's worth noting that Hispanic turnout was up 3.8% and that for Asians up 3.0%. These increases didn't help Clinton appreciably, perhaps because substantial numbers of both voted for Trump.

In September of 2016 I wrote the following:

If Hillary Clinton loses, she will be the last white presidential candidate nominated by Democrats.

Beginning in 2020 all Democrat nominees will be Black or Hispanic, or less likely Asian.

Not looking good for Biden, Warren, Clinton, Sanders and Schumer. What are the morning line odds on Cory Booker or Kamala Harris? Harris is a twofer, she's both African-American and Asian.

Tribal politics, anyone?

Another View of a Democrat Loss

You'll recollect back in September I wrote that, if she loses, Hillary will be the last white Democrat nominated to run for president. I stand by the prediction.

Now, writing for U.S. News & World Report, Mary Cate Cary examines the question of what happens to Democrats if Clinton loses.

Cary doesn't even mention candidate race - not particularly surprising as everybody is petrified of being called "racist." Here are her three points.

First, I've long thought that the anti-establishment wave that hit the right this year is heading for the left.

Second, if Clinton loses, Democrats will have to do some soul-searching on policy.

Third, a Clinton loss means millennial voters will abandon the party en masse.

I have no particular argument with any of her three points. However Cary overlooks the extent to which Obama motivated minority voters to do what they are often don't bother to do - register and vote.

It will be surprising if Clinton can replicate Obama's majorities among minorities, or be able to win if she cannot. I presume the party will draw the obvious conclusion.

Post-Election Ruminations

In no particular order as they occur to me, my thoughts about the election yesterday.

Gov. Ron DeSantis looks like a winner, and his Florida like a model. The “red wave” began and unfortunately ended in Florida.

What strengthens DeSantis, weakens Donald Trump, while the endorsements of both had very uneven impacts at best. 

Californians who moved to Texas left California politics behind, probably a key motive in their move. TX is, if anything, more “red” than formerly, CA more “blue” and more “screwed.” Ditto those who moved to FL from the Northeast.

I hope we’ve seen the last of Beto O’Rourke, Charlie Crist, and Stacy Abrams, all lost again decisively, and quixotically.

Both parties ran weird candidates in the PA and GA senate races. They were races where you almost wished both parties could lose.

Kari Lake’s supposed ninja-like skills were overrated in AZ, ditto for Tudor Dixon in MI. Drazan in weird OR was always going to be a long shot.

I believe game theory is the best explanation for how evenly balanced the two parties are. More and more energy is put into gaining that 50% + 1 edge, crucial in the zero-sum game that our de facto two party system produces. 

Maybe the most striking thing about the night was how few seats changed parties, most places seem locked in for one party or the other. My mental image is two elk stags with their antlers so tangled that they struggle and die locked together, though I hope that isn’t prophesy.

It appears the best outcome the GOP can hope for is a deadlocked, do-nothing Congress. Compared to the last two years of D domination, it is a real improvement. 

Maybe gridlock was also the best we could hope for while a D sits in the White House? We were never going to have a veto-proof majority in the Senate. 

The polls were no more accurate than formerly, but they were inaccurate in the opposite direction! If this means an overcorrection was in place, fine. If it means something else, we may have to rethink the entire enterprise. 

The pundit class won't like rethinking polling. We've relied on polls to give us an augury of future election results - basically something to write about.

We tend to believe ticket splitting doesn't happen much. This election proved that tendency wrong. We saw significant ticket splitting in PA where the D won the governorship easily and the senate race was very close. 

Something similar happened in reverse in AZ where the governor race is close and the senate race not so much. Conclusion: candidate quality does truly matter after all.

Later ... A gradual consensus seems to be emerging, and it isn't good news for Donald Trump. People voted D when most indicators seemed to suggest they'd vote R; the last time this happened people were bummed about Richard Nixon. 

This time? Maybe it is Trump? We need some precinct-level analysis to suss out the relative impacts of abortion, Trump, and fight-to-the-death party loyalty on the disappointing outcome we got.

An Oops and an Insight

For my first post of the new year, I bring you the distilled essence of a supposedly conservative columnist's mea culpa. The New York Times' Ross Douthat spent the last two years dumping on Donald Trump and for the second year running has had to own up to his failed predictions.

So a year ago, I imagined that conservatism was sclerotic but ideologically committed, and that liberalism was wrong about the world but pretty good at fearmongering and voter targeting. But my intellect and experience were wrong, and Trump’s Napoleonic intuitions were correct: The Republicans were all low-energy men underneath, and the liberal elites were as vulnerable to him as the Cameron Tories and Blairites were to Brexit.

Now, having made grim predictions about what a Trump presidency might bring, I have no choice but to hope that I’ll be proven wrong again, that a few years hence I’ll have to write another mea culpa.

It wouldn't entirely surprise me if Douthat gets "to write another mea culpa."

For an amazing insight into the Trump mind, read an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd done for Politico. I find particularly fascinating the following:

One other thing that Todd thinks is odd: After several of his Sunday appearances as a candidate, Trump would lean back in his chair and request that the control room replay his appearance on a monitor — sans sound.

“There’s the amount of time he spends after the interview is over, with the sound off. He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute,” Todd told me, sitting in his cluttered office in NBC’s nondescript, low-slung Washington headquarters on Nebraska Avenue.

“He’s a very visual guy,” says Todd. “He thinks this way, and look, it’s an important insight in just understanding him. The visual stuff is very real beyond just himself.” It’s a source of his political effectiveness, an understanding of the blunt force of imagery that Hillary Clinton, crushed by her briefing books, could never understand.

President Reagan's Mike Deaver had this visual approach to politics and it served the Reagan White House very well indeed.

The Obama Legacy

Long-time Democratic pollster and analyst Stu Rothenberg writes for Roll Call an appraisal of the condition in which President Obama will leave the Democratic Party. Let me share with you his opening sentence, and his concluding thought:

Barack Obama was elected on a swell of energy and enthusiasm, but he might leave the Democratic Party worse off than when he took office.

Obama still has two more years to boost Democrats’ standing. But if the last two years are any guide, congressional Democrats shouldn’t count on much help from the leader of their party.

The Dem's 2016 presidential candidate will have to surmount the Obama legacy and the voters' disinclination to leave one party in the White House more than eight consecutive years.

Arguments For and Against

The 2012 presidential election will be a referendum on the performance of President Obama. Assuming the Republicans nominate a candidate viewed by the voters as serious and qualified, voters will vote for the president if they've liked his performance over the last four years, or for the Republican if they haven't liked Obama's performance.

Many pundits have suggested the president is likely to be reelected, based on a variety of arguments. Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, has done a very nice two part article which looks at their arguments in considerable detail. You can find the two parts here and here. Trende concludes:

Right now the best you can say about Barack Obama's re-election chances is that they hover roughly around 50-50, and are largely dependent on forces outside of his control.

Odds of 50-50 aren't bad but the "outside of his control" part must give the White House heartburn.