Note to readers: This is the first of this year's "classic" columns, i.e., an opportunity for Dorf on Law
to take a break for the holidays while giving interested readers an opportunity to read some of our favorite recent columns. This piece was first published on January 27, 2017, a week into Donald Trump's presidency. Although I believe that it holds up rather well, I will note that the sixth paragraph includes this: "More
to the point, those of us who oppose Trump are optimistic enough to
believe that a large number of his current supporters are not
permanently in his camp."
Hmmm. How well has that optimistic belief held up? In any case, enjoy!
by Neil H. Buchanan
There is now a received
wisdom about the 2016 election that goes something like this: Trump was
inevitably going to win, and the reason no one saw it coming was that
journalists live in liberal bubbles in coastal cities and do not know
any Trump voters.
If only these journalists had "gotten
out there" and interviewed Real Americans, rather than holding them in
contempt, they would have felt --
really felt -- the pain of
these voters. This story then holds that those angry voters naturally
voted for Trump because he is the ultimate outsider, and they felt in
their guts that his solutions were just what is needed to reverse the
pain in their lives. Sticking it to those annoying elitists was an
added bonus.
But what if that received wisdom is
wrong? More importantly, what if this new conventional wisdom is
actually more condescending to voters -- more the result of the liberal
bubble inhabitants' biases and groupthink than of actually applying
logic to evidence -- than the supposedly arrogant narrative that it
replaced?
I offered an initial assessment of this already-established narrative
back on December 1, quoting one analyst who
wrote: "Trump is president because of a regional revolt
... . White people generally didn’t deliver the White House to Trump, however much they enabled him; the Rust Belt did."
As
that quote implies, everyone is trying very hard only to talk about the
Trump voters who are not racists or otherwise bigoted. For obvious
reasons, the question of race in the election is a sensitive one, as I
have explored recently. (See
here and
here.)
More
to the point, those of us who oppose Trump are optimistic enough to
believe that a large number of his current supporters are not
permanently in his camp. Yes, Trump has undeniably brought some
ugliness into the mainstream, not all of which will go away any time
soon. But we need to believe that most people are inherently good.
The
instant consensus noted above -- that liberal journalists missed the
real story -- relies in large part on the idea that Trump won his
sliver-thin margins in several now-post-industrial states by flipping
formerly Democratic voters to his side. If that really is the story,
then the last two and a half months of hand wringing about those white
working class voters is obviously a necessary step in Democrats' efforts
to return to political prominence.
The problem is that the data never quite told the story that everyone now thinks is true. The same day that I wrote about "
reaching the reachable Trump voters," in fact, two scholars published
a piece in Slate
in which they looked at voting data from what they called the Rust Belt
5 -- Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The story they
tell is quite interesting and surprising.
As everyone
should know by now, three of those states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and
Wisconsin) provided the Electoral College edge for Trump.
As I calculated recently,
if fewer than 54,000 Trump voters in those three states had flipped to
Clinton, we would not currently be scratching our heads about
"alternative facts" or worrying about trade wars (and shooting wars).
The authors of the
Slate
piece, Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr, point out that the
data support a distinctly different story from the "angry white working
class voters flocked to Trump" narrative. It is not that the raw vote
totals are wrong, so it does remain true that the equivalent of the
population of
Elyria, Ohio swung the election for Trump. That by itself remains an astonishing fact.
Kilibarda
and Roithmayr, however, describe the so-called Rust Belt revolt as a
myth because "[t]he real story—the one the pundits missed—is that voters
who fled the Democrats in the Rust Belt 5 were twice as likely either
to vote for a third party or to stay at home than to embrace Trump."
Overall,
more than a half million under-$50,000 voters who had voted for Obama
in 2012 did not vote at all in 2016. Furthermore, fewer than two-thirds
of the white voters who had voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump
last year, and those who stayed home or who voted for a third party
totaled 220,000 -- more than enough to swing the election for Clinton.
So
even if we are looking only for data to support the
angry-working-class-whites narrative, we end up with a chunk of those
voters who never embraced Clinton but who certainly could not join their
angry friends at Trump rallies.
In addition, the Republicans picked up as many voters in those states
whose incomes are above $100,000 annually as they did among voters who
earn less than $50,000. It was not really a working class revolt after
all.
More shockingly, Democrats also lost 400,000 votes
among the "black, indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) vote,"
compared to 2012. One third of those voters, for reasons known only to
them, voted for Trump in 2016. Put another way, more than 260,000
Democratic voters of color fell away in 2016 by not voting or by voting
for a third-party candidate.
Therefore, the notion that
down-on-their-luck white voters flipped to Trump is
not exactly wrong -- enough such voters did so to make up the deficit
that Clinton needed, many times over -- but only motivated thinking
by pundits could have turned this into the dominant theme of the
post-election discussion.
In some ways, this distorted
pundit-led discussion is an example of what can usefully be called an
insta-consensus. On election night, shocked analysts were casting about
for a story to tell, and Trump's bigoted campaign rhetoric all but
begged for that story to be about angry white voters. Everyone was
being sensitive not to call the white Trump voters
themselves bigots, so this had to be spun as a story about misunderstood
downscale white people.
This kind of distorted
insta-consensus is actually all too common. Perhaps the most dramatic
example is the completely false narrative that emerged after the mass
shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. The entire story that was
told about that horrific event -- a "trench-coat" mafia of goth-obsessed
kids wreaking revenge on the popular jocks who had tormented them --
turned out to be utterly false. Yes, I was surprised, too.
Although that example is extreme, the 2016 election post mortem is in its own way just as misguided.
Because
so many liberals are willing to believe the negative stereotypes that
they hear about themselves -- "Well, gee, I really don't like tractor
pulls, and I do laugh at candidates in the Iowa caucuses when they eat
fried cheese" -- I strongly suspect that this new narrative is a
peculiar form of penance for people who deep down are ashamed when Sarah
Palin describes other places as "the real America."
I recently read
a long article by the journalist George Packer in
The New Yorker,
which was published a week before the election. It is a fascinating
read, in part because it shows that whatever else one might say about
Hillary Clinton, she was keenly aware of the populist rumblings among
working class voters and was actually quite focused on winning them
over.
Packer's piece is not without its weaknesses.
Any journalistic effort that actually takes Thomas Friedman and Charles
Murray seriously as thinkers is not on strong ground, after all. In any
event, Packer focuses on the idea that the white voters who were drawn
to Trump were understandably angry with supposed liberal elites.
Packer quotes Murray: "The energy coming out of the new lower class really only needed a voice,
because they are so pissed off at people like you and me. We
so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them—'flyover
country.'"
And there it is again, the supposed
condescension and disdain that Trump's voters are now thought to have
been rebelling against. The problem is that all of this solicitude for
the feelings of Trump's voters is itself insulting, condescending, and
disdainful. One can imagine Murray and Packer whispering: "Shhhh.
Don't say anything bad about them, because they hate that.
They're very sensitive!"
To use the insult that the pundits on Fox News are now wrongly
hurling at college students, people like Packer seem to think that working class
white people are "snowflakes" -- fragile, pathetic, and weak losers who
will melt if someone says something unpleasant to them.
Surely,
no one likes it when others are being condescending. But I frankly
think that working class voters can take it when they find out that
their leaders don't like fried butter on a stick.
When I
was growing up in a working-class suburb of Toledo, Ohio, we knew that
Ohio was the butt of jokes (and within Ohio, Toledo was the butt of
jokes). When I went to college, for example, a kid from a suburb on
Long Island (a suburb that was surely no different from my suburb) asked
with a smirk, "How many cows do you have on your farm?" It was stupid,
but who cares? We were stronger than that.
Moreover,
as I have pointed out again and again, it is also condescending to
Trump's voters to say that they hate elites but somehow they cannot bear
to be told that Trump is conning them by installing people in power who
really look down on working people. (When the Koch brothers are
not pouring money into Republican campaigns, they are endowing operas
and ballets in liberal, disdainful, condescending, elitist New York
City.)
People can be stubborn, so we can depend on
Trump's voters to deny that they made a mistake in voting for Trump.
Indeed, we can be sure that the non-voters who actually flipped the
election to Trump will be even more insistent that their acts of
omission were not the reason for Trump's rise.
But it
is essential to engage with these voters and non-voters and show them
that Trump's promise to bring back the jobs of the fifties and sixties
is a cynical lie. That is going to upset some people, but that is
politics. The alternative is to refuse to engage on the issues at all.
People
are not snowflakes, and they can handle adult conversations in which
they are challenged to rethink their positions. For liberal pundits to
think otherwise, and to imagine that white working-class voters will
suddenly change their views if liberals learn to love pork rinds, is
what real condescension looks like.
