Hillary Clinton's view is that she isn't at all responsible for what happened in 2016 and she and her circle of loyalists have used this premise as a bedrock foundation on which to construct a series of often-contradictory, disingenuous and counter-factual narratives collectively adding up to one larger exculpatory myth. Her personality cult has dutifully treated all of this as if it were revealed religion but no serious analysis of 2016 can avoid the centrality of Clinton herself to her own loss.
While certainly not one of the more obnoxious Clinton cultists, Mark Olmsted still often repeats and carries water for their narratives. Witness his recent piece entitled and on the theme "If you're still blaming Hillary, you're asking the wrong questions." Of the many targets Clinton has chosen to blame for her own loss, Olmsted chooses as his primary focus the voters. "In the end," he writes, "there is no getting around the bizarre truth about 46% of the American electorate went temporarily insane, frankly."
That, of course, refers to voters during the general election, and it's no accident that this entirely ignores Democratic primary voters who sided with Clinton, a weak, loser candidate whose disgraceful 2008 campaign had already established to the satisfaction of any reasonable observer that she was a terrible campaigner, a terrible person and entirely unfit for the office. Even if one isn't old enough to have experienced that campaign as an adult, her weakness was positively screaming from the data every step of the way, long before any votes had even been cast. If any group of voters are to blame for 2016, it's the ones Olmsted avoids, those who suicidally closed their eyes to all of that and backed her. With their decision, they, in effect, elected Trump.
If one is conducting a proper autopsy of 2016 though, blaming voters doesn't really get one anywhere. Clinton has made it quite clear she feels she was entitled to the votes of people who didn't wish to give them to her but the only point in following her down that rabbit-hole is to absolve her of any real responsibility for what happened. That isn't just obnoxious and indefensible in itself, the implications of it, if Demos opt to roll with it, are that there's no need to for Democrats to reform and try to improve their party. Such a course of action--or, more precisely, a lack of one--would prove catastrophic for the party and its candidates, already in a state of crisis.
Olmsted:
"The premise is that Trump was so awful that it should have been laughable [sic] easy to defeat him. Everyone on the Democratic side actually agreed with this when she ran, which is why they concentrated so hard on making her campaign about Caligulyam's awfulness. But the same articles upbraid Clinton for this strategy, citing the real problem as her not offering a positive vision to enthuse the voters."
It's unclear what "articles" Olmsted is referencing here--whatever he may have in mind he never cites--but he has no real response to the criticism of Clinton in this either:
"This sidesteps the fact that the level of irrationality was arguably the highest among previous Obama voters who switched to Trump. Clinton was endorsed by Obama and pledged to continue his same policies. This part of the electorate wasn’t voting for or against policy--however it had been delivered."
Besides entirely dodging the criticism of Clinton he's allegedly trying to refute, this is a comically superficial analysis that makes no use of the abundant available data on these matters. A few points:
--Clinton's 2008 campaign against Obama was unspeakably ugly. Clinton repeatedly race-baited Obama, Muslim-baited him (at one point, circulating a photo of Obama in traditional Somali garb, laying the groundwork for 8 years of right-wing attacks aimed at Other-ing him), insisted white voters would never support him, even publicly offered fantasies about Obama being murdered. When voters went, instead, with Obama (whatever their feelings about him), they thought they'd rejected that appalling candidate, and even if Clinton's latest reinvention of herself is as the embodiment of the Obama legacy, people do sometimes remember.
--That effort by Clinton to draw such a close association with Obama was, in some quarters, to Clinton's doom. People simply become tired of a long-running incumbent. At the end of an 8-year administration, the opposition party invariably tries to tie the candidate of the incumbent party to the fellow already in the White House. The campaign always runs like this: "Do you really want four more years of this?"[1] In going Faux-bama, Clinton stupidly did the GOP's work for it.[2]
--People don't believe Hillary Clinton and don't trust her. That's the one thing that sticks out of her polling data above all other things; it couldn't have been clearer if it had appeared in bold, neon letters 30 feet high. Clinton was not considered honest or trustworthy. She was (correctly) perceived as an unprincipled opportunist who would say whatever she thought would be to her benefit at any given moment. That's crippling in itself. On this particular matter, no one had any reason to believe her effort to position herself as Obama's legacy would prove to be any more genuine than anything else she's ever said.
--Clinton wasn't "offering a positive vision" in the race. Her campaign ads were overwhelmingly just personal attacks on Trump. The most substance-free, in fact, in recent memory, maybe ever--per the Wesleyan Media Project, only 25% of Clinton's ads even mention policy. Olmsted's suggestion that "everyone on the Democratic side actually agreed with" focusing on "Trump's awfulness" instead of policy is laughable. The entire Democratic primary was about Bernie Sanders' efforts to get the Democratic party to adopt a positive, progressive vision for the future. At the Democratic National Committee Summer meeting in August 2015, he flat-out said that without one, Democrats would lose the White House, fail to regain the Senate and lose in the states. "The same old, same old will not be successful." Utterly--and tragically--prescient. Clinton's enthusiasm-murdering, defeatist, diminished-expectations primary campaign against Bernie Sanders yielded to her just as uninspiring "I suck less than Trump" campaign in the general. As vile as Trump undeniably was and is, he was talking about policy and even ran to Clinton's left on several key issues and as meaningless as his words may have been, he gave some little glimmer of hope to people who were angry, hurting and needing it, while the other side wasn't offering anything.[3]
--Olmsted singles out those who had previously voted for Obama then switched to Trump. There's some pretty good data on these voters courtesy of the Clintonite super PAC Priorities USA, which surveyed both the Obama-to-Trump voters and the larger body of voters who had previously supported Obama but sat out 2016 rather than cast a vote for Clinton. Its findings are devastating. Obama-to-Trump voters are people being left behind by the economy; 50% report their income is falling behind the cost of living (only 19% report it growing faster). Priorities USA breaks down O/T voters into those who say they strongly support Trump vs. those who say they have mixed feelings about him. The problem of having the unfortunate Clinton representing the Democratic ticket looms large indeed:
It's when one gets to the specific policy concerns of the O/T voters that things get particularly ugly:
With the exception of the two highlighted items, which are only prioritized by a plurality of those who say they strongly support Trump, it's a laundry-list of progressive priorities, things that would have credibly been Democratic priorities if Democrats hadn't gone with Clinton. "Why should we think," asks Olmsted, "that Sanders' message would have resonated with these same voters, even though Sanders' endorsement of Clinton (and campaigning for her) were unable to sway them?" The chart answers that question fairly decisively.
The data on those who voted for Obama then sat out 2016 are even worse. The drop-off voters are strongly Democratic; 70% of them say they have a favorable opinion of the Democratic party (28% very favorable), 74% say they have an unfavorable view of the Republican party (47% very unfavorable) and 82% have an unfavorable view of Trump (73% very unfavorable). Their priorities are even more progressive.
One of the instances in which Priorities USA gets cutesy with the data is in its presentation on why the drop-offs didn't vote, which it only breaks down by when they made their decision instead of by why, offering only a handful of anecdotes for the latter. This, which one strongly suspects is just an effort to fudge the extent to which Clinton was the problem with these voters, reminds one that this is, after all, a pro-Clinton org telling the tale. Still, Priorities USA, to its credit, has done a far better job of examining this matter than some.[4]
The election was lost in the Rust Belt and as Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr documented in Slate, that's the correct way to describe what happened; Trump didn't win previously Democratic voters, Democrats lost them. "In the Rust Belt, Democrats lost 1.35 million voters. Trump picked up less than half, at 590,000. The rest stayed home or voted for someone other than the major party candidates." There are probably a lot of things behind this and the thing that's probably most behind it is Clinton.
--Trump should have been a ridiculously simple opponent to defeat. Olmsted himself describes Trump's awfulness. There's no way around the fact that Trump was just a reality-show clown who had the highest negatives of any major-party presidential candidate in the history of polling. On election day, an average of 57.1% had an unfavorable view of him. When he defeated Clinton, her own average was 55% unfavorable, and well before the end, Trump was polling better than her on the issue of honesty, an important fact that is almost universally overlooked.
Olmsted attempts to counter the idea that Sanders would have done better than Clinton against Trump but as before, he's doing so without reference to a single fact, even though there is substantial and readily-available data on that question:
https://extranewsfeed.com/yes-sanders-would-have-won-exploding-false-clintonite-narratives-7c5a6bd17091
Obviously, one can never say with certainly how this sort of hypothetical scenario would have played out but anyone arguing Sanders would have done worse than Clinton doesn’t just do so without any supporting data, he does so in the face of all of the data.
"...if we’re still trying to figure out why Trump won," Olmsted writes, "can we just retire the laundry list of Clinton’s mistakes as the focus of the blame?"[5] But he's made no real case for doing so, and to note the obvious, an analysis that blames voters for being "insane" isn't of any value in helping guide Democrats moving forward. Clinton ran one of the historically bad campaigns. The decision to value loyalty over competence and to surround herself with yes-men and morons was hers. She was the one who opted to run that defeatist primary campaign and that "I suck less than Trump" general wherein her strategy was aimed at appealing to Republican voters. She was the one who was going out of her way at every turn to try to utterly alienate the progressive base of the Democratic party. The ongoing FBI investigation into her State Department emails was also a swamp of her own making; she was the one who chose, in an incredibly reckless manner, to set up that private server in her basement as a means of evading pubic records requirements and she was the one who ensured it was a constant presence in the news by lying about it at every turn. Her decision to run in the first place was entirely irresponsible. The truth about 2016 is that Clinton was just a politically inept, terminally out-of-touch narcissistic elitist who thought she was entitled to be elected president. No matter how one tries to dress it up, she was the problem. There's no way to "just retire the laundry list of Clinton’s mistakes as the focus of the blame" without confronting this, particularly as long as Clinton and her cult continue to deny she bears any real responsibility. That false narrative simply can't be allowed to become a Conventional Wisdom.
--j.
---
[1] This dynamic, it's worth noting, would have had minimal impact on the anti-Establishment populist Sanders.
[2] And some of us--like this writer--were raising a stink about this incredibly stupid move all along.
[3] Here, fill in the usual rant about the perils and problems of a two-party system.
[4] There have appeared at least two "studies" that purport to explain Trump's success among these groups as a result of his appeals to bigotry, offering the bizarrely counterintuitive notion that bigots voted for Obama then had some sort of racist awakening and decided to vote against Clinton. Priorities USA put the importance of Trump's appeals to bigotry in context--items like deporting illegal immigrants and building a wall on the Southern border are far less important to Obama-to-Trump voters than those many progressive priorities--and those other "studies" appear to be just another cynical variant on Clinton's "everyone's fault but mine" narrative.
[5] I'd also note that's a very questionable premise; after the entire party Establishment lined up behind her, Democrats have, as a rule, done everything possible to avoid addressing Clinton's mistakes. Among other things, the allegations of Russian interference in the election has certainly been used--rather obsessively--as a means of avoiding this matter.
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