Elections and Airplane Crashes

            A few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a wonderful book called Outliers: The Story of Success.  He offered intriguing theories about life and achievement, including the notion that real competence in any endeavor requires doing that endeavor for 10,000 hours. Leaving aside the fact a few social scientists scoffed at Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule because, they contended, he offered insufficient empirical data in support of it, we’ve found the 10,000 hour idea, and others he advances, compelling.  One of those offers a path for analyzing the election, his way of looking at airplane crashes.

Gladwell devoted most of his attention to cultural factors, like inadequate cockpit communication born out of the reluctance of co-pilots from some cultures to challenge captains about things they saw going wrong because to do so would have been to question authority in a way their societies don’t permit.  Gladwell, however, also made a point some others make about air crashes – that many result from the cascading effect of little things going wrong that add up to a major catastrophe. In most instances, removal of any one of these “little things” from the equation would have averted the crash.  As we think about Gladwell’s view of air crashes, the more parallels we see with the election.

Little Things The issue of race figures prominently in most analyses we’ve seen of the election.  Pundits point out Donald Trump’s support among white working class voters, add in his offensive rhetoric about ethnic groups, and the instant analysis says Trump won because of a white backlash against immigrants, Muslims, the first black president, etc. More left-leaning analysts saw Trump’s appeal to white voters in general, and Hillary Clinton’s weakness among them, and concluded that out-and-out white racism decided the election.

Then, there is the matter of Clinton’s complicity in her own defeat.  People supporting this theory look at both the technical/strategic and the personal.  At a technical/strategic level, they point to her campaign’s failure to see—until it was too late – Trump’s surge in the upper Midwest and her selection of Tim Kaine as a running mate instead of a Hispanic, like Housing Secretary Julian Castro, who might have produced a larger Hispanic vote for the Democrats.  These analysts, in effect, argue that Clinton could have denied Trump the White House just by running a better railroad.  On the personal front, others take her to task for the flaws that created some of her heaviest political baggage, such as her penchant for privacy and secrecy that likely led to installation of the private e-mail server. Another variation of this argument focuses on ill-advised decisions Clinton (and her husband) made before the campaign – giving the Wall Street speeches, how the Clinton Foundation operated, filling her circle with corporate and social elites instead of cultivating more relationships with working class people.

Happenings Then, of course, some things just happened, beginning with FBI Director James Comey’s meddling in the election in the name of keeping a promise to Congress.  Nothing required Comey to make that promise in the first place and nothing compelled him to speak on either of the two occasions he did during the last days of the campaign --- October 28 when he dropped his first bombshell letter and the Sunday before the election when he tried to clean up the mess with an exculpatory letter. The damage was done.

We could go on with the list of theories about why Trump won and Clinton lost, but we’ve made the point. Any of these things, if changed just a little, could have altered the outcome of the election.  In that sense, the 2016 election resembles the air crashes Gladwell describes in Outliers.  No one will ever explain the result by reference to just one thing or one set of things. The outcome just shows how complex and nuanced a world we inhabit.

Lessons What do we learn from looking at the election through this disaster prism?   Three lessons, we suggest.  First, be careful about drawing broad simplistic conclusions.  As journalist Mark Shields reminded us last week, many of the rural and small town areas in Michigan and Wisconsin that Trump carried so solidly went for Barak Obama in 2008 and 2012.  That should give us pause about automatically casting the inhabitants of those areas as bigoted, narrow-minded racists promoting mass backlash. Without absolving them from complicity in Trump’s nastiness, we can acknowledge that maybe they mostly seek a magic bullet that will expunge the effects of the things that make them feel left out of the new economic and cultural order.  Obama promised “change” too. Maybe that message, not the color of the messenger, rings truest with them.

Second, campaigns matter.  Trump ran a terrible campaign as measured by traditional standards of the craft. But, it didn’t matter, given his celebrity status. Clinton, on the other hand, supposedly the superior technical politician, made critical mistakes.  The three of us are avid sports fans and we know what will get any football or basketball team beat, no matter the difference in talent – turnovers.  Hillary turned the ball over plenty in this campaign and it eventually caught up with her.

Finally, in campaigns as in air crashes, some things happen that no pilot can control. If the tail section breaks off no amount of pilot skill can save the plane. That’s probably the best analogy for the Comey letters.  Sometimes things just happen.

A zillion ways exist to look at this election. For progressives like us, it was a disaster of the first order. But trying to assign one simple explanation makes it all the more likely something like this will occur in the future. We need to know all the possible causes, no matter how small.