Election 2016: From Here, Where?

The Trump Presidency stands around the corner with many Americans anxious, fearful, and angry. The President-elect lost the election by almost three million votes, but on January 20 he takes the oath of office nevertheless. Fully acknowledging that we stand with progressives, we ask: What now?

If solving a problem first requires admitting the existence of a problem, Democrats and progressives initially must take ownership of their 2016 defeat.  That compels us to suggest that former President Bill Clinton rethink his public pronouncement that Hillary Clinton overcame every obstacle standing in her way  except FBI Director James Comey’s October/November mischief and Russian computer hacking.  

Leaving aside how much either Comey’s pronouncements or the Russian interference influenced the outcome, and despite our enormous respect for the former President’s political knowledge, we think he disserves our cause by suggesting that his wife would have won but for those two dispiriting developments.  Looking at it that way allows the Clintons, and other Democrats, to evade accountability and delays the process of moving forward.

The suggestion Secretary Clinton lost only because of Comey and the Russians roughly equates to a football coach whining at the post game news conference about officiating while ignoring his team’s five turnovers.  We see at least three conceptual shortcomings in the 2016 Democratic campaign that helped lose it and, more important, have implications for the future.

Strategic    

Clinton’s failure to campaign at all in Wisconsin now symbolizes the campaign’s strategic flaws.  That, however, wasn’t the only tactical error.  The candidate’s thin schedule, when compared with Trump’s intense barnstorming, the selection of Tim Kaine as a running mate instead of a candidate who might have energized young voters (i.e. Elizabeth Warren) or voters of color (i. e. several possible Hispanic nominees), and the failure to deploy President Obama in the Midwest when he advised the campaign he should put in more time there all strike us as potentially outcome determinative decisions the campaign got wrong.

Judgment   

Hillary Clinton did not wake up in 2015 and just happen to decide she’d run for President.  That die was cast from the moment she stepped to the microphone at the 2008 Democratic convention and moved to nominate Barack Obama by acclimation. 

Given that, some decisions the Clintons made defy logic. Could not they, or those around them, imagine the problem a private e-mail server might cause in a presidential campaign?  Did none of their advisers warn them of the danger of the Secretary having ANYTHING to do with the Clinton Foundation?  With the prospect of a White House run looming, how hard was it to see that speeches to Wall Street executives might yield embarrassing quotes?  Or did someone warn them about all these things and they chose not to listen?

Message   

Secretary Clinton had the makings of a strong economic message in 2016.  She made substantive proposals on infrastructure, job retraining, health care, and tax policy that might improve the lives of the working class whites who swung the election to Trump. Clinton, however, buried her proposals in a weak slogan (Stronger Together than what?) and a conviction that if she talked enough about the evils of a Trump Presidency everything would turn out fine.  

Elections for many Americans turn on what a candidate proposes to do that will improve their lives.  Clinton never figured out how to make that case, all the while permitting the untrustworthy, unethical, unlikeable narrative to play out.

Democrats need to own up to these mistakes and not fall for the comforting eye candy implicit in the notion that ‘we wuz robbed’ by Comey and the Russians.  Why?  Avoiding such failures in coming years, that’s why.

The Future   

After the election, President Obama reminded Democrats they need to “show up,” even in hostile red territory.  He won in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan and not just with minority votes in the cities. Many working class whites in those states voted for him and, he noted, he lost some rural areas by small margins.  With the election decided by about 100,000 votes in three states, Democrats ignore his admonition at their peril.  The Clinton campaign made the decisions it made, for better or for worse, but the President’s “show up” theory offers an organizing principle Democrats should remember.

No doubt, wanna be Democratic candidates have begun plotting 2020 campaigns.  We urge them to consider the front page test: If you’re contemplating doing anything that reeks of ethical taint, ask what it will look like on the front page of the New York Times or splashed all over cable news and the internet. We may have struggled with the concept of foreseeability in law school, but it’s not hard in politics. If it might look bad in the headlines, don’t do it.

As Democrats move toward 2020, there’s already talk of who might run, who’s going to be the lead singer.  We find having a song a more important consideration for the time being. Democrats need a message for 2018 and 2020 that attracts white working class voters who deserted them in 2016, while still appealing to the Obama coalition of young voters and people of color. In fact, the party’s most difficult task may lie in keeping the messaging effort from becoming a zero sum game pitting working class whites against black and brown voters so critical to the success Democrats have had.

The irony of this circumstance lies in the fact the last two, two-term Democratic Presidents, both immensely talented politicians, pulled off exactly this trick.  Bill Clinton (he was “Bubba” at one time, you might recall) and Barack Obama won election with strong support from both groups.  It can be done. It’s mainly a matter of working at it.  Over the coming months, we’ll have plenty to say about that work.   

Your thoughts?