Another Gaggle of Post-Mortems

It's been a busy week, both in my life and in the more immediate volley from the tennis ball machine that is the Trump Presidential transition (TM Bob Cesca). I've been accumulating more columns and data dissecting last month's tragedy. I'm hoping I can pull this many into something coherent. Well, here goes.

Since I just referenced Bob Cesca, let's start with his piece from Wednesday. He asserts that the Dems really didn't experience much of a loss, having won the popular vote by so much, and the loss of white working class voters is overblown:

The shift in white blue-collar voters from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 is much more anecdotal than is being acknowledged among A-list pundits. It’s a fluke that largely reflects a narrow pocket of voters who hate Clinton due to an ongoing geyser of attacks, mostly unfair or based on nonexistent complaints, that has been erupting constantly for 25 years. This was more about a reaction in a small handful of battleground districts rather than a coast-to-coast existential crisis within the Democratic Party.

He believes the Democrats need to ignore the Beltway conventional wisdom that comes up about their party every election, win or lose, that they need to tack to the center. Rather, he feels, going left is the way to go, and he has statistics to back that up:

On health care, 86 percent of Americans with insurance policies purchased via the Affordable Care Act like their coverage. Furthermore, if we take the word “Obamacare” out of the equation, most Americans love the individual parts of the law.

Regarding taxes, 61 percent of voters surveyed think the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share in taxes and 67 percent believe corporations aren’t paying enough.

Concerning Wall Street, 58 percent of those surveyed support breaking up the big banks. Much of the credit here should go to Sen. Bernie Sanders, for setting an example of how Democrats can sell leftist issues without apology.

On income inequality, 66 percent of respondents agree that wealth should be more evenly distributed.

When it comes to college tuition, 62 percent of those polled want debt-free higher education.

Regarding abortion, most Americans surveyed believe abortion should remain legal in some if not all circumstances. Only 19 percent of voters think it should be illegal in all cases.

I'm with him on policy; not sure yet on the "WWC." (though I'm leaning that way, there are stats showing otherwise too)

Just one disagreement, and it's more a matter of degree because I think it's overblown:

The shift in Republican control over state legislatures, governorships and the U.S. Congress is less a consequence of the Democratic platform and more about the rise of conservative media, conservative propaganda and, yes, fake news.

Yes, conservative media and fake news are problems, but the bigger factor, as I've said in the past, appears to be how the mainstream media covers politics. I'm not going to link to anything I've written, because the inimitable Driftglass has written a tour de force (the danged thing, including citations, is about 5000 words) about it (SOMEBODY PAY THE MAN -- DAVID BROCK, I'M TALKING TO YOU). Take it away, Mr. Glass:

This is why I can tell you that this idea that "better messaging" to the white working class is somehow the royal road back to political majorities for the Democratic party is nonsense.  Sure, Democrats always need to work on speaking like mortal human beings and progressives in general suffer from an inexplicable inability to kill the fucking bunny even with all the claws and fangs at their disposal:

But messaging itself is not the problem.  The media is the problem.  And since, as the man said, the medium is the message, until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we're going to go right on losing.

This is shaping up to be a long post because sometimes I feel the need to drive a point home using a great big hammer, so if you want to scroll on down, be my guest.  But before you move along, my premise is fairly easy to summarize:

For a variety if reasons, white working class Americans have been taking a pounding since the late 1970s.  And for a different variety of reasons, a disturbingly high number number of white working class Americans keep voting for the people that fuck them over.

Judging by policy statements made, resources allocated, attention paid and political capitol spent, it's quite likely that history will judge the Obama Administration to have been the most consistently pro-manufacturing administration since Eisenhower.  In fact, outside of health care (and turkey pardons), I would wager a penny and a fiddle of gold that in the last eight years the Obama administration put more effort into promoting American manufacturing than into any other domestic policy priority.

If you are a member of the general public, unless you made an extra special effort to inform yourself, you are blissfully unaware of any of this.

If you are blissfully unaware of any of this, it is not because the Obama Administration failed to talk it up at every single opportunity, but because over the last eight years the American political media collectively decided that instead of boring-ass stories about what the Democratic party has been trying to do to improve the lives and futures of the working class Americans, what you needed to hear were lively fairy tales about Birth Certificates and Death Panels.  Email servers and Benghaaaazi.  A Republican rebranding scam called the "Tea Party".  Instead of stories about the Caucus Room Conspiracy and Republican sabotage and sedition, you needed to hear endlessly, plaintive cries from all the usual Beltway hacks about how Barack Obama was refusing to lead!

So, as the late, great Al Smith used to say, let's take a look at the record...

I have spent a couple of days going over hundreds of White House press releases, public statements, sections of each of President Obama's State of the Union addresses, etc. all on the subject of American manufacturing.  This is a small, representative sample from that gargantuan pile, with emphasis added by me as the spirit moves me.  

And he presents exactly that. Bottom line, the Obama administration presided over the creation of 800,000 new manufacturing jobs since the end of the Bush recession (note that that's about the likely exaggerated number that Bernie Sanders said NAFTA cost the sector, so at worst the Democrats caused a net gain over time, and that's if you even consider NAFTA a Democratic deal) , but nobody noticed because the media rarely talked about it.

Anyway, read the whole thing, but I want to bring in a little more detail from a couple of the articles Driftglass cites.

Tons of useful stuff (of course), from Rick Perlstein. The meat for me, for the purpose of my post-morteming:

Trump boogied his way to Pennsylvania Avenue to the tune of the extraordinary finding by a Washington Post-ABC News poll that “corruption in government” was listed by 17 percent of voters as the most important issue in the presidential election, second only to the economy, and ahead of terrorism and health care—and that voters trusted Trump over Clinton to be better on the issue by a margin of 48 to 39 percent, her worst deficit on any issue. This is the part of my article where rhetorical conventions demand I provide a thumbnail sketch of all the reasons why it’s factually absurd that anyone would believe that Donald Trump is less corrupt than Hillary Clinton. I have better things to do with my time than belabor the obvious.

Yet somehow, the great mass of Americans believed Clinton was the crook. Might it have something to do with the myriad articles like, say, “Smoke Surrounds the Clinton Foundation,” by The Los Angeles Times’s top pundit Doyle McManus? This piece, all too typically, despite endeavoring to debunk Trump claims of Clinton corruption, repeated charges like “Doug Band, who helped create the Clinton Global Initiative, sought access to State Department officials for Clinton Foundation donors”—even though donors did not get that access). And that donors harbored the “assumption” that they would “move to the head of the line”—even though they never did.

Trump gave absolutely no indication that he was anything but corrupt since the first time he ever seriously considered running for President back in 2000. And it's not even worth linking to how corrupt he's turning out to be as President-Elect because it would take me from now until Inauguration Day just to cover the first week post-election.

And what were pundits like McManus smoking? The vapors from a cunning long-term disinformation campaign run by the man Donald Trump appointed as his chief White House political strategist. Steve Bannon chartered a nonprofit “Government Accountability Institute,” whose president, Peter Schweizer, hacked out an insinuation-laden tome, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, then offered its “findings” on an exclusive pre-publication basis to the Times, which shamefully accepted the deal—with, predictably, the public’s perceptions of Clinton’s trustworthiness cratering in tandem with our national Newspaper of Record’s serial laundering of Steve Bannon’s filth.

So where did it come from? A book published by STEVE BANNON that the New York Times took as gospel for just long enough to not be able to put that cat back in the bag. This is why I tend to fact-check the Times nearly as much as I do PolitiUncutCo or whatever these days. The New York Times has been at the wide end of the anti-Clinton puke funnel since the Whitewater days. Fuck 'em. I'm never subscribing.

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic makes a point I tried to make a couple of weeks back -- Hillary did have a message for the working class (white or not):

But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.

She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word  “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.

What’s more, the evidence that Clinton lost because of the nation’s economic disenchantment is extremely mixed. Some economists found that Trump won in counties affected by trade with China. But among the 52 percent of voters who said economics was the most important issue in the election, Clinton beat Trump by double digits. In the vast majority of swing states, voters said they preferred Clinton on the economy. If the 2016 election had come down to economics exclusively, the working class—which, by any reasonable definition, includes the black, Hispanic, and Asian working classes, too—would have elected Hillary Clinton president.

The more frightening possibility for liberals is that Clinton didn’t lose because the white working class failed to hear her message, but precisely because they did hear it.

That message either wasn't heard, or Trump's message of fear, xenophobia, and hate resonated more with whites because they care about keeping others down than improving or even maintaining their own lot in life (which is basically the definition of a conservative).

After everything I've read over the last month, I'm inclined to agree with that last sentence. But Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr at Slate do not (go figure; contrarianism for contrarianism's sake is essentially what Slate is about). But I'm willing to hear them out without much commentary from me. These are their five main points supporting their thesis about how Hillary lost the Rust Belt rather than Trump winning it:

1. In the Rust Belt 5, the GOP’s pickup of voters making $50,000 or less is overshadowed by the Democrats’ dramatic loss of voters in that category.

2. Republicans in the Rust Belt 5 picked up almost as many wealthy voters making over $100,000 as voters who made less than $50,000.

3. Trump did not flip white voters in the Rust Belt who had supported Obama. Democrats lost them.

4. The 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.

The work of Martin Longman, whom I've cited a lot on this, plus the fact that Trump appears to have hit the high water mark for Republicans (more on that another time) in terms of total votes while Hillary appears to be approaching the second-highest mark in the popular vote for any candidate, ever. But I'll be digging into their work more because their viewpoint is as valid as any, until it's not.

Ari was just saying to me that in the last week, undecided broke for Trump, and he and many others believe that's due to the Comey letter. Kevin Drum's got a post up about the generally negative coverage of the campaign, but this is the part that stands out to me:

I can see how the Comey letter would dip Clinton's numbers at the end, but why did the media (relatively) fawn all over Trump over the last three weeks? Did they shine a positive light on his sexual assault stories? I honestly don't remember; once I started working heavily with the campaign in October, I mostly only had time to keep my eye on the polls more than the stories.

What post-morteming since 1992 would be complete without talking about conservative evangelical Christians? Digby shares a Washington Post article that tells us that conservative evangelicals sided with Trump because of some Supreme Court decision from last year:

The presidential election was so close that many factors were “but-for” causes of Donald Trump’s victory. One that’s been mostly overlooked is Trump’s surprising success with religious voters. According to exit polls, Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, and Hillary Clinton only 16 percent. Trump did significantly better than the overtly religious Mitt Romney and the overtly evangelical George W. Bush. He likely over-performed among other theologically conservative voters, such as traditionalist Catholics, as well. Not bad for a thrice-married adulterer of no discernible faith.

To what can we attribute Trump’s success? The most logical answer is that religious traditionalists felt that their religious liberty was under assault from liberals, and they therefore had to hold their noses and vote for Trump.

The DID NOT "hold their noses and vote for Trump." They enthusiastically voted for Trump. They had 16 other god-bothering candidates they could've voted for in the primary, yet they voted for him. Why? For the same reason the "white working class" did. Fear, hate, and xenophobia. These are the same people who tried to hold on to segregation as stridently and longer than just about anyone else. Trump gave them a much more luscious taste of that cracker-white apple than Bush, McCain, or Romney did. As we Jewish people say, "Zehu!"

Washington Post, you should know better already.

From the Washington Post to the Washington Monthly:

We’ve heard for months now that Donald Trump is as much a threat to the Republican Party as to the Democrats – and that part of his appeal was being tough on both of the stale/corrupt two parties.

Sure enough, there is evidence that on November 8, voters simultaneously said they liked Trump but disliked Republicans. Because the Democrats fell short of both expectations and winning power, it was barely noticed that:

40% of voters viewed Republicans favorably compared to 47% for the Democrats.

The triumphant, newly-re-elected Republican Congress has a 15% approval rating.

Republicans did lose two Senate seats and six House seats – a horrible disappointment for Democrats but still, you know, an actual loss of seats.

More people voted for Democrats in the Senate races than for Republican.

And yet the Republican Party has more power now than it has in decades, and is acting as if the party received a tidal-wave mandate.

Why? Because they cheat.

Aaaaand finally, I have to *#%@ing celebrate the return of the Rude Pundit, who comes back just in time to make the cut on this post. And he needed no stretching, or shootaround, or practice swings... he's on fire:

When I first put myself in a self-imposed time out, one of the reasons was that I was really fucking pissed at myself for getting the presidential election so wrong, for thinking that it was a no-brainer that Hillary Clinton would be elected, that the country wasn't so stupid and deluded and hateful that it would elect a fuzzy, bulbous fungus in human form instead.

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But lately, I've come around to another way of thinking. I wasn't wrong. Our election system is so innately fucked that it got it wrong. Right now, Clinton is up by nearly 3 million votes. That's 2 percent more than Donald Trump, with a lead that's growing with every precinct finalized. Yeah, yeah, she didn't win the presidency. But I wasn't wrong about the country. Nearly 54% of voters rejected Trump. And a plurality supported Clinton by far.  

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Trump won because the Founders created a fucked-up system to make slave states feel wanted because conservatives have always thrown a fit if you don't just accept their ignorance. We can delude ourselves and say that "in their wisdom" the Founders created the Electoral College as a way to put the brakes on the election of a vile blithering idiot with dictatorial aspirations. But it's that very system that has gotten us to this point.

And the kicker, which is an actual, honest-to-FSM ACTION that addresses the desperate pleas I've made the last two days, which agreeing with me about the reason said action just ain't gonna happen:

(If Clinton truly wanted to fight, she'd take Lawrence Lessig's advice and go after the constitutionality of the apportionment of the electors. Republicans would do it in a heartbeat if the electoral and popular vote were reversed. But Democrats never fight like that. The GOP is throwing sand in our eyes and stomping us while we're wondering why the ref doesn't call a penalty.) 

Fuck yes, Mr. Papa. Welcome back to the good fight.

Reading Assignment in Lieu of Original Stuff

Josh Marshall on the Democrats and identity politics.

Oy, The Rural Voters Again?

Yup. I'm again highlighting Booman's series about reaching out to rural and exurban voters in order for the Democrats to regain control of the country. It's one of the most important series of posts post-election that I've read. I'm not totally committed to Booman's conclusion that the change in rural and exurban voting was the factor that tipped the scales to Trump, but it's a factor I will look at very closely once we have the final tallies, and I also see the breakdowns from other states besides Booman's great analysis of Pennsylvania.. Says Booman:

The challenge is not just to sustain and hopefully grow their plurality base of voters, but to change the demographic nature of their supporters. This is why you’ll hear people like me say that the Democrats absolutely cannot ignore that they lost 75%-80% of the white vote in county after county in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest. This is the kind of racial voting we’ve seen in the South for years, and if it becomes the norm in the North it will make it impossible for the Democrats to win control of state legislatures in that region, make it nearly impossible to win back the U.S. House of Representatives, and give the Republicans a narrow opening to win the Electoral College with a minority of the popular vote, again.

A lot of people do not like the sound of that. But I don’t care how it sounds. It isn’t a value statement or an assessment of worth. It’s just a diagnosis of a problem. How you solve it, if it can be solved, is what ought to be controversial. The fact that it needs to be solved should not.

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But, unless the left is content to be a permanent minority in state legislatures and in Congress, and to lose presidential elections it should win, it has to solve this problem.

And part of solving it is in understanding how certain decisions and behaviors from the Democratic base made it easier for Trump to convince the white people in these counties that the Democrats were hostile and not on their side. I mean, this is a big challenge in any case, but the least we can do is not make it more difficult through our own myopic reaction.

If in fact it is the case, he's right. We have to figure out the how to solve the problem. But where I differ from some other liberals is that the solution needs to be at the expense of other groups in the big Democratic tent. We HAVE an economic message, and most people are on our side on most of the important issues. What we need to do is figure out how we get that message to these voters, not just past Alex Jones, Breitbart, etc; we need the mainstream media to talk about things other than e-mails. It took the Republicans a couple of decades of focused effort to gain influence over the media and other institutions. Who's going to write the Democratic equivalent of the Powell Memo? Hey, I might someday...

The Kochs Bolstered Trump's GOTV

After hearing (and saying myself) for months about how Hillary's ground game was going to easily outperform Trump's, I still was scratching my head yesterday about how Trump not only turned out his voters, but also changed the minds of Obama voters. TPM has some info on how Trump may have been able to measure up to Clinton in that regard:

Despite loud pronouncements from Charles Koch that his network would not support Trump, the Kochs’ massive political operation worked over many months to turn out Republican voters in key states. Above all, AFP was deeply involved in get-out-the-vote efforts, especially in the critical swing states of Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.

Publicly available numbers suggest that AFP’s grassroots organizing made a real difference – and indirectly helped Trump, who had little campaign capacity of his own. In Wisconsin, for instance, AFP claims that it reached over 2.5 million voters in phone banking and canvassing efforts. In North Carolina, AFP claimed over 1.2 million calls and 120,000 door-to-door efforts, or nearly the entire reported margin of victory for Trump. And in Pennsylvania, AFP claims it made over 2.4 million phone calls and knocked on over 135,000 doors, more than twice Trump’s margin of victory in that state. AFP’s grassroots efforts were especially pronounced in Florida, where AFP boasts that its people knocked on a record-breaking one million doors throughout the state to help re-elect Senator Marco Rubio. Hillary Clinton lost the state by just over 100,000 votes. In all four of these states AFP helped to re-elect the incumbent Republican Senator and make important down ballot gains. Obviously, given what we know about the decline of split ticking voting, most of the same citizens AFP mobilized for state and Congressional contests also cast ballots for Donald Trump.

That would certainly explain a lot, if true. Once all data is available, we need to figure out exactly what each campaign's ground game did, and who initiated it (the candidates, the parties, outside groups like AFP), and see what it all added up to.

And I don't even have to say how awful this is for democracy...

Pedaling that Unification Bicycle

Because there's always someone who can say things better than I can, Echidne makes the point about the Democrats not needing to drop anti-racism to increase support from the rural areas in the Midwest:

I'm going to take a guess on economic progress in that context, on trying to revive the ghost towns of the Rust Belt, on trying to stop the ravages that outsourcing and globalization have wrought there and on trying to make the Democratic Party refocus on combating income inequality and other similar economic topics.

But doing so doesn't mean that the party should drop human rights and civil rights concerns.  It should be able to chew gum and pedal that unification bicycle at the same time.  The political games inside the Party do not have to be zero-sum games.

The question will remain, what's the right balance of chewing and pedaling? It's going to take some time to figure that out.

Is Antitrust the Answer to the Rural Voting Deficit?

Martin Longman has posted more about winning about the rural vote, particularly in Pennsylvania. If his electoral analysis for Pennsylvania holds for the other Rust Belt states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio), winning at least a portion of this vote back could be the most important factor in putting the country back in the right direction. Because of extensive redistricting, the Dems are at such a disadvantage in many downticket races that they need to do much better than 51-49 overall to gain control of the Senate, the House, and the state legislatures.

His strategy for doing this is for the Democrats to embrace antitrust practices:

Another is the one I have been focusing on which is using anti-trust law to bring back small business ownership in rural America. This should be coupled with a set of policies aimed at empowering people to learn the skills and get access to the capital to start small businesses. The promise isn’t to bring back the factories but to bring back the Mom and Pop hardware stores and banks and pharmacies. These are businesses that cannot be outsourced and that used to be privately owned instead of franchised.

Perhaps the national Democratic Party will be somewhat divided on these issues, but nothing prevents populist Democrats from running on this set of policies in rural communities all over the country.

I'd love it if I saw it working at all; I mean, antitrust was the original main focus of this blog. But it would seem to me that rural areas would be an especially difficult place to push this narrative, even if it would be really good for them. At this point, aren't they all very dependent on Wal-Marts and other big box stores? How do the Dems even try that without being overwhelmed by pro-big box propaganda?

Breaking Down the Vote by Geography in Pennsylvania, Part II

Back on the topic of the results in Pennsylvania and what we can learn from them, if the Dems have in fact alienated rural voters to an extent where it'll be very tough to overcome by getting out more of the urban and suburban vote, then we need to place a ton of resources into, as Booman (Martin Longman) says:

Unfortunately, this can’t be swept under the rug. And the Democrats cannot afford to make this political behavior become habitual and culturally ingrained in the North as it already is in the South.

Progressives need programs, strategies and organizing in these communities. And they need it now.

We need that no matter what. Even if we could win the presidency every time without rural voters, we still have Senate, House, gubernatorial, state legislative, and other seats to win. At the same time, we do not have unlimited resources. Someone with access to more data and more time to crunch numbers will have to determine the proper allocation of resources. We'll also have to think about how to break the bubble of right wing media.

I'd like to throw one more thing into the mix by playing devil's advocate for a minute here.

Putting aside the racist and xenophobic messages, which I do think were important to Trump's winning over these voters, could it be that the combination of the candidate and his method of campaigning (which I admittedly watched with glee because I thought they were totally the wrong way to campaign), was perfect for reaching the rural voter? After all, rural America was the home of the traveling road show, the medicine show... messages spread out throughout the countryside about the miracle snake oil? Was Rudy Giuliani the geek?

Do the Republicans have any other raging assholes (yes, in spades), with the demagogic charisma (maybe?), with the kind of celebrity (sorta), who could pull off the campaign Trump did? Not on the same level. Assuming for a minute that the rural splits from Pennsylvania hold for other states the Dems need, could Trump's unique brand of circus rage-gasm have been the difference between that 70-30 2012 split in rural areas in 2012 and the 80-20 one in 2016? If so, that's something we need to take into consideration. I don't see the Republicans selecting anyone "moderate" if Trump doesn't run for re-election (it still hurts my head to think that the "re" part is a thing), but whether they do or don't might be a major factor in how the Democrats should strategize going forward. Ted Cruz might be the heir apparent, and I think he doesn't fit the Trump mold that well. Would Jeb! draw 15,000 people three times a day?

While you think about it, here's a better medicine show:

Breaking Down the Vote by Geography in Pennsylvania

I've been mulling over this post by Martin Longman from a few days ago about voter turnout in Pennsylvania. He lives in suburban Philly and knows the area well.

It’s not rocket science to figure this out. Clinton got more votes out of the cities and more votes out of the suburbs (where turnout was actually up) and she still turned a 300,000 cushion into a nearly 70,000 vote defeat. What happened is that where Obama lost the smaller more rural counties in the 70-30 range, Clinton lost them in closer to an 80-20 range. And if you spread that out across the commonwealth’s 67 counties, it swamped the Democrats and cost them not only the state’s 20 Electoral College votes but what should have been a pickup of a U.S. Senate seat.

For Clinton, and most observers, it wasn’t thought possible that she could lose if she not only netted her votes out of the cities but did better than Obama in the suburbs. It made perfect sense for her to stay focused on urban turnout and persuasion in the suburbs and she undoubtedly met all her benchmarks. 

Now, Pennsylvania is unique in some ways and it can’t be perfectly compared to any other state, but this general phenomenon can be observed in Florida and in Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, too. 

What happened here wasn’t a general failure to persuade white professionals in the suburbs or to mobilize the targeted cities in key swing states. It was a collapse of Democratic support in areas that were already voting heavily against the Democrats by unhealthy percentages.

People will want to go over these results with a fine-toothed comb, and I await that analysis, but the collapse of the Democrats in these rural counties isn’t tolerable if the left ever wants to control the House of Representatives or the state legislatures in most of the country. I know people are angry that these voters were willing to overlook or even actively support Trump’s racist idiotic campaign, but the Democrats will need to do better than winning 20% in these areas. It’s likely that the suburbs will continue to move away from the Trumpian Republican Party and that may solve the Electoral College problem. It won’t solve the other problems, though.

Two issues here:

First, why didn't this show up in the polling? Going into Election Day, 538's polling averages had Clinton up 3.7%, a pretty substantial lead. I'm not a statistician, but this would be pushing the boundaries of the margin of error. I'm trying to look at the crosstabs for the final CNN poll, but there's no geographic breakdown. Did the polls generally undersample rural areas? It's going to be tough for us to know how to properly campaign and GOTV if we're not polling correctly.

Second, was this the case in other states where Dems underperformed the polls, such as NC, FL, OH, WI, and MI? I haven't had a chance to take a look yet; I'm wondering if anyone else has. If this was the case, Longman is probably right. In the David Remnick New Yorker article I talked about yesterday, he mentioned that one of the first signs that Obama and his political director saw something being wrong was that there were surprising results coming out of rural areas in Florida.

I don't think we're anywhere near making conclusions, and won't be for a while, but I'll have another post up in the next 24 hours with a little more about Longman's post, particularly about why the Dems would be having problems in rural areas and what they might do to change that.