What does the working class look like?

Google defines the working class as the social group consisting of people who are employed for wages, especially in manual or industrial work. But that basically points to blue collar workers. During this past election cycle, the media referred to the working class as the working poor. So let's use the latter as our identifier.

Each year the Current Population Survey (CPS) puts together a poverty report. The most recent report can be found here. The poverty threshold is around $12K for a single worker or $24K for a 4-person household. The CPS reports that 13.5% of Americans live under the poverty threshold. That's approximately 43.1 million people.

Reading post-mortems from places like The Atlantic, CNN, The Hill, The New Yorker, etc. the conventional wisdom is that Hillary abandoned white working class voters (which had been in the Obama coalition) and therefore lost the election to Trump. And sure enough the 2012 exit poll shows Obama winning voters who earned under $30,000 63%-35% whereas the 2016 exit poll shows that Clinton won that group 53%-41%.  Given that her margins among minorities were not too different from Obama's margins, we can chalk up the bulk of that difference to white voters.  Just how many voters is that?

Of the 43.1 million people living under the poverty line, white people account for 28.6 million or 66%.  On the other hand, whites account for 79% of the people living over the poverty line. The CPS data does not breakdown age-race demographic combinations but we do also know that of the 43.1 million poor, 66% are above the age of 18.  If those people voted at the same rate as wealthier Americans (our first assumption), then we would be looking at about 15.7 million people under the poverty line that voted.  Since the CPS does not offer data for race-age subdivisions, we have to make a second assumption that the distribution of the poor over the age of 18 is the same as the distribution of the poor in general, such that 66% are white.  Multiplying that 15.7 million by 0.66 we find a total of 10.4 million voters here that make up the "White Working Class" - in effect, 7.6% of all voters.

Hillary turning Obama's 28-point margin of victory into a 12-point margin of victory, therefore means she lost 1.2% net votes to Trump. Compare that to the 2-3% that she lost because of Comey's interference and another 2-3% that she lost because of Putin's interference. And don't forget that a good sized chunk of that 1.2% may have flipped because of Comey or Putin.  To ascertain that Clinton's loss, therefore, was due to neglect of poor white voters is therefore an absolute falsehood.

Undereducated Whites are not a new cog in the Republican coalition

Nate Cohn's December 23rd column points to the cause of Clinton's loss as her inability to hold Obama's coalition together. His two pieces of evidence are:
1. Undereducated whites in Northern states voted for Trump in greater numbers than they did Romney.
2. Black voters in key Southern states did not vote at the same level as in 2008 or 2012.

The first point is wrong and the second completely misses the reason why.

Undereducated whites have been making a steady march to the GOP side since 1996. If I had to hazard a guess, I would point to the disintegration of union jobs due to globalization. Whereas union members are heavily Democratic voters, former union members, particularly in the Rust Belt, are now reliable Republican voters. There was one exception to this trend -- the 2008 anti-Bush backlash. Otherwise, as this graph from Pew Research shows, 2016 was worse for Democrats than 2012 which was worse than 2008 and 2004. And 2004 was worse than 2000 which was worse than 1996:

This trend, therefore should have been predictable. And, as Cohn points out, it very much was to the Clinton campaign. They built a 10 point drop into their forecast models. However, they still saw victory in sight in states like MI, PA, and WI.

So if that wasn't the major shortcoming, what was? Cohn's second point is closer to a likely outcome but he misses the reason why. He states that black turnout was down from historic highs in 2008 and 2012. But a small drop was to be expected considering the last candidate was President Obama. Cohn points out that there was roughly a 15% reduction in turnout.

What would cause that differential? It's not that Hillary ignored black voters. In fact she probably addressed the issues for them better than Obama had done (for cultural and societal reasons). In the end, it comes down to voter suppression. This year we saw ourselves facing a Voting Rights Act gutted by state legislators, governors, and the Supreme Court. That amounted to hundreds of thousands of voters illegitimately being dropped from voter rolls.

In the end, the combination of voter suppression, Comey, and Putin was enough to turn the tide in an election that a Democrat normally would have rolled to an easy victory.

Post-Mortem Roundup, 12/18/16

I appear to be doing these roughly weekly, and I'm going to try to continue with that.

There are a lot of contradictions in this bunch. Let's start with the Clinton campaign.

I told a friend a couple of weeks before the election that I felt really good about Clinton's chances based on the fact that the campaign appeared to be using a lot of the Obama strategy and infrastructure.  However, I was viewing that from the bubble of the volunteer room at Brooklyn HQ and the Brooklyn field office, where, yes, it appeared we were doing things right between sending hundreds of people every weekend to canvass in Philly and making hundreds of thousands of calls to Florida. But the fact is that that I cannot speak for what the campaign was doing in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Edward-Isaac Dovere at Politico said that the Clinton strategy in Michigan was just off:

FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.

The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data — operatives spit out “the model, the model,” as they complain about it — guiding Mook’s decisions on field, television, everything else. That’s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she’d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).

Building on Dovere's piece, Ed Kilgore says the campaign was too smart for its own good (which is silly in itself, but I'm sure worked well as clickbait):

Now the Clinton campaign was not unique in its reliance on a “model” for understanding election dynamics. One of the big trends since 2012 among political practitioners and observers alike has been the gradual displacement of random-sample polling with models of the electorate based on voter-registration files, supplemented by tracking polls of this fixed universe of voters. This approach tends to create a more static view of the electorate and its views, and probably builds in a bias for thinking of campaigns as mechanical devices for hitting numerical “targets” of communications with voters who are already in your column. You could see this new conventional wisdom (and the pseudoscientific certainty it bred) in pre-election models published by Bloomberg Politics and in an Election Day modeling experiment conducted by Slate. Having invested heavily in its own “model” for what it needed to do when and where, the Clinton campaign was naturally resistant to conflicting signals from the ignoramuses on the ground.

It is in that respect that just about everyone within and beyond the Clinton campaign erred in crediting it with a state-of-the-art “ground game” worth a point or two wherever it was deployed. Clinton had lots of field offices, to be sure. She had more money for get-out-the-vote operations. Team Clinton did much, much more targeted outreach to key voters in key states than did Team Trump. But in the end “Brooklyn’s” decisions were based on assumptions that had very little to do with actual developments on the “ground;” its hypersophisticated sensitivity to granular data about many millions of people made it fail to see and hear what was actually happening in the lead-up to the election.

For now it probably doesn’t matter whether it was James Comey or the campaign’s faulty self-confidence that cost Clinton the election. But when it comes time to build the next presidential general-election campaign, the people setting up the organization and paying the bills might want to rely a bit less on any system that values analytical omniscience at the expense of a willingness to change the game plan if there are signs that that is needed.

This is where I step in and say that one of the things we found was that maybe Trump didn't have a ground game, except he sort of did...

Josh Marshall implies also, that factors other than Comey helped create the rift in the "Blue Firewall," in this case in Wisconsin.:

What all of this comes down to is that something very big happened in this election that was quite separate from Comey and Putin. Let's put a pin in that for a moment before we discuss what that 'something' was. These outside interventions (obviously of very different kinds) were something like the straw that broke the camel's back. I think it's quite likely that without them Clinton would have held on in a tight race. Perhaps the shift in Wisconsin would have been 6% or 6.5% rather than 7.7% The consequences of this defeat, which are frankly massive, would be vastly different. But the shifting politico-demographic shift would be only slightly less steep.

If you believe in the integrity of our elections, American sovereignty and - yes, let's say it - the importance of the legitimacy of the Trump presidency, the Russian sabotage and influence campaign is hugely important. But if you can't distinguish between let's say the 1 or 2 percentage point shift caused by Russia and Comey, from the 5 or 6 or 7 percentage point shift that made that small shift so consequential, I really don't know how to help you. They're both extremely important, but for very different reasons.

Krugman also places the blame on Russia and the FBI:

Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more. If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?

And it wouldn’t have been seen as a marginal victory, either. Even as it was, Mrs. Clinton received almost three million more votes than her opponent, giving her a popular margin close to that of George W. Bush in 2004.

So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement. 

Back to bashing the Clinton campaign, in what appears to be John Judis's final postmortem, he calls the Clinton campaign "abysmal" and that they got outflanked.

The Hillary Clinton camp continues to dwell on the fact that she won the popular vote by 2.8 million, even though she lost the electoral college. But Clinton spent twice as much on the election as Trump did, and spent money to drive up the vote in Chicago, New Orleans, and California. According to Politico, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee were actually worried that while Clinton would win the electoral college, Trump would win the popular vote.

Trump, as his pollster Tony Fabrizio later explained, focused entirely on swing states, and didn’t try to “run up the score” in states like Texas, Georgia and Arizona that Trump expected to win. From October 21 to election day, Trump’s ad spending was entirely focused on swing states, while Clinton was still spending in Texas and California. If the two candidates had spent an equal amount, and if Trump had spent in states like Texas that he assumed he would win and in states like California where his margin was well below Mitt Romney in 2012, I believe the popular vote would have been much closer.

I do seem to remember Trump showing up in puzzling states like New Jersey down the stretch, so I don't think that she really got outflanked in that sense. She could've done better, but nearly everyone thought Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were in the bag, and there were plenty of calls for Hillary to expand the playing field (which she did, in making Arizona and Texas much closer than expected).

Here's a handy graphic of the candidates' appearances down the stretch:

The last 10 weeks of 2016 campaign stops in one handy gif: https://t.co/Hxc9cbKtTV pic.twitter.com/nYGulLESwN

— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) December 17, 2016

Judis continues:

FBI Director James Comey definitely hurt Clinton’s chances when he re-raised the issue of her emails on October 28, but he may not have cost her the election. If you look at the Los Angeles Times tracking poll, which proved to be the most accurate predictor of the results, Clinton had pulled even with Trump soon after the release of the NBC videotape showing Trump bragging about his sexual exploits, but Trump had begun to pull ahead again on October 26, two days before Comey stepped in.

The LAT tracking poll was actually the most inaccurate of all of the polls. Additionally, Nate Silver would beg to differ about Comey, saying that the Comey letter (which maddeningly, was NOTHING), did move the needle by a couple of points among late deciders:

Comey had a large, measurable impact on the race. Harder to say with Russia/Wikileaks because it was drip-drip-drip. https://t.co/LgJkfYpZCk https://t.co/9FYMNz763b

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 11, 2016

and

There's more evidence, too: Late-deciding voters broke strongly against Clinton in swing states, enough to cost her MI/WI/PA. pic.twitter.com/8r801ahDQO

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 11, 2016

and

I'll put it like this: Clinton would almost certainly be President-elect if the election had been held on Oct. 27 (day before Comey letter).

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 11, 2016

Nate also says:

Data was clear that white noncollege voters were overrepresented in swing states, helping Trump in EC. Narrative-driven coverage ignored it.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 17, 2016

Ron Brownstein discussed how traditional energy impacted the votes of said white voters.

Comparing the latest federal figures on states’ per capita carbon emissions with the 2016 election results produces a clear pattern. Trump carried all of the 22 states with the most per capita carbon emissions, except for New Mexico, and 27 of the top 32 in all. (Colorado, Illinois, Delaware, and Minnesota were the Clinton-voting exceptions.) The Democratic nominee won 15 of the 18 states with the lowest per capita emissions—with the exception of Florida, North Carolina, and Idaho.

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The Democrats’ challenge is that their coalition has crumbled in states that fear these changes, particularly in the Rustbelt, faster than it has coalesced in the states benefiting from them, which are mostly across the Sunbelt. To recapture the White House in four years, they’ll need recovery on both fronts. But the Democrats’ long-term prospects will likely rely on accelerating their leap across these overlapping economic, cultural, and energy divides.

Though renewable sources are gaining ground in some Midwest states, Democrats face structural challenges in a preponderantly white and older region where manufacturing powered by low-cost, coal-generated electricity looms so large. More promising for them may be racially diversifying Sunbelt states that are also decoupling from fossil fuels as they shift toward both renewable energy sources and post-industrial employment. Already, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Florida rank in the bottom 20 states for carbon emissions.

There might be something to it; I noticed driving through rural Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia today, I saw a number of billboards essentially saying that without fossil fuels, particularly coal, jobs there are gone, I don't know who paid for them. Could the Dems have put up billboards talking about bringing jobs to those areas? Should they have?


Digby also shared a post from Craig Newmark about who actually did and didn't vote. Some takeaways:

-Trump cleaned up with older voters and white voters

-Blacks turned out at a greater rate than Hispanics or white (which would seem to contradict what we've heard about them staying home)

-Hispanics and blacks were much more likely to have wanted to vote but found they were unable than whites.

-Hispanic voters had much longer waits to  vote than whites did

-Black and Hispanic voters were almost twice more likely to have had to fill out a provisional ballot (could've been the difference right there; do we know how many were ultimately counted?)

-Millennials were the most likely to have had to file a provisional ballot, followed by Gen X. Once again, how many were actually counted?


Jenee Desmond Harris interviewed Cornell Belcher about his new book, and I picked up on this:

In battleground states, particularly more diverse states, the percentage of white people voting Democrat decreases significantly as that population gets more diverse. So diversity is having an opposite impact that is harmful to Democrats.

That’s why I argue to Democrats that you are going to lose more and more white votes, and unless there is a major party realignment, this is going to continue to be a phenomenon. As the Republican Party is seen more and more as the racial identification party for white people, you’re not gonna see us all of a sudden winning blue-collar white voters.

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Jenée Desmond-Harris

So is there a way any of this — the strong influence of racial aversion and racial antagonism in politics — can be brought under control or stopped, or do we just have to wait for demographic changes that will make people who are motivated by racial antagonism less influential?

Cornell Belcher

I think the point I would argue it has to happen before demographic change — you already have people taking to the streets yelling they want to take our country back. What does that look like 10 years from now? What happens when that angry 45, 46 percent think they’re losing power, because they are losing power? We have to solve for this.

Jenée Desmond-Harris

But nobody has figured out how to solve for that, right?

Cornell Belcher

But we have to stop pretending that it doesn’t exist. That’s a start.

Jenée Desmond-Harris

I can see how pretending it doesn’t exist would be an important first step. It’s always strange to me to hear people say that Obama “triggered political polarization,” without explaining the race part. As if it’s a total mystery why that happened.

Cornell Belcher

One of the great tragedies is that the election of the first black president, as opposed to being a racial breakthrough, has in fact given rise to the opposite. It really has triggered an antagonism, or uncertainty, or fear that was dormant, at least up until now.

Ta-Nahisi Coates talked to President Obama and said a bit more about the above:

Whiteness in America is a different symbol—a badge of advantage. In a country of professed meritocratic competition, this badge has long ensured an unerring privilege, represented in a 220-year monopoly on the highest office in the land. For some not-insubstantial sector of the country, the elevation of Barack Obama communicated that the power of the badge had diminished. For eight long years, the badge-holders watched him. They saw footage of the president throwing bounce passes and shooting jumpers. They saw him enter a locker room, give a businesslike handshake to a white staffer, and then greet Kevin Durant with something more soulful. They saw his wife dancing with Jimmy Fallon and posing, resplendent, on the covers of magazines that had, only a decade earlier, been almost exclusively, if unofficially, reserved for ladies imbued with the great power of the badge.

For the preservation of the badge, insidious rumors were concocted to denigrate the first black White House. Obama gave free cellphones to disheveled welfare recipients. Obama went to Europe and complained that “ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs.” Obama had inscribed an Arabic saying on his wedding ring, then stopped wearing the ring, in observance of Ramadan. He canceled the National Day of Prayer; refused to sign certificates for Eagle Scouts; faked his attendance at Columbia University; and used a teleprompter to address a group of elementary-school students. The badge-holders fumed. They wanted their country back. And, though no one at the farewell party knew it, in a couple of weeks they would have it.

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When I told Obama that I thought Trump’s candidacy was an explicit reaction to the fact of a black president, he said he could see that, but then enumerated other explanations. When assessing Trump’s chances, he was direct: He couldn’t win.

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This speech ran counter to the history of the people it sought to address. Some of those same immigrants had firebombed the homes of the children of those same slaves. That young naval lieutenant was an imperial agent for a failed, immoral war. American division was real. In 2004, John Kerry did not win a single southern state. But Obama appealed to a belief in innocence—in particular a white innocence—that ascribed the country’s historical errors more to misunderstanding and the work of a small cabal than to any deliberate malevolence or widespread racism. America was good. America was great.

Over the next 12 years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal—the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people. This was the core of his 2004 keynote, and it marked his historic race speech during the 2008 campaign at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center—and blinded him to the appeal of Trump. (“As a general proposition, it’s hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are,” Obama once said to me.)

But if the president’s inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton proved the limits of his optimism, it also revealed the exceptional nature of his presidential victories. For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing.

 I've been wondering if happenings during Obama's second term had an effect on the Democrats' chances in 2016. For one thing, many non-liberal whites circled the wagons around Robert Zimmerman and thought of Black Lives Matter (which Clinton embraced) as a racist institution. Also, from the Weekly Standard:

Then there's race relations. Obama was elected in large part because of his promise to heal racial wounds. It hasn't worked out that way. In 2001, Gallup found that 70 percent of blacks and 62 percent of whites thought race relations in America were somewhat or very good. By the time Obama was inaugurated those numbers had flipped, with 61 percent of blacks and 70 percent of whites (having just absolved themselves by voting for Obama, one suspects) rating race relations as good. During Obama's tenure, both numbers have been in freefall. Today, only 51 percent of blacks and 45 percent of whites think relations between the races are good.

and from Trump himself:

“The country has practically never been as divided as it is now,” the billionaire added. “We’re going to bring everybody together. white, black. We’re going to bring everybody together. We’re bringing our country together, the richer the poorer, everybody!”

The talking point went around and we heard  many quotes along those lines from Trump voters, as well as the one (which for some reason I can't find) about how Hillary talked to Latinos, blacks, and other minority groups, but not "regular Americans."

We've been told a lot about how Hillary Clinton didn't speak to white working class voters (ignoring that a huge part of the working class isn't white), and that she needed to speak more about economics. From David Roberts at Vox:

Put aside, for a moment, the notion that economic issues can be separated from identity politics (they cannot). Let’s focus on the critique of Clinton. It’s one I’ve heard so many times that I got curious: What did Clinton talk about?

To find out, I gathered all her campaign speeches (from both the primary and general campaigns) into one document and did a simple word-frequency analysis.

The results are below. As you can see, I’ve been as generous as possible in filing things under “identity politics.” Anything about minorities or criminal justice or gay people or immigrants, I filed as identity politics. I even included mentions of climate and clean energy in that category, though in a sane world those would be top-tier economic issues.

So, without further ado, what did Hillary Clinton talk about?

 

 

That bliie line at the bottom that's three times as long as any others? "Jobs."

 

So, this is another time where the numbers don't bear out the assertions.

 

Still so much to unravel!

 

 

 

A Flurry of Post-Mortems

I'm still mostly holding off on my own final post-mortem, particularly on aspects that are based primarily in the numbers, until all votes have been counted, and recounted where applicable.

But that's not stopping plenty of other insightful writers from doing so, and I thought I'd share them for the readers and for posterity in my indices, with little comment from me (yet).

Dana Milbank wrote a piece about how voter suppression won the election for Trump. A couple of key points:

Though it’s difficult to quantify the effect of voter suppression in 50 states, Hajnal reports in a new study that after Texas implemented a strict voter-ID law, Latino turnout dropped sharply between 2010 and 2014, and the gap between white and Latino turnout increased by 9.2 percentage points. In the rest of the country, the gap between white and Latino turnout decreased over the same period.

Wisconsin adopted a tough photo-ID law, and in Milwaukee, where a large number of African Americans don’t drive or have licenses, turnout declined in 2016 by 41,000 compared with 2012, a 15 percent drop. Turnout was significantly lower than in 2004 and 2008 as well. The dropoff was steepest in the poorest precincts.

Martin Longman puts a more personal spin on it, but arrives in the same place:

It’s very difficult for Americans who live in car-based communities to understand and avoid being judgmental about mass transit-based communities. In 2004, I was working out of a North Philadelphia office in a heavily black neighborhood. I needed dozens of workers, so I had a lot of interviews and hiring to do. And I had a lot of paperwork.

When I placed an ad in the paper for low-wage temporary work, a line formed down the stairs from my second story office and half way around the block. The applicants ranged in age from 16 to 60, but most of them were under twenty-one. They did not drive. Their families did not own cars. Some of them had photo IDs from school or even from a library or gym, but almost none of them had a driver’s license.

There were no banks in their neighborhood, but an inability to open a bank account was the only liability I could detect. They simply did not need a driver’s license, and the younger among them didn’t need a photo ID to go out drinking or for any other purpose.

bspencer at Lawyers, Guns, and Money gives a more comprehensive take in five points. An example:

5.) As I mentioned on twitter, I counted on a sort of latent, self-preservational snobbery kicking in with potential Trump voters. It’s not that I thought we’d get many switchers. But I thought a fair number of R-leaners might find him too vulgar, too stupid, too buffoonish to vote for in the end. I’ve learned that that was wildly naive…and this loops around to my first point–R’s will LITERALLY vote for anyone who runs with an “R” after his name. Literally anyone. Even a Nazi!

Whatever else is true or false, this one I'll stand by even before the votes are done being counted. If the numbers of Rs that voted for Trump were even ten points lower than they turned out to be, that statement holds true.

Finally, David Roberts at Vox (which has been incredible as of late) goes both broad and deep and delves into nearly every single aspect of the election, comparing them to his prior assumptions. There's so much there (I read quickly in general, yet this thing probably took me the better part of half an hour to get through), but I just want to highlight a bit of his conclusion:

This feels like a black swan event to me, an unlikely concatenation of circumstances that offers a last gasp to forces in American life that are inexorably fading.

But that feeling? That gut sense that “it’s going to be okay”? I no longer trust that feeling. At all. (It’s only us white guys who got to feel it anyway.)

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It’s possible that white nationalism is an ineradicable element of American life. It’s possible American institutions have failed so thoroughly that some sort of illiberal strongman is inevitable. It’s possible that further Republican gains could give them control of enough states to start passing constitutional amendments returning the US to the 19th century. It’s possible that a terrorist attack under the coming administration could cause panic and backlash that leads to a police state. It’s possible something as bad as or worse than internment camps will come along, or widespread racial violence.

I don’t expect that stuff to happen, and I’m certainly not predicting it, but you can damn well believe I will never again take those possibilities lightly. There are no guarantees America will be okay.

As I've said, I personally felt that we were enough past these nationalist and racist attitudes that 2012 was the last time those could win a Presidential election. The question is, were we just a little early on that call, could our assumptions have been totally wrong, or is something different in play?

Ari and I are working on a way to figure that out to whatever extent we can. We'll keep you posted.

The Bob and Chez Show, 11/23/16 -- Young Online Activists

Here's another podcast that Ari and I listen to religiously. Two guys bringing humor into political discussion (as much as it can be these days).

They tend to approach politics from the center-left, and are often really skeptical about conspiracy theories coming from the further left, which is why I raised my eyebrows to hear them talking today about the need to audit the election results because of the possibility of Russian interference. What they assert makes sense; the Russians are confirmed to have purposefully meddled in the election every step of the way, so why stop right before the finale?

I don't know if there was funny business going on, but during the course of the day I began to see mainstream media outlets such as The Hill, and the NY Daily News exploring the topic, and began to think a recount is as necessary as it was in 2000; win or lose, we have to be able to trust the integrity of our election results. From the Daily News:

According to a Tuesday report in New York magazine, the group — which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society — said they found evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were hacked. The group pressed Clinton to seek a recount in those states.

Members of the group told the Clinton camp that in Wisconsin, Clinton's vote count was down 7% in counties reliant on electronic voting machines as opposed to those using optical scanners and paper ballots. A statistical analysis showed that under those circumstances, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes. Clinton lost the state — and its 10 Electoral College votes — by 27,000 votes.

The Green Party has initiated an effort to audit the results in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, three states where Trump did much better than expected. As of the time I'm about to hit "Publish" on this post, they're quickly approaching $2.2 million raised at a rate of around $10,000 per minute, and they need $2.5 million by next week. Seems like they'll get there by the morning. I do not know if that money guarantees an audit. Andy Greenberg at Wired explains the mechanism of such an audit.

Performing a real, statistically valid audit of electronic voting results isn’t so hard, says MIT’s Rivest. Auditing the entire national election would require checking about half a percent of paper ballots against electronic results, he and University of Berkeley statistician Philip Stark have found. For a states with close margin, like this election’s results in Wisconsin or Michigan, the audit would need a bigger random sample, but hardly a full recount. Rivest says that statisticians could perform an audit of just 2.3 percent of the ballots in Wisconsin, 11 percent of the ballots in Michigan, or just .7 percent of the ballots in Pennsylvania and determine if the results were correct with 95% certainty. (If they were found to be incorrect, Rivest notes, the audit would be expanded.)

Nate Silver and Nate Cohn both say we shouldn't get our hopes up, and I'm inclined to agree with them. It really seems that there were unexpected factors that made Trump outperform expectations.

CNN is also reporting that the efforts to turn the 37 electoral voters needed to overturn the results and elect Hillary are continuing; from what I've heard, they're up to six -- more than I would've expected -- with still nearly a month to go. While that seems anti-democratic, the Electoral College itself is anti-democratic, and the Republicans have embraced pretty much every undemocratic measure under the sun -- voter supression, voter ID laws, gerrymandering... at least we know that if we win, we will try to turn all of that around, not just because it helps us, but because it's clearly the right thing to do. I can't think of any reason all Americans shouldn't vote, nor any reason that each person shouldn't have equal representation.

But either way, there really is something wrong with the system if someone with 2,000,000+ more votes (and counting) can lose an election.

UPDATE (11/24/16, 2:54 AM ET): They reached their goal! Good stuff. At worst, it'll delay things for Trump and the Republicans. Every day we can buy is a day they can't do the terrible things they want to do.

Wait a Minute...

I spent a lot of the early evening going through polls, statistics, numbers, etc... I suddenly had a realization -- As much as we'd like to use this data to make conclusions and recommendations, it's just way too early.

I saw articles that were comparing eligible voters with voting-age Americans; ones that were putting vote counts from November 9th, 2016 against complete datasets from 2012 and other years without an explanation of why that might be an issue; and blanks in spreadsheets. We're still at least a couple of weeks from everything being in and certified and properly lined up against previous cycles.

So, I've decided to not focus on the voting data in my writing until at least December. That'll save me from at least some insanity. Not sure what to do about the rest.

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.