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.

I Don't Think Our Leaders Get It

#sorrynotsorry that my first day posting in a couple of days has been all doom and gloom, but this is where we really are.

Despite my initial well-documented skepticism (it's nice to have my archive back), Barack Obama is easily the favorite U.S. President of my lifetime. Hillary Clinton would've made a phenomenal successor and I think that her team is not getting enough credit for the job they did. It looks like Hillary may exceed Obama's 2012 vote total despite the fact that there were a huge number of third-party voters and that she was running to succeed a two-term President. Jennifer Palmieri and her team deserve a lot of credit for the job they did, despite the fact that they were institutionally cheated out of the election (forgetting anything hinky happening on Election Day at the polls, or the Electoral College).

In today's WaPo, Palmieri wrote:

I know how to be a gracious loser.

I could have let it go last week when Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, challenged me to look her in the eye and say she ran a campaign that gave white supremacists a platform. I considered for a split second. I knew you were supposed to be gracious when you come for the post-election forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. But I decided this was a year where normal rules don’t apply. Speaking the truth was more important. 

.

.

.

Our candidate gave us a good model to follow. She had the grace to call Trump on election night to congratulate him and concede. But in her concession speech she also challenged all of us to defend our rights and principles under the Constitution — rights and principles that she and many of the people who voted for her feared could be under threat in a Trump presidency. The campaign has ended, and we accept that Trump won. But we are not laying down our principles or abandoning our supporters.

.

.

.

If we are not to take Trump’s words literally, he needs to explain what he does mean. The Trump team likes to tell Clinton supporters “hashtag ‘he’s your president.’ ” But this isn’t a one-way street. If Trump expects the Americans who did not vote for him to accept him as president, he needs to show that he accepts all of them as Americans. He needs to show that he understands their concerns and hears their fears.

I suggest he and his team try “hashtag ‘we are all Americans.’ ” We all have a role to play here. But it’s the winner who carries the burden of taking the lead in uniting the country. It’s the burden of leadership. It’s the burden of being the president of the United States.

 

I know Hillary had to make a concession speech. She lost, and she was following protocol. And Obama had to at least start working on a peaceful transition, because that's protocol too, and we (Team Blue) are CLEARLY the good guys. But once the Bannon and Sessions nominations happened, that had to be it. From Ari Berman:

Trump cabinet picks:
EPA against science
AG against justice
Ed against public education
Hud against fair housing
HHS against healthcare

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 7, 2016

And then, of course, Labor Department against labor.

This isn't normal. This is the complete destruction of everything that makes America prosperous, things that keep millions off the street, out of the hospital, and from death. On top of that, it disenfranchises voters to the point where democracy is a joke, and potentially sows the seeds of mass persecution. Hell, forget isn't normal. This is light years beyond that.

In the face of that, I feel like everything I've seen and heard from the Democratic leadership is bringing a pen to a nuke fight. We can't continue to ignore the fact that we've been put in a place where a majority of Americans vote for Democrats for the Presidency, the Senate, and the House (often by huge margins) and are ignored. It can't be about having a conservative Supreme Court only because the Senate Republicans were willing to flout the crap out of "advise and consent."

This cannot be about "grace," or "hashtags," or "the burden of being the President of the United States." Donald Trump doesn't give a shit molecule about your "concerns" or "fears." It can't be about a "Sincere and Inspiring" farewell speech. It can't be about crossing our fingers and hoping Mitch McConnell doesn't end the filibuster or begging three Republicans to stand on the side of good on some issues when there is not a single issue or nominee on which the other side is pushing abject evil.

I stumbled upon a post from Edge of the American West from Election Night 2008 where the poster wrote, "The arc of the moral universe feels unbearably long right now, even as a I celebrate President-elect Obama." That's because the other side is doing every goddamn thing they can to bend it towards injustice, and that arc is on the verge of breaking.

We need to hear more from how the top of our party plans to handle this and what we should be doing, because we're fighting the top of theirs. This is a state of emergency. No more words. Plans. Actions. Barack, Hillary, Joe, Tim, Nancy, Chuck... do something.

I'm going a little further than how I ended my last post... If the seat of your pants isn't brown, you're not paying attention. Because that's the color of the shirts the other side might wearing if we don't act in proportion to the gravity of the situation.

Moving Into the Danger Zone in Michigan

This one development in Michigan could have serious implications for the future of this country and for the chances of Obama's second term being the high water mark of most of our lifetimes, if not those of our children and grandchildren.

Michigan’s Republican-led House on Wednesday night approved a strict voter identification proposal over strenuous objections from Democrats who argued the plan could disenfranchise properly registered voters.

Michigan voters without photo identification could still cast a provisional ballot under the controversial legislation, but they would have to bring an ID to their local clerk’s office within 10 days of an election in order for their vote to count.

It was really not an exaggeration on Trump's part (or Michele Bachmann's) that given demographic trends, 2016 could've been the last election, if not one of the next two, where the Republicans had a close to even shot at winning the Presidency, mostly because of the country approaching the point when whites are no longer a majority.

It looks like Trump won Michigan by about 10,000 votes. In 2020, if Trump does a glaringly bad job (which he likely will), and/or the Democrats just make some tweaks at GOTV in Michigan, that should be a margin that's easy to overcome. But this bill, which will become law, could keep hundreds of thousands of Democrats from having their votes counted in Michigan. And the new conservative Supreme Court will uphold this law, and many others.

I'm really at a loss as what to do. This is going to happen across the country. "Legal" or not, this is cheating. Without the voter ID laws, voter purges, voter caging, "cross-check," incredibly unfair (and racist) gerrymandering, Democrats would have won pretty much every election, at least the quadrennial ones, since 2000. The Democrats would have the White House, the Supreme Court, the House (easily), and the Senate. But now the Republicans have ways to cement the opposite.

It's not even just a matter of how to prevent this. It's how to react to it on a level as a citizen of this country. Every single item I mentioned in the previous paragraph is cheating. It may be ruled constitutional, but it's cheating. Which makes our leadership morally illegitimate. Prior to 2016, that made for bad government. Now it's led to something damned close to fascism.

I'm not exaggerating. In fact, I think I'm understating. We're in for the battle of our lives, and it's really an asymmetric one.