What Numbers and History Have Taught Me About Elections, Part 4: A New Yorker Tells You What He Knew About Both Candidates in 2016

 

Over the years I know that my positions, which are that of a centrist, have gotten me labeled as conservative by some very angry people. And considering how much I have attacked members of ‘the Squad’ and Justice Democrats in recent articles, I suspect in some circles I might well be considered both a racist and a sexist. This article is likely to make many believe the latter more strongly.

So to be clear: some of the most capable and brilliant elected officials in my lifetime of observing – let’s say the last quarter century have been women. Given the conditions she has had working against her even before January 6^th, Nancy Pelosi is one of the greatest Speakers of all time, perhaps since Sam Rayburn. The Democratic Party has an extraordinary group of female governors on its roster who may very well have a future in national politics. Gretchen Whitmer is the most well-known, but others include Katie Hobbs of Arizona and Laura Kelly of Kansas. There are several more than capable women in the Senate who may very well end up on the Democratic ticket in the next decade. In my home state Kristen Gillibrand will probably be moving up in the leadership roles in the years to come and Amy Klobuchar and Tammy Baldwin seem very likely to be prominent. All three are up for reelection and with the exception of Baldwin, are among the safer seats this quarter.

One has to respect the stand that Liz Cheney took over the last several years, regardless of what you felt about her before January 6^th. Nikki Haley will likely run for President again someday and demonstrated and ability to be the new face of the GOP. It’s conceivable Kelly Ayotte, who has been a force in New Hampshire politics, might be as well.

With that mind I will bring you back to November of 2000. Because even though I was a registered Democrat for my first election when I went into the ballot I voted a straight Democratic ticket – with one critical exception. The first vote I cast in a Senate election was for Rick Lazlo. I found him reprehensible and a horrible candidate for elected office. But there was no way in hell I was going to cast my vote for Hilary Clinton.

As someone who’s spent his adult life in New York well before 2016 I had more first-hand knowledge of both of the major candidates for the President before they ended up being the nominees of their tickets. And very early in my life well before I ever voted in any election I knew that these two people who were different in every major way, were alike in one essential one: their personality was completely manufactured.

Anyone who lived in New York knew well before The Apprentice debuted what a complete and utter fraud the perception of Trump as a successful businessman was. I’m pretty sure if you asked any New Yorker to compare him to anyone during the 1990s and 2000s it would have been George Steinbrenner. Both men were among the most hated New Yorkers for a very specific reason: Steinbrenner had taken charge of a beloved institution – the Yankees – and essentially made them a tool for his massive ego. When I moved to New York in 1990 the Yankees were a joke and Steinbrenner was probably the most hated man in New York City. Trump was, even before he ever considered running for President, just as loathed. Saturday Night Live had been mocking him for much of the 1980s and 1990s for his tabloid behavior and his utter contempt for business practices. (Phil Hartman, in my opinion, did the best and most accurate impression of Trump)

Pop culture did much to improve both men’s reputation: Steinbrenner’s portrayal on Seinfeld made him seem more likable (as well as the fact that the Yankees managed to win four World Series in five years after not having won a championship since 1978) and the last decade of his ownership did much to whitewash what a monster he’d been for the first twenty years of his ownership. As we all know The Apprentice essentially made Trump relevant in a way he hadn’t been outside of New York and whitewashed most of his behavior in the past twenty years as well. Well before he considered running for President, the impression America had was that he was a great businessman and man of the people, something anyone who’d lived in New York knew was a front.

Hilary Clinton’s persona in public life was just as manufactured but because it was so amorphous it was harder for most Americans to realize. For me it was simple and it crystalized during the Monica Lewinsky affair. When Bill and Monica were jokes of every late night comic throughout 1998 and well up to the impeachment the fact that Hilary Clinton stood by her man was considered noble. I knew what it was and it was confirmed when she announced to run for the Senate in New York, a state which was as much her home as it had been Bobby Kennedy’s when he ran for it in 1964.

Loathing Hilary had become a standard well before she ran for public office, and it was usually framed in terms of sexism. For me my loathing was simple and it became completely solidified over the next decade. Hilary Clinton, from the moment she stepped into public life when Bill ran for President in 1992, had one goal and one goal only. She wanted to be President. Not the first woman President, though she leaned hard into that goal in 2008 and 2016. President.

To obtain that goal she would be just as much a political animal as any man who has ever sought the office: she ran for Senate in a deep blue state because it helped her long-term ambitions and she was more likely to win if she ran in Arkansas. She advocated strongly for the War in Iraq when it was suitable and against it when the tide was against it. She would work with Republicans and other Democrats when it suited her needs and call them her enemies when members of either party attacked her. And she never had a theme for either of her Presidential campaigns, only the aura of inevitability and entitlement.

All of this was bad enough before you get to the fact that Hilary Clinton was a terrible on the stump. She didn’t have her husband’s empathy or Barack Obama’s oratory. She didn’t have the compassion that Joe Biden did or the ability to inspire voters the way Sanders did. I think everyone who campaigns for the Presidency looks staged and phony more often then they look genuine. But with Hilary she never looked anything other than, to quote one description of Tom Dewey “like someone who had just been given a big shove from behind.”  Hilary had no gift for policy, no ability to engage and in both her campaigns for President she never had a good theme or an ability to connect with voters.

I think Hilary just wanted to be president, full stop. She didn’t want to do good with the office, she didn’t want to break the glass ceiling, she didn’t want to change the world. I think all she wanted was to be President. That’s why she never divorced Bill, even after she won the Senate. I would have had more respect for her if she had the day she took office in 2001: it would have shown she didn’t need him anymore.

That’s the thing about 2016: it was as much about the Clinton brand as it was the Trump brand. Hilary was running on her last name. That was the biggest problem with her campaign both in 2008 and 2016: in an era where we had gotten very sick of legacies after W’s administration, the idea of another kind of restoration had less appeal. And because Hilary was essentially relying on the goodwill of her husband to carry her to the Presidency – far more than W had his father’s  - she was never able to come up with a real identity outside of it. The first time around Barack Obama – who regardless of his flaws was a new and different voice – was capable of reaching people that she never could. Hilary seemed unwilling to accept that fact and as a result made Obama battle right to the end of the primaries before finally conceding. Obama was far too generous when he made her Secretary of State, considering her behavior towards him in the primaries. And she was no doubt doing it so that she could remain politically relevant when his term ended.

I remember much of the leadup to the 2016 Democratic primaries: Hilary had the aura of inevitability and no one was looking forward to it, certainly not the Democrats. Everyone did their part and got out of her way with the exception of Bernie Sanders. I will always be convinced that so much of the vote for Sanders during the primary were anti-Hilary rather than pro-Sanders; I’m also convinced had a more popular candidate run for the nomination – Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren – Hilary would have been flattened in the primary. She spent the entire primary campaign as if she had already been elected and this was all a formality: she campaigned even worse then in 2008, perhaps because she knew no matter what happened she was going to be the nominee. It must have struck her as annoying that Sanders was not only popular but stayed in  the race until the end; the irony in the situation completely escaped her.

During the 2016 campaign I remember that the mood was similar to 2000: no one really wanted either candidate to win. Trump had already demonstrated in the primary how horrible a human being he was and how much that horrible behavior was found enduring to the Republican voter. If nothing else Hilary should have realized that she should have considered that you had to take Trump’s appeal seriously and made more of an effort to provide a contrast to the hate he was spewing. All she did however was provide her own kind of vituperative rhetoric, condemning not only Trump but those who were deluded enough to vote for him. “We cannot trust Donald Trump with nuclear weapons!” is the most famous line Hilary came up with, and the thing is that was only a reason to vote against Trump, not for Hilary.

And because she suffered from that same delusion she campaigned with that same note of inevitability. She never came up with a theme for her campaign, arguing entirely against Trump and decided that she had no reason to campaign as if it was a close election. That’s the thing no one wants to talk about 2016: the absolute mess Hilary Clinton’s campaign was. Much like Dewey she chose to believe that there was no way anyone would vote for Trump. There were far more signs than with Trump that he would self-destruct – the Access Hollywood tape was the biggest – but Hilary never seemed to care that much not only about winning but down-ballot Democrats. There was also the very real fact that Obama had been President for eight years and there would have been some swing voters who would have swallowed Trump as a nominee to get a Republican in the White House. All of that, well before anything James Comey send in October, should have been clearest sign that a Clinton victory was not going to be easy. But as we all know now that seems to be not just how Clinton and the campaign but millions of Democratic voters.

Right up until Election Night, like everyone else in America, I was expecting Hilary Clinton to win the Presidency. Unlike the rest of America I wasn’t convinced this was the best thing for the country. Clearly she would not have been as horrible a President as Trump but as we all know that’s an incredibly low bar to overcome. At every point in her campaigning she had reminded me more of W then anyone else I’d seen running for President in her behavior. She had never been a good senator, even before Benghazi she’d done nothing distinguished as Secretary of State and there was nothing in her resume to demonstrate she had the ability to inspire the public the way either Obama or her husband had as President. And given how much contempt the GOP had held her in every aspect of her life before she ran for President, anyone who thinks she would have faced anything less than the kind of abuse Obama had during his term is lying to themselves. They would have been determined to get her from day one and  the moment they got a chance they would have been holding hearings about everything in her career. She would almost certainly have faced a vote on impeachment during her term, only she would have received less public sympathy then her husband.

At the end of the day I was convinced Hilary would win because there would be more people who hated the idea of Trump being President then the idea of Hilary be President. And you can argue that’s exactly what happened.

This is the thing everybody forgets about election night 2016. Almost from the start of it, Trump was ahead in the popular vote as well as the electoral college. It was never by much – at one point it may have been a little more than a million votes – but it was clear to everybody. I know that I was physically ill by that as much as Trump’s apparent victory and I didn’t actually stay up late enough to see it.

I also remember I didn’t have the strength to get out of bed the next morning. I probably wouldn’t have but I had an appointment with my therapist scheduled for that day and I needed to talk to her – as I’m sure most Americans did. We discussed the results at length and I expressed my dismay at the country. She’s the one who told me that, in fact, Hilary won the popular vote.

And do you know what my reaction when I heard this? I was relieved. I didn’t start yelling that the system was broken, didn’t say that Trump was a legitimate President, didn’t demand a march. Indeed my reaction was exactly the same involve George W. Bush’s victory in 2000: it was a fluke but we’d get another chance.

I spent much of the next four years in a state of more or less being off-kilter but for all the ghastly aspects of the Trump Presidency I never considered him illegitimate. I thought he was a horrible human being who didn’t deserve to be anywhere near the White House but the fact that Hilary should have been President because she won the popular vote was not one of the things that angered me the same way it seems to have infuriated everybody else, from the mainstream media to late night comics to the Daily Kos. I don’t like that Trump became President any more than all of his haters but I never once considered that the entire Republic should be torn down as a result.

Which is why I now need to reveal the big lie of 2016: the one that has caused so much aggravation and shouting from the moment Trump was declared the winner. It’s not going to be easy but you need to know it because it’s been dividing our country ever since.

Yes Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by about 2.7 million votes out of 128 million cast give or take. And that is because she won California by roughly 4.3 million votes. Had California not be part of the union, Trump would have won the popular vote.

And for those of you are still upset that Bush became President in 2000, Al Gore carried California by 1.3 million votes.

Now there’s a very good reason most Americans don’t know this story and I also know it’s the same reason even knowing it won’t make a difference in the minds of the millions of Americans who have been arguing about the unfairness of the Electoral College. To be fair “the will of the people was subverted” is a more winning argument for a political party to make then “the American people rejected the will of the state of California” which is frankly a more accurate narrative in both the cases of 2016 and 2000.

  I can’t believe that Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Steve Kornacki, Jon Oliver, Seth Meyers etc., didn’t do a deep dive into the vote count of 2016 and not notice where the difference in the popular vote came from in 2016. It’s too big a discrepancy to just miss. And the reason they haven’t stated is not just among other things the arguments of Russia hacking the election and all of the real crimes that were involved. These are things that need to be investigated, and all the crimes that came out of it in the years that followed did need to be investigated and Trump was as corrupt as they say they were.

But two things can be true too at the same time: Russia did no doubt hack the 2016 election and Hilary Clinton was no doubt also a terrible campaigner who was unable to inspire enough people to vote for her. The first doesn’t discount the second, but the fact she ‘won’ the popular vote makes it far easier to absolve Hilary Clinton of all her faults. It has the added advantage of allowing the media and late night -  all of whom hate Trump and with whom the feeling is more than mutual  - to delegitimize his Presidency the same way they refused to acknowledge Bush’s.

But far darker than that is that is also overlooks the most famous statement Hilary made during the fall election when she called Trump’s voters ‘a basket of deplorable’. Four years earlier Mitt Romney had made a similar comment before a closed door session of Republican fundraisers and was caught on tape. His comment was just as horrendous as Hilary’s. But eight years later, there is now a huge part of the population who think the only mistake Hilary made was apologizing for it.

In my lifetime and well before there’s always been a contempt about anyone who would vote for Republican candidates. These statements were made about Nixon and Reagan, and they were certainly made about W. and Trump. There’s a very clear bigotry just in making this statement: “why would any intelligent person vote for Trump?” It’s one thing to dismiss the candidate but there is a sizable part of the population who dismisses the voter as well. They’ve been brainwashed by Fox News, they’re racists, they live in flyover country. They’re not real Americans.

That’s why, much as I’d like to believe the fact that all of this argument about the Electoral college over 2016 is all about the overwhelming landslide in California will change some mind, I truly believe it will just cause its opponents to dig in on their talking points. They are so locked into the narrative of blue states good, red states bad, that the fact that their candidate was in fact lost the popular vote in 49 of 50 states will not change their minds one bit. The Republicans, if the election had been determined by popular vote, and they saw the California results had been the reason: they would have had just as legitimate a grounds to be upset by the results as Democrats were with the electoral college. And I have no doubt no Democrat would have argued about unfairness then. In their minds, the will of the people had been heard because it was the right people. Who cares if flyover country voted for Trump in record numbers? The real states voted for Hilary and that’s all that mattered.

And because of this Hilary Clinton – who was one of the most polarizing figures in America for her entire active life and no doubt would have continued to divide the nation as President – becomes the best candidate in the mind of some people, particularly on the left: a failed one. Better, she was cheated out of the office. That they would have no doubt started ragging on her the same way they did to Obama and would do to Biden four years later if she’d been President is forgotten along with all of her flaws in her life and on the campaign trail. She didn’t lose the 2016 election any more than Al Gore lost in 2000: an antiquated system fueled by Republican corruption defeated her. She is now a defeated candidate which is the minds of millions is always better than an elected one.

That’s it for my experience with Presidential elections. For the rest of these articles I’m going to deal with the Senate, something that has been around for 250 years but that a lot of people only seem to have realized how important it is in 2017.