Trump Versus the Media

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Trump seems to be trying to intimidate the press. While this New York Post story appears mostly to have been generated by Matt Drudge’s fantasies, the Politico version of what happened when Trump met with 25 media executives yesterday — to discuss a “media reset” — was weird enough.

Trump turned to NBC News President Deborah Turness at one point, the source said, and told her the network won’t run a nice picture of him, instead choosing “this picture of me,” as he made a face with a double chin. Turness replied that they had a “very nice” picture of him on their website at the moment. …

… Trump also singled out CNN, the source said, without elaborating on what the president-elect said about the network. A CNN spokeswoman wrote in an email that the network would not comment on an off-the-record meeting.

The Washington Post, which I understand was not represented at the meeting, was less kind.

But if the media elite attended in hopes of improving relations with the forthcoming Trump administration, that wasn’t quite in the cards. The president-elect specifically called out reporting by CNN and NBC that he deemed unfair, according to four people who attended the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was off the record.

Instead of striking a harmonious tone to build rapport following the election, Trump was combative, participants said. In a calm and deliberate voice, he told the group sitting around a conference table that they had failed to provide their viewers with fair and accurate coverage, and told them they failed to understand him or his appeal to millions of Americans.

But he made no mention of the enormous amount of airtime that the networks, especially on cable, devoted to his campaign. A number of analyses have noted that Trump’s presidential effort was boosted by the news media’s fascination with him.

In a sign of another battle with the media to come, Trump also shrugged off the need for a constant press pool covering him, the people said, though he did not delve into specifics. Trump has repeatedly shirked his pool, upending a long-standing tradition of the president and president-elect.

WaPo currently is featuring an article saying that the Trump Foundation confessed to the IRS it had violated rules on “self dealing.”

Trump had a meeting scheduled with the New York Times, then cancelled it in a series of whiny tweets, but apparently kept the appointment.

But the New York Times had already published a story about how Trump and other billionaires are laying the groundwork for “an unprecedented legal assault on the media.”

 

Whatever Trump’s feelings about the media, New York Times v. Sullivan will surely survive his presidency. The case is revered, and in the last several years, the Supreme Court has moved to expand, not contract, the reach of the First Amendment. And states have taken steps, too: To prevent people from using the courts, and the discovery process, to silence or retaliate against their critics, 28 states and the District of Columbia have enacted anti-Slapp laws — the acronym stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” It’s possible, however, that Trump could appoint judges who would find a way around the usual press protections. More immediately, he could ask his Justice Department to prosecute journalists who report leaks from his administration. (President Obama’s Justice Department investigated reporters, but didn’t charge them.) It’s also possible that the press will be a meeker watchdog because of subtler changes that are harder to track. As the head of the executive branch, the president exerts a great deal of control over access to information. Federal agencies have power to shape the state of the union; they also describe it for us by producing reams of facts and statistics, which in turn shape our assessment of our elected leaders. Trump could hire people who cancel funding for government reports or research that doesn’t serve his interests, or who suppress findings the administration doesn’t like.

The new president will be a man who constantly accuses the media of getting things wrong but routinely misrepresents and twists facts himself. “Their single goal will be to burnish their reputation,” Tim O’Brien predicts of the Trump administration. There are signs, too, of new efforts to harness the law to the cause of cowing the press. Trump’s choice for chief adviser, Stephen Bannon, ran the alt-right Breitbart News Network before joining Trump’s campaign last summer. Breitbart announced last week that it was “preparing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against a major media company” for calling Breitbart a “ ‘white nationalist’ website.” Even if Breitbart is bluffing, the threat will discourage other news outlets from using that term to describe it, and that will in turn help Breitbart and Bannon seem more acceptable to the mainstream. Trump was right about one thing: You don’t have to win every case to advance in the larger legal war.

Because of the proliferation of alternative news sources, the mainstream press doesn’t have the power to make or break a president as in the old days (think Lyndon Johnson, if you’re old enough to remember the news coverage he got). But they could surely pile a world of hurt on an administration if they were pissed off enough, and not cowed into compliance. We’ll see what happens.

The Pay-to-Play POTUS

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What we will be complaining about ineffectually for at least the next four years:

Adam Davidson in The New Yorker:

Donald Trump has decided not to put his businesses in a blind trust, a mechanism by which his assets would be managed by people with no direct connection to the President. Instead, he has asked his children to continue to manage the global operation, which raises the possibility of an appearance of a conflict of interest. In the case of Ivanka Trump’s presence at a discussion with the Japanese premier, however, the conflict became explicit. In her new role as co-director of the companies, she will oversee negotiations with real-estate developers around the world. While the company hasn’t announced any projects in Japan, it seems reasonable to assume she might talk to companies there. …

The very nature of Trump’s business is rooted in the subjective value of being associated with Donald Trump and his family. The Trump Organization’s business model, as Danziger describes it, has shifted from building its own projects to selling rights to the Trump name, and to its newest brand of hotels, Scion. As Paul Waldman points out in the Washington Post, the price of such a license is subjective, determined by the buyer’s perception of its value. Licensees—say, a hotel developer in Japan—would have commercial calculations, such as how much business the Trump and Scion brands bring. Those potential buyers may now also have political calculations. How helpful would it be for any other venture they are involved in to also be business partners with the family of the President of the United States?

It occurs to me that some people might start to think of Trump’s buildings outside the U.S. not just as symbols of western hegemony, but as encroachments by the US government on their sovereign territory.

In many countries, being known as an entryway to conversation with the Trump family could, on its own, be worth many millions of dollars. Many have written about fears of overt corruption in a Trump Administration. But even if there is no explicit corruption, it’s impossible for Trump’s Presidency not to affect the way his partners value their associations with him. At the very least, his hotels—particularly the new one in Washington, D.C.—are likely to do a brisk business. As the Washington Post reported, diplomats see staying at the hotel as “an easy, friendly gesture to the new president” and quoted one unnamed Asian diplomat as saying, “Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’ ” It seems clear that he and his family will be enriched by his term as President.

 And anyone who thinks that Trump won’t be discussing the family business with his kids is a bigger rube than Trump’s voters.

 We’re already seeing signs that Trump’s foreign policies will align with his business interests. Washington Post:

Turkey is a nation in crisis, scarred by government crackdowns following a failed coup attempt and on a potential collision course with the West. It is also home to a valuable revenue stream for the president-elect’s business empire: Trump Towers Istanbul.

Donald Trump’s company has been paid up to $10 million by the tower’s developers since 2014 to affix the Trump name atop the luxury complex, whose owner, one of Turkey’s biggest oil and media conglomerates, has become an influential megaphone for the country’s increasingly repressive regime.

That, ethics advisers said, forces the Trump complex into an unprecedented nexus: as both a potential channel for dealmakers seeking to curry favor with the Trump White House and a potential target for attacks or security risks overseas.

Will Trump use U.S. military resources to protect his revenue streams? Note that Indian business partners have met with Trump since the election.

Back to WaPo:

 At least 111 Trump companies have done business in 18 countries and territories across South America, Asia and the Middle East, a Washington Post analysis of Trump financial filings shows.

The business interests range from sprawling, ultraluxury real estate complexes to one-man holding companies and branding deals in Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Panama and other countries, including some where the United States maintains sensitive diplomatic ties.

Some companies reflect long-established deals while others were launched as recently as Trump’s campaign, including eight that appear tied to a potential hotel project in Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Arab kingdom that Trump has said he “would want to protect.”

And there will be no blind trust.

Roger Parloff writes at Fortune that presidents are exempt from federal conflict of interest laws. However, every president in modern times has placed assets in a blind trust anyway. Federal criminal bribery charges do apply to presidents, so an obvious quid pro quo could get him into trouble. He is also not allowed to accept gifts.

In Donald Trump’s case, according to the New York Times, at least one of his businesses has outstanding loans from the Bank of China, which is majority owned by the state. Loans typically have dozens of conditions, and if the bank were to ever forgive or forbear on any of those, or Trump were to negotiate a refinancing, it would be scrutinized microscopically to see if it was a “gift.” If Trump’s policy toward China were tough, it might look like was exerting pressure in an effort to win better terms on his company’s loans. If his policy were accommodating, it might look like he feared retaliation by the bank in the form of tighter terms on those same loans.

White House ethics lawyers ordinarily pore over presidents’ tax forms each years (and those of cabinet members and nominees) to make sure there are no emoluments problems. Because Trump has refused to make his returns public, scrutiny of potential problems has been impossible so far.

And what about Russia? Again, we don’t know what we don’t know. But by all appearances Trump has long-standing business ties to Russia. How much will that influence his foreign policy?

The Boston Globe:

AS A PRESIDENTIAL candidate, Donald Trump vilified the Clinton Foundation as a dark criminal enterprise. No quid pro quo between any donation to the foundation and any official action taken by Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state was ever established. But Trump told voters the Clinton Foundation’s acceptance of money from foreign leaders while Clinton served as America’s top diplomat represented pay-to-play corruption.

If that’s Trump’s definition of a corrupt enterprise, he seems about to create his own version. The president-elect has already named his children — Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka — to his transition team, and said he intends to rely upon them as advisors once he takes office. At the same time, he is putting his children in charge of the family’s vast business empire.

Of course, the IOKIYAR rule applies here, and Trump spokespersons are busily putting out statements that it’s just outrageous to think the POTUS-elect would use his position to make money. Yada yada yada.

Very serious stuff, here.

Trump: On His Own

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By now I’ve gone through most of my thoughts about why this election was lost, and it’s time to segue into being an anti-Trump activist. I just hope I live long enough to see the day when progressives win elections. First we’ll have to see the day when progressives are allowed to run in elections without being sandbagged by centrists. But let’s go on …

It’s pretty clear the Trump crew still doesn’t know what it’s gotten into, but for now he’s happily putting together the Cabinet From Hell. The Democrats sure as hell had better fight these appointments. But Chuck Schumer will be Senate minority leader, and there’s no way to know what Chuck might do. Let’s just say he has a rare talent for taking wrong turns.

But if there’s any indicator how clueless Trump is about what he’s in for, here it is —

With Vice President-elect Mike Pence attending the show, the cast [of the Broadway hit Hamilton] used the opportunity to make a statement emphasizing the need for the new administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, a Republican, to work on behalf of all Americans.

It was a deeply felt and altogether rare appeal from the stage of a Broadway show — and it drew a surprisingly sharp rebuke from Mr. Trump on Saturday morning. The president-elect tweeted that the “Hamilton” cast had “harassed” Mr. Pence by making the statement and had been “very rude.”

Oh, my goodness, someone was rude to Mike Pence! Well, here is the statement that was read —

As the play ended, the actor who played Aaron Burr, Brandon Victor Dixon, acknowledged that Mr. Pence was in the audience, thanked him for attending and added, “We hope you will hear us out.”

“We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,” he said. “We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

The audience broke out in enthusiastic applause and cheers.

If there was ever a purer example of American citizens using their First Amendment rights to address their elected officials, that was it. It’s what the founding of the nation was about, right?

Of course, Mr. Trump has free speech, too, which he exercises through Twitter:

Bleepity bleepity bleep.

Pence had been booed by audience members, not by the cast, when he showed up at the theater. I say Pence is a guy who should be booed whenever he shows his face in public. I would have booed him, too.  But I also understand the cast of Hamilton discouraged booing and simply read the statement above.

I’ve since heard that there’s a right-wing call to boycott Hamilton. If only that would make tickets easier to get; I suspect it will not work, though. In New York City,  Hamilton is a lot more popular than Donald Trump.

But aren’t the right-wingers the same people eternally going on about how they value their freedoms? Seriously, I don’t think they know what the word freedom means.

It’s going to be a long four years, folks.

In Hamilton, after the surrender at Yorktown, King George sings:

Do you know how hard it is to lead?
You’re on your own
Awesome…wow
Do you have a clue what happens now?
Oceans rise
Empires fall
It’s much harder when it’s all your call
All alone
Across the sea
When your people say they hate you
Don’t come crawling back to me

I understand the audience gave that a standing ovation last night. Heh.

Racism Is No Excuse

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Let’s not overstate the racism factor. While there is much wailing about those awful racists who voted for Trump, a closer look at the numbers suggest that the real story of this election was the people who didn’t vote for Trump … or Clinton, or anybody else.

Carl Beijer, who writes for leftie publications, argues that this wasn’t so much the bigot election as the apathy election.

From 2012 to 2016, both men and women went from caring about the outcome to not caring. Among Democratic men and women, as well as Republican women, care levels dropped about 3-4 points; Republican men cared a little less too, but only by one point. Across the board, in any case, the plurality of voters simply didn’t care.

White voters cared even less in 2016 then in 2012, when they also didn’t care; most of that apathy came from white Republicans compared to white Democrats, who dropped off a little less. Voters of color, in contrast, continued to care – but their care levels dropped even more, by 8 points (compared to the 6 point drop-off among white voters). Incredibly, that drop was driven entirely by a 9 point drop among Democratic voters of color which left Democrats with only slim majority 51% support; Republicans, meanwhile, actually gained support among people of color. …

… The major trend in 2016 was one of increasingly apathy. Within that broader trend, the demographic patterns are muddy. Deviations in relatively support from group to group don’t map well onto the standard media narratives that dominated this election; for example, apathy grew more among women and voters of color than among men and white voters. Among the candidates, Clinton either broke even or lost support among every single demographic group, while Trump won support among voters of color and boomers.

See Carl B’s blog for more data.

I’ve read that, particularly in the Rust Belt states, if the same numbers of people who came out for Obama in 2012 had voted for Clinton in 2016, she would have won those states, even though Trump did better than Romney did in those rust bucket states. For example, this anecdote is from Wisconsin:

Urban areas, where black and Hispanic voters are concentrated along with college-educated voters, already leaned toward the Democrats, but Clinton did not get the turnout from these groups that she needed. For instance, black voters did not show up in the same numbers they did for Barack Obama, the first black president, in 2008 and 2012.

Considering how razor-thin the margin of victory was in Wisconsin and elsewhere — there’s your loss.

It also appears that some people who voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. So were they not racist in 2012?

Was the loss this year a “whitelash” against the Obama Administration? If so,why didn’t that cost President Obama the election in 2012? I can believe that some bigots are more worked up now than they were in 2012, considering that Trump and his followers have been stoking the fires. But if Democratic voters, including nonwhite ones, had voted as usual, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

During the primaries we were way oversold on Hillary Clinton’s alleged support among African American voters. She clobbered Sanders in the early southern primaries because huge majorities of black voters chose her, and that gave her a lead that he could never catch.  Clinton supporters even held this up as proof that Bernie Sanders is racist, which was absurd, and not that Democratic voters in the South just plain didn’t know who he was. As I wrote several times during the primaries, as time went on he won larger and larger percentages of black voters, and he had the support of a majority of black millennial voters.

But Beijer wrote back in June that people were misreading this.

Hillary Clinton has won an overwhelming majority of black voters who have participated in the Democratic primaries: the Wall Street Journal places her share at 75.9 percent, and my math puts it at 77.9 percent. This is certainly a better showing than we’ve seen seen from Bernie Sanders, who has won support from about a quarter of black voters.

But on this basis, Clinton’s partisans have routinely concluded that their candidate has won some kind of democratic mandate from black Americans. While this is true in the trivial sense — she has won votes from a majority of those who actually voted — this framing overlooks the overwhelming majority of voting-age black Americans who either voted against Clinton or declined to vote at all. In fact, based on an analysis of exit polls, turnout numbers, and census data, an extraordinary 87.9 percent of voting-age black Americans have not voted for Clinton.

The news stories revealing that the Clintons were worried about African American voters began to turn up in September.

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign is in panic mode. Full panic mode,” said Leslie Wimes, a South Florida-based president of the Democratic African-American Women Caucus.

“They have a big problem because they thought Obama and Michelle saying, ‘Hey, go vote for Hillary’ would do it. But it’s not enough,” Wimes said, explaining that too much of the black vote in Florida is anti-Trump, rather than pro-Clinton. “In the end, we don’t vote against somebody. We vote for somebody.”

This article is from November 1.

African-Americans are failing to vote at the robust levels they did four years ago in several states that could help decide the presidential election, creating a vexing problem for Hillary Clinton as she clings to a deteriorating lead over Donald J. Trump with Election Day just a week away.

As tens of millions of Americans cast ballots in what will be the largest-ever mobilization of early voters in a presidential election, the numbers have started to point toward a slump that many Democrats feared might materialize without the nation’s first black president on the ticket.

The reasons for the decline appear to be both political and logistical, with lower voter enthusiasm and newly enacted impediments to voting at play. In North Carolina, where a federal appeals court accused Republicans of an “almost surgical” assault on black turnout and Republican-run election boards curtailed early-voting sites, black turnout is down 16 percent. White turnout, however, is up 15 percent. Democrats are planning an aggressive final push, including a visit by President Obama to the state on Wednesday.

But in Florida, which extended early voting after long lines left some voters waiting for hours in 2012, African-Americans’ share of the electorate that has gone to the polls in person so far has decreased, to 15 percent today from 25 percent four years ago.

Voter suppression was a factor in some states that Clinton lost, but not in all of them.  See Voter suppression didn’t cost Hillary Clinton the election at Vox.

Here’s another analysis:

Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House, a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump.

Trump also won 194 of the 207 counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012.

By contrast, of those 2,200 counties that never supported Obama, Clinton was only able to win six. That’s just 0.3 percent crossover to the Democratic side.

Again, if we were to claim that racism cost Clinton the election, we’d have to conclude that people who were not racist in 2008 and 2012 had become so in 2016. Or, maybe, Clinton lost because not enough voters were enthusiastic enough about her to go to the polls and vote for her. Take your pick.

It’s true that a lot of outspoken white supremacists supported Trump. But I’m writing this because I’m seeing way too many people say that we can’t win over those racist voters who elected Trump, so we’re doomed. It isn’t that simple.

Blame Where Blame Is Due

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I began this post with an anecdote about a restaurant manager who sat in a booth studying spreadsheets while the restaurant was in chaos and failing to get food on the tables. This article from the Washington Post made me think of it again. Apparently the Clinton campaign was being run by a computer algorithm named Ada.

According to aides, a raft of polling numbers, public and private, were fed into the algorithm, as well as ground-level voter data meticulously collected by the campaign. Once early voting began, those numbers were factored in, too.

What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources.

The use of analytics by campaigns was hardly unprecedented. But Clinton aides were convinced their work, which was far more sophisticated than anything employed by President Obama or GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, gave them a big strategic advantage over Trump.

So where did Ada go wrong?

About some things, she was apparently right. Aides say Pennsylvania was pegged as an extremely important state early on, which explains why Clinton was such a frequent visitor and chose to hold her penultimate rally in Philadelphia on Monday night.

But it appears that the importance of other states Clinton would lose — including Michigan and Wisconsin — never became fully apparent or that it was too late once it did. …

… Like much of the political establishment Ada appeared to underestimate the power of rural voters in Rust Belt states.

There are Democrats in Michigan, right? Did the Clinton campaign not speak to actual human beings outside the Beltway?

Voters Are Not Mind Readers

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Following up on yesterday’s post … Charles Pierce wrote,

Today’s installment of our continuing series, People With Whom I Empathize But Do Not Understand, comes to us from the small town of Mexico, in Maine, courtesy of The Portland Press-Herald. …

Leo Grassette gave 41 years to the Rumford mill. He’s 80 now and still works part time at the Mexico Trading Post. He doesn’t have a career to worry about. If the mill closes and takes with it all the jobs, it won’t affect him. His pension is safe. But Grassette and his wife of 57 years have children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. In the 15 presidential elections held since he began voting, Grassette had never voted for a Republican. That changed last week. Like many, he felt Clinton was dishonest but it was more than that. She talked more about why Trump was bad than about why she was good. “Democrats used to be for the working class,” Grassette said. “I don’t feel that anymore.”

There is one party that wants to privatize Leo’s Social Security and one that does not. There is one party that wants to hand him a worthless voucher and call it Medicare and one that does not. There is one party that at least tepidly supports organized labor through which Leo got his pension, and there is one party that does not. There is one party that wants to keep Leo’s pension out of the hands of hedge fund cowboys and Wall Street thieves, and one that wants to hijack Leo’s pension into the casino economy.

How, I wonder, are the Democrats no longer “for the working class,” and why doesn’t Leo feel that anymore?

Because most non-college-educated  voters don’t know that Republicans plan to privatize Social Security. Most don’t know that Republicans want to privatize Medicare. Most don’t understand what how the loss of organized labor has hurt all working people.

And that’s because nobody bleeping tells them.

Indeed, if you were to walk up to a standard red state voter and tell him that Republicans are planning to gut Medicare and Social Security, they probably wouldn’t believe you. Republicans like to tell voters that they are the ones who are going to protect Social Security and Medicare from those goofy liberals. However, somehow, they’ve got it in their heads that the Democrats are the party in thrall to Wall Street and the Republicans aren’t. Having Hillary Clinton as the party’s standard bearer didn’t exactly correct that misunderstanding.

For at least 30 years the U.S. has needed an ideologically progressive, left-wing party to counter the Republicans, which have become an ideologically conservative, right-wing party. We’ve needed a party that would champion progressive economic populism and working people, and which would get blue-collar folks enthusiastic about progressive policy proposals instead of allowing right-wing hegemony to go unchallenged in all but urban and liberal coastal circles. We also needed a party that appreciated how much our younger people are being exploited instead of encouraged by the system.

And we needed a party that knows how to take the fight to the Right. We need a party that won’t negotiate with itself out of fear of what the Right will do. That approach doesn’t work.

Maybe now, if we can move the centrist/neoliberal/Clintonite/DLC crew out of the way,  we’ve got a chance at building that party.

The New Iron Curtain

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Joan Walsh complains that it isn’t true Clinton didn’t have policy ideas that would have helped working women. “Clinton proposed steep tax hikes for the rich, to pay for things like paid family leave and tuition-free college, a precisely redistributionist approach,” Walsh wrote.

I know she did. But I’m the sort of politics nerd who actually goes to candidates’ websites and reads them. I can assure you that hardly any voters in Missouri heard anything about Clinton’s paid family leave and other proposals.

Clinton could have run television ads here talking about what she wanted to do for working people. Instead, she ran ads letting us know that Donald Trump ties are made in China. I saw that one multiple times.

It might have helped if the debates had been a little more focused on issues instead of gotchas, but as I wrote a couple of days ago, Clinton doesn’t know how to frame arguments in language that a red stater could understand. The kind of shorthand or boilerplate language Democrats in blue states use with each other is alien in these here parts. So when Clinton in the debates talked about investing in the middle class, I knew what she meant. But that’s a meaningless phrase to red state folks. They have no grounding in what that might actually mean, because such things are never talked about here.

I don’t know how much more I can emphasize that if you live in a red state, and you are not the sort of person who enjoys reading newspapers from around the world through the Internet, you don’t hear liberal/progressive perspectives on anything. You will not have heard them since the Lyndon Johnson Administration, frankly, meaning that if you haven’t yet achieved Geezerhood you may not know there ever were liberal/progressive arguments for anything. All you know is that “libtards” like raising taxes, just because, and like big government programs, just because.

And, again, if you were watching this election from a red state or district, and all you knew about Hillary Clinton was what you saw on the television and in social media, you wouldn’t have liked her, either, regardless of how racist or sexist you might or might not have been.

I don’t know that all the small-town newspapers and red state television and radio stations are owned by wingnuts, but I suspect most of them learned a long time ago to be cautious about how they handle political news. As their marketing areas got redder and redder, too anti-conservative a message, or even coverage that too vigorously questioned the Right’s hegemony, could have cost them their business.

That leaves us with the national television news, which is mostly worthless. I know a lot of people blame the loss of the Fairness Doctrine for this, but IMO what really killed it were decisions made, many years ago, to consolidate news and entertainment programming. News departments used to be entirely separate from entertainment and were run by senior news people who were serious about, you know, news. Now news departments are considered part of entertainment and are managed by the same people who thought spinning the Geico Cavemen into a sitcom was a great idea.

See also Allan Chernoff, Blame the Rise of Trump on the Failure of Network News.

So if there’s one thing I wish I could get across to the Democrats in the Beltway, it’s that they’re going to have to make an extraordinary effort to break through the iron curtain of disinformation in red states. A couple of rallies and some meh campaign ads won’t cut it. They need to begin a barrage of progressive policy arguments in these states. They should drop pamphlets from airplanes, if that’s what it takes. And they need to begin it now, before the next election campaigns begin.

Walsh ends by issuing some snarky “apologies,” ending with “I apologize for thinking that the country was ready to elect a woman president.” Well, they might be ready to elect a woman president; they just weren’t ready to elect Hillary Clinton.

Postmortems

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I’ve spent the past four days pouring my thoughts into this blog, and while I have more to say I need to get some air, so to speak. So for today, here are links to the best analyses of the debacle I’ve seen so far. I may add to these as I see more. In no particular order:

Frank Bruni, The Democrats Screwed Up

Thomas Edsall, The Democratic Coalition’s Epic Fail. See also this Edsall column from August, Is Trump Wrecking Both Parties?

Dan Roberts, My Journeys in Trumpland

Matt Taibbi, President Trump: How America Got It So Wrong

 

 

Dear Sister and Brother Progressives:

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Once upon a time — 1986, actually — the late great Mike Royko wrote a Chicago Tribune column about the lack of short Greeks in the restaurant industry. The column had been inspired by lunch at a restaurant in which the orders were wrong, the service was terrible, and the beer didn’t arrive until he’d finished his sandwich. While this was going on the manager — a young man with a brand-new college degree in restaurant management — was sitting in a corner booth cheerfully sipping coffee and studying spreadsheets, completely oblivious to what actually was happening in his restaurant. One assumes the spreadsheets told him everything was fine. Royko wrote,

I don`t want to an alarmist, but when this nation collapses, he and those like him will be the cause.

First, we had the MBA–especially the Harvard MBA–who came along after World War II and took over American industry. With his bottom-line approach, the MBA did such a brilliant job that the Japanese might soon buy the whole country and evict us.

But we`re told not to worry. Now that we don`t manufacture as much as we used to, we`ll be saved by the growing service industry.

The problem is that the service industry is being taken over by people like the restaurant manager and his corporation. They go to college and study service. Then they install computers programmed for service. And they have meetings and look at service charts and graphs and talk about service.

But what they don`t do is provide service.

Royko went on to explain that he favored restaurants run by short Greeks. They may not have bothered with spreadsheets, but they could run a kitchen and get food on a table while it was still hot. Why the Greeks had to be short I’m not sure, but this was Royko’s column.

My point is going to be that we college-educated liberals/progressives who complain about Trump voters are too much like that manager studying spreadsheets. Everybody’s got data telling them those people don’t have anything to complain about. They supported Trump only because they are ignorant racists who don’t get what the world is really like. And while there’s a lot of truth in that, that’s not the whole picture.

You need to haul your faces out of the spreadsheets and spend some significant face time with those people to get the whole picture. And by “face time” I don’t mean yelling at them about how awful they are.

Although I’ve lived in the greater New York City area for the past 30 or so years,  I am originally from small-town Missouri and am the daughter and granddaughter of mine workers. The people I grew up with are the same ones Joe Bageant wrote about in Deer Hunting With Jesus, if you’re familiar with that book. And I spent the past four months leading up to the election staying with an aunt back home, watching everything unfold from within a very red state. And there are two things that I wish I could get across to those of you who are blaming racism and misogyny alone on the result of this election.

Executive summary: The first thing is that the population of people who swung the election to Trump — and no, they were not the third-party voters — have real grievances. It isn’t just the racism, even though racism is there. Second, I cannot emphasize enough that this population never hears progressive/liberal ideas explained to them. They have no idea what Democrats stand for, except higher taxes and Big Government.

One: No matter what the data tell you, to blue-collar workers in the midwest and “rust belt” the world is a much more economically precarious place than it used to be. I realize that much of this precariousness comes from Reaganomics and the slow dismantling of the New Deal, but globalization and neoliberal policies had a hand in it as well.

There are communities all across the midwest and northeast in which, 50 years ago, a young white guy could graduate from high school one day and get a steady job paying decent wages with benefits the next day, and as long as he showed up for work on time and sober and did his tasks competently, he probably kept that job for life. The wages from the local industry — whether manufacturing or mining — stayed in the community and supported lots of locally owned retail shops, roofers, automobile dealers, restaurants, etc.

(There was always poverty on the edges, and that poverty wasn’t necessarily nonwhite poverty. Some all-white sections of the Ozarks and Appalachia have never not been sunk into poverty, because they were areas that didn’t support large-scale farming or industry. These were people the white blue-collar workers used to look down on, also, when they weren’t their cousins.)

Now mines and factories are closed, and the big employers are no longer locally owned. It’s all Walmart and other big chain stores and restaurants, out by the nearest interstate somewhere, and the once-busy Main Street shopping areas are boarded up or taken over by shabby little insurance offices and Come to Jesus Gospel Tabernacles. The profits from the chain stores don’t stay in the community but go to far away corporations and stockholders, or the Walton family. The young folks graduating high school either settle for minimum wage service industry jobs with no future or move away. If they go away to college they probably don’t come back.

Somehow, that picture doesn’t show up on the spreadsheets. There is data showing us that the white working class is under serious stress (see Juan Cole on that point), but somehow that information is not sinking in.

Compared to 1999, white workers, according to another recent study in the Commonwealth Foundation: “have lower incomes, fewer are employed, and fewer are married.” This study found other causes for the increased death rates than just the ones mentioned above, but didn’t deny the Princeton findings. Here is their chart …

See also Why Poor White Males Are the Core of Trump’s Support and The White Man Burden.

So, something’s going very wrong in this population, and yelling at them about how racist they are really isn’t helping. But it does take me to the second point.

Two: Nobody talks to those people except to manipulate or exploit them. And by manipulating and exploiting I mean stirring up racism and xenophobia and scapegoating liberalism for their problems.

If you’ve lived all your life in the liberal northeast or Pacific coast regions, this may come as a shock to you, but folks here in the heartland never, ever hear progressive/liberal arguments for anything. Right-wing hegemony is so dominant that the progressive perspective on anything is completely shut out.

I do blame television news for a lot of this, because television news (particularly the networks people actually watch here) never explains anything. It just reports the sound bites du jour. And, frankly, right-wing arguments for anything come across better on television, because they are short and simple. Cutting taxes creates jobs, for example. Now, you and I know that isn’t true except under very particular circumstances that don’t prevail anywhere in the U.S. these days, but never mind. That’s what everybody says, so it must be true. The liberal argument for raising taxes to invest in, say, infrastructure, takes more than thirty seconds to explain. It doesn’t come across on television.

I wrote this the day after the election:

A day or two ago some talking head on the teevee said that most voters couldn’t name five things Clinton stood for, but they knew what Trump stood for. I had said something like that to a Clinton supporter awhile back, and she pooh-poohed the idea and began to rattle off Clinton’s policy positions, which I knew as well as she did. But, I said, I don’t think most people who are not politics junkies are getting that information. And then I was told that if people were too lazy to study Hillary Clinton’s website to learn how wonderful she is, that was their own fault.

Harry Truman wouldn’t have made that mistake.

But the problem isn’t just Hillary Clinton, but the whole attitude of the Democratic Party. We’ve needed them to be an ideologically left-wing party for a long time. We’ve needed them to go to those rust-bucket states and sell people on progressive economics for a long time. And nobody bothered. The only messages received by most voters not in the liberal coastal states are ideologically right-wing messages.

It may stun some of you to realize that the average voter here in Heartland World really never heard five things Hillary Clinton stood for. But they didn’t. The ads she ran in the St. Louis media market were nearly all anti-Trump ads. Television news (the networks most people watch) certainly never discussed Clinton’s policy proposals. Even if you watched the debates, what she said about policy wouldn’t have translated into anything recognizable. For example, Clinton said this in the first debate:

And so what I believe is the more we can do for the middle class, the more we can invest in you, your education, your skills, your future, the better we will be off and the better we’ll grow. That’s the kind of economy I want us to see again.

Those words mean something to those of us with some depth of knowledge of progressive ideas. But I can assure you those words didn’t register with the blue collar workers. They would have no idea what those words even meant. “Invest” how? In education? What does that mean? Sending us back to school? And where will jobs actually come from? “Invest in you” were just empty words to them.  All Trump had to say was “NAFTA,” and people sorta kinda know what that was and that it took jobs away, and Clinton was for it.

There was a time when at least some nationally known Democrats could connect to the poor white folks — the image is of Bobby Kennedy in Appalachia, sometime in the 1960s.  But in recent years the Democratic Party has seemed focused on how to win elections without their votes.

Back to the spreadsheets — if we can win x percent of these other demographics, we’re in! But it’s not working so far.

I certainly do not deny that there is a lot of racism and sexism in this population. That’s one reason those people are so easy to exploit and manipulate. And because racism especially is being exploited and manipulated, it stays alive. As a rule, whatever you feed will grow. 

Sometimes it’s pretty raw; a short time back I stopped at a little restaurant/market to pick up eggs and sandwiches, and a guy having lunch there was sneering loudly that Trump was gonna defeat that woman. And the way he said it made me want to smash him in the face with a ketchup bottle (I didn’t). Another patron, a woman, was screeching that Hillary wants to rip babies out of wombs and should be shot.

But, y’know what? Nobody ever explains to people here what Roe v. Wade really says, that late elective abortions already are effectively illegal and that there’s no such thing as a ninth-month abortion.  And who is to teach them not to be sexists or racists? How do you do that, especially if right-wing demagogues are so busily keeping the racism factor pumped up? Whatever you feed will grow. 

See also Michigan Democrat slams Hillary Clinton’s terrible campaign strategy: ˜How would any sane person not predict how this one would go?”

Please, blue state folks, stop trying to interpret the rest of the country from what you see on spreadsheets. And there’s nothing here I haven’t said before, but I keep repeating this stuff in the hope that somebody starts listening.

How Democrats Gambled Everything, and Lost

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This happened yesterday:

Donna Brazile, the interim leader of the Democratic National Committee, was giving what one attendee described as “a rip-roaring speech” to about 150 employees, about the need to have hope for wins going forward, when a staffer identified only as Zach stood up with a question.

“Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?” he asked, according to two people in the room. “You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself.”

Some DNC staffers started to boo and some told him to sit down. Brazile began to answer, but Zach had more to say.

“You are part of the problem,” he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump’s victory by siding with Clinton early on. “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”

Zach gathered his things and began to walk out. When Brazile called after him, asking where he was going, he told her to go outside and “tell people there” why she should be leading the party.

Well, she won’t be leading the party for long, but Zach’s anger is justified. Brazile and people like her were handed a set of circumstances that should have meant a decent year for Democrats, and they royally screwed the pooch.

The loss of the general election — not just the White House, but a potential Senate majority and a lot of crucial state offices as well — could have been prevented, I believe. But all was lost because the Democratic Party apparently was following an elaborate game plan that actually worked. It worked in the sense that all the pieces fell into place; everything that was supposed to happen did happen, just as anticipated.

Until election day.

I think it’s important to understand The Plan, because I sincerely believe that it shows us that the current leadership of the Democratic Party — and not just Donna Brazile — must step aside before another election takes place.

Step One: Put The Plan into place (March 2015)

The game plan apparently was worked out by the spring of 2015, well over a year ago. And this is something I wrote about a lot during the primaries (such as here). By March 2015 Hillary Clinton had won the “invisible primary” and had been chosen by Democratic Party insiders to be the nominee. I’m sure of this date because there were commentaries dated March 2015 declaring this had happened.

See, for example, Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg News:

Clinton has (apparently) won the nomination fair and square, through hard work and political talent. That is why she has earned the support of the bulk of Democratic party actors, and gained the acquiescence of other Democrats who aren’t as enthusiastic about her.

So all those perfectly viable other candidates either dropped out or never seriously considered the race. Had Clinton chosen not to run, plenty of the others would have jumped in, and the field would have been comparable to what the Republicans have put together.

See also Ezra Klein at Vox:

Bernstein’s argument is related to the “invisible primary” theory of presidential elections. Hillary Clinton, he says, “has earned the support of the bulk of Democratic party actors, and gained the acquiescence of other Democrats who aren’t as enthusiastic about her.” The result is that the Democratic Party’s “perfectly viable other candidates either dropped out or never seriously considered the race.”

Perhaps a slightly clearer way to put it is this: in the invisible primary, when the contest is as much a draft as it is a campaign, Clinton is “opposed” by essentially every Democrat fit for the presidency. If the party’s powerbrokers didn’t want to support Clinton and instead really wanted Sen. Michael Bennet to run, or Gov. Andrew Cuomo to lead the field, they would be working toward that outcome. Instead, they’re lining up behind Clinton. In this telling, Clinton isn’t winning by default. She’s winning by winning. The absence of competition is the product of Clinton’s strong, successful campaign to win over Democratic Party elites.

Again, both of the above articles were published in March 2015, and these are both respectable sources. So we’ve established that Democratic Party elites were determined to make Hillary Clinton the nominee several months before the primaries started.

How much other Democrats were actively discouraged from running I cannot say, but I assume that was part of The Plan, too. The only other arguably “establishment” Dem who entered the primaries was Martin O’Malley. And this ought to have struck people as odd, because it was an open seat, and it was already certain that the GOP would run a selection of whackjobs and clowns. It must have looked like a winnable election to a lot of people.

Yet other establishment Democrats sat it out. The field was cleared for Clinton. Why that happened is explained in Step Two.

Step Two: Set up the Hillary Victory Fund.

I know people got tired of me going on about the Hillary Victory Fund during the primaries, but there was something about it that just didn’t pass the smell test. Among other things, I complained that the HVF allegedly was raising money for down-ticket candidates, yet the money was all going to the Clinton campaign.

It appears that for the general election the HVF actually did generate a lot of money for the down-ticket candidates, although I haven’t seen a breakdown of actual numbers. Clinton beat Trump in fundraising by a large margin, and I read a few days ago that she was sending money to other candidates. The HVF should have been a brilliant plan to out-raise Republicans and achieve a substantial number of congressional and state election victories.

To recap, the Hillary Victory Fund was a joint fundraising effort set up with the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic parties of 33 states.  It’s essentially a PAC. Individual donors could give up to $356,100 per year, and since this was set up in 2015 some gave this maximum for two years, for a total of $712,200. The Hillary Victory Fund was a huge cash cow. Part of the deal is that by passing money through state parties, Clinton could take a portion of PAC money and use it as individual donations, meaning no strings attached.

And it was great for the DNC, also, which was in debt in 2014 and falling way behind the RNC in fund raising. Thanks to the HVF, money flowed into the DNC.

There was nothing illegal about the HVF, as far as I know, but it would have been illegal for earlier campaigns. The McCutcheon v. FEC decision in 2014 changed previous election rules and made the HVF plan possible.

So what was the problem?

The Clinton campaign began courting state parties to join the HVF in August 2015, at the Democratic National Committee summer meeting. Note that this was before the primaries had started. In effect, the HVF tied the fortunes of 33 state Democratic parties and the DNC itself to the Clinton campaign, before she was officially the nominee. If Clinton had lost the nomination, the money spigot would have been cut off, too.

This gave the DNC (not to mention 33 states) a powerful incentive to favor Clinton for the nomination. Past Democratic presidential election campaigns had also formed joint fund-raising committees, but not until after the nomination had been secured.

And, one suspects, the Hillary Victory Fund plan was part of the reason Democratic Party elites green-lighted her nomination back in March 2015, although that’s a piece of the puzzle I cannot document. It all must have seemed a sweet, brilliant plan. Clinton could use her chops for fund-raising among the well-heeled and flood the entire Democratic Party with lots and lots of campaign cash. And it appears she succeeded. Whatever other problems they may have had, the Democrats were not handicapped by being strapped for money this time

However, the significant point here is that Hillary Clinton bought the DNC. She owned it. The DNC depended on her for income. This all but cemented her position as the party nominee.

So, parts one and two of The Plan made sure that Hillary Clinton would be at the top of the ticket, and this was decided before the primaries began. No fair competition was allowed. The fact that a huge part of the Democratic/progressive base made it clear they wanted someone else was dismissed by the DNC as a mere problem to manage. It didn’t signal to them that maybe Hillary Clinton wasn’t the best choice.

Step Three: Hillary Clinton Wins the Nomination

Let me be clear that I am not going to argue that Hillary Clinton stole votes from Bernie Sanders or actively “rigged” the primary election. I have no proof of that, and I’m not going to go there.

But there’s no question the primary fight was slanted in Hillary Clinton’s favor. In July Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone wrote about Wikileaks:

As is sadly the case with most political stories these days, whether or not you care about the so-called “DNC leak” probably depends on which candidate you supported in the primaries.

If you supported Hillary Clinton, it probably won’t bother you that the Democratic National Committee is revealed in these documents to have essentially acted as an arm of the Clinton campaign during the contested primary season.

Most people guessed at this anyway. But it wasn’t until these documents were dumped last week under mysterious circumstances that the extent to which the party both advocated for Hillary and against her opponent Bernie Sanders was made plain.

And the critical factor in Taibbi’s piece was the Hillary Victory Fund. Eventually reports came out that there was something fishy going on, and the Sanders campaign complained. Taibbi continued:

By evening that day, news outlets were describing this not as an expose about the DNC and Clinton, but as an inside-baseball fight between the Sanders and Clinton camps.

“Clinton and Sanders spar over joint fundraising efforts,” wrote one CNN headline.

That CNN story even added language that “a Clinton campaign aide refuted some of Politico’s report Monday.” This was despite the fact that the “refuting” amounted to a promise that more money would reach the state parties in upcoming months.

What does it all mean? If you’re a Clinton fan, probably nothing.

To anyone else, it shows that the primary season was very far from a fair fight. The Sanders camp was forced to fund all of its own operations, while the Clinton campaign could essentially use the entire Democratic Party structure as adjunct staff. The DNC not only wasn’t neutral, but helped with oppo research against Sanders and media crisis management.

DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign as a result of this mess, which exposed to Sanders voters the extent to which they were viewed organizationally as annoyances to be managed.

So it was, for example, that even Sanders’s invitation to speak to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences on an ethical global economy was used against him; the Clintons and DNC turned it into an opportunity to ridicule Sanders because he only briefly met with the Pope (which was never the purpose of the trip), and media mostly went along. Karl Rove himself couldn’t have “managed” that one any better. I believe that may have hurt Sanders in the New York primary, which was a critical one for him to win. And he didn’t.

Do read the entire Taibbi post; he put the pieces together better than anyone else that I saw.

I know there were stories claiming that Clinton was using the HVF to buy superdelegates, but I don’t know that’s exactly true, and anyway that isn’t the big picture. The big picture is that anyone in the upper echelon of the Democratic Party (which would have included the superdelegates) were bound to go along with The Plan, because they all benefited from it directly or indirectly. The entire Democratic Party benefited from it, in theory, except for the poor schmucks who ran against Clinton in the primaries, and who were never given a fair chance to present their case to the American people.

I know Liz Warren caught a lot of grief for not endorsing Sanders and for campaigning for Hillary Clinton, but she was doing it for the Team, And this tells me why Rachel Maddow sold out and enabled a cover-up of HVF activities last May. She was doing it for the Team.

If you understand that the success of the entire Democratic Party (as they saw it) was tied to Hillary Clinton being the nominee, all of that makes sense.

Part Four: Promote Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.

It struck me as extremely weird that Clintonites were evoking the horrible spectre of President Donald Trump long before he actually won the nomination. For example, this widely circulated article from March dismisses Sanders supporters as privileged white people who wouldn’t be hurt by a Trump Administration, and if they weren’t so selfish they’d get behind Clinton, who of course was the only candidate running who might beat Trump. All of the Clinton television ads I saw leading up to the New York primary also promoted Clinton as the only reliable firewall between The People and President Trump.

How’s that one workin’ out for ya, New York?

The Wikileaks emails tell us that the candidate that worried the Clintons most was Marco Rubio. They weren’t worried about The Donald. And part of their strategy was to manipulate media to promote the worst Republican candidates. This is a variation of Sen. Claire McCaskill’s successful Todd Akin strategy that helped her defend her Senate seat in 2012.

So here was the Clinton plan:

An email recently released by the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks shows how the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party bear direct responsibility for propelling the bigoted billionaire to the White House.

In its self-described “pied piper” strategy, the Clinton campaign proposed intentionally cultivating extreme right-wing presidential candidates, hoping to turn them into the new “mainstream of the Republican Party” in order to try to increase Clinton’s chances of winning.

The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee called for using far-right candidates “as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right.” Clinton’s camp insisted that Trump and other extremists should be “elevated” to “leaders of the pack” and media outlets should be told to “take them seriously.”

Thus, the Clinton campaign encouraged media to give Trump lots of free publicity and to take him seriously — to “normalize” him, in other words. But the Wikileaks emails reveal a lot of hand-wringing behind the scenes back when the Trump nomination wasn’t a sure thing..

The correspondence reveals a campaign that has struggled all year to improve a flawed candidate. As far back as March, aides were keenly aware that she was resistant to the media, perhaps out of touch with regular Americans and unable to convey a clear message to voters. …

… “Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” asked Clinton adviser Joel Benenson.

Benenson contrasted the simplicity of Bernie Sanders’s anti-Wall Street message with Clinton’s multitiered campaign slogans.

Seven months later and on the cusp of Election Day, the concerns laid out in these emails and others largely remain. Clinton has proven to be a lackluster candidate who has struggled to win over the liberals who gravitated to Sanders during the primary, and who remains ahead in large part due to Trump’s historic weaknesses.

“Right now I am petrified that Hillary is almost totally dependent on Republicans nominating Trump,” Brent Budowsky, a political columnist and former political adviser, wrote in a March 2016 email to Podesta and Roy Spence, an ad maker for the campaign. “She has huge endemic political weaknesses that she would be wise to rectify.”

But Trump did get the nomination. So no worries, right?

Part Five: General Election

Hillary Clinton had a great resume and all the money in the world to spend on staff and advertising and anything else a campaign needed. What could go wrong?

All along, Hillary Clinton marketed herself as the safe choice. As the pragmatic choice. As the one who wouldn’t rock the boat that much. She would be the sensible steward of the Obama legacy who knew how to get things done in incremental baby steps that wouldn’t give anyone indigestion.

Except that across the political spectrum, most of the electorate was screaming for big change as loudly as it could. Clinton  and Democratic Party insiders were tone deaf to it.

And now we’ve learned that to lots of folks “drain the swamp” was a more compelling campaign slogan than “eat your spinach.”

The Plan was supposed to give Democrats the White House, the Senate, maybe the House, and maybe some governorships. Instead, not only did Dems lose the White House, but a lot of other good candidates lost because people who might have preferred them just didn’t go to the polls to vote.

In 2012, Obama got 65,915,795 votes, which was a lot less than he got in 2008, but enough. This week, Clinton got 59,814,018 votes. A shitload of people who helped elect Obama just plain didn’t bother to go to the polls and vote for Clinton. I understand that there was a big drop of votes from nonwhite and younger voters especially.

I argue the down-ticket candidacies were held back because Hillary Clinton was at the top of the ticket. As I watched the general election campaign in Missouri, I couldn’t help but notice that Republican campaign ads were citing donations from Hillary Clinton’s campaign as a reason to vote against state Democratic candidates. The HVF money may have hurt them more than helped them.

I don’t know that Bernie Sanders would have won the general election. Big national elections are complicated beasts with infinite moving parts; change one variable and thousands of others will change also. It may be that the GOP would have found some vulnerability in Sanders to exploit that we don’t know about.

(However, there is an argument out there that he would have done better against Trump than Clinton did. And if the Clinton campaign hadn’t encouraged it, perhaps Trump wouldn’t have been the nominee.)

But what if the primary had been genuinely open? What if Joe Biden or Liz Warren or Sherrod Brown had run for the nomination? One of them may have caught fire with the base the way Barack Obama did in 2008, and then we’d have had a very different election with an well-known establishment candidate enjoying the enthusiastic support of a bigger part of the base. We’ll never know.

Trump won in part because he is a master salesman who pitched a product lots of people were ready to buy.

One of the biggest upsets in American political history was built on a coalition of white voters unlike that of any other previous Republican candidate, according to election results and interviews with voters and demographic experts.

Mr. Trump’s coalition comprised not just staunchly conservative Republicans in the South and West. They were joined by millions of voters in the onetime heartlands of 20th-century liberal populism — the Upper and Lower Midwest — where white Americans without a college degree voted decisively to reject the more diverse, educated and cosmopolitan Democratic Party of the 21st century, making Republicans the country’s dominant political party at every level of government. …

… But Mr. Trump also won over millions of voters who had once flocked to President Obama’s promise of hope and change, and who on Tuesday saw in Mr. Trump their best chance to dampen the most painful blows of globalization and trade, to fight special interests, and to be heard and protected. Twelve percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters approved of Mr. Obama, according to the exit polls.

Mrs. Clinton won by a greater margin than Mr. Obama among affluent whites, particularly those living in the Democratic Party’s prosperous coastal strongholds: Washington and Boston, Seattle and New York. In Manhattan, where Mr. Trump lives and works — and where his fellow citizens mocked and jeered him as he voted on Tuesday — Mrs. Clinton won by a record margin, amassing 87 percent of the vote to Mr. Trump’s 10 percent. Around the country, she won a majority of voters over all, harvesting the country’s growing and densely packed big cities and a plurality of the suburbs.

But Mr. Trump won low-income white voters to the Republican ticket, reversing a partisan divide along class lines that is as old as the Democratic and Republican Parties — a replay of the “Brexit” vote in June, when the old bastions of England’s Labor-left voted decisively to leave the European Union. His breakthrough among white working-class voters in the North not only erased the Democratic advantage but reversed it, giving him a victory in the Electoral College while he lost the national popular vote.

Most strikingly, Mr. Trump won his biggest margins among middle-income white voters, according to exit polls, a revolt not only of the white working class but of the country’s vast white middle class. He did better than past Republicans in the sprawling suburbs along Florida’s central coasts, overwhelming Mrs. Clinton’s gains among Hispanic voters. He held down Mrs. Clinton’s margins in the Philadelphia suburbs, defying expectations that Mrs. Clinton would outperform Mr. Obama by a wide margin.

See also “Michigan Democrat slams Hillary Clinton’s terrible campaign strategy: ‘How would any sane person not predict how this one would go?‘” What happened on Tuesday can’t be explained by misogyny alone, no matter how much Amanda Marcotte might fervently wish to believe otherwise.

In many ways it really was a brilliant plan, but it was doomed from the outset because it depended on Hillary Clinton being at the top of the ticket, and it turns out she was too weak a candidate and too out of touch with the mood of the country to carry it off. She was never able to tell all those white folks in states that are being hurt by the global economy why she should be their president. All she did was try to contrast herself as the “safe” choice compared to that awful Donald Trump. Nearly all the Clinton campaign ads I saw in Missouri were anti-Trump ads, and the one exception was a drearily forgettable ad in which Clinton made vague noises about doing nice things. I don’t remember what, exactly.

But Donald Trump wasn’t as scary as she assumed, especially after the press had “normalized” him and taken him seriously. As she had directed them to do.

We might complain for days on end about the unfair smear campaigns that relentlessly follow her, but even an idiot should have known that she would be very, very vulnerable to more smears this year. It’s been going on since at least 1992. Why, of all people, did she have to be the Democratic nominee?

(Yet last spring we were being told by Democratic Party apparatchiks. that Hillary Clinton had already been so thoroughly vetted nobody could touch her, but Bernie Sanders would be killed for being a socialist. Remember that one?)

And no, those third party voters didn’t cost her the election. She lost it herself.

I want to close with more words from Matt Taibbi, from June:

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It’s exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.

Instead, because of the gross miscalculations of a lot of smart people utterly out of touch with their own country, the GOP has been regenerated. It owns the federal government now, and most of the states as well.

For a long time the Clintons and people who came up through party ranks with them have dominated the Democratic Party. And while the Clintons pulled off some smart moves in the 1990s, they should have moved on a long time ago. As someone on my Facebook feed said recently, “They’re not nurturing a farm team of young candidates. They’re not working to get working people back in. They’re mitigating progressives with their nervousness and wussy behavior. I’m tired of bringing knives to a gun fight.” And a lot of us are tired of being shut out.

So all you folks who are demonstrating against Trump — I know how you feel. But maybe you should be marching on Democratic Party headquarters instead. It isn’t just Donna Brazile who has to go. It’s everyone who owed their careers to the Clintons who have to go. They all must go, now. Because they are the problem. They have been holding the Democratic Party back for years, and it’s got to stop, now. And as long as they’re still in positions of authority, no one is going to trust the Democrats to not be the party of out-of-touch elitists.

So if you want a swamp to drain, start here.