How #Trump Won
For those of you
still catching up to reality of President-elect @realDonaldTrump,
let me (as someone that predicted his victory in August 2015)
enlighten you to how it really happened (vice how he did it which is
false because he did not know he was going to win until late in the
campaign). I will make a two page argument based on objective outside
observation. I favored neither Trump nor Clinton and I argued they
were both dangerous candidates. I hoped @GovGaryJohnson
would make the debate stage and then at least have a chance at
winning.
The first question
to address is can you win if you lose popular vote? This is the stupidest
question; popular vote versus electoral college is pointless until
election law is changed. If you win the electoral college you win, no
special mention nor extra value to winning the vote total. That is
how you win. Remember the Clinton campaign mocking Trump's
misunderstanding of how to win, they should have heeded their own
advice. They didn't make swing states a priority. The goal of an
electoral college is to prevent New York and California from deciding
all elections. If you live outside these two areas you want to make
sure large population centres, and all the big city priorities, don't
swamp other concerns. State electoral voting demands that candidates
make every state a part of the strategy rather than allowing them to
ignore flyover states.
Consider all the
possible, if somewhat far fetched, election outcomes against a crude
timeline. If you make a matrix of all possible outcomes like so:
| Candidate | Decided during Primary | Decided before Nov 8 | Decided on Nov 8 |
| Trump | |||
| Clinton | |||
| Johnson | |||
| Stein |
And you consider the
most likely reasons for candidate choice:
| Candidate | For Candidate | Against Opponent | Change vice Status Quo |
| Trump | |||
| Clinton | |||
| Johnson | |||
| Stein |
You don't need to
fill them in, just consider how the results align with these possible
causes. The reason for the timing as in primary, before election day,
and on election day considers the impact of media, scandals,
coverage, debates and so on as the likely turning points for people
to decide which they would vote for. These are arbitrary and fuzzy
but generally align with major information thresholds. The people
that decided earliest had the least information, the people that
decided later had the most. Did having more information change the
result? Both sides expected revelations against the other candidate
would change the outcome. The election outcome suggests that both GOP
and DNC solidified large portions of the electorate that decided on
one candidate early. But that wasn't the difference.
The deciding factor was disenfranchised voters returned to politics,
unemployed/desperate needed change, or otherwise opponents of the status quo wanted change. The
preponderance of new voters went to Trump. It was people that turned
off politics over many years that realized there was a real chance
for change with a candidate that owed no debts to anyone. He proposed
economic relief and policy restructuring – even without detail –
that convinced enough voters he might change the status quo. That was
the election decision. Logically, more people decided, in the
primaries, to vote Trump than decided to vote Clinton. That included
voters that don't partake in elections in general that changed
behaviour because this election was different. Information didn't
matter and as I describe below information against Trump didn't work
for this very reason. They didn't care what he did or said, they
convinced themselves with the LEAST information that he was the best
chance for change. Does the proposition that normal/average people
decided with the least information at the earliest moment and then
stubbornly defended their choice sound more or less likely than
alternatives? To me, this is the simplest explanation.
This explanation
fits the most possible outcomes and the events leading up to the
election; most voters decided early. Without Gov. Gary Johnson or Dr.
Jill Stein on the debate stage to alter the visibility / give
attention to 3rd party alternatives the vote came down to
who wanted change over who wanted status quo. Both Trump and Clinton
negative ratings negated each other just
like most of the scandals. Neither is pious nor perfect.
The fact that
famous, even pious people like the @Pontifex, people took turns
insulting or criticizing @realDonaldTrump and all those pleadings did
not change the outcome means that liberals did not anticipate all
outcomes nor did they understand voters. The Clinton campaign truly believed they had won, in part
because they were taking biased / skewed samples, but also because
they deluded themselves into thinking they COULD change enough voters
to win.
There was no chance of that. That is the reward for hubris!
What really happened
was most voters in the electoral majority, most average normal
voters, believed and could see first hand from a lack of good paying
jobs, that the USA needed to change directions. They were paying too
high a price for globalization and the evidence is ready for all to
see: the empty rusting factories that used to give voters a good
living. In fact, "change voters" have been voting for hope and change
since at least George Bush II. Bush II was the new sheriff in town, a
street smart governor that wasn't a beltway insider. He promised them
a stop to globalization, to make economic changes that kept jobs, but
instead got distracted by 9/11 and wars. The same with Obama over
McCain and Romney. He was the hope and change candidate. The
underlying belief is that the rules aren't fair and the people wanted
globalization to stop, if that means trade wars and tariffs then so
be it.
The point is Obama,
Bush, and now Trump were the more plausible change candidates than
their opponents. This is a direct rebuke of free trade policy.
Capitalism is choking as it swallows the world and these victims of
the rise and fall of prosperity wanted another change November 8
2016, a promised dropped 16 years in a row by other promisers.
Most of the normal,
average voters must have decided on Trump early on. The way that
famous person after famous person failed to dent Trump's popularity,
the way that $1.2 billion Clinton marketing did nothing to sway
voters, it means that simple people whom decided for Trump felt shame
or anger about their choice when it was rubbed in their faces.
Whenever something embarrassing or ridiculous was revealed about
Trump they took it PERSONALLY that the accuser was insulting them for
being allied to Trump. They were being personally mocked for their
choice. That made them even angrier and more determined, Trump
supporters were like rabid dogs whereas Clinton supporters –
because she is an odious candidate despite the varnish – were like
fickle cats. Clintonites were not sanguine enough about their choice
to match that level, including cheated / defeated Sanders supporters
that felt (rightly) betrayed by the Democratic party. The delicious
irony is, the more that sanctimonious elites lined up with Clinton,
the more President +BarackObama talked, the more Bush-era apparatchiks lined up with Clinton, the more media made fun of
Trump's many failings, the more comics and actors mocked Trump, it
was all electing Trump in the process and demoralizing Clinton
supporters at the same time. How could this buffoon even be in the
running Clintonites thought, and yet the roots of their hubris lie in the
fact they were so quick to judge, so quick to dismiss normal voters,
that they did not attack the most important economic assumptions of
Trump.
Clintonites were too busy yelling “Racist!”, “Hitler!”,
“Sexist!”, and “Misogynist!” (why they would hurl this one for
normal voters who probably don't know the definition, this by itself proves
their disconnection). Some of these attacks didn't even make sense to
Clinton supporters. The power of their attacks dropped as they
repeated them. It made decided voters LESS likely to change their minds. Doubling down on more baseless personal attacks made
themselves worse off. It was like struggling with a boa constrictor;
the more you writhe the more the coils expose your weaker spots and
the deeper becomes the pull of death. The voters were angry at the
elites, at the Clintons, at the Obamas, at the media so more proved
detrimental.
The Clinton campaign
was in a death spiral from May 2016 and no one was brave enough to
warn the boss. All this loss proves is that if she can't even get this
right, she wasn't a good candidate in the first place and the world
is better off without her.
Add to that the
appalling lack of integrity of pollsters to bias the very polls they
were taking, and there was no way to realize how wrong the
establishment was. The “hidden” Trump voters were in plain sight
but tired of the mockery from media. They stayed silent or lied about their choice because the media were nonstop nonsense and voters
were sick of intrusion and condescension.
This interpretation
fits with Professor Norpoth's model that predicted Trump would win based on
the primary results. The primaries are the biggest sample poll run
before the election so therefore a better determinant than daily sub
sub sampling. The radical difference in Trump's versus Clinton's primary numbers were all that was needed to predict the outcome no matter what self-interested political people tell you. That was the indicator of new / returning voters that wanted change.
The only way to
change the outcome was if +GovGaryJohnson would have made the debate
stage. He would have sounded like a sane alternative to the two hated
candidates and might have tipped the balance to a tie and into a
Congress-determined Libertarian victory.
