A few months back, I posted the Richard Rorty quote below.  This morning I circulated it to a dozen friends who voted for Trump with the question: “does this resonate for people you know who support Trump”.  I haven’t heard back from a few, but the 7 who have responded, said “Yes, except for the last paragraph” in one form or another.

members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots….

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Since we’re learning that political conversations no longer have to begin and end with data (and that data might be neither when it comes to understanding voter identity and movement formation), I’m not going to apologize for it being a small sample.

I’m in mourning, of course.  And I’m scared – more for my friends who aren’t white or who live outside of Capitol City (NYC is mine), but a little for my family too.  But that’s done.  I used to visit Mother Jones’s grave every time I drove to Decatur, IL and it’s her that’s my kick in the ass: “Pray for the dead, fight like hell for the living.”

I present the Rorty quote not as a provocation or a defense but more as a “bug description.”  When you have a software defect or bug, your first task is to describe it accurately, see what steps led to it, and then work on a fix.  One bug description is based on character flaw: “People are racist and misogynist and generally assholes.”  I’m not sure that has explanatory power as it leaves us with the question of where did this racism come from?  Why is it spiking when there are indicators – in polls, popular culture, and some voting patterns – that racism is declining?  Why did it happen so quickly?

More important to me is that the character flaw explanation has no viable solution:  liberals are quite skilled at lecturing and hectoring people about their un-evolved attitudes and social media has made them as efficient in hitting people with that message as one can be (unless you actually wanted to talk to a person).  But despite their skill and many channels for conveying these lectures, it doesn’t seem to be working.

The Rorty quote offers a different bug report:  “people have decided the system has failed them at a fundamental level and are turning to any alternative that looks like not the system.”  (This is paragraph one and two, and with a less specific paragraph three, one in which it might not have been the strongman, it might have been a Democratic Socialist, or a preacher, or . . . ).

I’m going to work on that bug and highlight a few things that come out of taking that bug seriously:

• we have to turn our attention from “why didn’t they vote for us” to “why can’t we earn their votes when it should be so easy?”
• we need to recognize that people’s lives as citizen aren’t made up exclusivelyof policy comparisons and resumes but are bounded by stories,  community, and a sense of trust and identity.
• we’ve had strong electoral outcomes when the country was considerably less educated and intelligent, so we may need to re-frame that argument.
• that said, we’ve lost the ability as a polis to have conversations around evidence, causal effects.
• we no longer have a clear sense of citizens who must work on “e pluribus unum” – on either or any side of the debate.

For too long, we’ve watched Dems actively target a knowledge worker, pro-business, white collar base while hoping union, working, black and latino folks will stick with them.  Each time they lose, they turn to better get out the vote efforts.  With the exception of Obama’s two elections, they rarely acknowledge that they need to bring people back in – earn votes (insert the full text of “cling to their guns” for the 100th time on this blog).  The biggest surprise for me last night was how much these rural, small town, small city areas got out the votes and defeated the polling predictions.  We thought having no ground game would kill Trump – turns out he didn’t need one.  You don’t need to get out votes when people really, really want to win.  However tragic and misguided, he earned their votes – getting mocked and abused while acting like their friend, risking social ostracism in Capitol City because he liked them more – and they came out.

Time to fight for the living . . . and to start with the long hard work of resisting the urge to improve their manners and focus instead on earning their trust back.

 

 

In the first ten minutes of the debate last night, Trump announced that if elected he would name a prosecutor and put his political opponent on trial.   This is a remarkably important moment in the destruction of the American Republic.

Trump went full late-stage French Revolution last night. There’s not much distance between what Trump said last night and actual political violence against one’s opponents.  There really isn’t.  Once you call your opponent a criminal and a traitor and strip them of all collegiately and humanity, once you whip up your followers into emotional ecstasy in a very personal way against your opponent, then you are that much closer to the guillotine.

It was a great debate for those of us who want to see the Republican Party disintegrate into a 1980s-Beirut-Lebanon-state-of-nature collection of warring factions.  Trump gave his 30 percent of the vote their fan fiction moment of unloading on Hillary Clinton to her face. But, he probably just handed the senate and maybe the House to the Democrats.

Do Trump supporters think for a moment that there aren’t many liberals who wished they could have seen George W. Bush or Henry Kissinger on trial for “war crimes?”  We didn’t put Nixon on trial after Watergate. It cost Gerald Ford the presidency, but the pardon of Nixon was the right move.  Because we aren’t a nation that puts our political opponents on trial. After the Civil War, we didn’t imprison Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and other Confederates leaders. There were no show trails of humiliated and defeated slavers and traitors. Robert E. Lee lived out his remaining years as a college president, rather than being hung from a platform at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

But, Donald Trump pledged last night, if elected, to use the prosecutorial powers of the federal government to imprison his political opponent.

That statement made him look like a president, but not a president of this country.

This morning, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, former French revolutionary and show trail impresario Louis Antoine St. Just appeared on a panel with Donny Deutsch and Rudy Giuliani. Despite, having himself been guillotined in July 1794, St. Just observed that, “A nation regenerates itself only on heaps of corpses. Mika, I can promise you that after this, only patriots will be left.”

After the debate last night, Kelly Anne Conway appeared on CNN in a segment with deceased French Revolutionary, Gabriel Riqueti, the former Comte de Mirabeau. The massively corrupt and dissolute Mirabeau started the segment by noting that, “I am very tired and drunk, having spent the last 72 hours awake, eating, drinking, fornicating, and discussing political strategy.”

Kelly Anne—who emerged from two days of seclusion—looking as radiant as British Fascist Dianne Mitford—remarked, “it was a masterful performance. He took the case right to Hillary Clinton.”

Mirabeau responded that Kelly Anne had the bosom of Madame De Stael and the polemical fury of Jean Paul Marat. “If I were still alive,” he observed, “I would, as Mr. Trump might say, move on you like a bitch.”

At 9:23 p.m. eastern standard time last night, the Republican candidate for president promised to use the power of the state to prosecute his political opponent.  He threatened his opponent with jail time if she loses. Mark that down.

Donald Trump may well pull our constitutional chestnuts out of the bonfire created by his fire-bug candidacy.  There’s almost no way he’s stepping down as the Republican nominee.  Not as long as 20-30 percent of the voting public will still cheer him and watch his eventual cable news network. He made it clear months ago, and I quote, that he “doesn’t give a rat’s ass what Paul Ryan has to say.”

I thought it was cute this morning when some Republicans suggested that Mike Pence might threaten to step down as the vice presidential nominee as a way of pressuring Trump to resign, Pence, spending the day in his brother-in-law’s basement man cave, watching the Colts and flipping through scripture at half-time.

No, Trump’s not going anywhere, but if we’ve learned one thing from PussyGate, it’s that American democracy is a fragile thing and not to be squandered out of angry votes for jackass candidates.

I don’t mean to disparage Trump voters. I don’t doubt their motives. I can name at least 16 people with whom I am either acquaintances, friends, or family who are voting Trump.  I share some of their views on income inequality.  I don’t think any of them are stupid.  None of them have been affected by factories moving to Mexico. All of them have achieved some level of middle-class prosperity. At least three of them are casually racist. They are otherwise really nice people, and their racism doesn’t define them, but, let’s not pretend racism isn’t part of this.

But for all that, I don’t doubt their motives. I do fear their decision to give into frustration and vote for a clown candidate.  The lesson from PussyGate is that they can’t do that again.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges

We take our democratic institutions for granted.  Until, we allow them to be broken. There are nine members of the Supreme Court.  The president appoints them and congress reviews that appointment in a reasonable amount of time and provides a vote on confirmation.  Unless, we allow that custom to be broken. Nine justices?  Well, now it’s eight.  If Hillary wins, and the GOP hangs onto the senate, is there any reason for them to approve any of her nominees to the court?  If there are two more court vacancies in the next four years, why can’t we move ahead with a six-justice court?

Let’s imagine that Trump did step down. Maybe there are even worse revelations to come. He has a miserable debate this evening. Even Paul Ryan has to abandon him.  Kelly Anne Conway pockets her media fees and resigns, and it’s just him and Christie and Giuliani sitting in Trump Tower.

He resigns, and the anti-Trump faction of the Republican Party names Mike Pence as their nominee. And they ask states to create new ballots.  Except that a number of states have already started to vote. And many have sent out absentee ballots. And those states using paper ballots have already printed them.

Democratic governors and attorneys general would likely claim that they can’t create and distribute new ballots in three weeks.  Republicans would likely file law suits.  Democrats would file law suits in all fifty states.  And there would be civil rights and voting rights suits all over the place.

The Trump faction of the now-shattered Republican Party would go to court and the streets to protest the Pence usurper.

Kinda Taxation without Representation

What do you do about the people who have already voted?  Gee, I voted for Hillary because I really hate Trump, but I’d love the chance to vote for Pence. Can I have a do over?  I wanted to support the Republican candidate because I despise Hillary, but now my vote for Trump won’t make a difference. Can I have a do over so I can vote for Pence?  I didn’t register to vote because I loathe Trump and Hillary, but now that Pence is on the ballot, I’d like to register.  My state should extend the registration deadline.

All this stuff will end up in courts.  And when it can’t be worked out in three weeks, some people start to suggest delaying the election.  And who decides that? Congress, which is mostly all running for re-election. And many of these law suits will get ten-day fast tracked to the Supreme Court.  Which only has eight members.  Who could end up deadlocked in a tie.

But, maybe we get lucky. Maybe Platonic swing-vote justice Anthony Kennedy saves us all by voting the right way. Except, I’m pretty sure that my definition of “voting the right way” is different from at least 30 million of my fellow citizens.  So, then what? If only there was some consensual system under which the majority of voters could render their opinion, while respecting the rights of the minority.

Trump will save us from all this because he’s not going to quit. But, he and others have taken us right up to the edge. With a month to go.

Ah, to be young and alive and Ivanka Trump in those heady summer days before the GOP convention. She was Trump’s secret weapon.  Exhibit A of his greatest success. “Look at my great kids! How big of an asshole can I be with a family like that?” said the nominee of the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan.

She runs the family business. She’ll be his White House Chief of Staff. Maybe she runs for Governor of New York. So smart . . . so strong . . . look at that dress . . .

And, yeah, it turns out she’s likely pretty smart, because she’s walked away from her father’s campaign faster than a Republican governor in a swing state.  We last saw her make a convention speech introducing her father. The speech focused on family leave and women in the work place and would have fit perfectly into the Democratic convention’s Wednesday night schedule.

Other than that, as far as I can tell, her only other major appearance was a cameo last month when her father announced his maternity leave plan. I know that no one cares about policy in this election, but it’s worth noting that Hillary has proposed a significant expansion of paid family leave.  For men and women. And not just for pregnancy, but to support people with seriously ill or dying family members.

Trump’s proposal only covered pregnancy.  And only applied to women. And wasn’t paid leave, but merely a tax deduction. For the populist blue-collar candidate, it was an old school rich-guy Republican proposal.  Not even a tax credit, which directly reduces a person’s taxes, but a tax deduction which only reduces the income being taxed.  And almost 70 percent of Americans don’t itemize their taxes; they take the standard deduction. But, really, who cares, because it’s likely that Trump forgot about the proposal five minutes after his daughter made him announce it.

Other than that, I haven’t seen her on Morning Joe or The View or appearing at voter registration rallies in Ohio or Women Entrepreneur conferences at the Wharton School.

Ivanka’s friend Chelsea Clinton is doing several appearances a week for her mother.  Her brothers, Eric and Don Jr. are out there, charming the American public in a way that only third-generation billionaire real estate developers can, scribbling in their pocket-sized Moleskin note books lists of people they are going to “sue the shit out of” when this thing is over.

None of this is meant to be a criticism of Ivanka.  One of the last remaining areas of bi-partisan decency is that a candidate’s family members who are either too young or not inclined to participate in politics are off limits. It’s one of the reasons why when nude photos of Melania Trump were published, the Democrats didn’t make an issue of it.

But Ivanka, pre-convention, was one of Trump’s most popular spokespeople. She was out there.  And then she just stopped. He’s getting killed in the polls with women in every age and socio-economic group. Wouldn’t a leering, groping, fat-shaming, “hey-honey-twirl-around-for-me-would-ya?” candidate benefit from his business woman daughter campaigning for him?

At the GOP convention, we were presented with Trump’s family as a reason—perhaps the only compelling one—to trust him with the presidency.  Since then, the Trump men have been prominent in support of their father, while his wife and daughters have demurred.

Maybe Ivanka is the smart, strong one in the family.  I wonder who she’s going to vote for in November?

It just can’t go without comment. Yesterday, Fascist candidate Donald J. Trump spoke before a mass audience of supporters in Fort Meyers, Florida, rousing his followers to denounce a WEAK liberal democracy and WEAK, politically correct, NYPD and FBI for being WEAK in their handling of terrorist suspects. We are WEAK!

Seriously, this what the Republican nominee for President of the United States had to say about the apprehension of the suspect in the New York and New Jersey bombings this weekend. As we all know, the NYPD, FBI, and various Jersey police departments identified and apprehended this guy in twenty-four hours.

And a big shout out to the Linden, N.J. police, Linden being my sister’s place of residence for ten years, so I know it well.

I’ve included a link below of Trump’s Fascist rally in Fort Meyers.  At 18:44 in the clip, he goes bat-shit crazy in regards the apprehended bomber.  Here are the bat-shit crazy quotes about how the bomber is being given concierge treatment by our WEAK government. My comments in italics.

“He’s going to receive amazing hospitalization. He’ll be taken care of by one of the best doctors in the world.” 

Well, they took him to Newark so probably a good doctor, but best in world? And as soon as he’s not in threat of bleeding to death, he’ll be in a prison infirmary. And under interrogation.  

“He’ll be given a fully modern and updated hospital room.” 

WFT? Updated?  Did Trump remodel the Newark hospital?  Is he paying the contractors for their work? Newark FBI Bureau Chief:  “He gets the best room, you hear me?  The updated rooms! Someone get on 1-800-Flowers. I want flowers in that room, god damn it!!! Something seasonal!

“And, he’ll probably even have room service, knowing the way our country is.” 

Um, yeah, they are going to give him food. Because no one cares if he dies, but we’d like to interrogate him and, um, we don’t let people starve to death in our hospitals. And, it’s HOSPITAL FOOD, you stupid jackass.

“And on top of all of that, he’ll be represented by an outstanding lawyer.”

He’ll likely have a public defender, who may well be “outstanding”.  Because everyone gets a lawyer. Sixth amendment and all.

“His punishment will not be what it once would have been”  

What in the name of @#$%& is he talking about?  This isn’t Death Wish VI, and he’s not Charles Bronson.  “He raped and killed my family . . . . And got off on a technicality . . . . A technicality!!”

Forty-eight days until Election Day.  Trump’s not hiding who he is.  Which side are you on?

The link is here. The above comments are at 18:44.  For god’s sake, don’t watch the entire thing.  Or, actually, if you are a Millennial thinking of voting Libertarian, please do watch the entire thing.

Give the Trumps credit. They aren’t hiding what they intend to do. Take this week’s farcical remarks by Trump, Ivanka, and Don Trump, Jr. about how Trump will place his businesses into a blind trust if he’s elected.

Trump could barely be bothered to complete his sentences when asked this question.  I’m paraphrasing, but he said, “If I’m elected, I’ll be so busy . . . .  All the winning . . . . I’m not going to have time to . . . . My businesses will be in a blind trust. You won’t believe how tin-cup, Mr- Magoo- blind it will be.  A blind trust, and my kids; they are here today; my kids will run it.”

Later in the day Ivanka (So smart! So stylish!) repeated that she and her brothers will run his companies, including the several hundred liability shield subsidiaries.  Many financial experts have pointed out that such a vague arrangement would be neither “blind” nor a “trust.”

A blind trust is George W. Bush or John Kerry placing their considerable wealth under third-party management, without their knowledge of how the money is being invested.  Trump already knows how much money he owes to Russian investors.  He already knows how much he owes to Chinese banks.  He already knows who the vendors are that he’s suing in civil court.

If Trump were elected “President”, if he were even a little bit magnanimous, he’d drop every active law suit that his companies are involved in on favorable terms to the other party.  Does anyone think for a minute that he’d do such a thing?  Or that he wouldn’t use the power of the presidency to put the screws to these people? Does anyone doubt that a “President” “Trump” would do the following:

Continue to run his global branding business from the White House.

Start a cable news network that he’ll run from the Oval Office.

Use the prestige of the presidency to intimidate small and medium businesses in civil court.

Use the prestige of the presidency to sue his critics in civil court for libel.

The banana-republic (not the stores)-level of corruption we can expect from a Trump Administration goes far beyond what terms like “conflict of interest” describe.  It’s why Trump has had success.  We need a new language to describe him. Although, “jagoff” is pretty good.

———

On a separate note Don Trump, Jr. told the truth in Pittsburgh yesterday when he said, that his dad won’t release his taxes because it would turn 300 million Americans into tax auditors. Yeah, it’s a democracy. That’s kind of the point of requiring candidates to release their tax returns to the public.

Hillary’s not allowed to be sick right now.  Not with two months to go. That’s not fair. But, that’s the way it is. I have no doubt that Hillary has the stamina and health to be president. But, now she has to show that she has the stamina and health to win the presidency.

I live in Manhattan. It was hot and steamy Friday, Saturday, and 9/11 Sunday. Not so much the heat as the humidity.  I can’t imagine standing in a crowd, in a business suit, in that humidity. I spent the day in shorts and a t-shirt and couldn’t handle being outside for longer than it took me to walk to the corner grocery.

The campaign says that she’ll be back on the campaign trail Thursday. A number of doctors have suggested that in order to recover from pneumonia, she should take six days or so off. Maybe this is for the best. She’s a terrible campaigner.  Maybe it is better for her to run a Twenty-First Century version of a front-porch campaign, with Barack, Joe, Tim, and Big Bill doing the talking, and Hillary receiving visitors at Chappaqua where, between sips of herbal tea, she describes her plans for making community college more affordable.   And then she re-emerges at the first debate in radiant health, eviscerating the puffy Donald Trump.

The other scenario is that she yields the floor to Trump all week.  She’ll make a few calls into talk shows. Tim Kaine will report that, “I have talked to Hillary on the phone today. She sounds great.”  Thirteen days from now she could still be coughing at the first debate.

She can’t help that she’s sick.  But, she can’t be sick right now.  Even before Sunday, she’s been a very faint presence on the campaign trail.  She left her convention with a massive bump and then sat on her lead through August and spent the time raising a lot of money, with the idea that she’d use September to elaborate on her policies and vision for the country.

Voters want to see you work for it.  That’s all she has to do to lock this up.  Just show them that she’s a fighter, has some vision, and that she wants their votes.

I’m thinking Obama on election eve in 2008. He had it locked up, but finished the campaign late at night in Pennsylvania at an outdoor rally in a driving rain, water pouring down his face as he spoke and then worked the crowd. He wanted it.

Or her husband in New Hampshire in 1992, (trying to make up for lying about sleeping with Gennifer Flowers) campaigning until his voice gave out and he couldn’t’ speak. He wanted it.

Both she and Trump are old. So, I don’t expect her to campaign like she is 45. But, she needs to step out. Tell us what she believes. Do several events a day.  Dive into the crowd and work rope lines till she’s shaken every hand. She’s gotta show us that she wants it.

———–

Of course, there is a double standard here.  Trump does an event a day. Rarely works a rope line or pops into a coffee shop.  Doesn’t sit down and talk to voters. And most nights flies back home to Trump Tower to sleep in his own bed.  But, he’s a would-be fascist leader, and history has selected Hillary as the only person who can stop him.

———-

My father ran for a local office in 1994. Township Supervisor.

Mid-morning on Election Day, my friend Jim and I were working the polls at the Dry Ridge Volunteer Fire Department, one of the bigger precincts in the township.  My father was making the rounds of the various precincts and pulled his pick-up into the Dry Ridge VFD parking lot. “What’s wrong with your dad? “ Jim asked, as we both noticed him limping across the parking lot, just dragging his left leg behind him.  I hustled over to meet him.

Throughout the election, Dad had in his pick up and I in my car, signs, wooden stakes, a staple gun, and a sledge hammer for either erecting or repairing yard signs.  These hammers were a foot or so long, with big hunks of lead at the top. Early on Election Day, Dad had been erecting signs near various precincts, and, at one such stop, the hammer slipped from his grasp and landed on his left foot.  It was May, and he was wearing canvas sneakers.   I don’t know if it broke his foot, but his big toe was swollen and bruised.

I sympathized with my dad’s pain, but, looking back across the parking lot at the busy polling station, the only solace I could offer was, “You aren’t allowed to break your toe today.”

Trump just can’t tell a joke. Every time he makes a horrific gaffe, like suggesting that gun owners assassinate Hillary if she wins or urging the Russians to hack State Department servers or throwing a mom and her baby out of a rally, his few surrogates and defenders quickly fall back onto the lame, “it was a joke” defense.

Each of these half-hearted attempts to fob off Trump’s unhinged eruptions as jokes reminds me of the scene in the Sopranos in which two gangsters catch Soprano capo Vito Spatafore frolicking in a gay leather bar. Caught red-handed, he can only desperately claim “It’s a joke!!” The clip’s here (with some blue language)

One of the many reasons that I loathe Trump is that he degrades all aspects of politics as a profession, including humor and fun.

Humor is important in a president.  It shows emotional intelligence. It shows that they can make fun of themselves. They can also use it as a weapon against their opponents. To demonstrate that even in times of stress, they are emotionally grounded.  To show that they are just having fun on the job.

Trump does none of this. No smiles. No jokes. No fun.

I’ve selected some clips of presidents or presidential candidates being funny.  Try to imagine Trump delivering any of these one liners, or extended comedy bits, or formal jokes, or off- the-cuff ripostes.

Reagan

Reagan could spin a yarn like an old Irishman, but he was a master of a well-delivered one liner.  Here is  his classic answer in the second debate against Walter Mondale during the 1984 election to a moderator’s question about whether his age (he was 73) would affect his ability to perform in office.  Recall that Reagan stumbled badly in the first debate, appearing old and confused, and giving the Mondale campaign a faint glimmer of hope. Reagan’s masterfully delivered joke essentially ended the campaign.

Note to Trump campaign:  You can tell that it’s a joke because everyone—including Mondale and the moderator—are laughing. And Reagan drinks from a glass of water, probably to mask the smile on his own face.

FDR

These clips are from 1938 and 1944, but when you watch them, you realize that FDR could step out of a time machine, appear on a CNN debate or at a rally in Iowa and instantly be declared the front runner.  In these two clips, he’s everything that Trump isn’t:  Intimate, but distant; self-aware enough to poke fun of himself, but always aware of his immense power; and, he’s funny.

Grilled Millionaires Speech

Roosevelt delivered this address at the University of North Carolina in early December 1938. It was a low point of his presidency.  He had over-reached in spectacular fashion with his Supreme Court packing scheme, among other things.  And the Democrats were handily defeated in the November mid-term elections. Here he is responding to his critics. In the face of defeat, he is defiant but ebullient.  He can barely keep a straight face, he’s enjoying himself so much.

My Dog Fala

Here’s Roosevelt again in 1944. The Roosevelts had a scotch terrier named Fala. Republicans were circulating a story that Roosevelt had accidentally left Fala on an island in the Pacific and had re-routed a navy destroyer to retrieve the dog, at great cost to the tax payers.  Roosevelt responded with extended ridicule.

Note to Trump campaign: You can tell it’s a joke because everyone, including the Republicans, are laughing.

 

Hillary

Hillary supporters frequently say that the notoriously scripted and reserved campaigner is warm and funny in person. Every now and then, she’ll throw her head back with a genuine smile and a big, little bit brassy, laugh. Here’s a glimpse of that humor, near the end of what would be 11 hours of testimony before a hostile House Benghazi committee, when a Republican back-bencher is pressing her on whether she was home alone all night during the critical events in Libya.  She shows a sense of the absurd that I find reassuring in a president.

Note to Trump campaign: You know it’s a joke because people are laughing (though not the hapless Representative haplessly searching for a smoking gun.)

George Wallace

And, finally, as promised in the headline, Alabama Governor George Wallace telling a joke in 1964 at Auburn University. Wallace, was, of course, one of the most odious political figures of the 20^th century, a full-blown white supremacist and demagogue. Like Trump, he represented angry white people. I mean, really, really angry racist white people.  But, unlike Trump, he can tell a joke.

Note to Trump campaign: You can tell it’s a joke because 1) he says it’s a joke 2) He uses a format that most human beings recognize as a joke and 3) people are laughing.

 

… but on a different vector.  This started as a comment on my post about liberals playing the race card and neglecting WWCs (and thus having their hands dirty in the “where did Trump come from” converation).  It  got very long while at the same time seeming to unpack issues raised by CVFD and Barry.  So a post .. .

The Intercept ran a piece yesterday unpacking some polling data about WWC support for Trump.   The headline “The Great White Hype:  No One is Energizing the White Working Class, not Even Donald Trump” doesn’t reflect the data at the center of the piece.  The data shows

a reversal [of growing WWC support] from earlier in the summer, when Trump’s support among the group was in the 60s, higher than Romney’s, though not by leaps and bounds.

Trump’s support from WWC – defined in questionable ways (more on that below) – was in the high 60s before the convention, and has dropped to 49% in recent weeks.

These data only says that Trump’s support from the WWC is on the decline, and probably a significant one.  It doesn’t say that he isn’t energizing WWC or that he never did.

Still, it adds to our conversations elsewhere about what makes these people tick.  The data in the story offers a couple hypotheses:

1. that there is an overlap between Sanders’s WWC message and Trump’s and that voters are leaving Trump and going to Dems (per CVFD’s question);
2. primary behavior didn’t really tell us anything about the substance of the support for Trump (because, as the article notes, it was such a small percentage of voters in a serial fish bowl campaign mode)
3. Trump’s popularity was broader and deeper than WWC, and now even more mysterious

Those are hypotheses only.  The data only shows some correlations and we probably can’t prove anything for a while.

Or it may be hard to prove anything at all.  The article also highlights some tricky data/polling issues:

1. What is WWC – polls have fairly thin definitions of WWC – lower education levels, income levels, geographic overlay.  Sounds straightforward, but what about office workers, people with college degrees with working class incomes, people on the border and in fear of slipping.  This is classic Orwell territory, and worthy of more conversation and thinking, but I’ll just quote John Cleese playing Robin Hood in Time Bandits “The poor are going to be absolutely thrilled!  Have you met the poor?  … Oh you must meet them.  I’m sure you’ll like them.  Of course, they haven’t got two pennies to rub together but that’s because they’re poor.” Class words cover a lot of complexity.
2. the notion of base is tricky  – it’s never that only one segment makes a candidate, or that there is a finite set of attitudes that shape that support
3. the exceptional nature of 2016 – and for that matter all elections since and including 2008.  All of them are made exceptional, or at least discontinuous from previous elections and polling environments because of the financial crisis, and the various effects of the internet (microfragmentation of communities, disintermediation of experts, fund-raising for example).  The article goes back to 1992, reminding us that we’re 24 years into independent rumblings, starting with Perot, continuing with Nader, always in the air with Trump and Sanders and now with Gary Johnson (I can’t talk seriously about Jill Stein, I know that’s wrong, but I can’t.)
4. connections between what a candidates say and why people vote for them – there is a straight causal line drawn between candidate sound bites and votes.  In TV coverage, Trump talks about the wall, mocks people, rails against PC by being offensive.  When people vote for him, the only causal link we have is that Trump voters love those things.  That’s like saying I support flip-flopping on DOMA, the Iraq war, politicians who are super tight with Wall Street, resisting the minimum wage, resisting the New Glass Steagal, TPP because I’m voting for HRC.  James Fallows, Thomas Frank and others (I’ll try and add the links) continually point out that:  1) Trump talks a lot about jobs, trade, and economic issues for the rest of his speeches; 2) that Trump supporters don’t always gravitate to the xenophobia but will never vote for HRC, will never vote Dem, want the system messed with, are willing to roll the dice; and 3) he’s the Republican nominee, that’s who they vote for.  Polling and issue mapping don’t capture this complex process of political identity building, answers to pollsters, or final votes.  They hint at it and provide hypotheses, but that’s as far as we can go with certainty.
5. self-awareness about polling – fielding, following, reading polls has always had a box score feel to it, but now it feels national.  It seems like everyone talks about them and has enough of an understanding to manage a critique of them (see the revived “skewed poll” debate).  Trump refers to “nice polls” that show him doing well, questions the bias of those that don’t.  This is an edge argument, but with all this awareness of how polls play into politics, do we really understand what someone is doing when they answer questions?  We regularly entertain the notion that people might not be saying they support Trump because they don’t want to appear racist to the poll-taker – why can’t people answer questions in order to buck the trend, lodge a protest vote, which finally comes to
6. the notion of likely in polls – likely voters, likely to vote for a party – these are all concepts that have to standardized over time and which are based partly on self-identification and validated by historic behaviors.  As historic behaviors become less relevant (Trump’s strategy is to reach out to “low propensity voters” and people are aware of the impact of the surveys they’re participating in, we have a lot of threads to unpack.

Good thing there’s fivethirtyeight.

 

Apologies CVFD and Mister Jones – the only link I could be bothered to track down was the John Cleese clip.  I’m really dragging us down.