2016 Postmortem

I actually wished I had a better word than flaws - as a "flaw" can be innocuous. However, I think he had two HUGE issues behind him - abortion, which he really did not have to say much, and the scapegoating of TPP and otehr trade deals for econnomic changes really due to automation and globalization.

Voting is a constrained choice and many people who juded Trump unfavorably voted for him. What I think back to is the 2002 NJ Senate race. It became clear by late summer/early fall that Torricelli was corrupt. I know relatively little about the Republican who opposed him, Forrester, other than that he did graduate from the Princeton Theological Seminary and was an former Eagle Scout. (NYT oped - http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/26/opinion/new-jersey-s-dreadful-senate-race.html )

Like many Democrats, I was appalled that I was going to vote for someone I KNEW did not deserve to continue to be a Senator. I voted for the control of the Senate, which though we did not get in 2002 - had Forrester won that seat, we would not have gained the majority in 2006. Based on just what I knew, it was very likely that Forrester was the more ethical, moral man. I suspect that there were many Republicans who voted not so much for Trump, but for Republicans to head all the various parts of the Executive branch and to nominate Supreme Court Justices they wanted. They voted for their team.

Not to mention, there was a reason that Trump at least twice made Bill Clinton's past a high profile issue. Unfair as it is to Hillary Clinton, it was a way of pointing out that Democrats nominated Bill Clinton in 1992 knowing he too had problems as well and he was renominated and reelected as more stories emerged. This actually worked on two levels. 1) Bill Clinton (and many earlier Presidents) were good Presidents in spite of not being models of good behavior. 2) It "normalized" that issue for some - either Trump or Bill Clinton would be in the White House. I know this ignores that Bill Clinton was not running. He would still be in the White House.

I would argue that the Reagan Democrats, in those rust belt states, are not - like me - on EITHER team to the degree that any of us are. I suspect that because the tilt of the Supreme Court was in the balance, Trump may have won many votes - including in those states - because of abortion. Think back that this was a big issue in 2004, where it was clear that Renquist would be replaced. Had Kerry won, that would been a shift from the right to the left. The seats up in 2008 were from the liberal side - so Obama's appointments kept the court where it was. They blocked Obama from replacing Alito because they controlled the Senate. I suspect that this issue had more force this year and in 2004 because THEY saw they could lose something they believed in to their core for a long time.

Of course, we NOW, see that we could lose everything that was so hard won in the last 8 years. However, I suspect that until election day, we were rather lolled into complacency. While there was a large core of people who have supported HRC for several decades and were excited that she would soon win the Presidency, there were many who were voting for her to support the Democratic agenda continuing. This is not to knock HRC, it is true in ANY election.

A much younger friend of mine complained that we always have a harder time because so many Republicans are essentially one issue voters, while we complain about ANY nominee as not being for 100% of what we want. For instance, people perceiving themselves as religious, voting for the degenerate Trump to "save babies" - in their words.

I also think that it always is hard to win a third term for any party. The other side can usually get the votes of people who are unhappy or frustrated. Here, Trump dishonestly used the trade deal issue. It has always been the Republicans who had the most unified support for the deals - even if Bill Clinton signed the NAFTA agreement, negotiated by GHWB. This may have been the second most powerful issue for Trump. He was able to label HRC as dishonest in her opposition to TPP - using her statements while SoS before it was completely negotiated. (From my point of view, her opposition was political. She shifted when Bernie Sanders, who consistently ideologically is genuinely against the trade deals, was gaining support.) In essence, this was a "twofer" for Trump - place HRC on the wrong side of an issue for the Reagan Democrats - AND reinforce her negative as dishonest and untrustworthy - while knowing that the big business Republicans will not believe they can not control him. (On the latter, his cabinet choices show they were not wrong.)

For me, I HATED when both Sanders and HRC trashed TPP, which may be the most progressive trade deal yet written. I do think that Donald Trump will renegotiate it -- taking out the hard fought for by the US environmental and workers rights provisions -- and it likely will pass with mostly Republican votes. So, the Reagan Democrats will get a deal that actually IS worse for them.

Economists have written about how the actual cause of lose of jobs in the rust belt were caused by technology (automation) and globalization - and was already happening before any trade deal was written. Even Jeremy Saks, who advised Bernie Sanders, actually supports trade deals as expanding the pie - arguing that you need to insure that some of the gains of the "winners" needs to support the "losers". In 1993, before NAFTA, you could already see in economic data that the yuppies (as the elites were labeled) were making more than their parents even dreamed of, while through the 1970s and 1980s, at least two thirds of the population found themselves slipping behind - even as they worked longer hours and most families found they needed both parents working, even as child care ate a considerable part of additional income.

I grew up in Northern Indiana - in the suburbs surrounding the steel mill towns. In my high school in a lower middle class town, about half of us went to college and half didn't. The state had a great program (the Hoosier scholarship) that paid some or all of the tuition at a state college - including the well regarded Purdue or Indiana University. This meant that if a student were reasonably smart (at least B average and SATs totalling 1000) , who wanted to go to college could.

However, there were immediate rewards for those who did not go to college. The boys got jobs in the steel mills that were well paying. The girls either took a secretarial course for a year or immediately applied for clerical jobs usually in Chicago. I was in the wedding of a friend who took that path. I was a junior in college, while she was a well dressed, sophisticated secretary at a Chicago company. She was a grown up, while I was a late 60s college kid. One of my brother's best friends went straight to the mills and even a few years after my brother graduated Purdue in mechanical engineering, the friend was STILL out earning him. I went to a 20 year reunion - the two halfs were already two different worlds. For one, most of us had young kids, while they had teenagers.

Now, most of the steel mills are gone, taking those jobs with them. The idea that you could work in a steel mill and live even a lower middle class life is not realistic now. Most of the secretarial jobs that people like my friend took before marrying well enough to quit until that did not work out, are gone - many of those jobs lost to AUDIX which answers phones and "takes messages" and computers that led to very few people being needed to type letters or memos. These people are rust belt voters and Lake County has always been a Democratic stronghold. HRC did win the county, which also contains a large black population in Gary, East Chicago and Hammond, but by significantly less than Obama.

These jobs have been disappearing for decades. This means that many of my age cohort who stayed in the region, did not - as they might have expected when they took jobs straight out of school and worked hard to do them well - recently retire after working for their company for decades, with union negotiated defined benefit pensions to augment their social security. That was the experience of their fathers, so this was not something that was an unreasonable expectation back in 1968 when they left high school. Many likely had to look for and take jobs paying less in the past decades. For them, the giddiness of the late 1960s when they expected to do financially better than their parents hit reality years ago, but it probably does make them vulnerable to people who can demagogue and create a scapegoat for an economy that dashed their hopes. You can imagine how susceptible they would be to a slogan "make America great again".

Now consider that their kids, many of whom became adults in the early 1990s, as my kids entered elementary school, could not follow the path of their parents. Those paths were already collapsing.

We need to find the words and actions that let us communicate to these people. In reality, many things that Obama did actually helped them - especially ACA. We have to find a way to get them to see us clearly enough that the Republican wedge issues fall flat. I have no idea how to do this.