Defying the Odds
Page 16
24. Zeke J. Miller, “Rubio Endorsement Rally Shows a More Diverse Vision for GOP,” Time, http://time.com/4230230/marco-rubio-nikki-haley-tim-scott-endorsement-diversity/.
25. Michael Grunwald, “Trump Goes Code Pink on George W. Bush,” Politico, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/trump-code-pink-bush-iraq-9-11-213630.
26. http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/SC/Rep.
27. Jeremy Diamond, “Donald Trump on protester: ‘I’d like to punch him in the face,’ ” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/politics/donald-trump-nevada-rally-punch/; Ben Mathis-Lilley, “A Continually Growing List of Violent Incidents at Trump Events,” Slate, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/02/a_list_of_violent_incidents_at_donald_trump_rallies_and_events.html.
28. Alex Pfeiffer, “Hidden Camera Video Shows Democrats Sent Agitators to Trump Rallies,” The Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/17/hidden-camera-video-shows-democrats-sent-agitators-to-trump-rallies/.
29. Janet Hook and Reid J. Epstein, “Cruz’s Stealth Delegate Hunt,” Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2016, A1.
30. “Transcript of Mitt Romney Speech,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/04/us/politics/mitt-romney-speech.html.
31. Kelefa Sanneh, “Intellectuals for Trump,” New Yorker, January 9, 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/intellectuals-for-trump.
32. Ashley Parkler and Nick Corasaniti, “6 Talk Radio Hosts, on a Mission to Stop Trump in Wisconsin,” New York Times, April 4, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/us/politics/donald-trump-wisconsin-radio.html?_r0.
33. Eric Bradner and Gregory Kreig, “Ted Cruz: Trump team planted National Enquirer sex scandal story,” CNN, March 29, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/29/politics/amanda-carpenter-ted-cruz-allegations/.
34. http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/WI/Rep.
35. Jonathan Lemire and Jill Colvin, “After Wisconsin stumble Trump moves to reshape his campaign,” Associated Press, April 9, 2016.
36. “Indiana Republican Presidential Primary,” RealClearPolitics, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/in/indiana_republican_presidential_primary-5786.html.
37. Nolan D. McCaskill, “Trump accuses Cruz’s father of helping JFK’s assassin,” Politico, http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/05/trump-ted-cruz-father-222730.
38. David Wright, Tal Kopan, and Julia Manchester, “Cruz unloads with epic take-down of ‘pathological liar,’ ‘narcissist’ Donald Trump,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/03/politics/donald-trump-rafael-cruz-indiana/.
39. Indiana Exit Polls, CNN, http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls/IN/Rep.
40. Ross Douthat, “The Defeat of True Conservatism,” New York Times, May 3, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/opinion/campaign-stops/the-defeat-of-true-conservatism.html.
41. John Harwood, “Despite Divide, Trump Still Needs His Party,” New York Times, May 10, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/us/politics/despite-divide-trump-still-needs-his-party.html.
42. Ed O’Keefe, “Dozens of GOP delegates launch new push to halt Donald Trump,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016.
43. “Trump Says Judge’s Mexican Heritage Presents ‘Absolute Conflict,’ ” Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-keeps-up-attacks-on-judge-gonzalo-curiel-1464911442.
44. David Rutz, “Trump: This Is the Republican Party, It’s Not Called the Conservative Party,” Washington Free Beacon, http://freebeacon.com/politics/trump-republican-party-not-called-conservative-party/.
45. The states where these questions were asked included Michigan (Cruz over Trump), Mississippi (Trump over Cruz), Missouri (Cruz), North Carolina (Cruz), and Ohio (Trump). Ohio was the only state where Kasich beat Trump one on one, and Rubio never did. “Republican exit polls,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls.
46. “Republican Exit Polls,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls.
47. “Republican Exit Polls,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls.
48. Hohmann, “Trump’s Pollster Says He Ran a ‘Post-Ideological’ Campaign.”
49. John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (New York: Scribner, 2002).
50. Michael Barone, “Does lack of social connectedness explain Trump’s appeal?” Washington Examiner, March 27, 2016, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/does-lack-of-social-connectedness-explain-trumps-appeal/article/2586842.
51. James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1979).
52. Andrew E. Busch, Outsiders and Openness in the Presidential Nominating System (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).
Chapter Four
Race to the Bottom
The General Election
Although neither nomination was made official until the party conventions in July, the race was on by May, when everyone knew who the contestants were going to be. It would be a contest between the two most-disliked major party nominees in the history of polling. By roughly a 10 percent margin, Hillary Clinton was disliked more than she was liked; Donald Trump’s negative gap was twice that of Clinton. And about one in four voters reported disliking both major party nominees; in 2012, that had been true of only one in ten.1 Despite ups and downs through the fall, those numbers did not fundamentally change. Frequently it seemed that each candidate’s campaign boiled down to reminding voters that they were not the other.
It was, consequently, fitting that the unofficial opening of the general election campaign consisted of a black mark for each, the opening salvos in a downward spiral that produced perhaps the most uncivil, vulgar, and scandal-flecked campaign in living memory. Trump greeted his de facto nomination with the attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, which served to reduce his poll standing versus Clinton and light a new fire under the NeverTrump movement in the Republican Party. Clinton prepared for her convention with a near-miss from the FBI and a direct hit from WikiLeaks.
After a several-month-long investigation of Clinton’s non-secure email use while secretary of state, an investigation that offered five immunity from prosecution deals and led to rampant speculation about Hillary in an orange jumpsuit, FBI Director James Comey took the unusual step of announcing the bureau’s non-binding recommendation to the Justice Department on July 5. Comey was clearly uncomfortable in his role, which amounted to electoral arbiter—should one of the two presumptive nominees who were likely to have a real shot at the White House be indicted?—and he split the difference. On one hand, he recommended against prosecution, saying “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” He then proceeded to say that Clinton and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” (“extreme carelessness” being essentially a synonym for “gross negligence,” the statutory description of the offense being investigated) and indicated that it was not unlikely that “hostile actors” had gained access to Clinton’s email system.2 Two days later Comey testified before Congress that Clinton had made numerous false statements about her email use.3 Hillary Clinton would escape prosecution—for now. Yet millions of Americans were left with the politically damaging impression that she was guilty and had only escaped because her last name was “Clinton,” an impression furthered by the supposedly unplanned meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton at the Phoenix airport shortly before Comey’s announcement. Days later, Republicans at their convention in Cleveland took up the cry “Lock her up!” and Trump had a new Twitter moniker to use for the rest of the campaign, to take the place of “Low-energy Jeb,” “Lyin’ Ted,” and “Little Marco”: “Crooked Hillary.” Everyday language cutting through the clutter of politics.
The WikiLeaks revelations disrupted the Democratic convention and began a drip-drip-drip that plagued Clinton until November. The first round of documents was leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee
that showed that the DNC had stacked the deck for Clinton in her primary battle against Bernie Sanders. DNC chair, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign, and Sanders supporters at the convention felt the Bern again. For the next three months, WikiLeaks would periodically torment Clinton, revealing one embarrassing inside story after another.
The Democrats tried to counter by claiming that the DNC and Clinton campaign had been victims of a Russian hacking campaign aimed at interfering in the American election by aiding Donald Trump. This complaint had more than a small amount of plausibility to it. A number of national security experts came to believe that Russian hackers were behind the security breach, and could not have been so without the knowledge and endorsement of the highest levels of the Russian government. (Not until after the election was a more definitive report issued on the subject.) There was also evidence that Putin’s army of professional internet trolls was employed on behalf of Trump.4 For his part, Trump had spoken admiringly of Vladimir Putin as a “strong leader,” his son seemed to give credence to allegations that he had substantial business dealings in Russia, and his people at the Republican convention had squashed a platform plank calling for weapons to be given to Ukraine for self-defense against Russian aggression—the only recorded instance of the Trump campaign caring about any portion of the GOP platform.5 However, her critics could argue that Clinton might not have been a poor choice for the Kremlin, either, having been the architect of the naı¨ve “reset” with Russia in 2009 and having signed off on the transfer of at least 20 percent of the U.S. uranium reserve to a Russian-owned company whose chairman had close ties with Bill Clinton and who had made large undis-closed donations to the Clinton Foundation.6 Whatever the international intrigue around WikiLeaks, the short-term consequence was that Democratic unity was undermined and the image of Clinton as a corrupt insider grasping at power by any means necessary was reinforced.
The epic incidents at the beginning of the general election campaign, illuminating the tendencies and character of the individual candidates, renewed an important debate in political science. Are presidential elections mostly about “fundamentals,” or mostly about “contingencies”? If they are mostly about the fundamentals, they are decided on the basis of the economy, the approval rating of the incumbent president, how unified each party is, broad contours of public opinion, and perhaps the stage in the political cycle (in 2016, the incumbent party trying to win three terms in a row). In that case, the candidates and the campaigns hardly matter, or matter only at the margins. If elections are mostly about contingencies, the candidates and the campaigns they run matter a lot, as do unpredictable national and world events—scandals, gaffes, debates, events outside the campaign that nevertheless affect the campaign. Perhaps the only thing typical about the election of 2016 was that, as usual, the election was actually shaped by the interaction of the fundamentals with the contingencies.
THE FUNDAMENTALS
One of the most fundamental of the fundamentals is the state of the economy. Here, the United States had officially been in a recovery since the summer of 2009. By October 2016, the unemployment rate had fallen to 5 percent. These happy statistics, however, had obscured other, less pleasant realities. Most notably, the Obama recovery had been the weakest economic recovery since World War II, with historically modest economic growth, job creation, wages, and productivity.7 Real gross domestic product (GDP), the standard measure of economic growth, had grown at an annualized rate of only 1.4 percent in the second quarter of 2016 and had not reached 3 percent in any year of Barack Obama’s presidency. The Gallup organization calculated the “real” unemployment rate, including part-timers who wanted full-time work and people who had dropped out of the job market, at closer to 10 percent.8 At least three in five Americans saw the economic glass as half-empty, calling the economy poor or bad.
Obama himself had suffered through most of his presidency—and the entire time from May 2013 to June 2016—with approval ratings below 50 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average. However, in summer 2016, Obama’s average approval edged upward, finally going over 50 percent. On Election Day it was 53 percent.9 Some analysts attributed this improvement to the slow but continuing improvement of economic statistics or to the quieting of some foreign policy crises. Others noted that Obama’s approval rose as he was pushed out of the news by Trump and Clinton or speculated that he looked better to Americans when compared with those two. In any event, both the economy and the president’s approval rating sent mixed signals and seemed to indicate a close election.
Perhaps the most immovable “fundamental” of the race worked against Clinton, and had to do with the election’s place in the electoral cycle. Clinton would be working against the tendency of voters to want a change after two terms of the same party in the White House. In the last six decades, Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Gerald Ford in 1976, George H. W. Bush in 1988, Al Gore in 2000, and John McCain in 2008 had each tried to win a third consecutive term for their party. Nixon, Humphrey, Ford, and Gore had come agonizingly close, but only Bush had succeeded. Not coincidentally, the incumbent president he sought to follow, Ronald Reagan, was the most popular and successful of the recent presidents. Another way of thinking about political cycles was to ask whether a party’s vote share was on the upswing or the downswing; here, too, Democrats were seemingly in trouble. Barack Obama’s share of the vote fell from 53 percent in 2008 to 51 percent in 2012, as he became the only president to be reelected with a smaller total vote than he was elected with.
The broad contours of public opinion would reinforce that tendency toward change. Three in five Americans consistently said they thought the country was on the wrong track. The appetite for outsiders was strong, as had already been demonstrated in the Republican primaries (by Trump and Cruz) and in the Democratic primaries (by Sanders). Needless to say, Trump was better suited than Clinton to a contest driven by outsiderism.
Finally, party identification in the electorate and party unity (as expressed, among other ways, through primary election results) can be important fundamental factors, and here one would have to give the edge to Clinton going into the general election campaign. At the beginning of June, Gallup polls recorded that 48 percent of Americans identified as Democrats and 41 percent as Republicans if party-leaning independents were included.10 She not only won well over 50 percent of the total Democratic primary vote but also obtained her main rival’s endorsement at the convention. By contrast, Trump had won well under half of the Republican primary vote, his strongest rival did not endorse him at the convention, and the intellectual superstructure of the Republican Party was bitterly divided over Trump and Trumpism. On the face of it, Clinton appeared to have the stronger hand, though Democrats nursed their own deep divisions, stoked by WikiLeaks.
An entire school of political science is devoted to turning those fundamentals, in one way or another, into predictions of election outcomes. Of nine notable political scientists and economists who offered models based on some combination of the fundamentals, five—among them Yale economist Ray Fair, the unofficial dean of election models—predicted in the summer of 2016 that Trump would win a majority share of the two-party vote. One of the five dismissed his own estimate on the grounds that his model assumed that both sides featured candidates with broad appeal running reasonably competent campaigns, but Trump was a uniquely bad candidate. In other words, in this unusual circumstance, fundamentals could be overtaken by contingencies. The other four predicted that Hillary Clinton would squeak by with between 51.0 and 52.1 percent of the two-party vote. No one thought the fundamentals foretold a Clinton landslide.11 Altogether, Michael Barone observed at the beginning of August, “It remains an open question how the seemingly irresistible force of public discontent will shift the seemingly immovable object of partisan deadlock.”12
THE CONTINGENCIES
The candidates have both been sketched in detail. Now they can be juxtaposed: Clinton the
prepared, the careful, the well organized, the cool (or, to her detractors, the cold), the co-head of an impressive political machine of national scope and a quarter-century duration. Trump the spontaneous, the unconventional, the volatile, the newcomer to politics who seemingly said whatever came into his mind. Clinton the consummate insider, Trump the ultimate political outsider. Clinton and Trump, distrusted by the ideological purists in their own parties as unprincipled opportunists; Clinton and Trump, each with their own plethora of scandals, distrusted and disliked by wide swaths of the American public. Trump’s obvious weaknesses led Clinton campaign operatives to identify him early in the primary season as their preferred Republican opponent, so much that they crafted a media strategy to help promote his campaign.13 Clinton’s obvious shortcomings led Republicans to see her as eminently beatable, but also to fear that Trump was not the one to do it. For its part, Trump’s campaign saw but a narrow path to victory.
Each campaign was a reflection of its candidate. Clinton’s was professional and amply staffed, leaving nothing to chance. Trump’s was lean and disorganized, with frequent turnover in top spots. Clinton’s was well funded, spending in the end more than twice what Trump spent. Clinton opened field offices across the country, demonstrating a commitment to the “ground game” by out-officing Trump by 489–207 by early October.14 Clinton also ran a full-fledged air campaign, a veritable barrage of television advertising, outspending her rival by $145 million to $32 million through October 4; Trump’s campaign was late on the air and significantly outspent in advertising overall, though it was competitive with Clinton in the last couple of weeks.15 Sometimes Trump’s campaign seemed to consist of little more than tweets and rallies, though his digital campaign turned out to be stronger than it appeared; headquartered in San Antonio, far off the beat of most political reporters, it stayed under the radar until late in the campaign.16