Defying the Odds

by James W. Ceaser

  If the Clinton camp had the advantage when going down the checklist of normal presidential campaign prerequisites, Trump had some compensating strengths. For all his apparent weaknesses, Trump’s campaign had an intangible spark that Clinton’s well-oiled machine seemed to lack, and a correspondingly higher level of enthusiasm among its supporters. While Clinton’s strategists fought to maximize her popular vote advantage, assuming that if they did so, the Electoral College would take care of itself, Trump’s planners crafted an electoral vote strategy.17 Since the election was to be decided by the electoral vote, this gave Trump something of a strategic edge. Trump’s demotic rhetoric gave him an edge in the race to break through the noise in a memorable way; free media coverage, though often negative, carried his message nonetheless. Above all, in an election in which voters seemed to be craving change, Clinton was the candidate of the status quo.

  One cannot survey the candidates of 2016 without addressing the wild cards, the three independent (or third-party) candidates who had a potential to affect the race significantly. Two of these were nominees of minor parties that had worked for years to gain a share of the limelight. Gary Johnson was the Libertarian Party candidate, nominated in 2016 as he had been in 2012. Johnson was the former Republican governor of New Mexico, where he had gained fame by promoting legalization of marijuana. He was on the ballot in all fifty states and hoped to take advantage of what some analysts had called the “libertarian moment” in American politics, especially an alleged tendency of millennials to favor a combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. Johnson expected to draw from both anti-Trump Republicans and anti-Clinton Democrats, and he picked William Weld, the former Republican governor from Massachusetts, as his running mate.

  Jill Stein was the Green Party nominee, also repeating a 2012 run. Running on a far-left platform, Stein, who was on the ballot in forty-five states, had little appeal to Republicans but might hope to draw significant numbers of disappointed Bernie Sanders Democrats and left-leaning independents. No one could forget Ralph Nader’s Green Party run of 2000, when he won 3 percent of the national vote and may very well have tipped Florida to George W. Bush.

  Finally, there was the conservative independent Evan McMullin, the standard-bearer of the #NeverTrump movement. His proximate aim was to give conservatives a candidate they could vote for with satisfaction. Having gotten a late start, he was on the ballot in only eleven states and was a registered write-in in about two dozen more, so he had less opportunity to win votes. However, unlike the other two, McMullin had at least one theoretically possible, though highly improbable, path to the presidency. McMullin was Mormon, and hoped to take advantage of Utah’s deep dislike of Trump (recall that he was beaten 69–14 percent by Ted Cruz in the GOP caucuses there) to be competitive in that state. If he could eke out a win in Utah, with its six electoral votes, and if Clinton and Trump were close enough otherwise, he might prevent either of the major candidates from winning an outright majority in the Electoral College. The choice would then go to the House of Representatives, which would choose from between the top three vote-getters—Clinton, Trump, and McMullin. With Republicans in the House majority (Republicans, not incidentally, for whom McMullin had been policy staff director) and no love lost between them and Donald Trump, McMullin could dream.

  On balance, the match-up between candidates and campaigns was tilted toward Clinton for the duration of the race, until the last day. From January 1 until November 8, Clinton led the RealClearPolitics poll average every day except for three days in late May just before Trump’s Curiel comments, when they were essentially tied, and four days in July between the Republican and Democratic national conventions, when Trump led by about one percentage point. Trump also briefly drew to within one point in late September. Otherwise, Clinton was ahead by anything from eleven points in March to three in much of September and just before Election Day.18 She also consistently led in estimates of the Electoral College vote. As a result, Clinton was the prohibitive favorite in the election prediction markets, which generally considered her a 70–80 percent probable winner. The famed Nate Silver also made her the odds-on favorite to win throughout the fall, though he was more cautious; at the end, he gave her a two-in-three chance of winning. There were a few notable exceptions. Dilbert creator and blogger Scott Adams predicted a Trump win, as did film-maker Michael Moore, who declared in October that “This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president.”19 Clinton’s numerical advantage among prognosticators may not have been quite as lopsided as Thomas Dewey’s edge over Harry Truman in 1948, when fifty experts were polled by Newsweek magazine and unanimously agreed that Dewey would win, but it was not far off.20

  What the experts tended to ignore was that Clinton’s lead was not solid enough to justify the level of certainty they often exuded. While she led most national polls, she never broke 50 percent after March 2016, and there were more undecided voters than usual. Even in late October, there were three times as many undecideds as at the same point in the 2012 race.21 More crucially, except for a few days in late October when she hit 272, RCP consistently estimated her electoral votes below the magic number of 270 needed to elect. That meant that Election Day would be suspenseful—and could even be surprising, if Donald Trump “ran the table” in important states. Clinton led all the way, but her lead was never big enough to be out of reach. When Election Day arrived, she had not yet closed the sale.

  Every time Hillary Clinton seemed to be on the verge of doing so, something new would upend the race. Every time Donald Trump seemed on the verge of overtaking her, something new, usually self-inflicted, would reverse his momentum. Every few weeks would bring some new reason to dislike or distrust one of the candidates. They took turns on this roller-coaster, this race to the bottom, all the way to November 8.

  BACK AND FORTH

  The first stage of this back and forth came when, in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic national convention, Trump attacked the mother and father of a dead U.S. Marine who had spoken at the convention. In his remarks, Mr. Khizr Khan, a Muslim, criticized Trump for his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States, asking, “Have you even read the United States Constitution?”22 While Khan and his wife, Ghizala, were being interviewed on CNN, Trump responded by tweeting “Mr. Khan, who does not know me, viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over TV doing the same. Nice.”23 He then engaged in a running social media battle with the Khans and their supporters for several days. Clinton was shocked, her strategists were secretly delighted, and key Republicans again took a step back. His one-point pre-convention lead suddenly became an eight-point deficit by August 8. In this case, Trump’s tweets were devastating—to himself.

  Over the next month, Trump slowly climbed back into contention, but was still three points down on September 11. He and some of his media allies (including the National Enquirer) had been raising questions about Hillary Clinton’s health—she had suffered a concussion in 2012 and recently had several extended coughing fits during speaking engagements—when she collapsed and had to be helped into her vehicle at the end of a 9/11 anniversary observance in New York. Her campaign then whisked her off to an undis-closed location and provided little information for several hours. Finally, the campaign disclosed that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia several days before. The incident did two things, both of them bad from Clinton’s perspective. First, her demonstrated health travails seemed to validate concerns that had been raised by Trump and raised further questions. Second, perhaps more damaging, her campaign’s obfuscation reminded people of the Clintons’ historic penchant for secrecy and dishonesty. If Clinton had been suffering from pneumonia for days, they asked, why couldn’t the campaign have just said so?

  If Clinton’s fall on September 11 gave reason for some voters in the middle to doubt both her capacity and her veracity, two days earlier she had already given Trump suppo
rters reason to write her off. In a private fundraiser in Manhattan—what better setting?—she attacked Trump supporters as racists and rubes, saying that half of Trump’s voters consisted of a “basket of deplorables.” Her immediate target was the “alt-right,” but by anyone’s reckoning the alt-right represented far less than half of Trump’s support, and when her speech became public Trump supporters across the country inevitably took the remarks as a broad-brush assault on them. For the rest of the campaign, they wore the “deplorable” label as a badge of honor, an indication of Clinton’s liberal snobbery. Clinton’s comments may also have hurt her with voters in the middle, as it undercut her claim to be a national unifier and her general election slogan of “stronger together.” Clinton’s comments quickly entered the ranks of private fundraiser gaffes, alongside Barack Obama’s 2008 dissection of those who “cling bitterly to their guns and their religion” and Mitt Romney’s 2012 denunciation of the “47 percent” takers. Between the “deplorables” and the health episode, Clinton’s lead fell to one percentage point on September 17.

  Then the tide turned again. Clinton regained her footing and a bit of her lead by the time of the first debate on September 26. Historically, the first debate has been the best opportunity for the challenger—in this case, one could say Trump—to make gains on the “incumbent”—who was not quite Clinton, but almost. In addition, pressure was on Clinton to show that she was in good health. This time, it was the candidate of the status quo who seemed to do best. Trump landed some early blows on trade and the economy, and he kept coming back to this central question: Clinton had been in Washington for “thirty years” (actually twenty-four), and what did she have to show for it? Clinton, though, remained poised and hit back hard on Trump’s long affair with “birtherism,” which he had finally foresworn only days before; his ill treatment of contractors on his real estate projects; the possibility that he had paid no income taxes for eighteen years (an allegation Trump seemed to confirm by saying it had been “smart business”); and Trump’s insulting comments toward Alicia Machado, Miss Venezuela in a Trump beauty pageant some years before. Trump was frequently rude or flummoxed and nearly always vague, and he did himself no favors when he spent the next week replaying the Khan blunder by fighting it out with Alicia Machado on Twitter. Analysis by commentators tended to see Clinton as the winner, and post-debate polls confirmed it (except for self-selected online polls, where the enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters showed itself).

  Clinton’s lead grew to three points by October 2. The Republican ticket may have briefly stabilized the situation with a sharp performance by Mike Pence against Tim Kaine in the vice presidential debate. Here, Pence was self-assured and focused on issues while it was Kaine who constantly interrupted. But the reprieve was short-lived. On October 7, a bombshell burst that must have seemed to Clinton like the final blow from which Trump could not recover. A decade-old tape from an Access Hollywood interview between reporter Billy Bush and Trump became public, showing Trump on a hot mic making extremely lewd comments about women. In the interview, Trump talked about kissing a variety of women, grabbing them by their private parts, and trying to have sex with them, claiming “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”24 The reaction was immediate and severe. An avalanche of Republicans condemned Trump’s comments. Some prominent figures withdrew their endorsements, including Senator John McCain of Arizona and Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who said she would write in Mike Pence for president. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had only endorsed Trump reluctantly, cancelled a joint campaign appearance. Altogether, by October 9, some three dozen Republican leaders had called on Trump to depart the race altogether. Former Utah governor and ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, who had previously endorsed Trump, said, “In a campaign cycle that has been nothing but a race to the bottom—at such a critical moment for our nation—and with so many who have tried to be respectful of a record primary vote, the time has come for Governor Pence to lead the ticket.”25 There were serious discussions in online media about whether it was feasible for Republicans to replace Trump at the top of the ticket with only a month to go.26 There were even rumors reported on the anti-Trump conservative website RedState that Pence himself was wavering about remaining on the ticket.27 It was a measure of the degree to which Republicans had been pulled onto the Trump train against their will that so many were still eager to find a new candidate at this late date. And those were just the Republicans.

  Trump issued a pro-forma apology for his comments, saying, “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.” However, never one to linger in introspection, he quickly went on the attack, saying the tape was “a distraction from the issues we are facing today.” He also compared his “foolish” comments to Bill Clinton’s abuse of women and Hillary Clinton’s record of having “bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”28 He then held a media event showcasing several of Clinton’s female victims before the second presidential debate on October 10. At that debate, Trump was lured into claiming that there were no women who could say that he had ever actually acted as he suggested in the Access Hollywood video. Within days, this claim was shattered, as, one after another, women came forward to allege that he had indeed kissed them, groped them, or otherwise attempted to force himself on them. At this point, Trump’s campaign seemed to be in freefall. On October 17, Clinton led by seven percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average and was poised to break through the 270 mark in electoral votes for the first time since the end of August.29 A huge gender gap seemed to be in the offing, with the possibility of mass defections among Republican women. Swing states that Trump desperately needed, such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, were swinging Clinton’s way. Republican strongholds like Georgia, Arizona, and even Texas seemed like they could be in play. In Utah, polls showed Evan McMullin moving to within striking distance of Trump, forcing the Republican campaign to dispatch Pence to the state that was normally one of the most Republican in the country. The only remaining question seemed to be whether Trump would lose respectably or in a landslide, and whether he would drag the Republican Congress down with him.

  This put Trump in roughly the same position that Harry S. Truman was in three weeks before the 1948 election, when pollsters thought his situation so hopeless that they stopped polling. Having learned their lesson sixty-eight years before, they did not stop polling, but most stopped believing it was a real race. Perhaps Hillary Clinton and her campaign were among that contingent. Certainly there were observers who claimed to notice a slackening effort. Indeed, throughout the fall campaign, Clinton held many fewer campaign events than Trump—fifty-two events to Trump’s eighty-eight between August 1 and October 10—a decision, according to analysts, that “reflected Clinton’s risk-averse style and her campaign’s calculation that she benefits by receding from the spotlight and allowing it to shine on Trump’s scandals and incendiary remarks.”30 According to reports published after the election, the Clinton campaign’s confidence in its data analytics operation also led it to forego polling during the last month in crucial states, some of which hardly saw the candidate in person or on the air.31 Clinton made zero campaign visits to Wisconsin in the general election.

  Then the final turn of the wheel came. It may have started, almost imperceptibly, with the third debate on October 19. It was almost certainly the most substantive of the three debates, and the one in which Trump came off best. Trump was widely disparaged for refusing to promise in advance to accept the results of the election, a refusal that fed the political conversation for days. However, he successfully hammered, as before, on Clinton as the insider, status-quo candidate, saying, “Hillary has experience, but it’s bad experience.” He hit her on emails, on ISIS, on the Supreme Court, on gun control, and on late-term abortion, and he drew some blood. (It also did not go unnoticed that, for the second debate in a row, Clinton offered a lengthy answer to a question about the Supreme Court without ever using the word “Constitution” except to ref
erence the Senate’s role in confirmation of judges.) For many skeptical Republicans watching the debate, Trump may have given the first real indication that he spoke their language. He also exercised more self-control than in past debates.

  Although Trump amplified his claims that the election was “rigged,” he also built on his improved debate performance with a policy-heavy speech— one of his few—in Gettysburg, where he promised, among other things, to support term limits for Congress, a federal hiring freeze, elimination of two regulations for every new regulation enacted, rescission of Barack Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders, the end of federal funding to “sanctuary cities,” the deportation of two million alien criminals, approval of the stalled Keystone XL Pipeline, repeal of Obamacare, and tax cuts and simplification, along with repeal of NAFTA, cancellation of the Trans Pacific Partnership, and other protectionist measures. As one conservative columnist noted, “As part of his Contract with the American Voter, Trump pledged to take 18 major steps on January 20, 2017. Most of these give center-right voters excellent reasons to support Trump at the polls.”32 Characteristically, he stepped on his lines by using the beginning of the speech to threaten to sue the most recent of his female accusers, and it is hard to say how much of the content of the speech penetrated the national consciousness, but it was another move in the direction of convincing the wavering—especially Republicans and conservative independents—that he met the necessary threshold of seriousness.

  The real world also intervened, not least through the announcement during the last three weeks of the campaign of massive health insurance rate increases tied to Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act appeared less affordable than ever, as voters in a number of swing states faced rate increases of 20, 30, or 50 percent. The president’s promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it had gone defunct three years before; the fact that his promise that health care reform would reduce premiums by $2,500 per family was similarly shredded. Clinton, who had chosen to tie herself to Obama’s mast, shared ownership of that failure. It did not help that her husband had publicly declared that Obamacare was leading to a situation—“the craziest thing in the world”—in which hard-working people were facing huge premiums and deductibles.33