Religious Liberty
Finally, an issue simmering not far beneath the surface, and which gave the Supreme Court particular importance in the minds of many, was the fear of millions of traditionalist religious believers that progressives were aiming not only to win political battles, and not only to radically redesign the nation’s moral compass, but also to drive them from public life altogether—in the words of one analyst, “run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions.”67 Two key exhibits—though there were many more examples available—were Obamacare regulations that sought to force even private Catholic charities such as Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for contraceptive and abortifacient coverage against their consciences, and the unremitting campaign by gay activists to silence and drive out of business those not conforming to the new order of same-sex marriage. It was arguably this fear for the future of religious liberty that accounted for Trump’s 81 percent share among white evangelicals and his narrower victory among Catholics despite his multiple divorces, affairs, strip clubs, and evident biblical illiteracy.
What held many of these issues together was a theme of nationalism and citizenship, as did the issues of immigration and trade that had long played a more open role in Trump’s campaign. After the votes were counted, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager, argued, “We didn’t have a traditional campaign of coalitions. It was the same message for everybody . . . ‘I’m going to make America great again’ . . . We just stuck to the same message the entire time. It was so simplistic, and it didn’t target any specific demographic.”68 As twenty-four-year-old Shannon Goodin of Owosso, Michigan, explained, “Clinton would go out of her way to appeal to minorities, immigrants, but she didn’t really for everyday Americans.”69
Within days of his election, analysts asked: Could anyone but Trump have beaten Clinton? On one side, Trump’s advocates, including the pseudonymous Publius Decius Mus, argued that no one else in the Republican field could have beaten Hillary Clinton.70 They pointed to Trump’s unusual strength among white working-class voters and held that the key states that flipped from blue to red could not have been flipped by anyone else.
There is no way to know with certainty, but there are two shortcomings with this line of reasoning. First, it is far from clear that no other Republican candidate could have won as Trump did, via the Rust Belt. To the contrary, a number of Republicans have done well there in recent years: John Kasich was the second-term governor of Ohio and trounced Trump in his home state primary, and Ohio senator Rob Portman, running for reelection in 2016, significantly outpaced Trump’s general election vote in Ohio without ever endorsing him. Republican Scott Walker was the second-term governor of Wisconsin and endorsed Ted Cruz, who trounced Trump in his state primary. Michigan and Iowa also had Republican governors. Of the key Rust Belt flips, only Pennsylvania did not have a GOP governor, and Republicans controlled both houses of the state legislature there, as they did in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin; Iowa had a split legislature. At the presidential level, the Midwestern states’ approval of President Obama had declined relative to other states. As analyst Harry Enten noted, the Midwest in general has been trending Republican; Trump did not create the trend—he rode it.71 Indeed, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had been on Republican target lists as potential pickups for several election cycles. George W. Bush’s campaign thought he had Wisconsin locked up in 2000 before losing 47.8 percent to 47.6 percent. John McCain, employing Sarah Palin, made a play for Michigan in 2008, and Pennsylvania has been the perennial dream of Republicans. There, they fell short by only four percentage points in 2000, two and a half points in 2004, and five points in 2012. Bush actually did win Iowa in 2004, and Ohio in both of his elections. Clinton’s opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and support for the EPA’s anti-coal regulatory campaign would have hurt her across the Midwest and Rust Belt against almost any Republican.
Second, even if it is true that no one but Trump could have won the way he did, through the Rust Belt, it does not follow that no one else could have won by any other avenue. For example, it is not difficult to imagine a Marco Rubio or a John Kasich winning Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Minnesota, worth thirty-six electoral votes and enough to pass 270 with room to spare even without Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. More generally, in the spring of 2016, head-to-head polls showed Kasich and Rubio beating Clinton soundly and Cruz beating her sometimes, although Trump trailed in almost every matchup versus Clinton. At this point one might also recall Trump’s toxic public image on Election Day, with two-thirds seeing him unfavorably, two-thirds calling him dishonest, 61 percent calling him unqualified, and only 35 percent saying he had the right temperament to be president. It seems unlikely that this candidate was the only Republican who could have beaten the most disliked Democratic presidential nominee since polling began.
In the end, most of the political science models that attempted to estimate the vote share of the major party candidates on the basis of the fundamentals were close to the mark, well within normal error. If anything, Trump under-performed the models on average (remember that five of nine predicted a Republican popular vote win), implying that the contingencies, including relative candidate and campaign quality, worked against him. Nate Silver also noted during the campaign that Trump was underperforming, given the fundamentals, and ascribed the gap to Trump’s “increasingly abnormal campaign and appeals to a narrow slice of the electorate.”72 Less scientifically, in late October Peggy Noonan, anticipating a Trump loss, held that a “sane Trump would have won in a landslide.”73 It may be better to ask whether there was any potential Democratic nominee other than Clinton who could have lost to Trump. Of course, one would first have to ask whether the Democratic Party, its bench depleted by the electoral catastrophes of the Obama era, had any other plausible nominees period. President Donald Trump may have been Barack Obama’s parting gift to his party.
The race to the bottom that was the 2016 general election campaign featured what may have been the most unsatisfying choice ever offered to American voters. If it had been a boxing match, it would have ended in a split decision, with Trump winning on points. If it had been a football game, it might have been a come-from-behind win from an underdog Trump team that had trailed all game on a last-second field goal that bounced in off the goalpost—following five consecutive fumbles by alternating teams. Had the sport been baseball, Trump might have prevailed 12–11 in extra innings, with the winning run coming in from third base on a balk. After a spate of penalties on each side, Clinton might have lost a soccer match 1–0 with an own-goal in the final minute.
Trump’s win in the general election was no thing of beauty, but it was a win—a win that surprised most of the political world. Defying the odds, outsiderism had prevailed against the ultimate insider. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had a strained relationship with Trump, declared that Trump had won because he “heard a voice out in this country that no one else heard.”74 The country had defeated the court. Almost no one had given Trump a chance when he opened his campaign in June 2015. He had just been elected president of the United States.
NOTES
1. Frank Newport and Andrew Dugan, “One in Four Americans Dislike Both Presidential Candidates,” Gallup, July 12, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/187652/one-four-americans-dislike-presidential-candidates.aspx.
2. “Text of F.B.I. Director’s Remarks on Investigation into Hillary Clinton’s Email Use,” New York Times, July 5, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/us/transcript-james-comey-hillary-clinton-emails.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article.
3. Nick Gass, “Comey challenges truthfulness of Clinton’s email defenses,” Politico, July 7, 2016, http://www.politico.com/blogs/james-comey-testimony/2016/07/clinton-untrue-statements-fbi-comey-225216.
4. Natasha Bertrand, “It looks like Russia hired internet trolls to pose as pro-Trump
Americans,” Business Insider, July 27, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-internet-trolls-and-donald-trump-2016-7.
5. Amelia Warshaw, “All the Times Donald Trump Sucked Up to Vladimir Putin,” The Daily Beast, July 25, 2016, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/25/all-the-times-donald-trump-sucked-up-to-vlaldimir-putin.html.
6. See Jo Becker and Mike McIntire, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” New York Times, April 23, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html. See also “Memo Sheds New Light on Clinton-Russia Uranium Scandal,” Powerline, August 26, 2016, http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/08/memo-sheds-new-light-on-clinton-russia-uranium-scandal.php.
7. Eric Morath, “Seven Years Later, Recovery Remains the Weakest of the Post– World War II Era,” Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2016, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/07/29/seven-years-later-recovery-remains-the-weakest-of-the-post-world-war-ii-era/.
8. “Real Unemployment,” Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/189068/bls-unemployment-seasonally-adjusted.aspx.
9. “President Obama Job Approval,” RealClearPolitics, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html.
10. “Party Affiliation,” Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx.
11. The five predicting a Trump majority were Fair, Professor Alan Abramowitz, Professor Helmut Norpoth, Professor Drew Linzer, and Professor Ray Cuzan. However, Abramowitz repudiated his own model. The four models estimating a Clinton majority were from Professor James Campbell, Professor Robert Erikson, Professor Andrew Gelman (utilizing Douglas Hibbs’s model), and the team of Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien. One other model was prospective, using public opinion surveys on most important issues and leadership skills, and it projected a Clinton win. Another was essentially a combination of polls of the public, experts, prediction markets and so on. It also predicted a Clinton win.
12. Michael Barone, “The Coming Electoral Crack-Up?” The American Interest, August 1, 2016, http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/08/01/the-coming-electoral-crack-up/.
13. Gabriel Debenedetti, “They Always Wanted Trump,” Politico, November 7, 2016, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428.
14. Joshua Darr, “Where Clinton Is Setting Up Field Offices—And Where Trump Isn’t,” FiveThirtyEight, October 7, 2016, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-clinton-field-offices/.
15. Adam Pearce, “Trump Has Spent a Fraction of What Clinton Has on Ads,” New York Times, October 21, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/21/us/elections/television-ads.html; Michael Levenson, “Clinton keeps the public schedule light in home stretch,” Boston Globe, October 17, 2016, https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/10/16/hillary-clinton-shuns-spotlight-donald-trump-spirals/u3RTMhaaAW2ojlJcv6Cy8O/story.html.
16. Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go,” Bloomberg Business Week, October 27, 2016, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go.
17. Peter Augustine Lawler, “Trump’s Mandate,” National Review, November 27, 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/442489/electoral-college-trump-popular-vote-mandate.
18. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton-5491.html.
19. Michael Moore, “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win,” http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/; Ben Dolnick, “No One Understands Donald Trump Like the Horny Narcissist Who Created Dilbert,” Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/09/dilbert_creator_scott_adams_gets_trump_like_no_one_else.html.
20. For an extended discussion about the expert assumption that Truman would lose, see Andrew E. Busch, Truman’s Triumphs: The 1948 Election and the Making of Postwar America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 152.
21. Nate Silver, “Election Update: Where Are the Undecided Voters?” FiveThirty-Eight, October 25, 2016, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-where-are-the-undecided-voters/.
22. “FULL TEXT: Khizr Khan’s Speech to the 2016 Democratic National Convention,” ABC News, August 1, 2016, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/full-text-khizr-khans-speech-2016-democratic-national/story?id41043609.
23. Callum Borchers, “Donald Trump uses Twitter to fight with Khan family while they’re live on CNN,” Washington Post, August 1, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/01/donald-trump-uses-twitter-to-fight-with-khan-family-while-theyre-live-on-cnn/.
24. David A. Farentholt, “Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005,” Washington Post, October 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html.
25. Aaron Blake, “Three dozen Republicans have now called for Donald Trump to drop out,” Washington Post, October 9, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/07/the-gops-brutal-responses-to-the-new-trump-video-broken-down/.
26. John Fund, “Early Voting Has Made It Impossible to Replace Trump,” National Review, October 9, 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/node/440896.
27. Betsy Rothstein, “Reports: Rumors Swirl That Pence Wants Off the Ticket,” The Daily Caller, October 9, 2016, http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/09/reports-rumors-swirl-that-pence-wants-off-the-ticket/.
28. Farentholt, “Trump recorded,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html.
29. “Battle for White House: State Changes,” RealClearPolitics, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_elections_electoral_college_map_race_changes.html.
30. Levenson, “Clinton keeps the public schedule light in home stretch.”
31. Charlie Cook, “How Analytical Models Failed Clinton,” National Journal, December 26, 2016, https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/646194?unlockO0PSAHTAHF7G58Y1.
32. Deroy Murdock, “Trump’s Gettysburg Address Overflows with Conservative Ideas,” National Review, October 26, 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441458/donald-trump-contract-american-voter-gettysburg-address.
33. Nancy Cook and Brianna Ehley, “Bill Clinton’s Obamacare remarks put Hillary on the hot seat,” Politico, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/bill-clinton-obamacare-crazy-229100.
34. See, for example, Kerry Pickett, “EXCLUSIVE: FBI Agents Say Comey ‘Stood in the Way’ of Clinton Email Investigation,” The Daily Caller, October 17, 2016. http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/17/exclusive-fbi-agents-say-comey-stood-in-the-way-of-clinton-email-investigation/. Also Jeremy Lott, “Clinton ally funneled money to wife of FBI agent who oversaw emails,” Washington Examiner, October 23, 2016, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/clinton-ally-funneled-money-to-wife-of-fbi-agent-who-oversaw-emails/article/2605371.
35. Heidi M. Pryzbyla, “As Election Day Looms, Clinton Joins Forces with Obamas in Philadelphia,” USA Today, November 7, 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/11/07/hillary-clinton-campaign-last-day/93410200/.
36. David Jackson, “Trump Conducts Election Eve Marathon,” USA Today, November 7, 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/11/07/donald-trump-campaign-final-day/93412700/.
37. See “Four Way: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson vs. Stein,” RealClearPolitics, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton_vs_johnson_vs_stein-5952.html.
38. Hal Boyle, “GOP Headquarters a Scene of Gloom,” Associated Press, November 3, 1948, in Robert J. Dinkin, ed., Election Day: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 160.
39. This and subsequent voter preference data, unless otherwise noted, is drawn from “Presidential Election Exit Polls,” CNN
, http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/national/president.
40. Andrew Gelman, “19 Things We Learned From the 2016 Election,” Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, December 8, 2016, ndrewgelman.com/2016/12/08/19-things-learned-2016-election/.
41. Lerigh Ann Caldwell and Benjy Sarlin, “How Trump Won,” NBC, http://www.nbcnews.com/specials/donald-trump-republican-party/presidency.
42. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Killing the ‘sisterhood’: Why identity politics didn’t work for Clinton,” New York Post, November 13, 2016,
43. Fernanda Santos, “In Arizona County Where Latinos Have an Edge, So Did Trump,” New York Times, December 13, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/yuma-county-arizona-latinos-trump.html?reftodayspaper&_r0.
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