Election Dissection, Part III: Media Misdiagnoses

This is the third entry in a series about why the Democrats lost the election. If you haven't already done so, you can read parts one and two by clicking here and here, respectively.

We heard a lot about the spread of fake news prior to the election, and how this ostensibly swayed the result, after it was over. Now, there's little doubt that fake news did spread significantly during the lead-up to the election--maybe even more than real news did. That said, it's important not to lump too many websites into this category, and ensure that it only contains websites whose operators knowingly make up stories that are completely false and then try to pass them off as true (as opposed to, say, the Onion, which is already well-known for being 100% satirical, or Infowars, which pushes conspiracy theories it believes to be true even if they aren't). Why? Because this just increases the incorrect perception that progressives can't argue with the other side on the facts, so they must instead try to undermine the other side's credibility a la 1984 by accusing them of spreading "fake news".

Another point I want to make here, possibly the most important one, is that I think a lack of critical thinking, not fake news, is the real root of the problem. People shared lots of stories that were totally made up under the assumption they were true. This is also why I think one of Facebook's solutions to fake news--the one that automatically tells users if a link has been disputed by fact-checkers--ultimately misguided. I further think that this action will ultimately just further alienate Trump supporters (i.e. people who regularly read untrustworthy conspiracy websites like Infowars and Breitbart.com) from the rest of America, partly because it commits the aforementioned fallacy of lumping these websites in with hoax websites. Ultimately, gullibility is the problem we should all try to solve by not assuming whatever we read on the Internet is true, especially when it's exactly what we want to hear.

Election Dissection, Part II: Barking All the Way Up the Wrong Tree

So in my last post, I explained why I think Hillary Clinton being the nominee, not any aspect of the Democratic platform, was one of the main reasons she lost the election. In this post, I will explain another catastrophic failure of strategy--a decision that seemingly every media figure made continuously from when Trump announced he was running for president until the day before Election Tuesday. This decision is what I am referencing in the title of this post, because it is reminiscent of the expression of "barking up the wrong tree"-which means that you are trying to do something other than what you should actually do.

What was this decision? To attack Trump as being racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and every other form of bigotry in the dictionary, instead of as a loose cannon who has no idea what he's talking about and, therefore, shouldn't be trusted with the power of the presidency. Calling someone racist/sexist/etc. (especially racist), especially if that someone is not in the same political party as you, doesn't do anything except further divide the two parties, and their constituent voters, from each other. Also, it encourages those who you are accusing of supporting a racist to be pissed off at you, thereby making the odds that they will vote for your candidate even lower than they were before. It also serves up a golden opportunity to them on a silver platter: namely, the opportunity to argue that, because liberals can't address any of Trump's policy proposals, they must instead resort to engaging in ad hominem attacks. This also provides a lush, nutrient-rich environment in which the GOP's infectious agents--hatred of political correctness and the mainstream media--can flourish and grow faster than they ever would if, say, you just ignored Trump instead of giving him $2 billion in free media.

Election Dissection, Part I: Kill the Messenger

This will be the first in a series of posts looking at why Democrats lost last year's presidential election--an election that many had assumed they were inevitably going to win.

The reason the Democrats lost the election was that Hillary Clinton won the nomination. This, in turn, meant that she did worse than Obama, which was all Trump needed to win. In 87% of counties, she got fewer votes than Obama did four years ago, and she did particularly worse than Obama in heavily Democratic counties. Ultimately, however, the main reason for her defeat was that she did significantly worse than Obama did in Republican-leaning counties, getting only 84% as many votes as Obama did there in 2012. Why did this cost the Democrats this election? I think there are two main, and very broad, reasons.

Before I explain those reasons, however, I should make it clear that the messenger, not the message, was what went wrong here, so long as by "message" you mean defining policy proposals rather than what some members of the party may have said on occasion about Republicans. Some people have been arguing that the Democratic message is too cultural-centric and not focused enough on what people in the heart of America care about, but I don't buy that. There's little doubt that multiple Democratic proposals, especially expanding Obamacare, reducing income inequality, and raising the minimum wage, are plenty appealing to members of the heartland, especially working-class people.

First, people hate Clinton and perceive her as corrupt, dishonest, and untrustworthy. There are many reasons for this, including the "vast right wing conspiracy" that has tried to portray her as all these things and more for more than two decades. This means people have been throwing as many scandals at her as possible for this entire time in the desperate hope that at least one will stick. Her emails have, of course, been the stickiest of these scandals, as there is little question that 1) she didn't handle her emails right while she was secretary of state and 2) she didn't tell the truth about everything she did in regards to her private email server. Even before everyone started focusing on the conclusions that she violated protocols in using a private server, there was a lot of mainstream media coverage of her emails in mid-2015, some of it inaccurately claiming she was the subject of a criminal investigation. This seems to have been a major reason her popularity abruptly dropped that summer. Of course, she was not indicted for any of this, but the two points I just made are still enough to convince us that she cannot be trusted, and of course her not telling anyone about her having pneumonia didn't help. Another major reason is that people believe her to be untrustworthy is that she is the epitome of the political establishment, which carries with it lots of dubious links to large corporations, especially Wall Street banks. Given that many Americans don't like the excessive influence such businesses have over American politics, this leads to her being perceived as merely doing the bidding of the huge corporations that financially supported her campaign. This image is only reinforced by the fact that she seems to rely on aides and focus groups to decide everything she ever does or says.

Second, throughout her campaign, she seemed to be "more of the same", a continuation of the default, and she never really explained how her presidency would not just be "four more years of Obama". This led to people often comparing her to boring things, like vanilla ice cream and Wonder Bread. This, too, was reinforced by her lack of an exciting message (or Trump's abundant charisma) and a focus on the boring, difficult aspects of being President. Her being part of the establishment also meant that when the mainstream media tried to explain why the scandals surrounding her were bogus, non-Clinton supporters ignored this message, believing it to be the work of the same corrupt government/business establishment in which Clinton was so entrenched. Ditto her lack of a crazy temperament problem like Trump's. This, in turn, led to a huge enthusiasm gap that the Clinton campaign and her supporters desperately tried to close by having famous celebrities perform at rallies and idealizing her as an awesome, rebellious feminist hero.