The voters are angry, and that’s understating it by quite a bit. Even though polls somehow have most of us having already decided between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it’s not as if most of those who have supposedly locked in our choices necessarily like it.
For evidence of that, all you have to do is look at your own social media account, and scroll down to see your friends, acquaintances and people who you barely remember from high school weighing in on the election.
And when they do, well, you’ve seen it, it ain’t pretty, which shouldn’t be surprising, given the tone of fear-mongering being set by the Trump campaign, which is trying to make the 2016 election about the dangers being posed to the extended American Century by Mexicans, Muslims, women not on their knees and the ever-villainous press, which not ironically is responsible for sowing the seeds of proto-fascism that allowed Trump his pedestal in the first place.
Trump’s repeated references to Crooked Hillary have enervated the throngs who attend his rallies to squeal in delight about how Clinton should be in jail, when they’re not calling for her to be tried for treason and executed for her alleged misdeeds.
But you knew that already, that Trump eviscerated a deep and talented field of Republican candidates in the GOP primaries by stoking the deep-seated fears of angry white voters, and that he’s now sinking the claws on his tiny hands into Clinton, and not surprisingly drawing blood.
What you haven’t yet considered is how effective this strategy is and will be in tamping down support for Clinton on the other side of the x-y axis.
Voters on the left tend to like to think of themselves as being more open-minded than their fellow countrymen and -women on the right, and as such they are thus more open to the false equivalencies being thrown out in the mainstream media and social media highlighting the darker sides of the two candidates.
OK, so Trump wants to dismantle NATO and make America great again by playing second fiddle to whatever Vladimir Putin wants to do; but Hillary voted for the war in Iraq. See, the line of thinking advances, she’s just as bad.
And yeah, so Trump is a billionaire proposing a massive tax cut for the 1 percent; but Hillary made hundreds of thousands of dollars speaking to Wall Street. Just as bad there, too, right?
Doesn’t matter that the equivalencies are grossly misstated, because the intent isn’t to convince progressive voters to switch from Clinton to Trump. The aim is to get enough progressives to either stay home or at the worst vote for one of the third parties in protest.
The vote your conscience movement hasn’t yet caught hold with enough voters to make a difference in the current polling. A scan of the internals of the last several horse-race polls suggests that Clinton is actually polling slightly better among Democratic voters than Trump is among Republican voters, as one would expect in a normal election cycle.
Dive a little deeper, though, and you see that Trump is leading among self-styled independent voters, and don’t be surprised to see the numbers of those types of voters grow in the coming weeks and months, with a related drop in the portion of the population ID’g as Democrats.
These voters peeling off won’t be your typical independents, who tend to be people in the middle of the spectrum, swinging one way or the other depending on the candidates’ placement on the x-y axis. Rather, they will be those in the upper-left quadrant, the usually reliable Dems who are part of the backbone of any winning Democratic strategy.
Let me make clear that I’m not talking about a necessarily huge cohort of far-left voters here; this is all back of the napkin math here, but I’m guessing it’s 1.5 percent to 2 percent of the overall voting population, roughly akin to the number that peeled off from Al Gore to Ralph Nader in 2000, throwing that election to George W. Bush.
And yeah, that one sure went well for those progressives who got for their protest votes two wars that nearly bankrupted the country, a rollback in their precious environmental regulations, and even when Democrats finally took political power back under Barack Obama, the best they could do in healthcare was a watered-down Heritage Foundation scheme from the early 1990s. Congrats!
I’m not sure at this stage what Clinton could possibly do to sway these voters to even at the least hold their noses on Election Day and vote for her as a protest against Trump. She can’t undo her vote to authorize military action in Iraq, and no amount of saying sorry, but we tried to end the Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan before the Arab Spring and Syria blew everything up, is going to cut it with her far-left critics.
Her choice of Tim Kaine as her running mate suggests to me that she realizes this, that throwing the far left a bone by running with an Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t wash what her progressive critics see as stink from her candidacy, and that she needs to focus on shoring up the center-left base and then try to peel off more traditional independents and center-right Republicans who have espoused Never Trump views.
In the meanwhile, you have Trump masterfully throwing firebombs, stealing the day even with his missteps, probably stealing many days precisely because of the missteps, on the theory that people driving by a car wreck can’t help but rubberneck.
The Clinton approach is to play nice in response, basically let the bully be the bully, and people will get tired of being bullied when it’s all said and done. And while I understand the strategy, it feels to me like a football team sitting back in a soft zone defense, allowing the opponent to throw underneath and get four or five yards per rush, and hoping that the quarterback makes a mistake, or there’s a holding penalty somewhere, or a fumble, or missed field goal, and however it happens, you live to play on to the next series.
When you’ve got Trump on the other sideline running tight end reverse option screens and fumblerooskies and Hail Mary after Hail Mary after Hail Mary, it seems like the soft zone is the smart approach, the safe approach, but then Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Ted Cruz had the same idea, and look where they are now.
(See History, Dustbin Of.)
The fundamentals of this election would seem to portend a safe Democratic win. Obama is on the plus side in approval ratings, the economy continues to be strong, unemployment is below 5 percent, which the academics consider full employment. All of those factors would seem to suggest a five- to seven-point Clinton win in November, no matter how poorly she ran her campaign, and how well Trump would run his.
We’ll probably get back to that area after the convention bounces cancel each other out later this week, but that’s where the fun and games begin.
The bet here is that the voices of the Never Trumps on the right side of the x-y axis will be drowned out in the barrage of anti-Clinton rhetoric that the Trump team will spew with the aid of its titular enemies in the venomous press.
And so the outcome of Trump’s push to depress far-left Democratic turnout for Clinton is what is going to decide this election.
And I’m sure if you’ve read this far, you know where my head is on how that one will turn out.
A lot can and will happen between now and November, but this one seems to me to be Trump’s election to lose.
Column by Chris Graham
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