By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Ever since I woke up early on Wednesday morning to check the election results, I have been wondering how liberal Democrats would react to Donald Trump’s victory. Would they blame the voters, the Electoral College system, WikiLeaks, James Comey?
I knew how the left-wing flamethrowers would react, people like Van Jones and Lena Dunham, who fell all over themselves charging the voters with racism and sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. You know the drill. I was looking for someone more temperate and open-minded.
Someone like Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. Dionne is a liberal Catholic, informed, usually thoughtful and rational in his analysis of events. He gave us insight in his November 9 column in The Washington Post into what is going on in the minds of the liberal elites in the wake of what happened on Election Day. They are having a hard time coming to grips with it.
Dionne starts with the Electoral College. Many other prominent liberals are in agreement. It has become the liberals’ favorite hobby horse. Dionne calls it a “foolish and antiquated system” that has “for the second time in 16 years” awarded the presidency to a “candidate a plurality of Americans had voted against.”
The first impulse is to dismiss liberals who make this case by pointing out that they would be singing the praises of the Electoral College as a bulwark against demagoguery if they were on the winning side in 2000 and in this last election. But let us deal with their point without raising any charges of hypocrisy. It is an issue worth dealing with on its own terms.
What is important to keep in mind is that the popular vote in a presidential election can be misleading. Trump could surely have accrued a few million more votes in blue states such as California, New York, and New Jersey — if he had campaigned there. But he didn’t.
His pollsters saw early on that Trump had little chance of winning these states. The Trump team conceded them to the Democrats. Trump made few personal appearances in these states, concentrating his time in the “battleground states” where he had a reasonable chance of winning. I live in Connecticut. If you had judged by local newspapers and television and radio stations around here, you would not have known that there was a presidential campaign going on.
But could we not say the same thing about the Clinton campaign? Could not she have secured a significant number of additional votes if she had campaigned in red states such as South Carolina and West Virginia? Sure. That’s the point. The popular vote is not necessarily a more accurate reflection of the national will than the Electoral College vote. You just can’t tell. The Electoral College system is what determines how presidential campaigns are run, and the campaigns make a difference.
Most of us have seen those maps that indicate in red which electoral districts Trump carried, and in blue those won by Hillary. If you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to take a look. One of the most detailed can be found at: http://pamelageller.com/2016/11/landslide-trump-305-electoral-votes-vs-233-clinton-electoral-votes.html. The country is colored overwhelmingly red, with blue slivers around the major cities.
If the popular vote determined who controls Washington, D.C., the red parts of the country, the regions that provide our food, the fuel for our cars and homes, and the lion’s share of the men and women in our armed forces would be completely under the control of the urban areas of the country. The Founding Fathers understood that such a government would be unworkable. Hence the Electoral College system.
Who else does Dionne blame? “I freely admit,” he writes, “that my own list of those who deserve to be held accountable is long. It includes…James B. Comey, who, apparently under pressure from politicized bureau agents, changed the trajectory of the campaign.”
How does this work? Comey was a patriot when he exonerated Hillary last summer, after listing the numerous instances when she destroyed evidence and lied to the FBI? But became a knave when he informed the country of the additional emails that turned up on Anthony Weiner’s computer? Come on. You can bet your bottom dollar that Dionne would be singing the praises of Comey and the WikiLeaks revelations if they had proven Hillary innocent of all the accusations against her. Dionne had no problem with the IRS leaks about Donald Trump’s income taxes.
Dionne points to how the media permitted to be established a “false equivalence between Hillary Clinton’s sins and the corruption of her opponent.” How can Dionne possibly know that the charges of deliberately destroying subpoenaed emails and doing favors as secretary of state for donors to the Clinton Foundation are without merit? If she is guilty of selling favors to donors to the Clinton Foundation that is a far more serious charge than anything that has leveled against Trump. It is not even close.
Dionne goes on to castigate “people of my gender, race, and class — college-educated white men — for giving Trump his margin. Yes, a class rebellion among less-educated whites was key to his victory. But we cannot forget that a large majority of well-to-do white men chose to vote for a dangerous misogynist who demonized immigrants and people of color.”
Please. When Trump spoke out against “Mexican drug dealers and rapists” coming across our border, the people who voted for him understood that he was warning about Mexican drug dealers and rapists, not all Mexicans. That would be obvious to Dionne if he were not determined to diminish Trump and his supporters.
And when Trump spoke out about the “horrible, horrible” conditions in our urban areas with large numbers of black residents, he was making the same point that black pastors and police chiefs make about the increase in gang activity in those neighborhoods. The people who voted for him understood that, as well; they were able to make these distinctions. E.J. Dionne would also be able to do that, too, if not for his political partisanship.
Trump’s misogyny? It would be easier to make the case that Trump’s sexual behavior should have disqualified him for voters, if we had seen liberal columnists such as Dionne mounting a crusade against Bill Clinton for much worse offenses. And they did not do that. Instead, they set up a smokescreen to help him stay in office, trying to convince us it was “just about sex.” Hillary did the same thing.
Dionne is grasping at straws in his search for explanations for Hillary’s defeat. He ignores the obvious reason: the failure of the Obama presidency and the radicalism he championed beneath his veneer of civility. The voters rejected Hillary because they saw her as corrupt, but also because they saw her as an extension of the Obama years. They voted against her for the same reasons that they have been voting against Democrats over the past eight years.
We should not overlook the great damage the Obama years have done to the brand of the Democratic Party. Just two years after his victory in 2008, the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives. In 2014, they lost the Senate. In 2009, Democrats held 60 seats in the Senate. They have 48 now. In the words of Governing magazine’s Louis Jacobson, “Democratic losses in the Senate have so far reached 22 percent, 27 percent in the House, 36 percent in governorships, and a stunning 59 percent in fully controlled state legislatures.”
Secular liberalism was given a shot at setting policy in this country for the past eight years. It came up short in the eyes of the voters. It is amazing to think that it was only a few years ago that James Carville was appearing on the talk shows discussing in smug tones the coming extinction of the Republican Party. The shoe is on the other foot.
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