After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the Republican party had an “autopsy” to try to figure out why a popular and successful candidate lost to an incompetent boob. One of the big conclusions drawn was that Republicans were the “party of white people” and that they could not win if they were perceived to support enforcing immigration laws; in the future the only way a Republican could win would be if he or she supported amnesty. Well… Tuesday kinda took a dump on that conclusion, obviously. But not as much as some might suppose… Trump got 59,937,338 votes against Hillarys 60,274,974 (these numbers are subject to modest adjustments), and only won the White House due to the magic of the Electoral College. In 2012, Obama got 65,915,795 to Romneys 60,933,504. Trump got fewer votes than Romney… and that’s not even taking into account the increase in population since then. Don’t get too puffed up, Trump fans… Trump didn’t so much *win* as Hillary *lost.* It would be a good idea for Republicans to start figuring things out.
Of course, Democrats are also trying to figure things out. A lot of them are leaping to the absolutely wrong conclusion… that Hillary lost because White Americans are racist, sexist, Islamophobic, transphobic monsters who somehow though Obama was just neato. The more thoughtful Dems are noting that Hillary got more than five and a half million fewer votes than Obama ’12… and about eight and a half million fewer than Obama ’12.
People on both sides can rightly say “How is is possible that my candidate lost to/got fewer votes than *that* candidate, who is so clearly terrible?” And the answer, of course, is that both candidates were terrible. Either candidate, put up against a generic, bland version of the sort of candidate the opposing party would normally put up, would have lost *badly.* Either candidate should have been easily defeated, because they both sucked.
As I said, some Dems are putting a bit of thought into the analysis, beyond “white people are teh eebil.” Such as here:
The Democratic Party Deserved To Die
The commenter there points out that both sides looked at places in the midwest/rust belt/flyover country that have lost industrial jobs and are cryign out for help. Both sides responded to those un/underemployed poor white folks with utter BS. But where Trumps BS at least *kinda* sounds good (we can fix the problem through sheer force of will), the Dems basically insulted those people:
Well, those jobs are actually gone for good, we knowingly told them. And we offered a fantastical non-solution. We will retrain you for good jobs! Never mind that these “good jobs” didn’t exist in East Kentucky or Cleveland. And as a final insult, we lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug overdoses about their white privilege.
An honest assessment of the situation is “your jobs are gone… not so much to offshoring but to robots. They are not coming back.” Neither side wants to face that. For the Republicans, answers such as a basic universal income or enforced Luddism are anathema. For the Democrats, deporting illegals so that the bottom rung of Americans can have jobs is equally unpalatable.
I think Trump is kinda up the creek here, if he actually wants to win re-election in ’20. Making better deals and setting up tariffs isn’t going to do a damn thing to restore jobs that are now technologically obsolete. The Dems are up the creek if they continue to insist on their culture of sneering at the middle of the county (i.e. “white people,” since there’s no chance they’d sneer at People Of Any Color Other Than White).
Either the whole thing is going to collapse, or someone will come up with a workable solution. As much as the ethics of the situation gives me the uncomfortables, I expect that, long term, the answer will come in the form of a welfare state that embraces slavery… a universal basic income with highly advanced humanoid robots doing many of the jobs currently being done by lower and middle income people today.