Here’s one final comment on the Presidential election. In terms of winners and losers, it would
appear that the Democratic Party is somewhat to blame for the outcome. There
are many who would like to say otherwise, but the bare fact of the matter is
that turnout, or the lack thereof, doomed Hillary Clinton’s attempt to
replace President Barack Obama.
Yes, there were other issues, like FBI Director Comey’s
reopening of the investigation into Hillary’s email issues. And the constant
dripping of information from Wikileaks. But even with them, the truth of the
matter is that Hillary was her own worst enemy.
She often stated that “setting up her own email server was a mistake and
she would not do it again.” But that she
did so in the first place added to the negative perception that many people
have of her. It certainly helped swing those final few undecided voters, but
there were many other problems along the way.
For instance, Hillary was unable to get the kind of turnout
she needed from the African-American voting block, which in the end killed her
in Florida and in Pennsylvania.
Ironically, in both states she held a slight lead going into the final
minutes of their respective elections.
In Florida, she had the lead coming out of the I-4 corridor,
but it was nowhere near what she needed to secure the victory. Most of the panhandle and western side of the
state vote republican, and as things turned out that was enough to turn the
state for President-elect Donald Trump.
In Pennsylvania the results were similar. Hillary had a small lead with the eastern
portion of the state already counted.
She easily won the Philadelphia area, a Democratic stronghold that
determined how the state vote went for both President Barack Obama elections in
2008 and 2012. As the vote tallies
progressed toward Pittsburgh and the adjacent counties, where there was a huge
turnout for Trump, it was enough to overcome the Philadelphia effect and turn
the state to favor the Republicans.
But those two huge states were sort of put in the background
as the AP declared Trump the winner in Wisconsin. At that point, the Democratic party started
to sweat a bit.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the whole pre-election
stuff was trying to figure out how the polls, which seemed always to favor
Hillary, could be so far off? What was
bothersome was the size of the crowds that would come out, and in some
instances wait hours, for Trump to make a speech. In Michigan in particular, the crowd waited
for three hours as Trump was delayed in getting to the airport. How is it that that kind of support didn’t
show up in the polls?
Some of the post-election punditry is explaining how perhaps
the polls counted too many Democrats or this or that. It seems that perhaps the applied the wrong
data about what made up the voting constituency. The pollsters were using turnout results from
2012 and applying it to the data from this year. But in the end, the turnout data for 2016
was a bit different.
Only two polls were even close: the LA Times tracking poll and the Investor’s
Business Daily (IBD) tracking poll. All other polls got it wrong, by varying
degrees.
As it turns out, the least likely person in the world nailed
it. Michael Moore called the race for
Trump back during the primaries. He
noted that more republicans voted than democrats in the Michigan
primaries. In the end, he said this
election amounted to the American people saying they had had enough with the
political elites and voted to turn them out.
Of course, he used language to express this which isn’t appropriate for
this blog, but you can easily Google it and see for yourself.
In the end, it was the late breaking
independents and the lack of turnout for key Democratic voters that “done her
in.” Sure, there may have been other
problems, but even so, you have to get the voters to come out. The people that did turn out were coming to
see Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, and Beyonce.
They really weren’t that interested in voting apparently.
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