Darryl Paulson: Why Donald Trump won — A review of the 2016 election
We know Donald Trump won and Hillary Clinton lost the 2018 presidential election. What else do we need to know? We need to know why Trump won and Clinton lost. We know that Clinton won the popular vote 65,844,954 to 62,979,879, or by 2.9 million votes. Trump’s popular vote deficit was the largest ever for someone elected president. We all know that he popular vote does not determine the winner in a presidential election. The only thing that matters is the electoral vote, and Trump won 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227. Trump won 34 more electoral votes than was needed to win the election. There were also seven “faithless” electors who cast their vote for neither Trump or Clinton. Three voted for former general and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ohio Governor John Kasich, former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul and Sioux anti-pipeline activist Faith Spotted Eagle each received one vote. Ask individuals why Trump Won and Clinton lost and you will receive a variety of responses. Some Clinton supporters argue that she lost because of Russian hackers and WikiLeaks releasing her emails. Others blame FBI Director James Comey’s “October surprise” about reopening the investigation into Clinton’s emails shortly before the election. Others blame Clinton for her defeat. She was an unpopular candidate who barely defeated a little-known Vermont senator even though the Democratic National Committee seemed to do everything possible to assist Clinton in winning the primaries. Many saw Clinton’s use of a private email server, in spite of warnings, to be a self-inflicted wound, as was her comment about Trump’s supporters being a “basket of deplorables.” Heading into election night, the election was Clinton’s to lose, and that’s exactly what she did. Clinton was not the only Democrat to lose. What was supposed to be a great election for Democrats, turned into a great election for Republicans. Republicans lost only two senate seats, although they had to defend 24 of the 34 contested seats. Republicans lost only six seats in the House, although Democrats had hoped to win control of both chambers at one point. In addition, Republicans picked up two more governorships, raising their total to 33, and they won control of both houses in the state legislatures in two more states, giving them complete control in 32 of the 49 states with a bicameral legislature. Trump won, in part, by shifting six states from the Democratic to the Republican column. Trump won the key state of Ohio by 8 points and Iowa by 9 points. He also squeaked out narrow wins in Florida (1.2 percent), Wisconsin (0.8 percent), Pennsylvania (0.7 percent) and Michigan (0.2 percent). Victories in these six states added 99 electoral votes to the Trump total, more than enough to win the election. Republicans like to point to Trump’s strengths by noting he won 30 states to 20 for Clinton, carried 230 congressional districts to 205 for Clinton and swept over 2,500 counties compared to less than 500 for Clinton. The political map of America looked very red and looked very much like a Trump landslide. But maps often distort political reality. After all, Clinton did win 2.9 million more votes than Trump. If she had not lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 percent, she would have been president and Trump would be managing his hotel chain. The usual explanation for Clinton’s loss was that turnout was far lower than normal. That is not true. The total turnout of 136.6 million was a record turnout and represented 60 percent of the voter-eligible population. Turnout was down slightly for black voters, but that ignores the fact that 2008 and 2012 had record black turnout due to the Barack Obama candidacy. According to a recent analysis of the 2016 presidential vote by The New York Times, Trump’s victory was primarily due to his ability to persuade large numbers of white, working-class voters to shift their loyalty from the Democrats to the Republicans. “Almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016.” Trump was able to convince enough working-class Americans that he was the dealmaker who would work for the little guy and Make America Great Again. “I am your voice,” said Trump, and the America voters believed him. ___ Darryl Paulson is Emeritus Professor of Government at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg specializing in Florida Politics, political parties and elections.
Libertarian’s Gary Johnson has never been the typical politician
Ronald Reagan won a historic landslide victory in the 1984 election, taking 49 of 50 states. But he failed to win the vote of a young Republican businessman in New Mexico whose willingness to go against the political grain has made him this presidential campaign’s X-factor. Outraged at the GOP president’s budget deficits, Gary Johnson for the first time voted for the Libertarian candidate. Ten years later, Johnson became New Mexico’s governor, and was known for vetoing bill after bill before he became a national curiosity for advocating legalized marijuana. Now, at age 63, he’s the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, a marijuana-promoting fitness aficionado who summited Mount Everest and now climbs a political mountain with tough odds of reaching the top. Though Johnson has grabbed more attention for his stance on drugs and difficulty answering foreign-policy questions, fiscal conservatism remains his animating force. “I always pushed the envelope,” said Johnson, who’s proposed deep cuts to military and other government spending as well as elimination of the federal departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Education, and Housing and Urban Development. “I wasn’t a wallflower when I was governor and I do think government spends too much money in areas that don’t make a big difference in people’s lives.” Before he came out for legalizing marijuana shortly after his re-election as New Mexico governor in 1998, Johnson was nicknamed “Governor Veto.” He piled up a record 700-plus vetoes during his two terms in Santa Fe. Admirers liked his dedication to limiting the size of government. Detractors considered him narrow-minded and incurious about the outside world. “He just does not believe government should be involved in dealing with social problems,” said state Sen. Jerry Pino y Ortiz, who ran two social service agencies during Johnson’s administration and feels the former governor let down his achingly poor state. “It’s like the dad who’s proud that his kid gets by on the smallest allowance at school, but the kid’s shoes have holes in them.” Rod Adair is a Republican political strategist and former state lawmaker who agrees with Johnson’s small-government philosophy. The problem, Adair said, is that the former governor knows relatively little beyond that. He says Johnson prefers to focus on his obsessive fitness routine — he’s an ultramarathoner and triathelete who summited Mount Everest in 2003 after leaving office as governor— rather than learn about unfamiliar areas like foreign policy. “Running for president, I don’t care where you’re governor, it’s very different and you need to have a degree of intellectual curiosity,” Adair said. “He doesn’t have that.” Supporters and admirers in New Mexico agree that Johnson was an unusual politician. He didn’t horse trade or hold grudges, they say, and was generally direct and honest. Those are attributes that have won him an unusually wide swath of support in the current presidential race, helping him appeal both to some disaffected liberal Bernie Sanders voters and more traditional libertarians. He and running mate Bill Weld, Massachusetts’ former GOP governor, are the only third-party ticket on the ballot in all 50 states Johnson has fallen short of the 15 percent threshold in national polling needed to enter the presidential debates, polling at about 8 percent for several months. If he receives 5 percent of the vote in November, that would be a bonanza for the Libertarian Party, assuring it of a valuable place on state ballots in the 2020 election. Johnson’s deer-in-the-headlights response to a question from a television interviewer about what he’d do to deal with the crisis in the Syrian city of Aleppo — “What’s Aleppo?” — earned him derision in September, though he quickly apologized. Weeks later, Democrats feared Johnson was pulling enough young voters from [Hillary] Clinton to throw some swing states to [Donald] Trump. Johnson’s campaign put out a lengthy statement urging Republicans disgusted with Trump’s taped boasts about forcing himself on women to vote Libertarian instead. Johnson says he’s happy to criticize Clinton, even though his running mate says his focus is solely on Trump. In an interview at a hotel near his Santa Fe home, Johnson predicted the national debt would more than double to $50 trillion should Clinton implement her various plans. She’s proposed spending that would be paid for by $1.4 trillion in tax increases on the wealthy. Johnson said those would doom the economy. “If those tax hikes go through, I think the recession of 2008 is mild by comparison,” Johnson said. Johnson was born in North Dakota, but his father moved the family to New Mexico when the future governor was 13. Raised by a school teacher and an accountant for the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, Johnson founded a construction company while he was still at the University of New Mexico. The firm grew and became a major contractor on Intel’s chip factory in Albuquerque, making Johnson his fortune. In 1994 he entered a competitive four-way Republican primary for governor. Johnson squeaked through with just over 30 percent of the primary vote, then defeated an incumbent Democrat whose party was so badly split that his own lieutenant governor ran against him. The new Republican governor confronted a Democratic-controlled legislature and it was ugly. Johnson vetoed more than half of the bills that came to his desk that first year and kept rejecting ones afterward. “When you have both houses of the legislature in the opposite party you’re always going to have a lot of sparks that fly, especially on financial issues,” said David Harris, Johnson’s longtime finance secretary. “He always applied the same test to everything,” Harris added — veto it “if it didn’t improve the government or it raised taxes.” Over the years Johnson routinely shot down efforts to create commemorative license plates that would collect extra money for wildlife preservation, firefighters or West Point graduates. He vetoed a proposal for a state holiday recognizing Hispanic labor icon Cesar Chavez. He vetoed a $2 hotel room fee increase in the city of Las Cruces. He even vetoed the entire budget in
Jeb Bush struggles for Alabama delegates
As news circulated throughout both the conservative and mainstream press that Jeb Bush failed to secure a full slate of delegates ahead of the Alabama primary in March, the question has emerged: does Bush have an “Alabama problem”? The conservative Weekly Standard sure seemed to think so. Their Michael Warren wrote Bush’s inability to fill commitments for all 47 of Alabama’s open delegates who will be awarded to the winner of the state’s primary amounted to “a sign the former Florida governor may be lagging in organization and enthusiasm in the Yellowhammer State.” Alabama political consultant Brent Buchanan was more severe still in an interview with Bloomberg Politics. “You can buy all the people you want, but it doesn’t make voters vote for you,” said Buchanan in an interview. “He’s just not connecting with people like his brother did. He’s a policy wonk, and that’s great for a governor. But it doesn’t always translate to the presidential race.” Bloomberg leveled a criticism at the Bush campaign that had lingered in Tallahassee, Miami and other Bush strongholds, but which has now reached the national stage, calling it “a top-heavy campaign with plenty of endorsements that’s still waiting for the candidate to turn on the ignition.” The more measured election watchers at the blog Frontloading HQ, on the other hand, were less apt to ring the alarm bells. Of those 47 spots, Bush has 32 delegate candidates covering 29 vacancies. That is short of the more than full slates that candidates like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio had filing in support of them. Looks bad, right? It is. If a campaign touts its strength in filing a full slate of delegate candidates in Tennessee — as the Bush campaign has done and others have reported — then it says something that the campaign has missed the mark further south in Alabama. It says something about organization in an area of the country — SEC primary territory — where Bush has spent some time this fall. It says something more that, compared to the other candidates, Bush ranks sixth in terms of the number of Alabama delegate candidates that filed pledges to the former Florida governor. And yet – There are, however, a couple of matters that have gone unsaid and/or underreported in this story. One is that the above it just one comparison. The second is that the process in Alabama — the rules — are being overlooked. Both factors when not considered help to overstate the extent of the problem for Bush in Alabama… …look back four years and you will see that all four candidates who made the Alabama presidential primary ballot — [Newt] Gingrich, [Ron] Paul, [Mitt] Romney and [Rick] Santorum — all had gaps in the delegate slates that appeared on the ballot next to their names. And yes, that is more an excuse from the Bush perspective than anything else. 2016 is not 2012. However, if FHQ had asked you before the Alabama filing deadline — so absent this revelation about delegate slates there — whether Bush would get more or less than 12 delegates (of 47 total), I suspect most would have taken the under given the crowded field of candidates. Alabama is a small state and its field of GOP consultants and activists who make up the RNC delegate-type crowd is even smaller. The final verdict: Jeb’s campaign for Alabama’s 50 delegates isn’t looking great at this juncture, but neither were the campaigns of many Republican pols who have ultimately gone on to carry the state. How the new “SEC primary,” the candidate winnowing process sure to begin this winter, and other 2016-specific factors will play into the recent news of Bush’s missing delegates remains to be seen.
GOP presidential prospects in Iowa agree to get tough with terrorists
Republicans wooing Iowa’s most active party members called Saturday for a stronger presence in the world but ran the gamut in tone and just how tough to get with America’s enemies. On Armed Services Day — and a day the Obama administration reported killing a senior Islamic State leader in Syria — most of the nearly dozen GOP presidential prospects at a state party dinner called for a more confrontational stance toward Iran. Former Sen. Rick Santorum‘s answer for handling Iran, one of four countries on the U.S. list of nations accused of repeatedly supporting global terrorism, was to “load up our bombers and bomb them back to the 7th century.” Earlier in the day, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush praised U.S. commandos who had reportedly killed the ISIS leader, described as the head of oil operations for ISIS. Bush gave no credit to Obama, whom Bush accused of allowing the rise of ISIS by pulling back U.S. forces from Iraq. “It’s a great day, but it’s not a strategy,” Bush told reporters in eastern Iowa. Although Bush joked lightly about the confused statements he made in recent days about whether he would have ordered the attack in Iraq in 2003, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told the GOP gathering Saturday night that it was a “valid question” to ask presidential candidates whether they would have invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein. “We have to question: Is Iraq more stable or less stable since Hussein is gone?” said Paul, who espouses some of the hands-off foreign policy of his father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham tried to reject any assertion that the existing problems in Iraq were the result of the Republican president who ordered the invasion, Bush’s brother George W. Bush. “The person I blame is Barack Obama, not George W. Bush,” said Graham, who criticized Obama for keeping a campaign promise to withdraw combat troops from Iraq. Of George W. Bush, Graham said, “He made the best decision he could.” Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, as did others, accused Obama of not taking the threat of Islamic State militants seriously. Perry pointed to claims by the militant group, disputed by terrorism experts, that it was behind the assault on a Texas cartoon contest that featured images of the Prophet Muhammad. “You see ISIS showing up in Garland, Texas,” Perry said. “You realize this is a challenging world we live in.” Aside from the nuances on Republican policy toward Iran and ISIS militants in Iraq, the GOP presidential prospects were united in taking jabs at Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. They linked Clinton to Obama and mocked her for not fielding more questions during her campaign events. Former business executive Carly Fiorina said that if Clinton is going to run for president, “she is going to have to answer some questions.” Paul joked about whether Clinton “ever takes any questions.” Earlier in the day Bush said he had taken between 800 and 900 questions, compared to a handful by Clinton. In one of the more specific broadsides against Clinton, Fiorina said the former first lady must not be president because “she is not trustworthy, she lacks a track record of leadership and her policies will crush the potential of this nation.” Others who spoke at the Des Moines event, which about 1,300 Iowa Republicans attended, were former surgeon Ben Carson, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former New York Gov. George Pataki, businessman Donald Trump and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Walker, who appeared at an afternoon fundraiser for a Des Moines area county official, called for a stepped-up fight against terrorism. Having recently visited Israel and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Walker called the Obama administration’s foreign policy to “draw a red line in the sand and allow people to cross it.” Instead, he suggested that the United States “take the fight to them.” Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Social conservatives a la Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee stand to win Alabama in 2016
While top-tier candidates Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker have never before faced the Alabama electorate, it’s safe to say that more socially conservative alternatives to the frontrunners stand to do well here in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, if history is any indication. In 2012 it was Rick Santorum who won the hearts and minds of Alabama’s GOP primary voters, capturing fully 35 of the state’s 67 counties on his way to a 6-point victory over runners-up Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who each took 29 percent of the vote to Santorum’s 35. Santorum has yet to make up his mind another bid for the White House. If he opts not to, the natural beneficiaries would likely be former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, both darlings of the conservative radio and press outlets that are often decisive in Deep South presidential politics. The relatively low totals Alabama voters gave Romney, a heavy favorite to win the nomination by the state’s late-ish March 13 primary, represented a rejection of the “establishment” candidate, a mantle especially likely to fall to Walker or Bush. Despite a controversial open primary system throughout the state, 80 percent of Alabama primary voters in 2012 indicated they were supportive of the Tea Party, a trait strongly tied to success for Santorum’s campaign that year. The former Pennsylvania Senator also took home a plurality of 2012 convention delegates in Kansas, North Dakota, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Mississippi. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul‘s campaign has been careful to keep his father Ron Paul at some distance, likely a wise choice here in Alabama: Congressman Paul pulled in just 5 percent of ballots cast in the state in 2012, around half his national average among all primary states. Three quarters of 2012 state primary voters also identified as “white evangelical or white born-again Christians,” a demographic in which strongly pro-life and pro-gun candidates like Huckabee and Santorum excel. Should Santorum announce he would be considered a frontrunner here, though the dynamics of who would win which slice of an ever-shifting GOP body politic is still very much an open question.
