Commentary: The 2016 campaign is over, and it turns out, if you voted, you took part in one of the most historic presidential elections ever held.
There are all kinds of ways to break down the post-election analysis, so I referred back to my series of KRWG Viewpoints commenting on various dimensions of the campaign.
For example, I benchmarked how the 2016 election was a mirror image of the 1976 election.
Both times, large fields of candidates tried to respond to deep dissatisfaction with Washington. In 1976, with Nixon’s resignation, the Democratic field was crowded. In 2016, with the Obama White House’s congressional stalemate, the Republicans turned out in force. We saw a dozen candidates vying within their respective party fields.
The electorates in each instance were highly disaffected and fed up.
In both cases, the outsider ultimately won.
With Republican Donald Trump, there’s no doubt to his being an outsider.
He has no political experience.
With Democrat Jimmy Carter, sure, he was Governor of Georgia, but he had yet to make an impression on the national scale. He was a non-player inside the Washington Beltway.
Like Minded Electorates
Take a look at the swing states that carried both candidates in 2016 and 1976, and you’ll see some alarming similarities arising from what turned out to be very like-minded electorates, albeit separated by four decades.
- Florida
- Pennsylvania
- Michigan
- North Carolina
- Ohio
- Wisconsin
Trump’s Iowa was the only swing state from 2016 that Carter did not win in 1976.
The big revelation of this year’s election was the rural vote. Trump captured more than 90 percent of all rural counties. He carried counties with populations of 10,000 or less by an even larger margin. And, he scored very high with lower-income and less-educated households.
Add it all up, and you get a two-fold message, something else I also commented on in my election-year Viewpoints:
- The first is a repudiation of a divisive Obama presidency
- The second outcome, as Esquire Magazine put it, is “The end of Clintonism”
Following eight years of a Bill Clinton presidency, along with another eight of a similarly-toned Obama administration, a Hillary Clinton presidency would have represented a monarchy, never mind a dynasty.
I said that in one of my commentaries several months ago.
On November 4, a massive nationwide, non-urban voting block and the resulting Electoral College results said the same thing.
Too many working Americans in places like Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia have lost higher-paying jobs to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) enacted by Bill Clinton and supported for years by other Democrats. America’s shrinking Middle Class spoke against NAFTA with a resounding voice.
In this case, continuity did not serve the Democrats well. Hillary Clinton represented the entrenched Washington establishment now associated with government’s inability to face the issues, work together and get the job done.
There was a pronounced trust issue associated with the career politician, including private wealth enabled by public service, that I also expressed concerns about well before November 8.
Like so many other pre-election day observations, this proved to be true, too.
I advised in my Memo to Trump, a Viewpoint offered September 30, to make sure his ground game was ready to go, and he did just that. The fact is, another surprising outcome of the 2016 election is on the grassroots side. The Republicans won the get-out-the-vote, boots on the street call to action presumed to be Clinton’s strength.
I wish that I could say I called it, but I did not predict Donald Trump’s win, per se. Instead, I offered some out-of-the-box thinking about the likes of Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg, two prominent non-players who remained on the sidelines.
However, I did say: “Expect the unexpected this election year,” and that’s exactly what we ended up getting.
When it’s all said and done, I stated, we won’t get the same ole’ same ole’!
Richard Kadzis, a former New England correspondent for NPR’s All Things Considered, has reported on numerous presidential candidates including Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy, Mike Dukakis, Jimmy Carter, Jerry Brown and Eugene McCarthy.