Is This Election The Second Coming of 1980?
In the past two days, in the aftermath of the "Commander in Chief Forum" broadcast on NBC, two impressions of the state of the race have stuck with me for conflicting reasons. A coworker today said today that he thinks most people have made up their mind who they're gonna vote for. I didn't respond to him, but more than most election cycles of the past generation, I don't believe that's true. Both candidates are so disliked and so distrusted that I suspect that the final chapter of this campaign is likely to bring about pretty significant polling swings. The other impression of the race that stuck with me came from liberal New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait, who watched Wednesday night's forum where the thumb was put on the scale by moderator Matt Lauer to keep Hillary Clinton in a permanent defensive posture while allowing Donald Trump to basically hold court, and for the first time concluded that Trump could actually win this thing. When it comes to politics, the soft bigotry of low expectations has tremendous kingmaking power, and since Trump's expectations bar couldn't possibly be lower, he has nowhere to go in the eyes of the public but up.
We saw this to a degree in 2000, where George W. Bush was considered such a frat boy dunderhead that he couldn't possibly compete with the alleged debating wizard Al Gore heading into the first Presidential debate. Bush put forth a competent performance and was suddenly elevated to equal intellectual footing with Gore. But perhaps even more relevant to the current cycle was the similar situation in 1980, where voters were itching for a reason to fire Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter but were not yet convinced that GOP challenger Ronald Reagan was Presidential timber. When Reagan showed up and not only stood his ground with Carter but alpha-dogged him twice, Reagan was finally positioned to take full advantage of Carter's vulnerabilities and went on to crush Carter by 10 points in a race that was tied before the debate.
It really feels like we're in the same place in 2016, albeit without an incumbent. Hillary Clinton is incredibly unpopular and voters won't need too much provocation to cast a ballot against her. Trump is not looked at as Presidential but something about him is subliminally attractive to a large number of voters who don't yet support him but can be won over. And also just like 1980, a third-party candidate is hovering in the shadows with a significant share of soft support that could very easily break towards one of the two major party candidates in the end.
Donald Trump's standing is not quite as strong as Reagan's was at this point in 1980, given that pretty much all 50 states were "swing states" that cycle, but the fact that he's even within striking distance given his endless litany of seemingly disqualifying conduct speaks volumes of Hillary's vulnerability and how hollow her current polling leads are. Couple that with how low the bar has been set for Trump's performance, the media treating him with kid gloves in the interest of making a race out of it, and the public's inability to be shocked by just about anything he says or does at this point and it becomes more clear just how dangerous he could be for Hillary in the next 60 days. Jon Chait first saw the template by which Trump could win Wednesday night on NBC and I can see it too, with the additional context of recent history adding even more clarity to Trump's path.
The high rate of undecideds in just about every race fully contradicts my co-worker's observation that most people are dug in to their pre-selected choice. I guess technically that may be true since "most people" on requires 51% of voters, but there are easily enough undecided voters out there to give Trump not just a victory, but a relatively easy one. For all the talk of Hillary's Electoral College advantage, there are more than enough undecideds in just about every poll of every swing state to get Trump not only to 270 electoral votes, but to more than 300 if he can consolidate support in the ninth inning as Reagan did in 1980. It's still probably odds-against, but Hillary has shown no indication she's getting better at this, particularly commensurate with how little Trump has to do to show he is getting slightly better at this than he was a month ago.
I was fully invested in the idea that Hillary was probably going to win for the past several months. She still may win decisively, but I'm no longer sticking my neck out to predict it. Perhaps in the weeks to come, after at least one debate, I'll make my usual state-level predictions, but right now I don't feel like this race is settled enough to waste my time.
We saw this to a degree in 2000, where George W. Bush was considered such a frat boy dunderhead that he couldn't possibly compete with the alleged debating wizard Al Gore heading into the first Presidential debate. Bush put forth a competent performance and was suddenly elevated to equal intellectual footing with Gore. But perhaps even more relevant to the current cycle was the similar situation in 1980, where voters were itching for a reason to fire Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter but were not yet convinced that GOP challenger Ronald Reagan was Presidential timber. When Reagan showed up and not only stood his ground with Carter but alpha-dogged him twice, Reagan was finally positioned to take full advantage of Carter's vulnerabilities and went on to crush Carter by 10 points in a race that was tied before the debate.
It really feels like we're in the same place in 2016, albeit without an incumbent. Hillary Clinton is incredibly unpopular and voters won't need too much provocation to cast a ballot against her. Trump is not looked at as Presidential but something about him is subliminally attractive to a large number of voters who don't yet support him but can be won over. And also just like 1980, a third-party candidate is hovering in the shadows with a significant share of soft support that could very easily break towards one of the two major party candidates in the end.
Donald Trump's standing is not quite as strong as Reagan's was at this point in 1980, given that pretty much all 50 states were "swing states" that cycle, but the fact that he's even within striking distance given his endless litany of seemingly disqualifying conduct speaks volumes of Hillary's vulnerability and how hollow her current polling leads are. Couple that with how low the bar has been set for Trump's performance, the media treating him with kid gloves in the interest of making a race out of it, and the public's inability to be shocked by just about anything he says or does at this point and it becomes more clear just how dangerous he could be for Hillary in the next 60 days. Jon Chait first saw the template by which Trump could win Wednesday night on NBC and I can see it too, with the additional context of recent history adding even more clarity to Trump's path.
The high rate of undecideds in just about every race fully contradicts my co-worker's observation that most people are dug in to their pre-selected choice. I guess technically that may be true since "most people" on requires 51% of voters, but there are easily enough undecided voters out there to give Trump not just a victory, but a relatively easy one. For all the talk of Hillary's Electoral College advantage, there are more than enough undecideds in just about every poll of every swing state to get Trump not only to 270 electoral votes, but to more than 300 if he can consolidate support in the ninth inning as Reagan did in 1980. It's still probably odds-against, but Hillary has shown no indication she's getting better at this, particularly commensurate with how little Trump has to do to show he is getting slightly better at this than he was a month ago.
I was fully invested in the idea that Hillary was probably going to win for the past several months. She still may win decisively, but I'm no longer sticking my neck out to predict it. Perhaps in the weeks to come, after at least one debate, I'll make my usual state-level predictions, but right now I don't feel like this race is settled enough to waste my time.
posted by Mark at 6:02 PM
3 Comments:
I agree with pretty much everything you said here. The fact that Trump hasn't disqualified himself by now means that there's nothing he can say or do (even shoot a nun on 5th avenue as he quipped once) that his supporters wouldn't defend. It's a post factual climate out there right now. And I didn't watch the town hall, but I heard that Lauer was disastrous and spend lots of time challenging HRC and asking tough questions but then not following up on Trump at all like when he said he always opposed the Iraq war.
I still think Hillary is going to win, but a Trump victory is a definite possibility. And I see Julian Assange as the proverbial turd in the punch bowl who for whatever reason is determined to screw Hillary over at the worst possible time.
Assange and Trump have one thing in common....they're both close to Vladimir Putin. Putin wants Trump in there as a useful idiot easily manipulated by simple ego-stroking, and since Assange is bankrolled heavily by Putin, this unlikely trio serves each other's purposes nicely. The public is highly receptive to anything related to Hillary's e-mails so if Assange is sitting on any additional smoking guns it could easily bury Hillary. It all contributes to a race that is far more unpredictable than anyone expected it would be a few months ago. The consensus still seems to be that Hillary's got this, even if nobody's talking about the Goldwater-McGovern-style wipeouts for Trump that they were a few months ago, but unless Hillary does SOMETHING proactive with her campaign and quits phoning it in, and soon, I think she could end up the underdog quite soon. I'll go back to 1980 again and say that not since 1980 has there been a Presidential election where such a broad range of electoral outcomes are as possible at this point in the cycle as what we're seeing now.
I didn't realize that Assange was bankrolled by Putin -- how did that come about? Is Assange in it for the Russian hackers giving him material? And I was thinking the same thing, that it seems like Hillary is kind of phoning it in at this point and almost trying to run out the clock to use a sports analogy, but I agree that she should be more aggressive.
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