How the New York Times went all in for Clinton – and lost

[David]

An excellent, if brutal article on the New York Times' coverage of the US election:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/01/how-the-times-failed-you

[swoop42]

Sanders could have done some good for the world and the poor working class of America.

Instead the poor white vote when largely for a crooked billionaire businessman.

[Jezza]

The Democrats lost the election the moment the DNC backed Clinton over Sanders. In a year where anti-establishment sentiment was rampant, the DNC was totally out of touch with what the ordinary person on the street was thinking.

They only have themselves to blame.

[Pies4shaw]

That's certainly the version of events being advanced by some sections of the US media. I wonder, though, whether Sanders would have been able to mobilise the black female voters in the way they supported Clinton or, alternatively, he would have been able to maintain the Obama black/hispanic male vote or get enough of an improvement in the "white vote" or the "young vote" to counterbalance other losses he would likely have experienced, relative to Clinton.

Before the election, stats seemed to show, amongst many other things, that people of colour would vote in favour of the Democrats in every State, whereas white people would vote overwhelmingly in favour of the Republicans. After the election, the results suggest that Clinton got the black female vote but that the black male voter turnout was well down. Of course, it isn't a zero sum game, in the sense that it would not have been sufficient for Sanders to win "the white disaffected male" vote or the "black male vote" - Sanders would have needed to do that and also maintain the strong pro-Democrat black female vote - there is, however, attitudinal evidence that suggests that those women voted for Clinton because (presumably amongst other things) she was a woman, so it's difficult to be confident that Sanders would have maintained that vote. The point is, in substance, that there is no "ordinary person in the street" when it comes to US presidential voting - rather, there's a series of constellations of voters who, within each constellation, have more-or-less similar concerns. Consequently, the "winning" of the presidential vote is determined by getting high-enough turn out of your "pro" constellations of voters and as close as you can to abject apathy from the "anti" constellations.

Looking for a macro change in voter behaviour between 2012 and 2016, the big change was that both candidates attracted less votes than their counterparts did in 2012 (Trump down by around 650,000 on Romney but Clinton down by 5,000,000 on Obama), even though the total number of eligible voters actually increased.

The larger general problem in US politics seems to me to be that, whichever candidate got elected, the President was going to be elected by slightly over one quarter of eligible voters. Thus, Clinton got the vote of about 26.25% of the eligible voters nationwide and Trump got about 26% of the vote of eligible voters nationwide. I'm not commenting on the adequacy or appropriateness of the US electoral system or laws - but there is clearly a serious problem when almost every second voter in the country doesn't cast a vote. What the mythical "ordinary person on the street" seems to think is that it makes so little difference that they CBF voting for a presidential candidate. Thus, if "Mr Did Not Vote" had been standing, he would have been elected by a landslide, losing only 6 States. In fact, it seems that the only place in the US where either candidate won a majority of the total eligible vote was Washington DC.

The analysis is complicated by the fact that there are many, many competing analyses out there about how to assess voter behaviour in the 2016 presidential election but they each seem to me to be based on crunching empirical data, rather than looking for theoretical underpinnings that could provide a reliable base for projecting voter trends in the next election. So, typically, the task for the electoral strategists in each camp each election is to try to sort out which of the competing "cuts" of the data will be significant "this time" or whether some new "cut" of the demographics will be more significant. It's easy after the event to say "Romney lost here" or "Sanders would have won there" but those assessments make huge underlying assumptions about how substituting the candidate with some other candidate would have altered the votes of every other potential voter.

[David]

I feel like it's really hard to say whether Sanders would have done better than Clinton. He certainly would have picked up most of the 'left' vote that ended up staying at home or voting for third parties, a great many young voters of no political allegiance and – perhaps more crucially – a good chunk of Trump's 'disaffected' vote in swing states. On the downside, he would have lost a great many centrists and Wall Street types, some of whom would have held their noses and voted for either him or Trump and the rest of whom would have presumably stayed home (provided a viable third-party option like Michael Bloomberg hadn't emerged). And, as you point out above, P4S, he would have attracted far less of the black vote who (for some reason, despite Sanders' civil rights record and Clinton's more questionable history) formed Clinton's base.

So, who knows, really? Hindsight says he couldn't have done any worse, but I'll be the first to admit that I thought his candidacy would be a big gamble with a similarly low turnout (which is what Trump needed to, many of us thought then, fluke a victory). There's also the problem that, as President, he would have been able to get practically nothing through a congress stacked with obstructionist Republicans and right-wing Democrats (of course, eight more years of stalemate would have been preferable to what we have now).

It's entirely possible that Clinton was still the safer bet. After all, sometimes the safer bet loses out. But it would have been nice if the mainstream media had stuck to reportage as opposed to blatant advocacy.

[Mountains Magpie]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If anyone still truly believes that Clinton/Sanders/Trump/Obama/Bush is really running the show..........