In trying to make sense of the election results this week, I have been looking around for someone who called it. Because I certainly didn’t. On Tuesday morning, I woke up believing that the American people would, in their collective wisdom, make the sensible choice. I even entertained the idea (though this seems very naïve as I look back on it), that voters would deliver a rebuke to the party that had deformed so completely as to put a lying, boastful jackass up for nomination. I was not the only person who thought this way. A lot of people who try to pay attention were entertaining ideas earlier this week that the backlash against Trump by ordinary Americans could set the Republican party back by decades, and reasonably might be expected to cost them the Senate on election day as well as the presidency. That is not at all what happened. All of us got it spectacularly wrong. So who got it right?
Two people — Trump himself (who said repeatedly that his campaign’s strategy of focusing on rust-belt states would tip the Electoral College vote in his favor, no matter what the polls said) and Michael Moore. if you haven’t heard his essay, here he is reading it:
(I should note that it was very hard to find a link to this video from a non-right-wing source. The people we used to call “tea partiers,” whom I guess we now should call “Trumpists,” loved this, even though it pretty clearly makes the point that pissed-off white people are preparing to act irrationally and in a way that could destroy the country).
And, having thought about it almost to the exclusion of anything else this week, and having looked at and read a lot of other explanations, I think Moore got it right. That may be because, before I had seen the Moore video, I had been trying out a similar theory in my head — that, in every election since Clinton, the American people had always gone for whichever candidate seemed like the bigger “fuck you” (between the two options) to the establishment and Washington. That rule seems to hold even in re-election campaigns (such as Bush v. Kerry and Obama v. Romney), where the “challenger” was in each case thought to be someone Washington was already quite comfortable with and would have no trouble assimilating.
Moore has a particular Michigan-centered perspective, and that helps give color to his larger point that working-class people in that state have gotten shafted for 20 years, which has caused (as he sees it) white people to not really care about the more frightening or crazy things Trump says and black people to not believe either candidate is particularly worth voting for. Michigan and Wisconsin ended up being decisive in this election, so the Michigan-centric explanation is very useful, though you could see how the same kinds of anger and economic victimization could play out in other states that went for Trump, such as Pennsylvania.
What is compelling about Moore’s explanation is, of course, that it is not dismissive. He holds up the perspective of a person whose first goal in voting for Trump was to piss off the privileged and powerful people who don’t give a shit that working three jobs isn’t enough to make a workable life. That makes sense to me. It resonates with me. Some 61 million Americans voted for Trump, and while I absolutely believe that group includes racists, sexists, and xenophobes (including some of the self-loathing variety), it also includes a lot of decent and kind people who voted the wrong way. There are also a lot of decent and kind people who didn’t vote at all for the same or similar reasons. I don’t really understand them either.
I have more to say about this, but I should eat dinner. First post — done!