Democrats still don’t understand “what happened” in 2016 (op-ed)

Michael Eric Dyson wrote in his latest book (What Truth Sounds Like), “There were many reasons for Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 election.  The lack of enthusiasm among Democratic voters, including women and African Americans; a failure of the Clinton campaign to mobilize black voters through media buys; diminished black voter registration; ongoing Republican black voter suppression tactics; purged voter rolls and polling place abnormalities and dysfunction that compromised ballots in battleground states with a lot of black voters; possible Russian interference; the appeal of Donald Trump to disaffected white voters who felt that the spoils of the previous eight years had gone to black folk - a view, by the way, without a blush of empirical evidence - and a toxic backlash to the first black president in the nation’s history, whose election infuriated millions.”

But was there any empirical evidence for Dyson’s claims?

Columbia University professor, Musa al-Gharbi, was one of the few academics that predicted Trump would win the presidency.  In a post-election interview al-Gharbi stated, a lot of pundits and scholars are less interested in dispassionately understanding why Trump won, they’re more interested in finding excuses for why Clinton lost.

Racism and sexism are powerful excuses, but were they accurate assessments? 

Al-Gharbi doesn’t completely dismiss racism and sexism, but he insisted the mainstream press ignored other studies that contained other viable possibilities. 

For example, one study revealed that districts that were blue in 2012 and flipped to red in 2016 disproportionately suffered casualties of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Because Clinton was a well- known war-hawk “people with actual skin in the game couldn’t bring themselves around to endorsing her.”  And Trump campaigned in these areas against American involvement in “unnecessary wars”.   Since this study didn’t allow readers to draw simple conclusions like Trump voters are irrational or immoral the study was treated by the mainstream media as a nonentity.

Then al-Gharbi mentioned a popular study that concluded Clinton’s defeat was due to dominant groups feeling threatened by change and a candidate that took advantage of that trend. (This was Dyson’s point.)  But al-Gharbi said 90 percent of Trump voters were the same republicans that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, but based on voter turnout, Trump had fewer white voters than Romney.  That means individuals that voted blue in 2012 but voted red in 2016 were responsible for Trump’s victory.  Dyson claimed these were “disaffected white voters” striking back at a black presidency.  But al-Gharbi said Trump received more black votes than any Republican since 2004, and Trump also received more Hispanic and Asian votes than Romney in 2012.

The most critical flip votes for Trump were by “people of color”.

Were these “people of color” motivated by a threatened status, racism, sexism, or anger that a black man attained the highest office in the land? 

Or were they motivated by a combination of issues no political strategist anticipated?

The current crop of Democratic presidential candidates has no interest in understanding this phenomenon, as a matter of fact, their excuses for Clinton’s loss doesn’t allow them to acknowledge that these voters exist, but they do, and al-Gharbi predicted they will vote for Trump again in 2020.

First published in New Pittsburgh Courier 4/10/19