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Just before Trump was elected, Scott wrote a great piece called Tuesday shouldn't change the narrative. In it he talks about how the race between Trump and Hillary was very close, close enough that random fluctuations in opinion or random events like the weather could be the deciding factor in the race. He argues that people shouldn't change their worldview based on whatever the outcome is. I believe I see so many people falling into this trap though. It didn't take long after Trump won for people on all sides to start talking as if it was always inevitable, like "Trump won because he inspired people more and riled up his base, Clinton was an uninspiring candidate playing too safe" or "Trump's victory was inevitable because of the deep history of racism in the country", etc. I feel like (though I'm not sure I can think of examples off the top of my head) even Scott might fall into this trap a little bit.
People even took the victory as an indictment of MSM, since most sources said that Trump had something like a 1% chance of winning. I believe this is illogical, though, because even if he did have a 1% chance of winning, it could have been that 1% chance that caused him to win. It's not like whoever has the highest percent chance at the time of the election is declared the winner.
I'm just curious to hear people's thoughts on this, both about this pattern of thought of erroneously retroactively changing worldviews or thinking events were inevitable, as well as about the 2016 election. I think that Scott's article has a good lesson, and it'd do most people good to try to remember it more, before taking the events which have transpired as an indication that only those events could have ever transpired.
The common wisdom these days is that Clinton was a uniquely awful candidate so of course she lost; this is obviously wrong, Clinton was a very strong candidate, with access to immense funds, a social network of insiders at every level of politics and business, Clinton name recognition, and the full force of Girl Power and the media behind her. Similarly, the common wisdom now is that of course Biden won, he was a return to normalcy and proof that Trump was widely hated.
This ignores, of course, that Trump received the second largest number of votes of any candidate, ever, even if you accept the election was on the up and up, which I find to be a dubious proposition at best, and more than he did the first go around, and this was even with the media uniformly against him and the political machines of both parties loathing him with every fiber of their being.
The real takeaway is that the electorate is roughly but not perfectly split, and that elections come down to random fluctuations. Run Biden v. Trump again, and it's not at all unlikely Trump wins, especially if election laws are actually followed this time. Run Clinton v. Trump again, and it's entirely possible Clinton wins.
The nation is a house divided and it stands by inertia alone.
But was her message strong? I remember listening to Trump and Clinton give speeches a few days apart to the Midwestern/Rust Belt crowd (maybe Michigan in both cases?). Clinton came off as fake, speaking platitudes to an audience she's supposed to go through the motions with in between stops with the base she really cares about. Trump was more genuine, putting more work into sounding like he really was going to do something for those people. This was probably fed by my biases of having broken with the liberal side of the isle for the more libertarian no-man's-land a couple of years before. But, part of Clinton's campaign was to focus really hard on the areas she was going to win anyway - like the big cities in California - in order to drum up the popular vote, because they feared that Trump would get the popular vote otherwise while Clinton would win the electoral college. Clinton needed to win the popular vote, too, to avoid any electoral drama with Trump. She didn't put the effort into swing states or red states that she maybe should have, and who knows how that cost her.
Speaking of 2016, biases, and post hoc narratives to explain Clinton's loss and Trump's win, one of my favorite postmortems for the 2016 election was an experiment NYU did to see if sexism played a role in the outcome. Some professors got together, hired a couple of actors, and put on a gender swapped presidential debate reenactment to see if the audience - including several other NYU professors, all most likely Clinton supporters - had a different reaction. Many were surprised to find that she-Trump's message and delivery resonated more with them, while he-Clinton came off as cold and unlikable. I don't have time right now to do more than a hard skim, but I'm pretty sure this is the article detailing the whole thing.
I don't believe Clinton's messaging was good, but I'm not a Democrat, and would be unlikely to find Democrat messaging powerful even in the best of circumstances. I agree Clinton was imperfect: her campaign choices were questionable, and the sheer disdain she radiated surely turned off portions of middle America, but nevertheless I assert she had a lot going for her.
I remember that performance, too. She-Trump was quite magnetic.
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