Trump owes his election to the same fluke factors as W: Liberal complacency and media nonsense

History repeats itself: How’d things go so wrong in 2016? Look back at 2000

Donald Trump owes his election to the same fluke factors as George W. Bush: Liberal complacency and media nonsense

AMANDA MARCOTTE

Election postmortems drag on and all sorts of angles, with varying degrees of plausibility, are being examined for how things went so horribly wrong: Racism, sexism, disaffected rural white voters standing next to delightfully photographable tractors. But one potential explanation continues to be overlooked: Voter complacency.

Or, more specifically, Democratic voter complacency. Contrary to headlines suggesting that a sudden rush of previously checked-out white voters rushed to the polls, Donald Trump’s actual numbers don’t exceed what Mitt Romney got in 2012 by very much. Trump has fewer than 200,000 new voters, which means he got the “Pepe the Frog” morons who had probably never registered to vote before this — and not much else. But Hillary Clinton currently stands at 3.5 million fewer votes than Barack Obama got in 2012.

Many are rushing forward now, of course, to say that was because Clinton was a uniquely uninspiring candidate, which is to say they are projecting their own sexist reasons for disliking Clinton onto the public at large. Thomas Frank of the Guardian writes that Clinton was “exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment” and suggests the Democrats should have run “Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style”. Because nothing says populist hero like Biden’s vote for a bill undermining the right to declare bankruptcy — a bill that Hillary Clinton asked her husband not to sign. (He didn’t.)

But sure, lots of people probably stayed home because they’re threatened by women in authority, whether they rationalized it by pretending Biden is some populist outsider or not. But it’s also worth noting that this election, despite the big honking Voldemort-as-a-game-show-host character at the center of it, played out almost identically to the infamous presidential election of 2000, and with the same result: Huge swaths of Democratic voters got sick of the whole thing and just stayed home rather than participate.

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http://www.salon.com/2016/11/18/history-repeats-itself-howd-things-go-so-wrong-in-2016-look-back-at-2000/