Misunderestimated

I guess we should have seen that coming, because Donald Trump certainly did.  The Brexit vote in the UK back in June showed how easily a shameless populist could capitalize on the ill-defined anger* that seems to permeate most "advanced" societies these days.  Trump regularly boasted that he would achieve a "Brexit plus" on election day, and so it has proved.

George W. Bush's accidental coinage about himself, "misunderestimated", provides a useful basis for analyzing what happened yesterday.  It's clear that the leadership of the Democratic Party misunderestimated the challenges of the campaign in both a tactical and strategic sense.

Tactically, the Dems woefully misjudged Trump's persistence and his appeal.  That didn't start with them, of course.  Back during the primary season, Trump's rivals for his own party's nomination assumed he would flame out or lose interest.  Instead of taking him on directly, they attacked each other, and all in their turn fell by the wayside, leaving Trump with no real opponent for the nomination.

Once the general election started, the Democrats made a similar error, largely relying on Trump's own endless gaffes to defeat him, rather than forcing him to concentrate on the issues, on which he was (and is) conspicuously weak.  Hillary Clinton's policy positions were much more detailed and well-articulated than Trump's, but the Democrats were never able to make that count.  Trump, like a certain other right-wing demagogue back in the 1930s, just kept playing the same tune to his captive audience over and over again, and it worked.

Strategically, the Democrats misunderestimated the sheer anger felt throughout the electorate.  The feeling that Washington is a corrupt and incestuous cesspool, completely out of touch with the problems facing Americans in their day-to-day lives, is all-pervading.  This election turned out to be about change, yet the Democrats offered up a nominee who stood foursquare for more of the same.  Donald Trump never had to spell out in any great detail what changes he would make if elected: the simple fact that he was not Hillary Clinton was enough for many of his supporters.

This raises the question: if the Democrats had offered up a "change" candidate of their own, would the result have been any different?  Maybe, but it's unlikely that the change candidate in the Democratic primaries -- Bernie Sanders -- would have done very well.  While CNN was waiting for the results to start coming in last evening, it displayed the results of a number of exit polls it had conducted during the day.  One of these asked respondents what direction of change they would like to see under the incoming President; only 15 percent wanted a "more liberal" shift; a far higher percentage wanted a more conservative government.  This would not have translated into support for Bernie Sanders.

So, what's next?  Trump is already 70 years old, and although he appears to be in robust health (and is abstemious in his habits), he is bound to run out of energy sooner rather than later.  Moreover, although he will enter office with GOP majorities in both the House and the Senate, the next set of mid-term elections, in November 2018, see the entire House up for grabs again.  Realistically, Trump will have no more than a year to make his mark before the electoral machine starts cranking up again.  That is, of course, plenty of time for him to do some real damage.  However, perhaps the greater concern is that he will not have either the ideas or the time to deliver the kind of change that his electoral "base" is seeking.  In that case, the anger that has made this election such an unseemly spectacle at times will be redoubled.  

* Ill defined, but by no means inexplicable.  Living standards across Europe have been stagnant or going backwards since the financial crisis, and most analyses show that the average US worker is no better off in real terms than they were in the 1970s.  Add in the astounding rise in income inequality, and it's no surprise that people are angry.