Why does Clinton hate Sanders so much?

Hillary Clinton & Bernie Sanders.  Source: Associated Press

Why is Hillary Clinton still so angry at Bernie Sanders?

I think it is because his criticisms, and his possible victory, call in question the meaning of her career.

She has spent her whole political life ingratiating herself with the rich and powerful.  Her justification is that this is the price of getting into a position in which it is possible to do good—the limited good that is politically possible.

Clinton has a record of supporting regime change wars, pro-corporate trade treaties and bank bailouts, for which she has been richly rewarded in campaign contributions and six-figure speaking fees.

When I bring this up, her supporters say she “had to” do these things.  Otherwise, they say, she would have been shut off from political power, and she would not have been able to be a champion for children and working mothers.

But if Sanders wins, it will show that you don’t “have to” have the patronage of the rich and powerful in order to win.

Clinton has been the subject of scurrilous and false attacks all her political life—mostly depicting her as some sort of dangerous or extreme radical, which is the opposite of the truth.  But Sanders’ criticisms are the ones that sting, because they are based on fact.

A Sanders victory would not break Clinton’s rice bowl.  She will continue to be a rich celebrity until her dying day.  All it would do is show that she was on the wrong side of history.

LINKS

Hillary Clinton in Full: A Fiery New Documentary, Trump Regrets and Harsh Words for Bernie by Lacey Rose for Hollywood Reporter.

We Regret to Inform You That Hillary Clinton Is at It Again by Luke Savage for Jacobin magazine.

Why They Hate Bernie’s Supporters by Carl Bejier [Added 1/25/2020]

What Hillary Clinton actually said

These are remarks that Hillary Clinton made at an LGBT fund-raising event in New York City on Sept. 9, 2016

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right?  (Laughter/applause) They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it.

Hillary Clinton

And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.  He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million.  He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.  Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

But the “other” basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that “other” basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change.  It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from.

They don’t buy everything he says, but — he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end.  Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

— Hillary Clinton, CBS News[9]

Source: Basket of deplorables – Wikipedia

Was she wrong?

Hat tip to Bill Elwell.

Gender, race and the 2016 psychodrama

I recently read a collection of essays entitled NASTY WOMEN AND BAD HOMBRES: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election edited by Christine A. Kray, Tamar W. Carroll and Hinda Mendell (2018).

The question the book seeks to answer is how such an ignorant and misogynistic man such as Donald Trump could have defeated such an intelligent and well-qualified woman as Hillary Clinton.

The answers are sought in rhetoric, psychology and popular culture, not public policy. Clinton and Trump are treated as symbols, not as individuals with public records.  The election is treated as a psychodrama, not as a struggle for power.

The common theme was the need to overcome prevailing male attitudes toward women (“the patriarchy”) and prevailing white attitudes toward people of color (“white supremacy”).

I have reservations about this approach, which I’ll get to in due course..  But I first want to acknowledge the book’s merits.

One chapter discussed the obscene and vicious abuse directed at Hillary Clinton based on her gender, in the form of postcards, posters and Internet memes.  She was caricatured as a witch, a Medusa, a hag, a lesbian and a transgender man.  Unlike with Trump and Bernie Sanders, her age was held against her; she was depicted as a hag.  No human being should be subjected to this.

This unfortunately is not unusual nowadays for women who successfully compete with men.  They are subject to harassment via the Internet, up to and including threats of rape and death..

Donald Trump got his share of abuse, too—for example the widespread meme, including a video distributed by the New York Times, showing Trump and Vladimir Putin as gay lovers—the unstated assumption being that gays are weak and disgusting.

But I don’t think Trump, Sanders or any other male candidate was subjected to anything comparable to what Clinton had to endure because of her sex, and that Barack Obama had to endure because of his race.

I’d be interested about the experience of conservative woman in politics, such as Sarah Palin and Nikki Haley,  Do they get the same level of vicious and obscene abuse as white women?  My guess is, probably not, but I don’t know.

Another of the essays was about images of the women’s suffrage movement of a century ago.  The suffragists were mocked for presuming to assume male roles.  The mockery was extremely condescending, but it wasn’t threatening or obscene.

Is the viciousness of attacks on women nowadays due to a lowering of standards of public discourse?  Or do anti-feminist men today feel more threatened than than anti-suffragist men did back then?

But then there also are women, quoted in another chapter, who think that Hillary Clinton does not behave as a woman should.  Many of these same women excused Donald Trump’s bad behavior.

Indeed, the 2016 Presidential campaign illustrated the double standard for personal morality for men and women.  It is not just that Hillary Clinton could not have gotten away with trash-talking like Donald Trump.  Neither she or any of the current crop of female Presidential candidates could have been forgiven for infidelity in their marriages, as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have been.

Various writers highlighted this double standard and speculated as to the cultural and psychological reasons why it exists.  Others dealt with a range of topics, from the myth of immigrant crime to religious freedom for Muslims.

Russiagate, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats

Russia Collusion: Hillary Clinton, DNC & FBI are the real stars by Michael Doran for National Review.  [Added 3/15/2018]  A plausible account of how Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson created and sold the Russiagate story.  Long but interesting.

Christopher Steele as Seen by the New Yorker by Philip Giraldi for The Unz Review.  [Added 3/15/2018]

Russia Didn’t Abuse Facebook—It Used It Exactly As Intended by Joshua Geltzer for Wired.  [Added 3/15/2018]

Is Trump the New Clinton? by Musha al-Gharbi for The Baffler.  [Added 3/15/2018]

John Pilger on Clinton and Assange

Hillary Clinton and Julian Assange (Reuters)

The Australian journalist John Pilger wrote a good article about Hillary Clinton’s book tour of Australia and her vicious attacks on Julian Assange.

Clinton has made herself rich and powerful by serving the interests of militarists and plutocrats.  Assange has effectively lost his freedom, and may well end his life in prison, for revealing the secrets of militarists and plutocrats.

Yet Clinton has been able to persuade journalists that she is a victim and that Assange is her persecutor.

I find it amazing that Assange has never yet been shown to have published any material that turned out to be bogus.   That is more than the New York Times and Washington Post can claim.

LINK

Clinton, Assange and the War on Truth by John Pilger for teleSUR.  Hat tip to Bill Harvey.

Clinton was cheated in 2016, but not by Russians

Hillary Clinton was cheated out of her victory in 2016—not by Russians, but by Republicans.

Republican state governments changed the rules to make voting more difficult for categories of people likely to vote Democratic, and they purged thousands of legally-registered voters, mostly Democrats, from the voter registration rolls.

President Barack Obama and Attorney-Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch had eight years to do something about this.

Yet they did little of nothing—that is, nothing that I know of, but I want to hedge the possibility that there was some minor effort I didn’t notice.

The Democratic Party had eight years to push back against this.  The Democrats could have started a grass-roots effort to get Democrats registered despite all barriers, and to reinstate voters who were illegally purged.  Yet they did little or nothing.

None of this is an excuse for what the Republicans did, of course, but the Republican motivation is clear.  Why weren’t Democratic leaders motivated to fight back?

Thomas Frank on the Democrats’ future

Scroll down for links to six recent Thomas Frank interviews on the Real News Network

Thomas Frank, who understands American politics as well or better than anyone else I know of, is giving a series of interviews on the state of the Democratic Party to the Real News Network.   I link to them below.

Most of my friends are liberal Democrats, like me, and they can’t understand why a working person would go against their own interests by supporting Donald Trump.  But then they themselves go against their own interests by supporting Hillary Clinton.

The problem is not Clinton as an individual.   As an individual, she is much more qualified to hold public office than Trump.

The problem is that the Democratic Party has come to depend on wealthy donors to finance its campaigns and it looks to well-to-do salaried professionals as its core voters.   Working people are coming to realize that the Democratic Party does not represent them.

It is not that large numbers working people are turning to Donald Trump.   The GOP is even worse than the Democrats.  It is that increasing numbers of working people—black, white and brown—see no point in voting for either party.

Thomas Frank on Clinton’s attack on Sanders

Paul Jay of the Real News Network did a good interview with Thomas Frank, one of my three or four favorite political writers, on why Hillary Clinton is attacking Bernie Sanders at this late date.   The interview starts about five minutes into the video.

Frank says Clinton has no just reason to hate Sanders personally.   He conducted a relatively gentlemanly primary election campaign, and supported her loyally during the general election.   She should be grateful that he decided to run within the Democratic Party in the first place, and not as a third-party candidate, like Ralph Nader in 2000.

But what Sanders represents, which is the pro-labor New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party, is deeply threatening to the power of the corporate wing of the party, which is what Clinton and her husband have represented through their political careers.

I think the reason the Democratic Party has done so little to fight voter disenfranchisement and to register voters is that disenfranchised and unregistered voters are mainly in demographic groups that corporate Democrats don’t care about.

They would rather seek the votes of culturally liberal suburban Republicans, whose votes, as Frank noted in the interview, Clinton actually won in the 2016 election.

The argument of the corporate Democrats is that (1) the Republican leaders are so reactionary and dangerous that nothing else matters except defeating them, (2) this can’t be done without matching the Republicans dollar for dollar and so (3) Democrats can’t afford to advocate policies contrary to the interests of their big-money contributors.

This is why they found that Sanders campaign so threatening, Frank said.   Sanders showed it was possible to conduct a political campaign based on small donations.   As far as that goes, Clinton outspent Trump two to one, and she still lost.

Sanders and Clinton are both getting on in years, and I don’t think either has a future as a national political candidate.  But I think there will be a long struggle between Sanders and Clinton factions under different names.   The struggle will be bitter because the stakes are high—whether the U.S. government will be accountable to the common people or to a corporate and political elite.

A hypothetical question

Suppose Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election.   Do you think James Comey would have kept his job as director of the FBI?

Glenn Greenwald sums things up

Glenn Greenwald, on The Intercept, said pretty well everything that needs to be said about President Trump’s attack on Syria.

1.  New wars will strengthen Trump: as they do for every leader.
2.  Democrats’ jingoistic rhetoric has left them no ability — or desire — to oppose Trump’s wars.
3.   In wartime, US television instantly converts into state media.
4.   Trump’s bombing is illegal, but presidents are now omnipotent.
5.   How can those who view Trump as an inept fascist now trust him to wage war?
6.   Like all good conspiracy theories, no evidence can kill the Kremlin-controls-Trump tale.
7.   The fraud of humanitarianism works every time for (and on) American elites.
8.   Support for Trump’s bombing shows two toxic U.S. conceits:  “Do something” and “Look strong.”
9.   Obama’s refusal to bomb Assad hovers over everything.
10.   None of this disproves, obviously, that Hillary Clinton was also a dangerous hawk.

LINK

The Spoils of War: Trump Lavished With Media and Bipartisan Praise for Bombing Syria by Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept.   Hat tip to peteybee.

Why I’m not sorry I voted for Jill Stein

Hillary Clinton was not defeated by a white working class uprising in favor of Donald Trump.

And she was not defeated by the defection of liberals and progressives to Jill Stein.

She was defeated by her personal failure, and the failure of the Democratic Party overall, to hold the votes of its core supporters—black and white, male and female.

It is important to remember this because merely attacking President Trump (as justified as these attacks may be) will not, in and of itself, bring back the Democratic vote.

You can’t beat something with nothing.   Unless Democrats offer a path to prosperity and peace, they will very likely lose and, even if they win, their victories won’t matter.

The unclassified report on Russian hacking

The unclassified CIA-FBI-NSA report asserts that they have “high confidence” that Russian intelligence agencies hacked the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign in order to elect Donald Trump.

Possible motives are retaliation for the Panama Papers leaks, the reports on Russian doping of Olympic athletes, and activities of the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy in Russia.

But the report presents no actual evidence that this happened.   All it says is that Vladimir Putin hoped Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton, which is plainly true, and that this is the sort of thing that Putin would do, which might well be true.  Most of the report is devoted to analysis of anti-Clinton reporting by RT News, a Russian-funded TV news broadcaster.

It’s possible that the conclusion is true, but the report does not consider alternative explanations, such as leaks by a disgruntled DNC employee.   It does not describe the scope of the investigation—for example, whether the FBI had access to the DNC e-mails, or relied on the word of the DNC contractor, or whether it used NSA signal intelligence.

Maybe the classified version of the report does answer the unanswered questions.   I look forward with great interest to the congressional investigation.

Did the DNC leaks really affect the election?

I have learned throughout my long life never to say that some powerful person or institution could not have done a certain thing because doing would have been idiotic.

But it certainly would have been idiotic for Russian intelligence agents to think they could influence the 2016 election by leaking e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief.

And while that isn’t proof that they weren’t the leakers, it is a reason to reserve judgment.

The Clinton campaign leaks had little or no effect on the election outcome.  All they did was to confirm what some of us already thought about how the DNC was tied in with the Clinton primary election campaign, and Clinton was tied in with her rich donor friends.  If I had been pro-Clinton, this would not have been new information that would have changed my mind.

Within my circle of friends, I don’t know anybody who cared much about the Clinton campaign leaks.  On the other hand, everybody I know who ever handled classified information was upset by the FBI reports on Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.

The CIA statements of about possible Russian involvement in the Clinton campaign leaks have had much greater impact on American public opinion than the leaks themselves ever did.

Where is the National Security Agency in all this?  All this is in the NSA area of expertise.  The NSA would have better information than the FBI or CIA.

The CIA and FBI in the 2016 election

During the election campaign, FBI statements about Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information hurt her and helped Donald Trump.

CIA statements about alleged Russian hacking of Clinton campaign e-mails hurt Trump and helped Clinton.  As it turns out, the FBI counter-intelligence service is not convinced that it was the Russians who hacked the Clinton campaign.

And, in fact, Craig Murray, a former British diplomat and human rights activist close to Julian Assange, claims to have personal knowledge that the Clinton campaign leaks came from a disgruntled Democratic campaign staffer.

President Obama wants the “intelligence community” to produce a report on whether Russian intelligence agencies have interfered in U.S. elections going back to 2008.  And he wants the report done before Donald Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, which seems like an impossible deadline to produce anything more than informed—or uniformed—opinion.

Meanwhile Democrats who are trying to change the Electoral College vote want the electors to be briefed by the CIA on alleged Russian inference.

I have no evidence that the disagreements between the FBI and CIA are any more than an honest difference of opinion.   Even if that is so, I don’t like the idea of presidential candidates being vetted by the CIA.

Trump: detente with Russia, conflict with China?

One good thing which I hoped to see in a Trump administration was a détente with Russia.

Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and in her campaign record seemed hell-bent on a military confrontation with Russia, the one country with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the United States, over issues that matter very little to the American people.

It looks like this hope will be fulfilled.  Unfortunately Trump seems hell-bent on a military confrontation with China, and also with Iran.   This, too, could turn out badly for the United States and everybody else, although for different reasons.

President Trump isn’t even in office yet, and his lifetime success strategy is based on being unpredictable, so I don’t claim to be able to foresee what he will do.

But based on his appointments and his rhetoric, it appears as if he intends to intensify the “pivot to Asia” begun under the Obama administration.

The anti-Russia policy was based on economic sanctions, covert war and a military buildup to force Russia into a destructive arms race.    It appears as though an anti-China policy will be the same.

The problem with this, from the U.S. standpoint, is that China is a stronger economic power than the United States.  By some measures, it has a larger gross domestic product.  It has a stronger manufacturing economy.   The United States has a trade deficit with China.   The U.S. government probably could finance its budget deficit without selling some of its Treasury bonds to China, but it would be more difficult.

Why did Clinton lose? How did Trump win? Part 2

Most of the election forecasters predicted a narrow win for Hillary Clinton, and, in a sense, they were right.

By the latest count, she won a popular vote majority of 2.5 million, or 1.8 percent, over Donald Trump.   That was less than President Obama’s margin of victory in 2012 (5 million, or 3.9 percent) and 2008 (9.5 million, or 7 percent).   It is safe to say that if her margin of victory was as great as Obama’s, Trump would not have been able to win the electoral vote.

So in order to explain the election result, there are two questions to be answered.  Why wasn’t Clinton able to hold on to the 2012 and 2008 Democratic vote?  And how was Donald Trump able to win the electoral vote without a nationwide popular vote majority?

I think Clinton lost ground because she took traditional Democratic constituencies for granted.   Working people—not just the “white” working class—saw less reason to vote for a candidate who took $625,000-an-hour speaking fees from Wall Street and other corporate interests, supported trade agreements that workers blame for job losses and declining living standards, and gave priority to college-educated liberals.

They didn’t switch to Trump in large numbers.  They just stayed home.  Clinton meanwhile sought to peel off votes from college-educated suburban Republican women.

She still might have won if not for voter suppression aimed at Democratic constituencies such as African-Americans and college people.  As Greg Palast pointed out, voter registrations canceled through use of the bogus CrossCheck system were equal to Trump’s in key states.

The other was the Trump campaign’s success in using social media to target key Democratic voting blocs and persuade them to either support Trump or stay at home.

Union worker support for Democrats is eroding

President-elect Donald Trump is an enemy of organized labor.

He favors “right to work” laws, by which employees can enjoy the benefits of a union contract without having to pay union dues.

Source: International Business Times

He once said that the U.S. economy is un-competitive because wages are too high, although he later backtracked.

He promised to appoint a Supreme Court Justice with the same philosophy as the anti-union Antonin Scalia.

He promised to revoke every executive order issued by President Barack Obama, which presumably includes orders enforcing wage standards for federal contractors and new rules for overtime pay.

So it’s not surprising that American labor unions made an all-out effort to defeat him in the recent.  Labor unions donated $135 million to anti-Trump political action committees, and spent an additional $35 million to get out the vote and other political activities.  AFSCME, the NEA and other unions sent out nearly 4,000 canvassers, who knocked on an estimated 9.5 million doors.

Exit polls indicate that Hillary Clinton carried the vote of union families by an 8 percent margin.  But this is not as good as it seems.  Four years before, Barack Obama won the vote of union households by an 18 percent margin.  In other words, Clinton was down by 10 percentage points.

Donald Trump did better than Mitt Romney among union voters, but his gains were less than Clinton’s losses.  A large number of union families either didn’t vote or voted for small-party candidates.

What wasn’t Clinton able to hold more of the union vote?  First, Trump made a direct appeal to them for votes of union members, which Republicans haven’t done in recent elections.   Clinton tried to appeal to college-educated moderate Republicans, which she did with some success, but not enough to offset the erosion of majorities from traditional Democratic constituencies.

Second, Trump made an issue of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement, North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade agreements.  Clinton promoted the TPP as Secretary of State, but opposed it as a candidate.  Many factory workers blame the TPP, NAFTA and other trade agreements for loss of jobs to foreign countries.

I did not vote for Trump, but I think he is right about the TPP.  If he hopes to be re-elected, he’d better not break his word about opposing the TPP as he has so many other campaign promises.

The presidential vote will be recounted

Jill Stein of the Green Party raised enough money to meet the deadline for filing for a recount of the Presidential vote in Wisconsin.

She has until Monday to do the same in Pennsylvania and until Wednesday for Michigan.  I’ll update this post after the filing deadlines.

In order to change the apparent result of the election, the recount would have to show that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, got a majority of the votes in all three states.

That’s not likely.  But a recount even in just one state would help to reassure me that the vote count was honest—or confirm my suspicion that it may not have been.

I think that’s Stein’s motivation as well.  She is not a supporter of Clinton and neither am I, but all American citizens have an interest in an honest vote count.

The need for “faithful” Electors

I got an e-mail the other day asking me to sign a petition to members of the Electoral College pledged to Donald Trump to switch their votes to Hillary Clinton.

This is theoretically possible.  “Faithless” electors have violated their pledges in previous elections.

But trying to overturn Trump’s election in the Electoral College would set a terrible precedent.  It is a bad and dangerous thing even to attempt.

If I were a Trump voter in a red state, I would be furious at the idea of my vote being set aside by somebody I probably hadn’t even heard of.

It would mean that, in the future, voting would not necessarily decide the Presidential election.  The vote would be followed by an attempt to persuade, threaten or bribe the Electors into going against the wishes of the voters.

Democracy is possible only when the results of elections are regarded as legitimate, and a peaceful transfer for power is taken for granted.

When elections are not regarded as legitimate, the basis of power is armed force.  And in general the Trump supporters are better armed and better trained in the use of weapons than the Clinton supporters.

Americans once again chose an outsider

In my opinion, Donald Trump got as many votes as he did because he is an outsider.

Why are outsiders popular?  American voters don’t like economic decline or stalemate wars.

The earning power of Americans has been in decline for the past 30 to 40 years, while wealth has become ever-more concentrated in the pockets of 1/10th of 1 percent of the population.

Over the same period of time, the United States has become more and more involved in inconclusive foreign wars.

Americans have turned again and again to outsiders who promise to change the system—Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bill Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008.   Donald Trump was the outsider in 2016.

The hunger for outsiders will cease when a President leads the nation on a path to prosperity and peace.  Or when the country has declined to such a state that elections cease to be held or cease to matter.

GOP didn’t gain votes, but Democrats lost many

Hillary Clinton was not beaten by an upsurge in votes for Donald Trump.  She was beaten because she lost votes, not because Trump gained votes.

I don’t believe the American public is satisfied with either the Democrats or the Republicans.  That’s why we’ve been alternating Democrats and Republicans in power for the past 30 or 40 years.

We keep giving one party, then the other, an opportunity to prove its leaders can achieve peace and prosperity and, again and again, they fail the test.

As these charts indicate, Hillary Clinton’s loss in the Presidential election was caused by voters turning away from her, not the popularity of Donald Trump.   The charts below show that in every demographic category except “people of color,” the “other / no vote” voters outnumbered Democrats or Republicans.   And even support by “people of color” for Democrats dropped sharply.

Thomas Ferguson on the Democrats’ future

Political scientist Thomas Ferguson is always worth reading and listening to.  In this interview with Paul Jay of the Real News Network, he said the Democratic formula of “Wall Street plus identity politics” is dead.

That formula is to take Wall Street money and then champion the interests of women and minorities in ways that don’t threaten Wall Street’s profits.

The problem from the standpoint of the Democrats is that so many people—including women and minorities—are more worried about keeping their jobs, earning a decent wage and paying their bills than they are about Donald Trump’s offensive way of speaking.

But it’s hard to do anything about jobs, wages and debt and stay in the good graces of big donors.

He said Donald Trump could be a popular and successful President if he follows through on certain of his campaign promises, particularly the one to begin a major public works—that is, infrastructure—program.

Is there a chance he would do that?  Too soon to say, Ferguson said.

LINKS

Democrats, Trump and the Ongoing Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit by Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept.  (Hat tip to Tim Mullins)

Clinton actually got more votes than Trump

The votes are still being counted, but it now seems almost certain that more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for Donald Trump.

The same thing happened in the 2000 election.  Al Gore received more votes nationwide than George W. Bush.  Two out of the last three Republican victories were with a minority of the votes!

Until and unless the Electoral College is abolished, this is likely to happen again, and always in favor of the Republicans.

The reason is that Americans do not vote directly for President, but for members of the Electoral College, who then choose a President, and that the Electoral College is tilted in favor of small states—most of them rural states with Republican majorities.

Each state gets a number of electoral votes equal to its representation in the House of Representatives, which is apportioned according to population, plus its representation in the Senate, which is two per state.

Democrats are concentrated in cities and in large states with large cities.  Republicans are more spread out across the country, and are more over-represented in the Senate and in the Electoral College (and also in the House of Representatives, due to gerrymandering).

Trump as a possible one-term President

I think there is a strong possibility that Donald Trump will be a one-term President—provided there are still free and fair elections in 2020.

I think that for the same reasons I thought Hillary Clinton might be a one-term President.  I believe there will be another recession, as serious as the last, during the next four years, and I think Trump will be even less able to cope with it than Clinton.

He campaigned as a populist champion of the common people against the elite.  But he spent his life among the elite, and his business history shows that he is only tough with those with less wealth and power than he has.

Trump kicks downward.  He  doesn’t punch upward.

His transition team is drawn from K street lobbyists.   His preference is to appoint from the private sector, not from government or academia.

His likely choice for Secretary of the Treasury is Steven Mnuchin, his campaign finance chairman.  Mnuchin is CEO of an investment firm called Dune Capital Management, but, according to POLITICO, he worked 17 years for Goldman Sachs, whose subprime mortgage manipulations were a big contributor to the last recession.

The problem is that, in a recession, what makes sense for a business owner doesn’t make sense for a President.  A business owner’s instinct in tough times is to cut back.  That is rational behavior for the individual, but cutting back means less money in circulation, less economic activity and a worse recession.

Why did Clinton lose? How did Trump win?

Yesterday morning at this time I was confident that Hillary Clinton would win the election and that Donald Trump would lose—not because I thought Clinton was a strong candidate, but that Trump (seemingly) was such a bad one.

Throughout the primary and general election campaigns, I expected Trump to self-destruct and, in the closing weeks of the campaign, I thought he did.

My great fear was that the Clinton administration would be a failure and that, four years from now, a sane Donald Trump would emerge—someone who stood for the same things that Trump stands for, but who had a minimum of dignity, courtesy, self-control and background knowledge, someone equivalent to Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen or Vladimir Putin.

But I was wrong.  Despite all his self-destructive behavior, the real Trump won.   Why?

Trump was a candidate of change, and Clinton was the candidate of the status quo.  More people wanted change, even risky change, than wanted the status quo.

Trump appealed to hate, and Clinton appealed to fear.  Hate is a more empowering emotion than fear.