Don’t count on a landslide.
As the presidential campaign enters the final stretch, two things are becoming clear. One is that Hillary Clinton is almost certain to win. Donald Trump suffers from sheer implausibility. It becomes more apparent every day that he is not qualified to be President by knowledge, experience or temperament. The other is that the election will be fairly close.
Trump can win only if something unexpected happens. Like another financial crash. Or criminal charges against Hillary Clinton. Or a sensational terrorist attack (both Russian President Vladimir Putin and ISIS have indicated a preference for Trump).
Democrats hoping for a landslide — like 1964, when Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater by 23 points — are likely to be disappointed. Hillary Clinton rarely breaks 50 percent in the polls. And the polls have been narrowing as her convention bounce has faded. As of Labor Day, she had a four-point lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average, 46 to 42 percent.
Clinton is losing a lot of young voters for whom she has never had much appeal. She lost young voters big time to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. While young voters don’t trust Clinton, they are strongly opposed to Trump. Right now, third-party candidates are pulling about a quarter of the youth vote. Sooner or later many young voters will realize that by voting for a third-party candidate, they are helping Trump. They need to be reminded of how Green candidate Ralph Nader elected George W. Bush in Florida in 2000.
There are other reasons why the outcome is likely to be close. It’s an open race. There’s no incumbent President or Vice President on the ballot. That’s only happened twice since 1950 (1952 and 2008). The relevant incumbent this year is President Obama, and his approval ratings are hovering at just over 50 percent.
The increasing polarization of the electorate means that Republicans and Democrats will stick with their party. Polls show roughly 80 percent of partisans doing just that, with Independents closely divided.
Then there’s the “time for a change” factor. After a party has been in office for eight years, voters usually want change. The only exception since 1950 was in 1988, when voters elected George H.W. Bush because they wanted a third term for Ronald Reagan. Expect Republicans to repeat incessantly that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for a third term for Obama.
Clinton has become the status quo candidate. She’s linked to eight years of Barack Obama and, before that, eight years of Bill Clinton. The prevailing sentiment is, elect Clinton and nothing will change. That puts her in a marginally better position than Trump. Voters believe if they elect Trump, things will change for the worse.
Clinton’s biggest problem is that she is a charter member of the political establishment. She’s the elitist, while Trump is the complete populist. He speaks the language of the disgruntled white working class. He says “notsupposedtas” — things his supporters believe but establishment politicians are “not supposed to” say. Like foreign trade is a rip-off and immigration is a threat and torture is O.K.
Trump’s hostility to foreign trade and immigration and military intervention are pure populism. Hillary Clinton supports immigration reform. She favors foreign trade (though she has shifted her position on the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership and now opposes what she once called the “gold standard” of trade deals). She has a record of supporting military interventions. Pure elitism.
Back in the 2008 Democratic primaries, Clinton was the populist. Obama was the elitist. Remember how he criticized economically disgruntled small-town voters who “cling to guns or religion . . . or anti-immigrant or anti-trade sentiment”? Obama mocked Clinton as “Annie Oakley” because she boasted about how her father took her out behind the cottage her grandfather built in Pennsylvania and taught her how to shoot.
Obama is still the elitist. He has always been the prince of education. Mitt Romney, his 2012 opponent, was the prince of wealth. They represented two bitterly competitive elites. Neither has a populist bone in his body. Obama’s elitism gave us Donald Trump, the populist un-Obama.
Which leaves Hillary Clinton in the awkward position of defending Washington, the political establishment and the status quo. Her handling of government emails, her Wall Street payoffs and her hobnobbing with ultra-rich donors re-enforce the impression of privilege and elitism. It made her vulnerable to a surprisingly strong challenge from Bernie Sanders, an economic populist. And it’s creating a alarming amount of support for Trump, a social populist who has scandalized the Republican establishment by embracing economic and foreign policy populism.
Bill Clinton tried his best to redefine his wife as the candidate of change. Speaking at the Democratic convention in July, he called Hillary Clinton “the best darn change-maker I have ever met in my entire life.” Nice try. But Trump will never concede the change issue, and Clinton is not in a good position to claim it.
She will win, not because she represents change, but because the kinds of changes Trump is talking about are threatening to minority voters and scary to voters with an informed understanding of the issues. But it won’t be an easy victory. Elitism is always a tough sell.
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