Donald Trump’s victory proves that what really matters is... the economy, stupid
The result has not turned politics on its head, but has affirmed some basic truths about elections,
writes Eilis O’Hanlon
TWO men from Essex, England, once won more than £500,000 by betting on there being a hole-in-one in upcoming golf tournaments.
The strategy was based on pinpointing an event that is comparatively common, but which is widely perceived to be rare, even by bookmakers. Holes-in-one happen regularly. We just don’t think they do.
The widespread dismay in certain circles at the result of the American election is an example of the opposite phenomenon.
Hillary Clinton’s supporters had convinced themselves that one particular outcome was bound to happen, while ignoring the fact that what they were hoping for was extremely rare. The rare event was for the candidate of one party to succeed a president from the same party who had just served two terms.
This has only happened once since 1950 — when George Bush Snr succeeded Ronald Reagan. For the Democrats, it’s an even rarer feat. With the exception of the 20-year period from 1933, the previous time the party managed to get its candidate to succeed a Democratic president who had served two terms was in 1836.
Still, Clinton’s supporters managed to convince themselves that the election of their woman was such a certainty that it justified having a collective tantrum when she didn’t. Partly that was because they thought Donald Trump was such poor competition that he would easily be brushed aside; mostly it was because they preferred to see what happened as a revolution against modernity that defied logic and decency rather than recognising it for what it really was — a reaffirmation of oldfashioned political reality.
What happened was not, as RTE’s former US correspondent Carole Coleman told Today With Sean O’Rourke the morning after the result , “truly new”. Nor was it, as another guest said, a sign that “all the rules have been broken”.
On the contrary, it was actually an example of very traditional political rules being confirmed.
Before the election, voters were polled as to their attitude towards the various candidates. Now, polling has taken a battering because of certain skew-whiff predictions in recent times, Brexit and Trump’s win not least, but it’s only the results they keep getting wrong.
Voters may not be entirely honest when asked who they’ll vote for, but they rarely have any reason to lie when asked other, more subtle, questions.
When asked before the American election which candidate would bring the most “change”, more than 80pc said Trump, and 19pc said Clinton.
These questions are important because they involve no value judgement whatsoever. It simply asks who will bring change, not whether that change will be positive or negative. Trump was the overwhelming candidate of change, not only for his own sometimes-unhinged ideas, but also because he was up against a woman who had been at the heart of the political establishment in Washington for two decades.
To be the candidate of change traditionally gives a huge boost to any campaign, and never more so when the system is seen to be broken, and people are hurting.
The only change that Clinton offered voters was her gender, which was not sufficient to hypnotise enough people into forgetting they and their children don’t have jobs.
Not only that, but Trump was up against a candidate who the incumbent President Obama was presenting to the American people as the guardian of his legacy — as his successor, as a continuation.
If you don’t think the current system is working, then why would you want to see a continuation of it?
It’s the same with Fine Gael’s “keep the recovery going” slogan during the election in February. It only works if you’re already feeling the recovery.
Change is not itself enough to carry a candidate across the line. He or she also has to demonstrate that they can carry out that change. Here, again, polling data is crucial.
Asked to list the most important issues in their minds as they decided on a new president, the economy was well out in front, followed by national security and terrorism.
On both these issues, Trump was way ahead of Clinton in how much voters thought the candidates had solutions to these problems.
Not only that, but he prioritised them in the campaign, repeatedly. The media may have been obsessed by the wall along the Mexican border or the pledge to lock up Clinton for allegedly deleting thousands of her emails while under investigation by the FBI, but Trump wasn’t. He stuck rigidly to the economy.
His supporters were not distracted either. As one Ohio woman told Friday’s Today programme on BBC radio, she might not have liked his comments about women, but this election was about the “economy, economy, economy”.
Looked at this way, the election appears quite different to some of the more hysterical media analysis.
One candidate offered change, prioritised the issues which mattered most to ordinary voters, and was regarded by a clear majority as having the best solutions to those problems. The other represented a party which has been in office for 16 out of the past 24 years, and had a historically abysmal record in getting candidates across the line.
Confronted with all those factors, without knowing anything else about the identity of the individuals involved, most people would say that the former candidate would win.
What skewed people from seeing it in this case is that the former candidate was Donald Trump.
Character matters, and his is incredibly flawed, but it’s only a fatal error if the person against whom you’re running has a moral character which is seen as being unimpeachable.
Clinton is not that character. Personally, I don’t understand much of the animus towards her; there’s undoubtedly an element of misogyny in how she is perceived. Despite all that, she would still have won had she been the candidate in 2008 after two terms of George W Bush.
What prevented her doing so this time is that she was the establishment candidate at a time when voters were sick of the smug, moneyed, entitled establishment that presided over economic decay.
Clinton’s Irish supporters may be weeping and wailing over the election result, but they would hate her if she was in our system. They would call her “Crooked Hillary” too.
Jan Halper-Hayes, of the Republicans Overseas group, summed up the situation brilliantly on BBC’s Question Time last Thursday — Clinton represents everything that is wrong with modern politics, and Trump represents everything that’s wrong with modern culture. The liberal left, progressives, call them what you will, have convinced themselves that culture is king; that social attitudes and feelings are what really matter, because this is how they see the world. It’s all about projecting virtue.
They loved Obama because of who he was, a cool guy doing a “mic drop”, not for what he did or did not achieve. He made them feel like better people.
They got a shock this week because old-fashioned politics — and class politics, no less — reasserted itself, with working-class women soundly rejecting the identity politics which obsesses their middle-class sisters.
That’s the lesson the liberal left should take from Tuesday’s election. “It’s the economy, stupid,” has not been disproved, whatever some commentators say, but instead it has been vindicated in the most dramatic way imaginable. The economy is so crucial that it even overcomes people’s misgivings about Donald Trump.
If they really care about making the world a better place for women, ethnic minorities, and the LGBT community, then prioritise the economy every time, because people are much nicer to each other when they’re doing well.