Epicenters

( For today’s column I share my brother Manny’s contribution. He’s based in San Francisco and is a Global Managing Director with Bain & Company, an international management consulting firm.)

Many of the events going around the world – the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, the Turkish coup, rightist and nationalist movements all over Europe and parts of Asia have some common underlying root causes. Economic difficulties are being experienced by segments of the population – where large economic swings caused by globalization and technology are both creating or eliminating jobs for different types of workers. Racial, ethnic and religious differences are polarizing peoples and governments. Terrorist attacks and the refugee crises all add to a global atmosphere of fear and calls for change. We’ll comment in the context of implications for Filipinos at home and abroad.

One very timely issue is the US presidential race, down to the final candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. On the surface you might recognize the archetypes – Trump is the outsider, anti-establishment, unapologetic, tapping into the disaffected voters who have not benefited from the US economic success of the last decades. He is also playing the “law and order” card – as the candidate who will ensure safety from terrorist attacks and attacks on police. Hillary Clinton is the “Traditional politician” – a former First Lady, Senator, and Cabinet member who plays the experience card but is hounded by allegations of corruption, abuse of power, and dynasty politics. She is also the first woman presidential candidate of one of the major political parties. But both are more complex than the simple archetypes. The implications for one or the other winning will be meaningful for Pinoys – on international trade regulation, foreign policy on aid or military support, Supreme Court selections that can influence critical decisions including abortion policy, and possibly even racial discrimination aftereffects.

The US process takes much longer than ours – Presidentiables have been positioning since late 2015, the primary system to choose the final nominees started in February 2016 – and now the general campaign will last till November. Roughly one year (or 25 percent of a President’s four-year term) is spent on intense campaign politics. Compare this to three months in the Philippines – or five weeks in Australia to select a prime minister. It’s a very inefficient process, just now entering the final stages.

The Philippines’ executive branch and election process have much in common with the US system, but let’s explore four major differences that will affect how the general election might play out:

The role of the VP – as a single ticket vs the separate President and VP races here. The choice of the two Governors (Pence of Indiana for Trump, Kaine of Virginia for Clinton) are important. You vote for a team of two and so the choice matters not just for the potential to help win key states or segments, but to help manage the country. No scenario of the “irrelevant VP” with no role. Both VP candidates are viewed as balances to the ticket. For Trump, Pence is a respected centrist Governor who can help flesh out specific policies that Trump has not chosen to discuss to date. He’s a bornagain evangelical Christian. For Clinton, Tim Keane is also a respected male centrist Governor from a key state. He’s a Jesuit-trained practicing Catholic, a fluent Spanish speaker who can appeal to the Hispanic vote that is disaffected by Trump’s comments on Mexico and building a wall to stop illegal immigration. Keane is also a supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

The 2-party system – the system is set up to get to a final head to head vote. Trump beat several major contenders including Senator Cruz and Governor Kasich to be the Republican standard bearer. Hillary had to beat Senator Sanders for the Democrats. In the Philippines system, we had 5 major candidates all running in the final election, so President Duterte’s 38 percent won it for him even if 62 percent of the voters voted for someone else. Many countries like India, Indonesia or France have a run-off election if the phase 1 winner doesn’t get to 50 percent which is arguably better to create a stronger mandate. Both US candidates had to have a strategy to win the nomination of their party but now need a different strategy to win the general election – meaning targeting the undecided voters, or the voters in either party disaffected by their nominee choice.

The “winner take all” electoral college system – this is a complex system vs our simpler model of a national popular vote. Imagine if in the Philippines, if you took all the votes of a province like Cebu or Pangasinan and whoever wins that province gets the value of the province 100 percent. If a candidate knows they have no chance to win that province they may not bother visiting or campaigning there. The impact in the US is that before an election even starts, you already know which way about 40 states will vote, so the final campaigns ignores those states and concentrates all their time and resources on the ~10 “swing” states that are still a tossup. This will play out strongly over the final three months, and sometimes if the VP selection helps win one key state that might be enough. Less than 60 percent of American voters typically vote in a presidential election – a very low number for a country that so values democracy – but this is at least partially explained by a view that in many states (e.g. California is recently very pro-Democrat), your vote would not change the outcome. For the swing states, voter turnout is a big deal.

For lack of space, the fourth major difference which is the complex segmentation of the US population will be tackled next time. At this point, it is hard to guess who will win (could we have predicted the easy victory of President Duterte four months beforehand?). As we noted, very few states will matter. We’ll come back to this topic periodically over the next few months.