Over a week, now, after the election, and we're all ripping up data from the results to try to figure out why Hillary Clinton is more likely on her way to jail than to the White House. There is an area of the results that I've been speculating on just a little bit that I wanted to kick around with you.
It is a little subliminal, but that's to be expected since the topic itself is not incidental, but something we only see over time.
We're all familiar with the concept of the Law of Diminishing Returns, which is as likely to be cited in an economics lecture as it is in the topic of elections. A series of repeated activities or events simply tends to have progressively less impact later in the series than earlier. We build up something akin to immunity over time, which diminishes the effect of each activity as it repeats.
I saw that in the 2016 presidential campaigns, and to me it is the difference in how the law applied to the two candidates' efforts, what they did and what happened to them. And here's what I'm thinking.
The diminishing return on Donald Trump's side was the effect of the things that he said at his rallies and, perhaps more, on his tweets. Think of it -- we knew Trump for decades, completely divorced from politics -- the billionaire construction magnate who built resorts and buildings and golf courses. We knew what he did, and his political leanings were irrelevant.
All that changed when he became a candidate. One sad fact of present-day campaigns is opposition research, which was almost irrelevant in the case of Trump. First off, we already knew that he was a bombastic New Yorker, quintessentially so. "Oh, my", the opposition said, "He was married three times!". Well, it was Donald Trump. We already knew that. We knew he was, or likely was, a womanizer.
Since it wasn't news to us, we in the electorate shed it like water off a duck's back. What we had not read or been aware of, was his propensity to tweet provocative things at three in the morning. The media hated that (or secretly loved it as fodder) and made sure his most provocative tweets showed up later that morning so we would hate Trump. And it's eminently possible that it worked -- for a while.
But not forever. Eventually, the things that he tweeted, and the endless re-quotes and re-misquotes of things he said, simply reinforced what we had already learned about Trump through the campaign. He said provocative things. He was intensely against illegal immigration. He used themes, postponing the details for when details were needed, since he intended to negotiate them then anyway.
The rest of the stuff? By July or August, we were so attuned to the way Trump communicated that, although each tweet, or each debate performance, was still blasted by the press as being awful and disqualifying, we in the voting public had already written it off as, not to be trite, Donald being Donald. Diminishing returns.
Hillary Clinton was a whole different case. With her, the repeated releases of incriminating data that showed her complete disregard for information security, built a picture of a person that many suspected she actually was like. The discovery that the Clinton Foundation was apparently a RICO organization, a criminal enterprise built to make the Clintons wealthier at the expense of national security, was condemning at the start. But additional releases -- new thousands of emails, new evidence against the Foundation -- made far less impact than the early, expository ones.
So what was different between the two candidates, and what was the difference in the outcome? I see it this way. With Trump, the information we kept getting told us who he was. With Hillary, the information told us what she did. We thought we already knew Trump, and everything we saw reinforced our expected image of him. It may not have been the greatest image, but in no way did it change our perception of the things we thought he would do.
With Hillary, we had no idea what she was going to do, and even why she was running, other than self-aggrandizement. What we discovered over the campaign, even early on, was that she was incompetent as a public servant, and worse, corrupt in office. There was certainly a heavy amount of diminishing returns there, but the image was of someone who was incompetent and corrupt. The later emails and investigations were tedious and tiresome -- but consistent.
The consistent pounding was about who Trump was, versus about how Hillary operated. Maybe each new tweet from Trump, or each new leaked email from Hillary, got less and less of a rise out of the public. We care, apparently, about getting things done and care less than we let on about the nature of the person -- as long as they will work hard and smart. We learned that Hillary might work hard and smart, but for Hillary first, last and always.
We took the "America First" tack, apparently.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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