Education and the Electorate

As I write this, there is the expected amount of carping among the left and the press (but I repeat myself), poring over the election results and making what are far-too-premature analyses about why Hillary Clinton lost the election embarrassingly.

These analyses include that the election was swayed by the "uneducated" in the electorate, meaning particularly the "flyover states" they simply don't feel like understanding.  The analysts are, of course, people who think you get milk from a grocery, not from a cow, if you get my drift.

They are the parents of the snowflakes, and in some cases the snowflakes themselves, who shared Hillary's arrogance about knowing what was right for the country better than the voters.  "Oh, dear", they're thinking, "how are we in a country where they could vote for Trump!  Ew."

Well, there is so much wrong with that.  First of all, the raw numbers tell you a different story about actual voting, as in who went to the polls on Tuesday or whenever they voted.  Donald Trump got fewer votes than Mitt Romney did in 2012.  Hillary Clinton just got way fewer votes than Obama did.  So it was actually a lot more about how their candidate, the entitled, privileged former first lady, turned off those who might have voted for her, than it was about the people who voted for Trump.

The Democrats had a huge capacity to contact people and drive them to the polls.  We all knew that.  That actually makes the dive in voting for the Democrats (from Obama to Hillary) even more telling, as even with that machine they couldn't get Hillary within a country mile of the number they needed to win.

Simply put, Trump got a significantly higher proportion of those who preferred him, versus what Hillary got of those who might have preferred her.  Her voters didn't show and, as I said, the existence of the machine makes it even worse.  Every time Trump said something the press thought or made out to be terrible, his number went down, OK, but hers didn't go up.  It was all about enthusiasm, meaning that we should have inferred a lot from those huge Trump rallies.  Trump's joke about Hillary's never having a bigger crowd than that night, at the Al Smith Catholic dinner, rings true now.

And that's where "education" comes in.  It is not that the Trump voter lacked education; that's so easy for the press to try to jump all over.  The Trump voter was educated, looking at things like each candidate's view of the Constitution, the business of medical insurance, the national debt.  The Trump voter, when asked, had at least a reason to vote for him, while Hillary's campaign was hung up on voting for her because she had a uterus.  She never made the "issue" case nearly well enough to offset her perceived pomposity and arrogance (see "deplorables, basket of").

That's not the Trump side.  No one pretends to say that Donald Trump was the best debater in presidential history.  And no one pretends that he has tactical-level plans for every Cabinet department's detailed objectives -- nor does he need to.  What he does have is a broad set of principles on what is good for the nation, a laser focus on getting things done (on time and under budget, by the way), and an understanding that you hire good people to run the agencies that execute the right tactical-level plans.

It's the same concept that a president has to use to conduct war, telling his generals what the goal is but relying on them to tell him how to achieve it, and trusting their functional expertise.  Barack Obama had no goals, so he second-guessed his flag officers constantly and bound their hands, which is why our enemies no longer fear us.

We are educated.  We know what it means to have principles and hire experts to do their jobs within those principles.  It's actually very much the model that Ronald Reagan worked under, and we know enough to understand that it works, if you hire the right people.  We also understand that Trump has certain principles and he will govern under them, and that he will work with Congress to get them done because negotiating has been his life.

It's OK, we get it.  The press lost the election, and has to defend itself by putting down the voter.

But we're educated.  We knew that already.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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