It Was Indeed "The Bern"

Donald Trump is now President-Elect Trump, which is something that seems to have startled much of the country, including a lot of Trump's own voters.  They were indeed startled, because for virtually the entire campaign, almost no one working the polling and canvassing had Trump as winning.  It wasn't just the electoral map, which was a big hurdle, but the fact that their polling simply wasn't giving him the votes to make it close.

Note -- Investor's Business Daily and Rasmussen were the exceptions, showing Trump as a couple points up for the weeks before the election.  Their methodology needs to be studied, except that they didn't do well in the Obama-Romney election in 2012.  Go figure.

As you look at the numbers and try to draw something from them, one thing stands out, at least for me.  Donald Trump drew fewer votes last week than Romney had in 2012, maybe a million fewer.  Hillary Clinton also drew fewer votes than her Democrat counterpart in that election (Obama), except she drew about five and a half million fewer, at least at the count as of writing this piece.

I don't know how you can analyze this in any way other than looking hard at the Democrats' side.  What, pray tell, would best characterize the voter who voted Democrat in 2012 and didn't show up at all in 2016?  Because that, friends, is where the election became Trump's victory.

It was not black voters.  Yes, Hillary pulled in fewer of them than Obama had, but not in the numbers that would make a big dent in that 5.5 million vote deficit versus 2012.  It doesn't seem to have been Hispanic voters either.  From what I can see, there were maybe only a few hundred thousand votes different for the Democrats' ticket, and Hillary didn't draw more of those than Obama had.

Nope; you have to ask yourselves what might have been the big bloc of votes that were cast in 2012 and not this year, and you keep coming back to the single thing that would have pushed them away.  Obviously it wasn't Trump, unless you consider his potential recruitment of blue collar ethnic Catholics who might have voted for Obama in 2012 -- remember, mind you, that Trump got fewer votes than Romney had in total.

I'm pretty sure that you can figure it out at this point.  Over 13 million people voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries, and to that number we can add millions more who would have voted for Sanders, except they lived in caucus states like Iowa where there is not a popular vote counted.

Donald Trump won the presidency as a result of fewer people voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 than had voted for Barack Obama in 2012.  That was an ideological non-vote.  To me, it is clear that the bulk of those 2016 non-voters were Bernie Sanders supporters who stayed home last Tuesday and simply could not see in Hillary Clinton what they saw in Bernie Sanders.

I get that.  I mean, I don't get why anyone would think that Sanders could have possibly been a successful president.  We had no possible way to get the amount of money needed in taxes to pay for the first dollar of his proposed spending increases, and still figure out a way to start paying down the principal on the national debt, let alone the interest.

But young voters are voting off brains that are still not completely congealed, evolved drool glands (from Dave Barry --  "As far as babies are concerned, the sole function of the world is to provide objects for them to drool on. If you were to open up a baby - and I am not for a minute suggesting that you should - you would find that 85 to 90 percent of the space reserved for bodily organs is taken up by huge, highly active drool glands.").  So things that sound good, but make no sense when you think about it, like "free college tuition for everyone", make sense to them because they still have some drool gland that hasn't yet formed into brain yet, and it partially blocks the rational part of the mind.

Since I can't get inside the head of a Bernie voter (and am not recommending that you try), I can only imagine that of those who were old enough to vote in 2012, a huge number considered (and a healthy percentage of those did end up) not voting for Hillary.  Hillary was, after all, the anti-Bernie in enough ways that mattered to the partially drool-dominated brain.

Hillary was Establishment; Bernie was, well, something else.  Having no track record of accomplishment in the Senate in the 86 years he has been there, it's hard to say what he was, but Establishment wasn't one of them.  Hillary was Wall Street, Bernie was anti-corporation.  They were both limousine liberals, but that was not a campaign factor.  It is beyond easy to suppose that a healthy chunk of Obama voters became Sanders people, and a healthy chunk of them saw Hillary as impossible to vote for.  They couldn't vote for Trump, so they stayed home.

Why do I think that?  Because, although the polling was pretty poor and hard to glean anything from accordingly, we do need to note that when Trump said something about which the press got all high and mighty, Trump's number would go down for a few days -- but Hillary's numbers didn't go up!  Understand?  Voters were not being pushed to the Hillary side by what he said; they were simply being pushed from Trump into "Undecided" for a week (or told the pollsters they were), and they eventually came back to Trump.

The "Yes for Bernie but Never Hillary" crowd were already not on the Trump team, so nothing he said mattered to them.  When it came down to the ballot box, the people who kept getting pushed away by his comments came back to Trump because they had never signed on to the Hillary side.  The "Bernie Si/Hillary No" people, on the other hand, were always staying home, and I believe they did.

Thank God they stayed home.  Now perhaps Washington will get something done that's actually good for the USA.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton

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