The one thing that became obvious as the election returns rolled in is that the data we had been relying on (and the strategies we employed as a result) was wrong. As I write this, our critical bastions in the Midwest have been overrun by a solid tide of red that seem to point to a polling failure of ~2% in the popular vote and ~3-7% in the Midwestern battlegrounds.
I’m sure this will be debated endlessly, but right now I think a fair argument could be made that this is a continuation of the (growing) Tea Party wave that started in 2010, and that 2012 was thus an anomaly which could have been a simple result of the Republicans nominating the wrong guy to tap into the Tea Party ethos. Again and again the Republicans tried to find a suitably crazy alternative to Romney, but only found failure. In 2016 they finally succeeded with Trump, and the result is the election we saw tonight.
And that gets us back to our failure to see this coming. In 2012 and 2013 Sean Trende at RCP made the case that Republicans could win for the next couple of decades, largely by focusing on maximizing their vote share with whites.
At the time, I was personally offended at the idea because of the clear racial implications (I’d even looked forward to seeing him eat some crow after this election). But looking at the results tonight, its hard not to conclude that he was on to something.
Trump was a historically flawed candidate, and still managed to eek out a win following the Sean Trende playbook. Any halfway competent Republican is likely going to take the lessons of today to heart and double down on racialist and populist appeals in the future.
It’s imperative that we be a reality based community if we are going to find our way out of the wilderness. Assuming Trump doesn’t immediately set out to construct a tyranny (in which case we have bigger problems), we need to take the blinders off and come up with new strategies to succeed in the current racialist era instead of hoping that the coalition of the ascendant will bail us out in 2020.
Studying up on what Sean Trende had to say, and reforming analytic infrastructure to understand the world as it exists are the first step to coming up with strategies to counter rampant Trumpism.