NOTE: This is a repost of a diary from a few weeks back.
As many of you know, I recently ran for County Commissioner here in Oakland County, Michigan...specifically, in the Birmingham/Bloomfield Hills area, which happens to be Mitt Romney’s literal hometown. As you might imagine, it’s a heavily Republican area, and my opponent crushed me by nearly 2:1 (64% to 36%).
As I noted repeatedly in diaries here at dKos, I knew the odds were extremely long, but I was hoping to at least “beat the spread” by hitting, say, 45% or so; enough to put at least make my opponent slightly nervous. Instead, I received pretty much the same percentage I would’ve gotten if I hadn’t done a damned thing. That’s a bit depressing, but whatever; so be it. I hope those who donated to my campaign don’t feel like I wasted your money.
However, there’s something else about the election results in my district which I think are relevant to the Trump/Hillary results.
I’ve been hearing the “Dems Abandoned the White Working Class” line ad nauseum for the past week and a half, because Hillary’s support collapsed here in the Rust Belt (MI, PA, OH & WI). And perhaps there’s some truth to that.
However, that’s only part of the story...and the results in the table below prove it, I think.
My district includes all of Birmingham, all of Bloomfield Hills and about 95% of Bloomfield Township. According to Wikipedia, Bloomfield Hills is the 2nd wealthiest city in Michigan. Bloomfield Township (where I live) ranks 10th; Birmingham ranks 11th by average per capita income.
In other words, this crowd may be pretty white, but it’s also about as far from “working class” as you can get. I saw a lot of Trump signs in front of million-dollar McMansions while out canvassing.
Anyway, I tallied up the GOP/Dem candidate vote tallies across the past 3 Presidential elections. Nationally, 2012 is a much closer parallel, but I had to use 2008 because in 2012, Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee...as the Hometown Hero, he obviously swamped Obama 4 years ago.
Note that population growth actually isn’t much of a factor. The number of registered voters increased 4.9% from 2008 — 2016...but the total number of votes cast actually dropped by 2.6% (from 40,563 to 39,514).
In 2008, John McCain narrowly beat Barack Obama 51% to 48%...and that was at the height of the Obama phenomenon.
Here’s what I assumed would happen in my district this year:
- HILLARY: I assumed that Hillary Clinton would perform similarly to Obama: Her high unfavorables would be cancelled out by the historic nature of her race, as there’s a lot of college-educated, pro-choice Republican women in this area.
- TRUMP: I figured that Trump would nosedive from McCain’s numbers due not just to his incoherent policies, but mainly due to him simply being an unqualified, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, vulgur con-artist pig. I figured on a 25% drop or so vs. McCain.
So, what actually happened?
Well, Hillary Clinton did beat Donald Trump by 3 points: 49% to 46%.
More to the point, note that her vote tally was almost identical to Obama 2008, down by less than 1 percentage point. In other words, I was absolutely correct about Hillary’s performance.
On the other hand, look at Trump 2016: His raw vote total only dropped by 13%. There was some “Trump = a disgusting pig” ick factor which turned off normally reliable GOP voters….but not nearly as much as I thought there would be.
I’m pretty sure this is the same error that Hillary and her campaign made: They assume that Trump was so disgusting, so repulsive, so vulger, so unqualified, so hateful, so racist, misogynistic, xenophobic and just all-around gross, that it would result in a huge drop-off on the GOP side. Instead it was only half of that..even in highly-educated, supposedly moderate GOP areas like Birmingham/Bloomfield.
The rest of them shrugged off his horrible traits and treated him like a typical GOP nominee.
That 12-point difference is one of the keys. We thought he would be a bigger turnoff to this crowd than he turned out to be...and we were wrong.
This goes back to my “I hit a nerve” posts. The bottom line is that racism, misogyny, xenophobia, vulgarity, etc etc are simply not nearly as big of a deal to Republicans in general as we thought they were. Again, it’s not that they approve of these traits; it’s just that they treat them as minor character flaws as opposed to deal-breakers.
Multiply Birmingham/Bloomfield by a hundred other high-income, highly-educated GOP areas across the midwest and I think that fills in another large piece of the puzzle.