John Cassidy's Blog, page 19

Donald Trump’s Great Bait and Switch

In her gracious concession speech last Wednesday, Hillary Clinton said of her victorious opponent, Donald Trump, “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.” That’s an admirable sentiment, but it doesn’t mean we can ignore how the President-elect puts together a government. Trump isn’t just another politician, and we shouldn’t pretend he is. Moreover, in 2008, we saw how the decisions taken immediately after the election proved immensely consequential. When President Obama brought in the Robert Rubin crew to run economic policy, he effectively committed himself to a bank bailout that stabilized the financial crisis and put the economy back on the road to growth, but also produced a huge populist backlash, which, as we saw last Tuesday, is still reverberating.

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Related:
Donald Trump Brings a New Age of Political Combat
Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Problem
The Anti-Élite, Post-Fact Worlds of Trump and Rousseau

Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result

Since Tuesday night, there has been a lot of handwringing about how the media, with all its fancy analytics, failed to foresee Donald Trump’s victory. The Times alone has published three articles on this theme, one of which ran under the headline “How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election.” On social media, Trump supporters have been mercilessly haranguing the press for getting it wrong.

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Related:
The Alt-Right Hails Its Victorious God-Emperor
What Trump Needs to Learn About Protests
Losing the Popular Vote Won’t Rein in President Trump

How Donald Trump Became President-Elect

Historians will be debating what happened on Tuesday for decades—centuries, perhaps. But there are some assertions that we can already make. The polls were wrong, for one thing: on average, going into Election Day, they had predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the popular vote by about four per cent. The early voting analyses were wrong, too: most of them said that Trump was too far behind in Florida to win that pivotal state. And journalists (myself included) were wrong: we mistakenly trusted the polls instead of what we saw before our eyes—huge crowds turning out for Donald Trump at rallies all over the country. The Clinton campaign, which as late as Monday evening was expressing a high degree of confidence, was also wrong.

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Related:
“I’m with Hillary 2016”: A Clinton Campaign Sign’s Final Resting Place
With Trump, Coal Wins, Planet Loses
Election Day in the East Village: Singing Helps

Donald Trump’s Closing Message

On Monday evening, while Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi were getting ready to entertain the huge crowd of Hillary Clinton supporters on Independence Mall, in Philadelphia, Donald Trump made one of his final campaign stops about a hundred and twenty-five miles farther north, at Lackawanna College, in the city of Scranton. When I got there, in the late afternoon, the auditorium, which has a capacity of forty-five hundred people, was already full, and hundreds more were lined up outside. One man who had made it in, a retiree who had driven over the Poconos from New Jersey, said he had taken his place in line at eleven in the morning.

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Related:
Trump’s Stunning Win
Who Believed in Trump, and Who Is to Blame
Trump’s America, Hiding in Plain Sight

Could James Comey Cost Democrats the Senate?

At midday on Sunday, the latest opinion polls and early-voting data were pointing to a victory for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. Then came the news that James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., had written yet another letter to Congress, this time to say that his agency had reviewed a cache of newly discovered e-mails connected to Clinton and was standing by the conclusion it reached, this summer, that no “reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against the Democrat. (My colleague Amy Davidson has an excellent piece on the Comey letters, plural.)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Latino Voters Show Trump What It Means to Be American
Trump TV Late-Night Packet
Bonus Cartoon: The James Comey Edition

Closing Arguments: The Logic of Negative Campaigning

Going into its final few days, the 2016 Presidential campaign looks pretty similar to how it has looked for months. The Clinton forces are running a data-driven and carefully targeted campaign designed to turn out a slightly modified version of the Obama coalition: liberals, minorities, young people, highly educated voters, and suburban women. Hillary Clinton herself is doing what she has been doing all along: personally tearing into Donald Trump, depicting him as too inexperienced, divisive, and unhinged to be President. Speaking on Friday to a crowd in Detroit that included a lot of African-American voters, she reminded them that Trump’s father’s real-estate company was sued for discrimination during the nineteen seventies. “We can’t trust him with our Constitution,” Clinton said. “We can’t trust him to obey the rule of law. He has shown us who he is. Now we have to show him who we are.”

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Related:
The Sexual-Assault Election
Meet Maya Harris, Hillary Clinton’s Progressive Link
Putin Appears with Trump in Flurry of Swing-State Rallies

Two Americas: Why Donald Trump Still Has a Lot of Support

On Tuesday, an ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll showed Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton by a single percentage point, and the news went around the Internet like a virulent flu bug. When my wife saw it, she asked, “How can Hillary Clinton be losing to a mentally unstable megalomaniac and sexual predator who doesn’t pay income taxes?”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Bill Clinton Should Do as First Gentleman
Trump’s Last Pitch to the Philadelphia Suburbs
Are You Suffering from Election-Induced Fatigue and Related Trauma Syndrome?

Why Is Donald Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin?

According to the polls, Donald Trump has been trailing Hillary Clinton badly in Michigan and Wisconsin for months. In Michigan, two surveys taken last week showed Clinton leading by seven percentage points. In a third poll, the margin was six points. It’s a similar story in Wisconsin, where the past three polls have shown Clinton ahead by four points, six points, and seven points.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bonus Cartoon: Monday, October 31st
Trevor Noah’s Crash Course in Surviving an American Election
Will Republicans Fight to Shrink the Supreme Court?

Clinton Had a Bad Week, but Trump Is Still Lagging

With nine days to go until the Presidential election, Hillary Clinton remains the strong favorite. She’s ahead in the national polls, and the early-voting figures are going in her direction. In the contest to amass two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College, her opponent, Donald Trump, is where he’s been for some time now: holding a weak hand, and needing to pull an inside straight.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bonus Daily Cartoon: Sunday, October 30th
If Hillary Wins, She’ll Be Grateful for Comey’s Move
Donald Trump Is Visited by Three Spirits

James Comey’s October Surprise

On Friday morning, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sent a letter to the heads of several committees on Capitol Hill, in which he said he wished to “supplement” the testimony he gave in July about the Bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server. During that testimony, Comey had defended his decision not to bring any charges in the case, even though his agents had found evidence that Clinton and her aides were, in his words, “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
James Comey Broke with Loretta Lynch and Justice Department Tradition
Comey Praises Brave F.B.I. Agents Who Had to Touch Anthony Weiner’s Computer
The F.B.I. Reinvigorates Trump