e_Paper 20-11-2016

22
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016
DT
Opinion
Broken barometers
America’s institutions will be sorely tested in the next five years
The white population is dwindling
• William Milam
How did it happen? In an
election characterised
by outright lies, the
biggest liars of all
were the polls which predicted a
reasonably comfortable victory for
the less flawed candidate, Hillary
Clinton.
I thought of Benjamin Disraeli’s
celebrated words “there are three
kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies,
and statistics.” Since political polls
make powerful (if often incorrect)
use of statistics, the saying applies
forcefully to this election.
Why were the major predictive
polls so far off? Exit polls offer
some clues, but even they are
not fully revealing, as they are
conducted in so-called bellwether
voting precincts considered
historically predictive of the
outcome of an election, and not
selected randomly.
What the exit polls seem to
show are the divisions that were
predicted all along. First, the US
population is divided sharply by
class, education, and income; by
generational gaps, by urban vs
rural residence, and by gender,
although class, education,
and race complicate gender
differences.
Overall, Trump won 53% of
the male vote to Clinton’s 41%.
Clinton won 54% of the female
vote to Trump‘s 42%. But, a
surprise to some of the pollsters,
was that more white women voted
for Trump (53%) than Clinton,
which meant that fewer women
overall voted for Clinton than for
President Obama in 2012.
This probably reflects that some
white women stayed home in the
Republican Party, which was, I
think a late-developing trend that
worried some of the pollsters.
As a rule, younger voters
favored Clinton while older voters
liked Trump. Clinton took 55%
of the millennial vote to Trump’s
37%.
This implies that 8% of the
millennial vote went to thirdparty
candidates as protest votes.
Moreover, the real question is
whether the young turned out
in force as they did for Obama in
2012.
About 55% of the electorate
voted. Turnout in 2012 was only a
shade higher, just over 57%, But
one wonders whether one percent
of the voters, about 1.5 million
more votes, would have made a
difference in the outcome.
Probably not if they broke
as the actual votes cast did.
REUTERS
But clearly, a larger turnout of
millennials breaking 55% to 37%
might have.
Education and income
underscore the deep divisions in
American society. Trump earned
51% of the votes of those without
a college degree, eight percentage
points more than Clinton. College
graduates voted 52% to 43% for
Clinton.
When parsed by race and
income, however, the figures take
on a different look: Trump won
whites without college degrees
67% to 28%, while Clinton won
non-whites with or without
degrees by over 70%.
Incomes also show disparity
but with some wrinkles: Lower
income voters gave Clinton large
majorities, while middle and
higher income voters broke almost
evenly but with Trump getting
small majorities.
It is with the whites without
college degrees that Trump made
his major gain. His success with
that group enabled him to win the
white vote overall by a whopping
31 percentage points.
In 2012, Romney had won
the White vote by 20 percentage
points over Obama, which was
obviously not enough to win that
election.
Clearly portions of the white
working class vote that had been
traditionally Democratic went to
Trump in this election.
It seems that he either
motivated voters who had
dropped out of the political
process some time ago to return
with his vision of a return to a
“golden age,” or he simply tore
voters in this class away from their
Democratic roots.
Probably both were a factor, but
there is no agreement yet among
the various expert pollsters, still
trying to figure out how they went
so wrong.
If it is the former, that would
explain some of their error given
the reappearance of voters who
had slipped off the radar screens
as likely voters years ago.
There was more to it, however,
than just a surge of uneducated
white voters looking to return to
their golden age of the 50s and
The white population is aging and decreasing, while minority
communities are young and growing. They are also coalescing politically
as well as gaining in income, education, and influence
60s. There were surges predicted
which were supposed to offset
this generally understood, if
underestimated surge of white
working-class voters.
Where was the surge of
women voters to Clinton that
was predicted, particularly after
Trump’s vulgar talk about his
sexual predations in the tape that
was revealed a week before the
third debate, and which Clinton
made much of in that debate.
She won the women’s vote by
about 12 percentage points over
Trump, but President Obama won
women by 11 points in 2012. No
surge there.
Where was the Hispanic surge
we all expected after all the
pejorative comments Trump had
made about Hispanics?
While the exit polls are
probably wrong in their conclusion
that Hispanics supported Trump
more than expected, clearly, if
there were an increase in support
for Clinton, it was not enough.
So, Clinton’s problematic
candidacy and/or campaign
probably was a larger factor than it
was thought to be at the time.
I think that there are two
exit poll results that are most
important in judging this election.
First: The most important is
candidate quality.
Clinton won three out of four
on this one very decidedly. This
is about which candidate has the
needed experience; which cares
most about me; and which has
good judgement.
Trump won only one big time:
Which candidate can bring change.
But in the election booth, change
trumped experience, judgement,
and caring.
Second, I find the answers
to the last question on the exit
poll list astounding -- that a
great number of voters say they
had made up their minds in
September or even earlier; thus
it is possible that nothing in the
rest of the campaign, the debates
the revelations on Trump’s sexual
predations, or the continuing
email scandal made any difference
to the result.
That leads us to demographics.
The White vote, which was
84% of the total electorate in
1984, has shrunk to 70% this
year (it was 72% in 2012). This
shrinking majority of whites has
made pollsters and forecasters
believe that it will soon be outvoted
by the growing minority
communities. In my home state of
California, the population is now
about evenly split.
The white population is aging
and decreasing, while minority
communities are young and
growing. They are also coalescing
politically as well as gaining in
income, education, and influence.
The writing is on the wall for
the white majority. The question
we have to ask is will the Trump
administration try to stop this
inevitable demographic wave?
It would take an authoritarian
government and extraconstitutional
measures. But if
change is what the voters want,
authoritarianism and extraconstitutional
measures may not
be as far-fetched as they seem
right now.
The US is the world’s leading
and bellwether liberal democracy.
Our institutions and political
resiliency may be sorely tested in
the coming four years. •
William Milam is a Senior Scholar
at the Woodrow Wilson Center in
Washington DC, and a former US
diplomat who was Ambassador to
Pakistan and Bangladesh. This article
was previously published in The Friday
Times.