The Big Divide Among 2020 Democrats: Debating Why Trump Won
The Big Divide Among 2020 Democrats: Debating Why Trump Won
(Bloomberg) -- As Democrats compete to take on President Donald Trump in 2020, the debate over why he won in 2016 has led them to dramatically different answers that are shaping their campaigns.
Some, like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, argue that Trump was elected because of a simmering resentment among voters about politics and their place in American culture, and they’re promoting a fundamental reshaping of the way government works — Medicare for All, tuition-free public college, among other things — that they believe addresses the angst.
“We need to take a deep breath and recognize that a country that elects Donald Trump is already in serious trouble,” Warren argued in a speech in New York in September.
Others, like former Vice President Joe Biden, think Hillary Clinton’s loss shows that the party needs to pay more attention to its blue-collar roots and win back Rust Belt voters who voted for Trump in 2016 with a traditional Democratic message.
“This is the first campaign that I can recall where my party did not talk about what it always stood for, and that is how to maintain a burgeoning middle class,” Biden said in a speech in Pennsylvania in 2017.
“You didn’t hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly line making $60,000 a year and the wife making $32,000 as a hostess in a restaurant,” he said, “and they got two kids and they can’t make it, and they’re scared.”
There is evidence for both sides of the argument.
Economists point out that Trump did better in areas that did not rebound as well from the Great Recession, where there is more anxiety about the future of the economy. But Clinton also failed to campaign in states that she ended up losing narrowly.
“Ask yourself how somebody like Donald Trump ever gets within cheating distance of the Oval Office in the first place,” Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said at a Democratic debate. “It doesn’t happen unless America is already in a crisis – an economy that’s not working for everyone, endless war, climate change.”
Another candidate, Andrew Yang, says Trump won because he addressed a crisis in American manufacturing, which Yang blames on automation.
“Why Donald Trump is our president today [is] that we automated away 400 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” Yang, a technology entrepreneur, said at a Democratic debate. “And we’re about to do the same thing to millions of retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck driving jobs on and on throughout the economy.”
But those who focus on Clinton’s loss argue that she failed to reach out to voters who supported Barack Obama and then voted for Trump. Looking at different surveys, the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia estimated that between 6.7 million and 9.2 million people switched from Obama to Trump.
“We lost because of awful lot of hard-working Americans who live in areas where we did not pay much attention to,” Biden said at a Hindu festival in November 2016. “Barack Obama won these people. They are not racist. They did not vote for the Democrats this time.”
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar has pointedly said she’s not afraid to campaign in the rural areas in the Midwest.
“There are people that voted for Donald Trump before that aren’t racist; they just want a better shake in the economy,” Klobuchar argued at a Democratic debate. “And so I would appeal to them.”
Not everyone agrees that the problem was a dropoff in rural, blue-collar voters, however.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has pointed out that Clinton could have done better with African-American voters, whose turnout rate declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years, dropping 7 percentage points from 2012, when Obama was on the ticket, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Every winning Democratic coalition in modern times has included the active participation and leadership of African American communities and organizations,” Booker said in a speech at National Urban League conference in July. “That’s how we won” in 2008 and 2012, he added. “And if you look at the data from 2018, it is because of that coalition.”
Booker is campaigning in heavily Democratic cities with large black populations like Detroit and Philadelphia as well as Milwaukee, which he believes could have made a difference in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three states that Clinton lost. He told the New York Times that “a Democratic victory flows through cities like this.”
And Sanders argues that Clinton failed because she offered a moderate platform that failed to inspire young people to turn out to vote.
A campaign that’s “same ol’, same ol’ — that does not create excitement and energy, that does not get these young people out to vote by the millions — is a losing campaign,” he told Politico.
But for Biden, the explanation is simpler.
“I never thought she was a great candidate,” he said at a hedge fund conference in 2017. “I thought I was a great candidate.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Teague Beckwith in New York at rbeckwith3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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