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Congratulations to Reluctant Trump, You Won the Election
Ever since Donald Trump’s surprising (at least to me) victory on November 8, many have wondered exactly what happened and why the pre-election polls were so very wrong. We may finally have an answer. Last week Edison Research released its breakdown of exit polls and their conclusion is both heartening to me and good news for conservatives.
Edison identified a “hidden group” of voters that made all the difference in swinging the election to Trump. This group who they identify as the “Neithers” is what is affectionately known around these parts as ReluctantTrump. While Hillary maintained a decided favorability lead over Trump, it turns out that 18 percent of the electorate found neither candidate acceptable. The surprising finding is that this 18 percent broke for Trump in a major way:
The effect was even more pronounced in the five swing states that broke the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” and handed Trump an electoral college victory:
In the end, it wasn’t Trump’s Personality Cultists or Republican Party Loyalists who won this election, but a significant group of voters pinching their noses and gritting their teeth: our very own Reluctant Trumpers.
There is not much offered in terms of the actual poll data, so this is only a surface analysis, but what is there points to a few conclusions I consider good for conservatives:
- Trump did not win by riding a populist wave. Had the Democrats offered up even a mildly acceptable candidate the Neithers could easily have broken the other way or stayed home. The margins of victory in the five swing states were very narrow and any slight shift in how they broke would have thrown the election to the Democrats.
- Between them, Donald Trump and Gary Johnson received 64 percent of the Neither vote. This indicates to me that they are a decidedly right-of-center group (despite allusions in the piece about a significant portion being “favorable” to President Obama).
- In the states where there were Senate elections, the decidedly more conservative senatorial candidates won by larger margins than Trump did, which indicates even more room for victory on a conservative agenda.
This gives conservatives far more power in a Trump administration than they would have had if Trump won merely by riding a populist wave. In order to pass his agenda, Trump will need the Neithers in his camp. If they are really made up of ReluctantTrump Conservatives, as I suspect, this is the opportunity to push Trump in the right direction. In this respect, NeverTrump may have been dreadfully wrong; reluctantly backing Trump may indeed end up as the smarter conservative play, as Ricochet First Citizen @tommeyer pointed out in The Federalist.
Congratulations ReluctantTrump, this election continues to prove me and other NeverTrumpers wrong; let’s hope it proves us wrong in the most important of our criticisms. Let’s hope we get actual conservative governance.
Published in General
You’ve eaten dinner at my table, Larry. Do you consider me to be part of the “entitled elite”? Are we going to trod this ground again?
Yes you did. My point here was that Trump’s victory is owed in large measure to people that don’t necessarily buy into his national populist message but rather right of center individuals that feared Hillary more than Trump.
This is my problem with the way you keep casting this election. If anything I think that this election has revealed that neither NeverTrump nor ReluctantTrump have ownership what it means to be conservative. The ReluctantTrump/Neithers weren’t the “true” conservatives any more than NeverTrump were “true” conservatives – they simply made different calculations of concerning their own vote. I know plenty of libertarians who voted Trump because they couldn’t stomach Hillary and many conservatives who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump and that had no nefarious “allegiances” that they owed to anyone other than their own conscience. You keep wanting to cast this as your “good guys” vs the rest of us “bad guys” and to keep the divisions that the election opened going. What’s the point? Time move on as this schtick has grown tiresome.
There seems to be a need to keep the “us vs them” thing going even in victory. I’d rather not get into this on this thread – it’s an extremely tiresome debate.
I don’t want to get in to it either. But I’m not going let Larry call me an entitled elite. Because I’m just a middle class working schmuck same as him.
Well as a Tanker you were chauffeured around the battlefield in comfort without having to plod along on your own two feet. That makes you pretty elitist in my book.
Whiner.
That’s where most of us have been. No way was I going to let (within my quite limited ability) Hillary get Ohio – that was my calculation. And enough other Ohioans decided the same way.
And this also goes back to a point I’ve been arguing for a long time – there’s no such thing as True Conservatism, there’s just a motley of shifting alliances and competing concerns. “Conservatism” is, and always will be, in an argument with itself about what to conserve, how to conserve it, and what priority different things get at different times when there is conflict (and there always will be conflict).
Yep.
You do find a few Israeli coeds there, Thank God!
Except ReluctantTrump/Neithers didn’t vote in a way that increased the chances that a radically Progressive president would be elected, and are the reason you can write a post hoping for “conservative governance.”
The ReluctantTrumpers may not have sole ownership of conservatism, but this election they acted a lot more like owners than the NeverTrumpers did.
I was persuaded to not vote for Trump by my high school friend who was very pro-Trump and also very nutty (pro-Putin, anti-vaccine, anti-Obamacare but pro-socialized medicine, etc.). I had concluded that he represented the core philosophy driving the Trump movement. So far, Trump has been acting more like a conservative and less like my crazy friend. I’m still skeptical that picking Trump over Cruz or Rubio was really a good idea, but so far he is clearly better than Clinton would be. Maybe he’s just delegating the conservatism to Mike Pence. That’s fine too. I hope I continue to be wrong in my earlier predictions.
I think the most important result of this election is that the Democrats were trounced. I’m happier about keeping the Senate than I am about Trump winning. If Trump is really not that into ideology, and just wants to go with what works, I hope he will be making deals with conservative Republicans and not with Democrats, who for now are in a very weak position. Trump winning in a year when Democrats did well would have worried me a lot more.
Non-Trump voters like me made a calculation that we might have better luck in future elections if Trump did not win in 2016. We also were concerned that the Republican Party might shift in a leftward direction. I’m less worried about that now that I’ve seen some of Trump’s cabinet picks, but I didn’t know about those until after the election.
You can’t fault a voter for guessing wrong on what Trump is going to do, because he is not predictable. He said he was going prosecute Hillary and now he’s not. I’m not saying he’s wrong in that, but he’s not predictable.
Interesting analysis, but my own personal take is summed up in the words of William Goldman: “Nobody knows nothing”.
Especially in the bizarre election cycle we just experienced.
Just having Trump was it’s own strange reality TV phenomena, but the (D)’s selecting the corrupt, congenital liar, obviously physically unwell, awful politician, Hillary Clinton made this election cycle all the more surreal and difficult to quantify.
As a “Neither” who voted for Trump, I can testify that it was Hillary’s attack on the “deplorables” that forced me off the fence. I understood why many were pro-Trump; and, though I thought ill of him, I did not think ill of them. The mainstream Republicans had betrayed us. There was reason to be angry.
So far, I am pleased with Trump’s cabinet picks. I know Elaine Chao and admire her. Sessions is a good man. I have my concerns about Tom Price, whom I have met, but he may be better than I suppose. And Trump was smart to sideline Chris Christie; I hope that he settles on Romney or Petraeus for Secretary of State and that he picks Mattis (whom I also know slightly) for Defense.
I voted for Trump, figuring that he was the lesser of two evils. I now think it possible that he will be pretty good as a President. I certainly hope so. But time will tell.
Sorry. I should have said the elite NTs. Those of you who followed them don’t necessarily fit into the category I was describing. Let’s stop with the personal businesses. If the shoe doesn’t fit that’s fine.
It doesn’t change my statement except to state more clearly that my trouble with NT elites isn’t their one vote (or non-vote or their vote for Hillary) it’s their hard work to damage Trump in concert with the Hillary campaign. This is the essence of my criticism going back to my fake interview post with Bill Kristol that made it to the flagship podcast on those merits alone. This whole thing isn’t about you nor is it about me. It’s about the election choice.
The closest analogy I can think of is the feminists with Bill Clinton. They didn’t want him treating women badly but they had a higher priority than their claimed feminism. Leftist ideology trumped their feminism. Most of the NT elites are conservatives but their personal integrity (or some other item — there were many) trumped their conservative ideology.
I’ve always left room for the few NT elites who couldn’t truly decide which of the two was worse. But this category of person wouldn’t help the Hillary campaign like most of the NT elites did.
This is a pretty fair assessment. I see no reason why a good conservative cannot change their outlook when new information comes to light. I said along a long that there was a lot that Trump could do to move me off the NeverTrump position. During the campaign he never did that, however, he has 4 years to bring me over to his camp. So far he’s doing pretty well – lets see where it goes from here.
If you two want to play the blame game please go do it somewhere else. I fail to see the point.
That ship sailed when Clinton played the sax on Arsenio. We are not going back.
Another fair-minded, prudent statement which highlights what a poor, deeply flawed meme “NeverTrump” was. My reaction to “NeverTrump” was always less fair or balanced than to commentators stating “I’ve been ready to be convinced by Trump, but not yet.”
Back to your post, another factor in play for the Neithers was the Comey announcement(s). I know that direct queries by pollsters revealed little influence but polls often miss the bank shot.
Throughout this campaign, whichever candidate was dominating the news cycle was losing support. Comey put Hillary at the top of the news cycle for the final 10 days.
Cannot have helped.
I’d put it at when he answered the “boxers or briefs” question. But you’re right, we’re not going back.
Jamie Lockett, thanks very much for this post.
No.
…or “Yes.”
(but not “maybe”)
Given that Jill Stein received well above the number of votes needed to swing the election to Hillary, and I doubt that the “empower the Green Party to weaken the Dems” voters constituted a significant portion of the electorate, I think that the right needs to be very careful about reading more support for Trump than he really enjoyed. If this was a two way race, or if voters thought it would be close (most didn’t), there is good reason to think it would have swung the other way.
This is not taking away anything from Trump. He won because he campaigned for every vote. Hillary lost because she didn’t, and will hear Bill say “told you so” until she dies.
Even @GoldwaterWoman admits she was ready to dump Trump after the Access Hollywood tape leaked. But that was early October, and it didn’t seem to have a lasting impact. I wonder what would have happened if Comey made his announcement on October 5th, and the Access Hollwood tape had leaked on October 30th? Remember W’s drunk driving October surprise hit the weekend before the election, too. The very late hit seems to be more effective.
What makes you think we were following them? I voted my conscience, and I stand by my vote.
Agreed. Throughout the election Trumpers kept trying to characterize NeverTrumpers as either put off by Trump’s style, or as self-styled keepers of the conservative flame. They wouldn’t accept what we said, that Trump was objectionable on *many* levels, in ways no Republican candidate has ever been (or at least in our lifetimes). For many, his most redeeming feature was that he was “not Her,” just as Hers “not Trump.” That is not a way to make a mandate.
Maybe. I haven’t seen any persuasive evidence the Bush gambit had an impact. Florida was projected to be close regardless.
You mean the NeverTrumpers didn’t have conviction in their beliefs? Shocking. :-P
I do think Trump expanded the Republican electorate to include the blue collar working types, and I think the Republican Party now has a chance to incorporate them into a permanent coalition, though it will mean modifying our absolute free trade position. A position, by the way, I’ve grown skeptical of myself. There’s something in between absolute free trade and protectionism. It’s a false choice if you’re looking at the issue in absolute terms. Optimum American prosperity strikes a balance.
Most NeverTrunpers I know didn’t vote for him so I don’t know where you get your snide remark.
As for trade: yes there is a position between absolute free trade and total protectionism – it’s called crony capitalism and it’s the system in place now. Protect favored industries, ignore the rest. Pick winners and losers. In the end the only real loser is the consumer – that is each and every American citizen.