Im-Politic: Your Guide to the Inauguration Weekend Numbers Game

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2016 election, Electoral College, Im-Politic, inauguration, popular vote, Richard Nixon, Trump, Vietnam War moratorium, Women's March

With today’s national and global Women’s Marches, the numbers game has just intensified greatly. Don’t kid yourself. Despite organizers’ claims that they’re not anti-Trump events, they’re all about discrediting Donald Trump’s presidency even as it’s just beginning – a continuation of the campaign that began right after the insurgent Republicans’ victory with (accurate) observations that he seemed to have lost the popular vote.

If you have any doubts, you need to get on Twitter. There, President Trump’s opponents, including in the supposedly impartial mainstream media, have spent the last 24 hours gleefully and ceaselessly reporting that the crowds that gathered for yesterday’s inaugural events were considerably smaller than those for previous such presidential occasions. And the boasting has continued today, with (also accurate) observations that the women’s marchers – including in Washington, D.C. – are also more numerous than the inaugural gatherings.

Don’t get me wrong. In a democracy, playing the numbers game is really important, legitimate, and actually necessary. In fact, these newest claims bring back memories of my own participation in the second Vietnam War “moratorium” demonstration in the nation’s capital in November, 1969. Interestingly, as the roughly 500,000 protesters filled the Mall, many of us wondered if our presence would make any difference to then President Nixon, who seemed more than able and willing to ignore us. It turns out he was paying plenty of attention.

I strongly suspect that President Trump has been paying attention, too. He certainly should. There’s clearly a lot of manufactured hysteria at work in these marches (which, as is typical with such efforts, tend to attract mongers of many imagined grievances), along with superficial virtue-signaling.  But it’s also clear that many participants are genuinely troubled, scared, outraged, or some combination of these emotions. That’s their right, and Mr. Trump unfortunately bears the blame for at least some.

Nevertheless, numbers exist in a context, and here’s some to consider before concluding that any of these developments mean that Mr. Trump is anything less than a legitimate president, or that he’s even losing the battle for public opinion.

First, the numbers game that counts most is the election. And under the U.S. Constitution, the election numbers that count decisively are those of the Electoral College. That’s the contest President Trump won, and it’s the contest around on which all the candidates for the White House based their strategies. Had the popular vote been the determinant, all these campaigns would naturally have evolved much differently – with possibly big implications for the popular vote.

Second, there may be much less to the turnout numbers of the last 24 hours as well. After all, without doubting the strength of anti-Trump feelings, the president’s opponents can draw on the impressive institutional strengths that have been built up over decades by major interlocking progressive and identity organizations – including labor unions. They’ve had more than two months to organize these marches and protests not only at the national but at the state and local levels as well.

So it’s not at all surprising that they were able to mobilize – and transport – large numbers of participants. What’s much more surprising is how poorly they performed when they had a chance to prevent Trump from reaching the White House in the first place. And don’t forget – their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, was thought to have a major edge with the population groups that supposedly represented America’s demographic future.

As Mr. Trump repeatedly states, he’s heading a movement, too. But it should be obvious that this movement is embryonic, and that its organizational reach is limited at best. Think of how few truly Trump-ian candidates ran in House and Senate races. Think of how poorly they were funded. In fact, a major test of the staying power of Trump-ism will be its ability to recruit, train, and finance quality office-seekers throughout the country.

It’s also important to remember that relatively few Trump voters have long histories, or any history, of political activism. As indicated above, they’ve had few if any organizations to join, and their very support for such an unconventional candidate with such a strong anti-establishment message surely makes clear their deep disdain for the nation’s public life.

Of course, they turned out for Trump campaign rallies and other events in numbers that were stunning largely because of the campaign’s lack of organization and infrastructure. But now that their champion is in power, nothing would be more logical than for them to return to their lives and jobs in the simple expectation that it’s now up to Mr. Trump to deliver. As a result, for so many to have journeyed to Washington, D.C. – which, chances are, involved taking more than a short, Amtrak northeast corridor train ride – augurs well for the new president.

The only reasonable conclusion? Donald Trump continues to generate strong feelings among backers and opponents alike, and since both groups number in the tens of millions, he’s now – as widely noted – the leader of a deeply divided country. Can he bridge this divide substantially? Significantly? At all? And can he expand his base to include whatever fence-sitters are left? The answers will go far toward determining his administration’s success.

As for his opponents, the big question they face is one similar to one posed endlessly to the Trump campaign: Your backers will attend rallies. But will they vote?

Im-Politic: Why the First Presidential Debate Really Mattered

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2016 election, Alicia Machado, battleground states, Donald Trump, Electoral College, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Lester Holt, presidential debate

As I wrote last Tuesday, I was hoping to get the complete TV ratings for last Monday’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton before deciding how the results would impact the election. They’re apparently still not out, but I’ve found enough info in the news coverage to answer my biggest question, and conclude that the evening was a major setback for the Republican nominee – though not quite in the sense widely assumed.

The decision to delay stemmed from my feeling that knowing how long most viewers stuck with the contest could matter decisively in judging its effects. As per the conventional wisdom, it was clear to me that Clinton won the debate as a whole. But I also agreed that the Democratic standard-bearer was kept on the defensive for much of the first half hour by Trump. Since human attention spans are often short, I surmised that the more viewers who lost interest in the slugfest as it wore on, the fewer who saw those segments where Clinton skillfully baited Trump into protesting his personal failings way too much. Therefore, they would have missed those exchange in which he projected the childish, boorish bullying image that’s saddled him throughout the campaign – and understandably limited his appeal.

But at least according to the press coverage, most of the audience watched most of the full 98 minutes, and therefore saw Trump at his worst. Moreover, Trump’s insistence on sustaining his Twitter assault on former beauty queen Alicia Machado has amounted to doubling down on failure – for days. So the maverick businessman has indeed been bested – and the most reliable polls subsequently showed that strong majorities of Americans agreed.

The question still remains whether Trump’s hopes for the White House have been fatally damaged. My hunch: Quite possibly. But in my view, what’s just happened isn’t that Trump lost an opportunity to reassure and possibly win over some college-educated independent men and women and thereby overcome a narrow Clinton lead and widen his Electoral College path to the presidency. It’s that he’s squandered a chance to blow the race wide open.

After all, on the eve of the debate, Trump not only had drawn into a virtual tie in the national presidential polls. He was also displaying momentum or stabilizing the situation both in key traditional Republican strongholds where Clinton was making headway (like Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona), and in states that changing demographics have been turning first from Republican red to genuinely purple and now possibly to Democratic blue (like Colorado and Nevada). Moreover, the Trump rebound had been widely – and rightly – attributed to a focus on issues like the economy and national security

So imagine the effect had Trump responded to Clinton’s renewed charges of misogyny with something like, “Madame Secretary, this is really so sad – but so revealing. This country faces so many problems and crises – no good jobs, lousy growth, terrible infrastructure, failing schools, rising crime, unprotected borders, terrorism. And you’ve just decided to waste the precious time we have tonight by diving into the gutter. I won’t dignify this sleaze-mongering with an answer. And I hope you’ll return to focusing on the issues Americans really care about.”

This kind of statement would certainly have passed the “presidential test” – with flying colors. I suspect it would have been absolutely electrifying. And of course Trump missed other opportunities like this during the debate – notably moderator Lester Holt’s evident belief that his involvement with birther-ism is the country’s worst race relations problem.

But it could well be that the above amounts to wishing that pigs had wings. There’s no doubt that even with only five weeks left till Election Day, both candidates will have many more chances to redefine themselves and the presidential race – due to their own efforts and to the wild cards that an unpredictable world could throw into the mix. But the longer Trump obsesses on tabloid-level vendettas, the longer his campaign will remain a hostage to fortune – and needlessly so.

Im-Politic: What American Muslims Think of American Political Parties

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2016 elections, American Muslims, Democrats, demographics, Donald Trump, Electoral College, Gallup, George W. Bush, Im-Politic, Muslim ban, Muslims, polls, Republicans, September 11, The Atlantic

I hate to keep reporting on polls here at RealityChek because, as I keep noting, gauging public opinion sometimes doesn’t seem much more scientific than alchemy. But sometimes the results are so darned interesting – and focus on such neglected subjects – that they demand spotlighting.

So kudos to the Gallup organization for shedding light on a question that’s the mirror image of something that surveys have been obsessing about recently. Rather than (yet again), asking what Americans of different parties think of Islam and the nation’s Muslim population, Gallup asked American Muslims what they think of the two major political parties. Thanks to recent headlines, the results aren’t surprising.  But their ultimate political importance may be much less obvious.

Just as most polls have detected more concern about American Muslims and their religion in Republican than Democratic ranks – along with more Republican support for measures like Donald Trump-like bans or restrictions on Muslim travel to the United States – Gallup’s latest shows that American Muslims are the religious group most enthusiastic about the Democrats.

According to Gallup, fully two-thirds of American Muslims “identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.” American Jews are the only other significant religious group that comes close, at 60 percent. The figures for Catholics and Protestants, respectively, are 43 percent and 39 percent.

In addition, “Muslim Americans have the lowest percentage of any religious group who identify as or lean Republican.” And here the gap is even wider. This figure of 16 percent is much lower than that of the next least Republican identifiers – Jews, at 31 percent. Forty one percent of Catholics and 48 percent of Protestants identify with or lean Republican.

There’s of course a strong temptation to conclude that Republicans’ unpopularity with Muslims is all Trump’s fault. But this interesting recent Atlantic piece makes clear that the GOP’s standing with America’s Muslims has been weakening steadily since George W. Bush’s initial election as president in 2000. Moreover, it provides evidence that this decline began during Bush’s presidency, despite his high profile efforts to encourage toleration towards Muslims throughout the entire post September 11 period.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, election results presented in this article indicate that Muslim views of Republicans have actually improved somewhat since the mid-2000s, and that this trend has continued in the Obama years.

Will today’s Republican campaign drive even more Muslim voters into the Democratic camp? And how much will this matter, given the importance of individual states in the U.S. presidential election system and how the geographic distribution of the (voting age) Muslim population compares with various electoral college strategies all presidential candidates are developing right now? I sure don’t have any answers at this point. (Just FYI, here’s one U.S. government state- and county-level breakdown on where the nation’s Muslims live.)

What does seem clear is that what you hear about Islam and Muslims and related policy questions from the two major parties and their candidates will of course reflect genuine convictions about national security and public fears. But it will also reflect technical political calculations stemming from Gallup-like polls and Electoral College-related demographics.