Trump's Secret? Electoral Realignment Beats Money Every Time

As I learned from E. E. Schattschneider's book, The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America, an electoral realignment is the most powerful force in the world. As Trump demonstrated, a political realignment makes up for a lack of money, a lack of a ground game, and a lack of many other things too.

Unfortunately, the wisdom of this eminent political scientist is no where to be seen in the conventional explanations for Trump's outstanding victory. So far, the best approximation I ran across is an article by Whitney Blake at the Weekly Standard that uses the wisdom of hindsight to put the presidential election into a proper perspective.

Her article, "12 Ways in Which Trump Upended Conventional Wisdom," neatly organizes the manner in which Trump reversed virtually all the surefire theories which predicted his failure. Prime examples include his lack of money or a robust enough ground game.

See, http://www.weeklystandard.com/12-ways-in-which-trump-upended-conventional-wisdom/article/2005550#.WDn-IcFyytZ.twitter

Reassuringly, old-fashioned political science outperformed the poll-based election models championed by Nate Silver at http://fivethirtyeight.com/. As Blake reports, the one piece of conventional wisdom which stands tall is the political science variable which asserts it is extremely difficult for an incumbent party to hold the White House for three consecutive terms. The last time this occurred in modern history is when Ronald Reagan handed off the Oval Office to George H. W. Bush.

In contrast to Blake's vision, I think it is simpler and more elegant to assert that the key to Trump's success was his ability to spark a political realignment. He did this, initially, by neatly reversing the Republican party's decision to embrace illegal immigrants and pursue a path toward legalization and potentially voting rights for them. At the time, Trump's anti-illegal immigrant stance was a bold and vivid contrast to the Republican establishment's preferred pro-illegal immigrant stance as articulated by both Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Trump's complete rejection of amnesty and willingness to face the ire of Latinos offended by his views represented a rebuke of the establishment which could only have been sustained only by a self-financed Republican primary candidate.

Trump's dramatic redefinition of the battle between Democrats and Republicans was locked in place by the Democrat party's corresponding embrace of white privilege ideology and the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement. The result of these strategic decisions is that the white working class finally gave up on the Democrat party. Hillary's nearly constant drum beat of white privilege left the white working class with the stark choice of accepting a permanent subservient status or simply withdrawing all support for this nonsense.

See, http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/04/13/hillary-clinton-white-people-need-recognize-our-privilege

Ultimately, I think Hillary's embrace of white privilege ideology doomed her campaign. It turned a key portion of the Obama coalition into enemies of the Democrat party. This was a huge mistake. It was, in fact, an unsupportable thesis to assert that black dysfunction was the result of white working class bias. As I have said elsewhere, it never made sense to me to blame the problems of blacks on innocent whites:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there. It strikes me as nothing less than ideological blindness to insist that such extraordinary violence is the unfortunate result of peaceful white folks living ordinary lives in our nation’s rural and suburban areas.

Moreover, it was inevitable that the Democrat's stress on identity politics was eventually going to lead to white identity politics - a brand of white nationalism - which suggested it was quite rational for whites to support aggressive action to preserve their majority status. Such action might include a 50 year moratorium on all immigration to the U.S. It might include revising immigration law to limit the number of non-white/non-Christians coming to the U.S. as a means of preserving white majority status and white cultural norms. It should not surprise anyone that there is nothing inevitable about demographic changes -- not if white nationalism takes hold.

In the end, however, I disagree with those who see the alienation of the white working class from the Democrat party as merely a quaint, fleeting nostalgia for an earlier version of America.

You cannot rest a political realignment on such a fragile idea. It makes more sense to me that the Democrats lost the white working class due to a visceral reaction against a political elite which deliberately minimized the significance of black on white crime, the assassination of police officers, the terrorist attacks launched by adherent Muslims or the unspeakable crimes of murderers and rapists who also happened to be illegal immigrants.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND. Pronouns - Master/Commander.

Trump Hyperdrive: Sifting Through the Election Results

I think it is quite clear that Trump comes to office with a powerful mandate for change even though he narrowly lost the popular vote to Hillary. Looking at the big picture, I see powerful evidence of a repudiation of Obama and his policies in the fact that Republicans now control the White House, Senate, House and – in the long-run – the Supreme Court.

Republicans also dominate with 35 governors and a majority of state legislatures. See, http://www.governing.com/topics/elections/gov-republicans-add-dominance-state-legislatures.html The bottom line is that The Tea Party movement took away Obama's control of Congress in 2010. Now, Trump has taken away his fragile legacy.

I am also confident in predicting great changes will soon take place. Elections definitely have consequences. Withing a few months, Trump will reverse Obama’s numerous executive orders, change his foreign policy, and dramatically alter immigration patterns into the U.S. This is good news because, as I have argued for a long time, Obama came into office with a radical socialist agenda. See, http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/08/when_exactly_did_barack_obama_renounce_communism.html#.UBwxfAzIFng.google_plusone_share

Moreover, I think it is say to say this new nationalist, populous realignment will be locked in for a long-time once people experience the good things and great improvements that will take place under a skillful Trump administration.

While I am pleased that I called Trump's win correctly, I am disappointed that I completely missed the magnitude of his victory. I relied too heavily on polls. To set things straight, here is a great article that lays out how the Trump data team was looking at the numbers right before the election.

See, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/trump-s-data-team-saw-a-different-america-and-they-were-right

Nevertheless, I think the results illustrate something I have thought for a long-time. It never made sense to me that liberals could get away with blaming rural whites for the problems experienced by inner city minorities.

Finally, I remained startled at how bad the polling was for this election. I suspected that all these media outlets were producing inaccurate polls on purpose in order to actively discourage Trump’s nationalist, populist voter turnout. In retrospect, Nate Silver’s wildly wrong prediction of a Hillary victory will do a lot to sully his reputation. Silver, after all, was consistently wrong about Trump’s chances at every step of the process. Now, Silver appears to be blaming the pollsters without asking whether or not their liberal bias impacted their findings.

See, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-missed-trump-we-asked-pollsters-why/

Silver’s current argument seems to be that there were a lot of shy Trump voters who failed to signal their support for Trump. This was a possibility, however, that the so-called experts dismissed prior to the election. See, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/donald-trump-bradley-effect

I called the election correctly, in part, because I knew enough Republicans who were shy about their support for Trump and I was convinced that the third party vote would eventually decline and that most of those voters would go to Trump rather than Hillary. I think I was also right to assume a Hillary bias among pollsters and to discount their predictions accordingly. I have had enough exposure to academia, the media and journalists to be confident that anti-Trump bias impacts their behavior.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

My Newest Portrait: I Support Donald Trump

One of Trump's Twitter followers, @amesmoreno put together a new meme that pretty much captures the present political moment for me. She offered to do one for me and I took her up on it. Here is the result below:

There seem to be a lot of pundits knocking both Trump and his supporters as if we are not smart enough to sign on the current political system's corruption and lack of interest in the needs of the great middle class. I don't usually use my own face on my political work, but I'll make an exception for this effort. By the way, @amesmoreno has offered to set this up for anyone who shares their photo with her on Twitter. Who knows, these may end up in the Trump presidential library some day.

It looks like about 20 of us have been graced by this gift of marketing imagery. Here are some other samples.

 John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Mr Trump - I Can Verify Obama is an Affirmative Action President

I could not help but notice that Donald Trump is offering to donate $5 million to one of Obama’s favorite charities if only Obama releases a range of sensitive documents including his undergraduate transcript from Occidental College. I wish Trump would just give the money to me. After all, I believe I have the personal experience and training needed to verify the gist of Trump’s concerns: I can confirm that Obama is an affirmative action president.


I observed that the young Obama had the IQ of an average white college student when I first met him over Christmas break in 1980. Obama was then a sophomore at Oxy and I was a graduate of Oxy who was paying my dues as a political science graduate student at Cornell. I met young Obama when I was in Portolla Valley, CA, reconnecting with my college-era Marxist sweetheart, Caroline Boss. By then, Boss had shared two classes with young Obama, an international relations course taught by Larry Caldwell and Carlos Egan and a political theory class taught by Roger Boesche. Ironically, I taught alongside both Egan and Boesche while I was an assistant professor in the political science department at Williams College.

Boss knew young Obama well enough to let me know that he was “one of us” meaning that he shared our radical point of view and all the class warfare angst associated with it. For the life of me, however, I do not remember her saying anything to the effect that young Obama was one of the brightest students at Oxy--much less a genius.

The bad news, for Trump and others, is that I do not believe Obama’s transcripts would tell us anything about either his nationality or scholarship status. Mine do not. My nationality is not indicated and I do not see any field on the transcript where it would be noted by school officials. I should add that I got to Oxy on a track scholarship. (I ran a 4:23 mile in high school.) However, I see no mention of my athletic prowess or that scholarship on my undergraduate transcript. Reviewing my own transcript, I can report that I earned straight A’s my freshman year. These transcripts also show my SAT scores. I am sure Obama’s transcripts would show his SAT scores too. This would be useful information, in part, because we can estimate a person’s IQ from their SAT scores.

If Trump is reading this piece, I can report that I have gotten good at guessing someone’s IQ. I suspect that anyone who – like me – has made a living as a college professor, a college admissions counselor, or a management consultant gets good at this task. In my case, I also have the experience of growing up with a younger brother who has a genius level IQ and the rocket science resume to back it up.

I can report to Trump that the young Obama came across as an average white guy. This, of course, is exactly what he was. Obama had a white mother and grew up nurtured by his white grandparents. Based on my exposure to young Obama, I estimate that his grades were in the middle B’s and that his IQ was slightly above average for a college student. Personally, I am not surprised by his recent comments on the Jay Leno show to the effect that he was not particularly good at math--“Malia is now a freshman in high school. I’m pretty lost.” I suspect that Obama has been pretty lost for a long time since he does not report taking any college or graduate school classes that might have demanded skill in math, science or economics.

In conclusion, I should add that I have had the opportunity witness a number of former presidents speaking to live audiences. I feel confident making some comparisons. For example, I do not think Obama is blessed with a higher IQ than Carter or Clinton. Obama is not smarter than either George H.W. Bush or his son George W. Bush. Of all of these former presidents, including Reagan, the only one who startled me with his intelligence was Clinton who I saw during a recent business trip to Little Rock, Arkansas. All in all, I think it is reasonable to assert that the only reason Obama is now president is that so many people mistook him to be a genuine African-American, the sort of person who deserved an affirmative action boost to get ahead.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.