So the 2012 election had major consequences. America would look very different today if it had gone the other way.
Now, to be fair, some widely predicted consequences of Mr. Obama’s re-election — predicted by his opponents — didn’t happen. Gasoline prices didn’t soar. Stocks didn’t plunge. The economy didn’t collapse — in fact, the U.S. economy has now added more than twice as many private-sector jobs under Mr. Obama as it did over the same period of the George W. Bush administration, and the unemployment rate is a full point lower than the rate Mr. Romney promised to achieve by the end of 2016.
In other words, the 2012 election didn’t just allow progressives to achieve some important goals. It also gave them an opportunity to show that achieving these goals is feasible. No, asking the rich to pay somewhat more in taxes while helping the less fortunate won’t destroy the economy.
Donald Trump vs. the Modern Political Campaign
the whole machinery of the modern campaign serves to constrain an individual candidate’s ability to chase votes. Seeking donors requires promoting an economic vision that turns off working-class voters. Winning the favor of élites means presenting detailed policies to show that you are a serious candidate, but policies are trade-offs, and each will alienate someone. Employing political professionals, who will want jobs with other candidates in the future, lessens the likelihood that your campaign will scorch the earth—by demonizing an ethnic group, for instance—in order to win. If the pros sound a little jealous of Trump, it’s because he raises the alluring, impossible alternative. What if they could just opt out?
.. The most compelling demographic analysis of Trump’s support is that he is leaning on the “missing white voter,” a type first identified by the analyst Sean Trende, of Real Clear Politics, just after Obama defeated Romney. Trende concluded that seven million fewer white people had voted in the 2012 election than had in 2008, and that the missing voters had certain identifiable characteristics. They were more rural than suburban, poorer rather than richer, and less rather than more religious. White voters in the South turned out just as strongly in 2012 as they had four years earlier, and so did evangelicals. The missing voters were from the Midwest, the Northeast, the red parts of blue states. “In other words,” Trende wrote, “H. Ross Perot voters.”
.. That Trump had opted out of the machinery of the modern campaign freed him to chase a group of voters who were traditionally hard to reach. With no need for donors, he could go all in on economic nationalism; with no inclination to woo party élites, he could simply decline to assemble policy proposals; and with no aspirations ever to run again, he could demonize multiple minority groups. (One way to read this last sequence is as a logical escalation: he targeted Hispanics, saw his poll numbers soar, and then targeted another group that was less popular—Muslims.) Early in his campaign, Trump sometimes seemed to be polling the people who turned up at his rallies. “How many people here believe in global warming?” he asked the crowd at a New Hampshire event I attended in September, apropos of nothing. Then he waited to see how many hands rose. “Very few,” he said to himself, approvingly. “Very few.”
.. A darkly comic possibility looms. Awaiting the Republican nominee is arguably the most controlled campaign in recent American history, Hillary Clinton’s
How Social Media Is Ruining Politics
It is turning out to be more encompassing and controlling, more totalizing, than earlier media ever was.
.. If Sanders is a king, Trump is a god. A natural-born troll, adept at issuing inflammatory bulletins at opportune moments, he’s the first candidate optimized for the Google News algorithm.
.. What Trump understands is that the best way to dominate the online discussion is not to inform but to provoke.
.. If traditional print and broadcast media required candidates to be nouns—stable, coherent figures—social media pushes them to be verbs, engines of activity. Authority and respect don’t accumulate on social media; they have to be earned anew at each moment. You’re only as relevant as your last tweet... In the 1920s, radio disembodied candidates, reducing them to voices. It also made national campaigns far more intimate.
.. The blustery rhetoric that stirred big, partisan crowds came off as shrill and off-putting when piped into a living room or a kitchen. Gathered around their wireless sets, the public wanted an avuncular statesman, not a firebrand. With Franklin Roosevelt, master of the soothing fireside chat, the new medium found its ideal messenger.
.. In the 1960s, .. TV placed a stress on sound bites, good teeth and an easy manner. Image became everything, as the line between politician and celebrity blurred. John Kennedy was the first successful candidate of the TV era, but it was Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who perfected the form. Born actors, they could project a down-home demeanor while also seeming bigger than life.
.. What’s important now is not so much image as personality. But, as the Trump phenomenon reveals, it’s only a particular kind of personality that works—one that’s big enough to grab the attention of the perpetually distracted but small enough to fit neatly into a thousand tiny media containers. It might best be described as a Snapchat personality. It bursts into focus at regular intervals without ever demanding steady concentration.
.. they still view social media as a complement to TV coverage, a means of reinforcing their messages and images, rather than as the campaign’s driving force.
.. In this familiar plot, a trope of modern campaigns, the candidate is first pilloried, then required to make a heartfelt apology, and finally, after the sincerity of the apology is carefully weighed, granted absolution. At which point a new narrative begins.
.. With social media, we seem to have entered a post-narrative world of campaigning. And that greatly circumscribes the power of traditional media in stage-managing races. Rather than narrating stories, anchors are reduced to reading tweets.
.. What is a surprise is that social media, for all the participation it inspires among users, is turning out to be more encompassing and controlling, more totalizing, than earlier media ever was. The social networks operated by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google don’t just regulate the messages we receive. They regulate our responses. They shape, through the design of their apps and their information-filtering regimes, the forms of our discourse.
.. When we go on Facebook, we see a cascade of messages determined by the company’s News Feed algorithm, and we’re provided with a set of prescribed ways to react to each message. We can click a Like button; we can share the message with our friends; we can add a brief comment. With the messages we see on Twitter, we’re given buttons for replying, retweeting and favoriting, and any thought we express has to fit the service’s tight text limits. Google News gives us a series of headlines, emphasizing the latest stories to have received a cluster of coverage, and it provides a row of buttons for sharing the headlines on Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook. All social networks impose these kinds of formal constraints, both on what we see and on how we respond. The restrictions have little to do with the public interest. They reflect the commercial interests of the companies operating the networks as well as the protocols of software programming.
.. Political discourse rarely benefits from templates and routines.
Justin Trudeau and Liberal Party Prevail With Stunning Rout in Canada
The Conservatives were reduced to 99 seats from 159 in the last Parliament, according to preliminary results.
.. The election became something of a referendum on Mr. Harper’s approach to government, which, in the view of his critics, has often focused on issues important to core Conservative supporters, mostly in the West, rather than to much of the population.
.. And Mr. Harper won the three previous elections without ever exceeding 40 percent of the popular vote.