Bill Scher: No, Obama Probably Wouldn't Have Beaten Trump
As a liberal, it pains me to say the following: President Barack Obama believes he would have beaten Donald Trump, but he’s probably wrong .
Many Democrats have reason to resist accepting such a horrifying hypothetical. Obama’s favorable rating trumps Trump’s.
(Delusional) Obama has a proven track record of winning Rust Belt white working-class votes, while also sparking record rates of African-American turnout.
But to lean on those arguments risks overlooking the boiling political, economic and cultural forces that bubbled up in reaction to eight years of Obama, and splattered red all over the electoral map.
At minimum, Obama’s own case for why he would have won—made in a podcast interview by his former aide David Axelrod—is weak. Asked “what happened” to his 2004 and 2008 calls to “overcome these differences” among the races once he became president, Obama responded, “A lot of people suggested that somehow, it really was a fantasy. What I would argue is, is that the culture actually did shift, that the majority does buy into the notion of a one America that is tolerant and diverse and open. … I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it.”
The comments clearly got under Trump’s thin skin. “President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! - jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc." he predictably tweeted on Monday. Refusing to let go, he popped off again the following day, “President Obama campaigned hard (and personally) in the very important swing states, and lost. The voters wanted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
So who is right? Obama is only correct so long as you are talking about a majority of voters, who gave Hillary Clinton and her “Stronger Together” message a ringing endorsement. However, the Electoral College majority recoiled not only from her, but also from Obama’s implementation of his multicultural vision. Trump was able to flip six states Obama won in 2012, driving up white turnout while many of the minorities Clinton needed stayed home.
Obamacare looms large, despite the fact that it is one of the most tangible benefits Obama delivered to working-class Americans, regardless of race. Yet the reaction to the program was undoubtedly tinged with racism. Political scientist Michael Tesler uncovered in his book Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era, that “racially resentful” whites were far more likely to support government-provided health insurance before Obama began his push for the Affordable Care Act in 2009. But once the president led the charge, Tesler found, many “Americans thought blacks would benefit more than whites.”
Tesler’s statistical analysis is backed up by the reporting of Vox’s Sarah Kliff. She spoke with Kentucky Trump voters in Obamacare plans, but who don’t receive subsidies, complaining about “the ones getting the welfare and food stamps” and “the people that don’t want to work” benefiting from government handouts.
Trump voters were also angered by how Obama handled race issues as president, especially his defense of Black Lives Matter activists. The New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones spoke with Obama-to-Trump converts in Iowa and found “they had come to feel at odds with their party; it no longer reflected their own cultural norms. … Obama really turned [one voter] off when, after a vigilante killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin, he said the boy could have been his son. She felt as if Obama was choosing a side in the racial divide, stirring up tensions.” ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis, after speaking to voters in Ohio, noted one who had “grown somewhat disenchanted” with Obama after supporting him, then “talked about how much the Black Lives Matter protests against shootings by police officers grated on him” and lamented, “If I say anything about that, I’m a racist.”
These anecdotes are also backed up by data. The 2016 exit poll asked, “Does the country’s criminal justice system treat all fairly or treat blacks unfairly?” Seventy-two percent of those saying blacks are treated unfairly were Clinton voters, while 73 percent of those saying blacks are treated as fairly as everyone else were Trump voters. Tesler further noted in a post-election Washington Post analysis that surveys showed “racial resentment and ethnocentrism — rating whites more favorably than other racial and ethnic minorities — were more closely linked to support for Donald Trump in 2016 than support for Mitt Romney in 2012.”
Clinton bore the brunt of this “whitelash,” instead of Obama, because she too defended Black Lives Matter in her campaign and spoke out against police brutality. Obama hadn’t forcefully engaged the subject in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns. As I noted back in September, he went out of his way eight years ago to sympathize with whites who held racial resentments because often they “see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his monumental essay on Obama’s presidency, has a line that sums up the president’s delicate approach to racial issues: “He walked on ice but never fell.” I wonder, though, whether this would have remained true if Obama had run again in 2016. It’s entirely possible—even likely—that the president’s navigation of this treacherous political territory would be for naught, because many whites had stopped viewing Obama as “post-racial” and tagged him, however unfairly, as the source of racial tension. Obama betrayed his own lack of confidence in his ability to unify the country when he vented to Axelrod about how the “filter” of conservative media had distorted his record: “a lot of these communities, what they're hearing is: Obama wants to take away my guns, Obamacare's about transgender bathrooms and not my job, Obama is disrespecting my culture and is primarily concerned with coastal elites and minorities.”
And in an earlier post-election interview with the New Yorker, Obama had a clear recollection of when his bond with whites began to fray: the seemingly trivial 2009 “Beer Summit.” That was when Obama initially defended a black Harvard professor who had been arrested by a white police officer after trying to enter his own home, and then tried to calm the ensuing racial tension by having the professor and the officer over to the White House for a drink.
Obama’s initial bluntness took a political toll. And he knew it: “The biggest drop that I had in my poll numbers in my first six months had nothing to do with the economy. It was ‘the beer summit.’ Among white voters, my poll numbers dropped, like, I don’t know, ten per cent or something. If you don’t stick your landing in talking about racial issues, particularly when it pertains to the criminal-justice system, then people just shut down. They don’t listen.”
Several commentators, and prominent Democrats including Vice President Joe Biden, are dismissing the evidence regarding race and instead argue that the economy fueled Trump’s election. They tend to cite three pieces of evidence: that Trump won the votes of exit-poll respondents who said trade takes away American jobs, that he improved on past Republican performance in areas once known for manufacturing hit hard by Chinese competition and that GDP growth was anemic in the first two quarters of the year. (Third-quarter GDP was healthy, but past history suggests that third-quarter growth happens too late for voters to feel it by Election Day.) To the extent all the above were factors, none of it would boost the prospects of an incumbent, especially one more committed to the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership than Clinton was.
In his post-election analyses, Obama contends that he performed better in white working-class areas because he showed up and proved he was fighting for them. “Part of the reason I got elected twice [was] just sitting down in people's living rooms and VFW halls and at fish fries and listening to people,” he told NPR. But Obama visited Indiana, a heavily white state he won in 2008, five times in his first term. He helped drive state unemployment down 2.6 percentage points from its recessionary peak. Yet despite delivering for the state’s white working-class, he lost the state by 10 points in 2012. As the Atlantic’s Alana Semuels explained this week, many Indiana voters simply refuse to believe that Obama’s policies benefited them.
Rejection of the economic data didn’t damage Obama in the rest of the Rust Belt four years ago, because he had dramatic evidence to help him prosecute his case. His management of the auto industry bailout was an unmistakable success, and he could hammer his rival for opposing it. But Obama didn’t have such a singular, regional accomplishment from his second term to prove he was looking out for the still-struggling white-working class. So the economy, despite the steady job growth, low inflation and 2015 jump in household income, would have harmed him just as much as it did Clinton—if not more so.
Even if Obama could not have stopped what one Clinton aide dubbed a “rural surge” for Trump, you might assume that Obama would have survived thanks to more robust African-American turnout. New York Times numbers-cruncher Nate Cohn concluded that “black turnout dropped somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent.” And: “If black turnout had matched 2012 levels, Mrs. Clinton would have almost certainly scratched out wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania,” which would have been enough to win the Electoral College.
But wouldn’t Obama have seen a similar tick downward in turnout and enthusiasm? A New York Times canvass of African-Americans in Milwaukee picked up disenchantment with the president on the economic front. “We’re worse off than before,” said one who wrote in Sen. Bernie Sanders. “Ain’t none of this been working,” said another, who did not vote at all. Some Black Lives Matter activists criticized him for not siding with them enough, and Dr. Cornell West hounded Obama for years as a dreaded “neoliberal.”
These anecdotes don’t jibe with Obama’s soaring popularity in his final year. But we can’t forget that the president was underwater through much of his second term. He only consistently cracked 50 percent in the Gallup tracking poll after Trump survived the raucous Republican nomination and Clinton was being wounded from the left by Sanders. Obama, safely out of the fray, surely looked preferable by comparison. If he was fully in the campaign fight, facing blow after blow from Trump, he may well have seen his popularity diminished, just as Clinton’s tanked when she entered the race.
Determining that Obama would have likely lost is not the same as concluding that American voters wanted to repudiate his record by electing Trump. Clinton’s solid popular-vote win, which Obama would have replicated, remains a strong argument that Trump won without a mandate for his largely conservative agenda. But accepting Obama’s probable defeat also speaks to the difficulty for an activist Democratic president to build the foundation for a three-peat: After two terms, the imperfections of any package of governmental reforms will inevitably show, and simmering frustrations are bound to weigh down the incumbent party’s nominee. There’s a reason the same party rarely wins three presidential elections in a row.
You might be asking now: So what? Who cares if Trump would or wouldn’t have beaten Obama? Isn’t this just a fantasy exercise? Perhaps, but it’s a useful one. It crystallizes the deep cultural divide—along racial, regional and educational lines—that has wracked the country and threatens national unity. It forces us to acknowledge that the symbolic nature of Obama’s victory, however powerful it may be in shaping future generations, was not enough to heal past wounds. And it reminds the Democratic Party that the challenge of winning back working-class whites, many of whom still seethe with racial resentment, is greatly complicated by the moral and political obligation to stand by the party’s multicultural base and fight for equality. Politics isn’t a zero-sum game, but action begets reaction.
Twenty-four years ago, Bill Clinton could redeem the Democratic Party in the eyes of white “Reagan Democrats” by publicly humiliating the Rev. Jesse Jackson at the civil rights leader’s own event and still win the hearts of black voters. Such a two-pronged strategy is no longer available. The party base, along with the nation, is more diverse, and the expectations of civil rights leadership from people of color and white liberals have risen accordingly.
Eight years ago, Obama was able to fuse a broad coalition against a backdrop of economic and foreign policy carnage on the Republican Party’s watch. A repeat Republican performance from Trump may be in the offing, making Democrats’ job easier. But they can’t presume it or wish for it. They need a new strategy to broaden their base, and the path forward is not obvious.
"In retrospect, we can all be Monday morning quarterbacks," Obama admitted to Axelrod. But Obama's overly confident prediction is a perfect example of why Monday-morning quarterbacking is so fraught with danger. The assumption that he would have won suggests that Clinton pursued a flawed strategy or was a uniquely flawed candidate, or that the presidential glass ceiling is firmly in place for any woman. Some or all of these things may still be true. But to cling to that assumption, without exploring the evidence that suggests otherwise, may prompt Democrats to think all they need is another charismatic candidate to fix their political problems. The Democratic Party’s problems run much deeper.
As a liberal, it pains me to say the following: President Barack Obama believes he would have beaten Donald Trump, but he’s probably wrong .
Many Democrats have reason to resist accepting such a horrifying hypothetical. Obama’s favorable rating trumps Trump’s.
(Delusional) Obama has a proven track record of winning Rust Belt white working-class votes, while also sparking record rates of African-American turnout.
But to lean on those arguments risks overlooking the boiling political, economic and cultural forces that bubbled up in reaction to eight years of Obama, and splattered red all over the electoral map.
At minimum, Obama’s own case for why he would have won—made in a podcast interview by his former aide David Axelrod—is weak. Asked “what happened” to his 2004 and 2008 calls to “overcome these differences” among the races once he became president, Obama responded, “A lot of people suggested that somehow, it really was a fantasy. What I would argue is, is that the culture actually did shift, that the majority does buy into the notion of a one America that is tolerant and diverse and open. … I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it.”
The comments clearly got under Trump’s thin skin. “President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! - jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc." he predictably tweeted on Monday. Refusing to let go, he popped off again the following day, “President Obama campaigned hard (and personally) in the very important swing states, and lost. The voters wanted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
So who is right? Obama is only correct so long as you are talking about a majority of voters, who gave Hillary Clinton and her “Stronger Together” message a ringing endorsement. However, the Electoral College majority recoiled not only from her, but also from Obama’s implementation of his multicultural vision. Trump was able to flip six states Obama won in 2012, driving up white turnout while many of the minorities Clinton needed stayed home.
Obamacare looms large, despite the fact that it is one of the most tangible benefits Obama delivered to working-class Americans, regardless of race. Yet the reaction to the program was undoubtedly tinged with racism. Political scientist Michael Tesler uncovered in his book Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era, that “racially resentful” whites were far more likely to support government-provided health insurance before Obama began his push for the Affordable Care Act in 2009. But once the president led the charge, Tesler found, many “Americans thought blacks would benefit more than whites.”
Tesler’s statistical analysis is backed up by the reporting of Vox’s Sarah Kliff. She spoke with Kentucky Trump voters in Obamacare plans, but who don’t receive subsidies, complaining about “the ones getting the welfare and food stamps” and “the people that don’t want to work” benefiting from government handouts.
Trump voters were also angered by how Obama handled race issues as president, especially his defense of Black Lives Matter activists. The New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones spoke with Obama-to-Trump converts in Iowa and found “they had come to feel at odds with their party; it no longer reflected their own cultural norms. … Obama really turned [one voter] off when, after a vigilante killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin, he said the boy could have been his son. She felt as if Obama was choosing a side in the racial divide, stirring up tensions.” ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis, after speaking to voters in Ohio, noted one who had “grown somewhat disenchanted” with Obama after supporting him, then “talked about how much the Black Lives Matter protests against shootings by police officers grated on him” and lamented, “If I say anything about that, I’m a racist.”
These anecdotes are also backed up by data. The 2016 exit poll asked, “Does the country’s criminal justice system treat all fairly or treat blacks unfairly?” Seventy-two percent of those saying blacks are treated unfairly were Clinton voters, while 73 percent of those saying blacks are treated as fairly as everyone else were Trump voters. Tesler further noted in a post-election Washington Post analysis that surveys showed “racial resentment and ethnocentrism — rating whites more favorably than other racial and ethnic minorities — were more closely linked to support for Donald Trump in 2016 than support for Mitt Romney in 2012.”
Clinton bore the brunt of this “whitelash,” instead of Obama, because she too defended Black Lives Matter in her campaign and spoke out against police brutality. Obama hadn’t forcefully engaged the subject in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns. As I noted back in September, he went out of his way eight years ago to sympathize with whites who held racial resentments because often they “see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his monumental essay on Obama’s presidency, has a line that sums up the president’s delicate approach to racial issues: “He walked on ice but never fell.” I wonder, though, whether this would have remained true if Obama had run again in 2016. It’s entirely possible—even likely—that the president’s navigation of this treacherous political territory would be for naught, because many whites had stopped viewing Obama as “post-racial” and tagged him, however unfairly, as the source of racial tension. Obama betrayed his own lack of confidence in his ability to unify the country when he vented to Axelrod about how the “filter” of conservative media had distorted his record: “a lot of these communities, what they're hearing is: Obama wants to take away my guns, Obamacare's about transgender bathrooms and not my job, Obama is disrespecting my culture and is primarily concerned with coastal elites and minorities.”
And in an earlier post-election interview with the New Yorker, Obama had a clear recollection of when his bond with whites began to fray: the seemingly trivial 2009 “Beer Summit.” That was when Obama initially defended a black Harvard professor who had been arrested by a white police officer after trying to enter his own home, and then tried to calm the ensuing racial tension by having the professor and the officer over to the White House for a drink.
Obama’s initial bluntness took a political toll. And he knew it: “The biggest drop that I had in my poll numbers in my first six months had nothing to do with the economy. It was ‘the beer summit.’ Among white voters, my poll numbers dropped, like, I don’t know, ten per cent or something. If you don’t stick your landing in talking about racial issues, particularly when it pertains to the criminal-justice system, then people just shut down. They don’t listen.”
Several commentators, and prominent Democrats including Vice President Joe Biden, are dismissing the evidence regarding race and instead argue that the economy fueled Trump’s election. They tend to cite three pieces of evidence: that Trump won the votes of exit-poll respondents who said trade takes away American jobs, that he improved on past Republican performance in areas once known for manufacturing hit hard by Chinese competition and that GDP growth was anemic in the first two quarters of the year. (Third-quarter GDP was healthy, but past history suggests that third-quarter growth happens too late for voters to feel it by Election Day.) To the extent all the above were factors, none of it would boost the prospects of an incumbent, especially one more committed to the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership than Clinton was.
In his post-election analyses, Obama contends that he performed better in white working-class areas because he showed up and proved he was fighting for them. “Part of the reason I got elected twice [was] just sitting down in people's living rooms and VFW halls and at fish fries and listening to people,” he told NPR. But Obama visited Indiana, a heavily white state he won in 2008, five times in his first term. He helped drive state unemployment down 2.6 percentage points from its recessionary peak. Yet despite delivering for the state’s white working-class, he lost the state by 10 points in 2012. As the Atlantic’s Alana Semuels explained this week, many Indiana voters simply refuse to believe that Obama’s policies benefited them.
Rejection of the economic data didn’t damage Obama in the rest of the Rust Belt four years ago, because he had dramatic evidence to help him prosecute his case. His management of the auto industry bailout was an unmistakable success, and he could hammer his rival for opposing it. But Obama didn’t have such a singular, regional accomplishment from his second term to prove he was looking out for the still-struggling white-working class. So the economy, despite the steady job growth, low inflation and 2015 jump in household income, would have harmed him just as much as it did Clinton—if not more so.
Even if Obama could not have stopped what one Clinton aide dubbed a “rural surge” for Trump, you might assume that Obama would have survived thanks to more robust African-American turnout. New York Times numbers-cruncher Nate Cohn concluded that “black turnout dropped somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent.” And: “If black turnout had matched 2012 levels, Mrs. Clinton would have almost certainly scratched out wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania,” which would have been enough to win the Electoral College.
But wouldn’t Obama have seen a similar tick downward in turnout and enthusiasm? A New York Times canvass of African-Americans in Milwaukee picked up disenchantment with the president on the economic front. “We’re worse off than before,” said one who wrote in Sen. Bernie Sanders. “Ain’t none of this been working,” said another, who did not vote at all. Some Black Lives Matter activists criticized him for not siding with them enough, and Dr. Cornell West hounded Obama for years as a dreaded “neoliberal.”
These anecdotes don’t jibe with Obama’s soaring popularity in his final year. But we can’t forget that the president was underwater through much of his second term. He only consistently cracked 50 percent in the Gallup tracking poll after Trump survived the raucous Republican nomination and Clinton was being wounded from the left by Sanders. Obama, safely out of the fray, surely looked preferable by comparison. If he was fully in the campaign fight, facing blow after blow from Trump, he may well have seen his popularity diminished, just as Clinton’s tanked when she entered the race.
Determining that Obama would have likely lost is not the same as concluding that American voters wanted to repudiate his record by electing Trump. Clinton’s solid popular-vote win, which Obama would have replicated, remains a strong argument that Trump won without a mandate for his largely conservative agenda. But accepting Obama’s probable defeat also speaks to the difficulty for an activist Democratic president to build the foundation for a three-peat: After two terms, the imperfections of any package of governmental reforms will inevitably show, and simmering frustrations are bound to weigh down the incumbent party’s nominee. There’s a reason the same party rarely wins three presidential elections in a row.
You might be asking now: So what? Who cares if Trump would or wouldn’t have beaten Obama? Isn’t this just a fantasy exercise? Perhaps, but it’s a useful one. It crystallizes the deep cultural divide—along racial, regional and educational lines—that has wracked the country and threatens national unity. It forces us to acknowledge that the symbolic nature of Obama’s victory, however powerful it may be in shaping future generations, was not enough to heal past wounds. And it reminds the Democratic Party that the challenge of winning back working-class whites, many of whom still seethe with racial resentment, is greatly complicated by the moral and political obligation to stand by the party’s multicultural base and fight for equality. Politics isn’t a zero-sum game, but action begets reaction.
Twenty-four years ago, Bill Clinton could redeem the Democratic Party in the eyes of white “Reagan Democrats” by publicly humiliating the Rev. Jesse Jackson at the civil rights leader’s own event and still win the hearts of black voters. Such a two-pronged strategy is no longer available. The party base, along with the nation, is more diverse, and the expectations of civil rights leadership from people of color and white liberals have risen accordingly.
Eight years ago, Obama was able to fuse a broad coalition against a backdrop of economic and foreign policy carnage on the Republican Party’s watch. A repeat Republican performance from Trump may be in the offing, making Democrats’ job easier. But they can’t presume it or wish for it. They need a new strategy to broaden their base, and the path forward is not obvious.
"In retrospect, we can all be Monday morning quarterbacks," Obama admitted to Axelrod. But Obama's overly confident prediction is a perfect example of why Monday-morning quarterbacking is so fraught with danger. The assumption that he would have won suggests that Clinton pursued a flawed strategy or was a uniquely flawed candidate, or that the presidential glass ceiling is firmly in place for any woman. Some or all of these things may still be true. But to cling to that assumption, without exploring the evidence that suggests otherwise, may prompt Democrats to think all they need is another charismatic candidate to fix their political problems. The Democratic Party’s problems run much deeper.
