Hanover
Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government, opened the discussion with a defense of polling sources, which have taken criticism for forecasting a victory for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
Nyhan, a contributor to the New York Times’ Upshot blog, said that expressing a high probability of a Clinton win — in the Times’ case, 85 percent — was not the same as saying she couldn’t lose.
“It’s important to be humble about what we didn’t understand and what we got wrong,” he told the audience of more than 150 in the Rockefeller Center, “but it’s also important to recognize that probabilistic polling is not a certainty.”
Nyhan’s early data indicated that Trump “overperformed,” or did better than the 2012 Republican nominee, by about 10 percent among whites without a college degree — the nation’s largest voter demographic.
The flipping of Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio to Republicans likely came as a result of white working-class resentment toward both parties, the experts said.
Panelist Dean Lacy, chairman of the government department, noted that Democrats once had counted on that demographic’s support; West Virginia, for instance, was once a solidly blue state. After Democrats began to focus more on minorities than on the shrinking white majority, he said, many voters went to Republicans.
Then, when that didn’t stop their economic slide, they tried Trump.
“They’re experimenting,” Lacy said. “Trump is their latest experiment. And if it doesn’t work for them in four years, they’ll try something else.”
Lacy pulled up statistics of his own that showed a correlation between political polarization and economic inequality. Although we are now more divided than ever, he said, the best comparison to today’s political state is that of the Gilded Age in the late 19th century.
For Nyhan, the most important question was how the political system will react to Trump’s radical reframing of Republican policy preferences.
“The big question is whether the rest of our political system follows along or not,” Nyhan said. “Do Republicans pivot Trump back toward traditional conservatism, or do they swing toward that cosmopolitan versus nationalism style of politics” — the politics of Trump — “instead?”
Near the end of the discussion, Nyhan broached perhaps the most uncomfortable issue of the election.
“We have to talk about race,” he said. “We’ve been dancing around it.”
Nyhan said his data indicated that Trump supporters were highly motivated by issues of race and ethnicity.
“It doesn’t mean it’s all racism,” Nyhan said, but rather that the real-estate billionaire’s adherents voted for him as a way to band together around their shared racial identity. “That identification is powerful and symbolic.”
The panelists also made a few predictions for policy changes to come, now that the GOP controls Congress, the White House, and likely soon the Supreme Court.
For starters, Lacy said, “the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead and Obamacare has a target on it.”
One of Trump’s biggest policy planks has been immigration, where he has promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico and create a deportation force to remove millions of migrants from the country. This was the subject of considerable anxiety for Thursday night’s audience.
“I’m afraid,” said a young woman standing in the back. “What can happen with immigration?”
The woman asked what might happen to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a policy of Obama’s that protects undocumented immigrants brought to the country during childhood from deportation. Without DACA, she said, “I have no home.”
“It’s quite vulnerable to whatever Donald Trump wants to do,” Lacy told her, especially since Obama implemented the measure by executive order, which a new president can unilaterally reverse.
Because Trump is so unpredictable and changeable in his policy positions, the panel said, many of his other decisions are up in the air. For that reason, Lacy said, Trump may have difficulty working with Congressional Republicans, who don’t know what to expect either.
“They have no idea what Trump believes or wants — they don’t even have any idea what he knows or cares about,” Lacy said.
Even so, the discussion moderator, Rockefeller Center senior fellow Ron Shaiko, expressed concern that the Supreme Court was where Trump may “give away the store” to evangelical Republicans. That demographic, which heavily favored the president-elect on Tuesday, has watched in past years as the nation’s highest court enshrined same-sex marriage, for instance, as a constitutional right.
Among all of the controversial topics raised on Thursday evening, the one to bring the strongest audience reaction was a matter of process. As of Thursday night, the ongoing count had Trump at 47.5 percent of the popular vote and Clinton at 47.7 percent. Yet Trump won the election by taking more Electoral College votes than Clinton.
“In the 20th century, can you explain the rationale for the Electoral College over the popular vote?” asked a man, drawing a burst of nervous laughter from the crowd.
“It’s rigged,” Lacy quipped, perhaps playing off Trump’s insistence before Tuesday that the election was somehow stacked against him.
The government department chairman went on to explain that the framers of the constitution wanted to keep electoral power in the hands of elites, who they presumed knew how to better run the country.
Now, Lacy said, the thinking is that the Electoral College ensures that the president has broad geographical support.
The problem with that, he said, is this arrangement disproportionately benefits Republicans, who are spread out in rural areas, over Democrats, who tend to cluster in population centers.
Lacy also noted that it was the French, when they controlled vast areas west of the Mississippi, who helped divide up much of what is now the U.S. into giant rectangles — most of which now contribute Republican electors to the college.
“So,” he concluded, “the French rigged this election.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.