Hillary's flawed strategy for defeating Donald Trump

It's essentially the exact same strategy attempted by the Republican establishment which proved wildly ineffective (although I at one time bought in and thought it would work). That strategy is to play to college-educated voters who feel the current system of American politics is working for them and don't believe Trump is a serious presidential candidate worth taking a risk on.

These people are generally clustered in suburbs and cities and there's definitely a fair number of them. These were the people that were voting for Rubio or Kasich in the Republican primary and also swelled the ranks of people that ultimately propelled Clinton past Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.

You can see the evidence of this being her strategy based on her recent selection of Virginia senator Tim Kaine as her VP and in the ways in which she's attacked and countered against Donald Trump.

Kaine is another establishment Democrat with a neo-liberal approach to foreign policy (he's backed free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership) and the ability to pander speak in spanish to the Latino voters that they'll be counting on. He's also a fairly boring persona that won't upstage Clinton while allowing the campaign to double down on presenting voters with an option to continue business as usual with experienced leadership.

Her attacks on Trump have centered around labeling him as a racist, an authoritarian, and a dangerous mad man who will expose the country to grave risks due to his volatile nature and lack of experience. These are all attacks that will appeal to college-educated folks who perceive of themselves as being above racism and unwilling to take risks when things are going well enough.

Like in the GOP primary, I don't think that's a very strong strategy for the following reasons...

Problem One: Rebuilding the Obama coalition

The first problem with this strategy by Clinton is that the Obama coalition that propelled the Democrats into power back in 2008 was much broader than "risk-averse, college-educated voters."

Besides Bush losing traction with voters, the GOP also got swamped in 2008 by the fact that Obama brought a ton of new voters into the electorate so that whereas in 2004 we saw 121 million people vote, 2008 featured 129.3 million voters and 2012 still saw 126.8 million voters.

Even if McCain or Romney had enjoyed the appeal of Bush they still would have been trounced by Obama's ascendant coalition.

What Obama did so successfully was fire up the massive population of millennial voters entering the electorate and win their support with massive margins. Those millennial voters recently went for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and generally view Clinton very unfavorably.

Now wikileaks is releasing all of these Democratic National Committee emails indicating that the party conspired to stop Sanders and is filled with the kinds of corruption that Sanders was decrying during the primary.

So here's a closer view of the efforts by the Clinton campaign to get millennials to come out in large numbers again and vote for her over Donald Trump:

via GIPHY

Problem Two: Pointing and shrieking at Russia isn't a viable defense

One of the best ways to unite a diverse collection of people is to pit them against a common enemy. Investigations into the DNC leaks have suggested that Russia is behind the hack and that they are now releasing the data in an attempt to hurt Clinton and assist Trump. The Democrats have been keen to try and make this the prevailing narrative, "look how Putin is interfering in American politics!!!!!"

Of course, the Russians didn't write the emails where DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz conspired with fellow Democrats and media to stop Bernie Sanders, nor the emails where the party planned to reward big donors with government appointments. Sanders voters who feel cheated by the current American political system don't really care if they only know about the corruption thanks to Putin, the problem here is that the system seems rigged against them.

Trump is playing average Americans against the nation's ruling elites, Clinton is trying to unite them back behind the ruling elites and against the Russians.

But Russia just isn't viewed as being this horrifying opposing power anymore. Check out this Gallop survey on how Americans perceived Russia back in February. There will be some that are outraged that Russian interests are playing a role in the American election and there will be some that view Russia as having increased moral credibility due to their willingness to battle ISIS directly (at least nominally) and to expose DNC corruption.

Problem Three: Terrorism and national defense

The margins of victory that Clinton will need amongst college-educated voters to take down Trump's coalition is going to have to be pretty sizable. It's worth pausing to note that what Trump has essentially done is unite the two factions that fought each other in the Civil War, working class whites in both the North and the South, into one big party. That's likely to result in some pretty big voting numbers and 538 already has projections showing what kind of electoral map that's likely to produce in November.

That leaves this remaining problem for Clinton, which is overcoming the hurdle of her own hawkish foreign policy preferences combined with her weakness on rule of law issues. Do you know who loves feeling secured by the rule of law? College-educated folk living in suburbs or gentrified, urban locales.

Clinton's warm embrace the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has started to come across more negatively amongst security-loving suburbanites after a rash of shootings that victimized police officers, is a problem for her. It may help her maintain Obama's large margins of victory with black Americans but potentially at the cost of losing margins with other demographics.

Then there's the terrorism issue, which wasn't a major part of the 1992, 1996, 2008, or 2012 elections and isn't an area where Clinton has a great record to sell.

Between Clinton and her husband:

-They fell on the side of Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs back in the late '90s, which had some negative results for the Serbs.

-She supported the takedown of Saddam Hussein in Iraq as a N.Y. senator, a secular dictator who kept terrorism at bay in that state.

-She initiated the takedown of Muammar Gaddafi, a secular dictator who kept terrorism at bay in Libya.

-She wants to allow more refugees from Syria into the United States.

-She favors more open borders.

Clinton's policy preferences, like those of the rest of establishment in either party, have demonstrated a clear pattern of creating greater disorder and empowerment of radical Islam abroad combined with fewer safeguards from allowing that disorder or ideology to spread domestically. They're often so caught up in playing political chess with Russia that they forget that Americans are much more concerned with the blowback of failing to address radical Islam than they are oil prices in the Balkans.

College-educated voters may not see Trump's protectionism as being necessary or helpful but many of them may feel that a Trump presidency has a greater chance of keeping them safe from the threats of increased crime or domestic terrorism. This is why the force of Trump's convention speech was assuming the mantle as the "law and order candidate."

Clinton is trying to terrify voters into believing that Trump is the next Hitler, Trump is looking to terrify voters into believing that Clinton will allow disorder to spread across the United States. When you turn on the news at night, which of those two scenarios seems more likely?

The upshot is that her play for winning big margins with that demographic is probably not strong enough to generate the needed margins of victory. Combine that with her utter lack of appeal to millennial voters and the likely decreasing margins there and you have a recipe for a Democratic disaster in November.

The end of Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz understood the potential of the "doomsday scenario" well before much of the rest of the Republican party. The GOP has long desired to be able to play offense on the electoral map and not rely on surviving from attacks in Ohio and Florida every four years and the strategy for doing so has always been obvious from a mathematical perspective.

The problem has commonly been diagnosed as the GOP lacking Hispanic votes in a nation where Hispanic share of the population is on the rise. However, that analysis can be demonstrated to be fatally flawed by simply examining the "turn Texas blue!" attempts by Texas Democrats. Hispanic population surges are largely focused in places where Republicans aren't really at any risk of losing ground politically, like Texas, and the reasons are twofold.

One is that Hispanics simply don't vote in great numbers. I remember sitting in a Texas history class at UTSA back in 2005 with a professor who was a seasoned veteran of in-state politics that had a wife who was the city manager of San Antonio. Amongst our required reading was a book called "the life and times of Willie Velasquez" who was a Chicano leader that made it his mission to register Latinos to vote. Simply getting his people to the polls was a very difficult struggle in the effort to improve their lot in life.

This reality has been largely lost on white liberals nationally that have perceived immigration as a pathway to electoral dominance and perhaps conveniently ignored by establishment Republicans pushing for an outreach campaign to Latino voters and immigration policies that happen to benefit the major corporations that love to donate to their campaigns.

Anyways, the last effort to take down Texas Republicans was in the 2014 gubernatorial election when the insulated Democrats in Austin put forth Wendy Davis as their candidate. I'm not sure why they thought that a Ivy-league educated blonde woman famous for standing up for abortion was going to be a hit with the Hispanic voters they were counting on but it backfired spectacularly.

The Republican Greg Abbott crushed Davis 59.3% to 38.9%. Hispanic voters only went to Davis by a 55-44 margin, which is nothing compared to the 71% that Obama got nationally, and Texas turnout was low.

The other reason the emphasis on Hispanic voters approach doesn't work is that down south, the Republicans generally get support from both evangelicals and working class white families (obviously in many instances, there is considerable overlap whereas in the north they are more distinct). With white voters over represented at the polls and marching behind a single banner politically they are pretty hard to beat.

Getting aggressive with the electoral map doesn't require that Republicans do a better job of reaching out to a group that is more naturally inclined to the Democrats and naturally disinclined to participate in the first place.

The key is uniting white working class families across the entire US with evangelical voters. That was Ted Cruz's plan but Donald Trump is the one that actually pulled it off.

Trump is now continuing to try and build that coalition, ultimately choosing Mike Pence to try and shore up the evangelical community rather than looking to project more strength by choosing Gen. Flynn.

As for Cruz, he accepted an opportunity to speak at the Republican National Convention and he had a major choice ahead of him. He could either

A) Make peace with the coalition of voters he had intended to represent and champion by nominally endorsing Trump and then biding his time to see if it became necessary to wait him out or else try to fully hop aboard later.

B) Try to make peace with the establishment by refusing to endorse Trump.

It seems that Cruz thought that if he used lawyerly terms like "don't stay home in November" and "vote your conscience" perhaps he could fool the voters into believing he was still on their side but it didn't work. The "Lyin Ted" moniker had already ruined any chances of that. He was booed off the stage by the delegates.

Meanwhile, Cruz has no realistic shot of making real headway with the establishment either, who largely despise him and will only use him as a tool to the extent that he's useful. He might have been useful for appealing to anti-establishment voters before but certainly not now.

By refusing to acknowledge the choices of the very group of people he hoped to champion, Cruz has now eliminated his chances of successfully running for president in the future. Either Trump will win and he'll be left bitterly watching from the sideline or Trump will lose and voters won't forget Cruz's part in helping to take him down. His best chances at major relevance now are as a career Senator or perhaps finding his way to the Supreme Court where his disagreeable nature would likely be perceived as less of a liability.

American evangelicals have just lost a talented and effective politician, machiavellian and ambitious as he may have been. The 2016 election continues forward like a wrecking ball through the status quo political landscape.

"The world turned upside down"

That was the name of the tune that the British allegedly played when General Cornwallis' army was surrendering to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781. The most powerful empire around the world had just been defeated by their own colonies and a rather irregular army in a shocking upset.

Now, 235 years later, it's pretty common for the established powers to go down when battling natives on their own soil.

The U.S. military is regularly going down when battling "4th generation" forces (fighters that aren't affiliated with a state but with a tribe or cause) despite tremendous advantages in money, technology, and resources.

In the political world, the whole weight of the U.K. political establishment and the European Union was unable to prevent "Brexit," which was essentially the native English people choosing British sovereignty over globalized governance over and against the wish to remain by Scotland, North Ireland, and immigrant-heavy London.

The struggles of the United States political establishment to win victories against the local upstart, nationalist outsider has also been stark. It started with Trump beating Jeb Bush (choice of the party elites) senseless in the polls and early GOP primaries.

The most stark example was when Trump went into South Carolina, which was expected to be an establishment "firewall," and ripped Jeb's brother George for "failing to stop 9/11" and incurring a firestorm of anger and hatred from virtually everyone in the Republican party.

Many expected for this to be the moment where Trump finally faltered. Instead he won South Carolina with 32.5% of the vote in a crowded field. Second place was basically a tie between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz who had 22.5% and 22.3% respectively. Jeb got 7.8%, zero delegates, and was forced out of the race in humiliating fashion.

Now we come to the general election. It's common for insiders like the 538 bloggers to regularly mock Trump for failing to raise money, or for establishment friendly conservative pundits to caution that without support from the nation's elites that Trump can't win a general election against Clinton.

In general, the common wisdom is that you can't win a battle for the country without major dollars. Everyone is still operating under the same underlying assumptions that the Pentagon has about warfare.

"You can't beat the U.S. military with home made bombs and rusty AK47s!!!"

Well apparently you can, and in an age of DVR and increased skepticism towards the ruling elites, it's very much in question whether dropping ad bombs across the airwaves is actually that useful.

In fact, judging by recent swing state polls and campaign spending, there's some question about whether taking enormous campaign donations from the wealthy and using them on ads is beneficial at all:

In modern warfare between a foreign state and a 4th generation opponent, having superior weaponry and being able to drop bombs safely from a distance is actually a major weakness. Why? Because it's seen as bullying, it turns the local resistance into an underdog that the natives root for, and it ties the bomber in with the very political establishment that people don't trust.

Victory for the establishment has to come in the form of them maintaining control over an area and they can't control the area if they are seen as illegitimate bullies.

The same is now true for American politics. Voters on either side are not confident that the ruling elites in either party are actually acting in the everyday man's best interest. Clinton's Wall Street cash grabs and massive spending tends to underscore the fact that she's the choice of the elites and that the last thing they want is for Trump to win.

What happens if everyday Americans increasingly see Trump as the only true, American option and Hillary as the figure head for an oppressive elite?

The world has been turned upside down and the factors that used to determine elections don't quite matter as much anymore.

Potential VP General Flynn and what conservative pundits can't seem to understand

Donald Trump is rumored to be heavily considering retired General Michael T. Flynn as his VP choice. The retired general, in his own words, believes that combating radical Islam is THE issue of our times as a Western civilization and says Obama's administration pushed him out for insisting on this viewpoint.



You could definitely see why Trump would be drawn to a figure like this, it's basically doubling down on his potential advantage over Hillary Clinton in the general election as the candidate who can make Americans feel safer. What's more, it's an effective counter to the Clinton camp attack line that Trump is unstable and likely to push the US into a disastrous military conflict.

Given the Clintons' own predilection for disastrous overseas ventures then juxtaposed with a respected, former Democrat General who was appointed head of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Barack Obama himself, Flynn would be an effective political foil to much of the Clinton strategy.

And that background is basically all you need to understand why Republican and Democrat establishment figures are highly opposed to the eventuality of Flynn being named VP.

The Democrat case, always easily explained by reading a Vox.com article "explaining" Gen. Flynn, makes a Hillary case for why he'd be awful on Trump's ticket by pointing and shrieking at the following facts:

1. Flynn is an "alarmist" in describing radical Islam as America's main enemy!

Of course, most Americans would probably at least sympathize with that view if they don't buy it whole sale. Multiple terrorist attacks on American soil in the span of a few years combined with the rise of radical Islam worldwide will tend to have that effect.

2. Flynn is sympathetic to Russia!

The establishment on either sides' repeated attempts to cast Russia as America's ultimate foe in these times always makes me chuckle. As though the memory of the Cold War was still so strong that Americans were more likely to view white Christians as the main enemy rather than Muslim middle easterners. We'll get back to that identity issue in a moment but suffice to say that Americans are much more worried about being blown up by radical Islamists than they are anything that Putin might get up to.

3. Flynn butted heads with Obama and the Pentagon establishment!

Flynn felt alone in ascribing the threat level to terrorism that is now probably taken for granted amongst Americans if not the White House. Obama and the Pentagon didn't like that...I think the more Americans learn about Flynn's battle with the military establishment and commander-in-chief the more they'll come to respect him and the angrier they'll grow with the latter. Especially if he's given a platform as a VP to broadcast how his concerns over America's strategy for combating terrorism were overruled.

4. Flynn believes in sending troops into the Middle East!

This one is actually somewhat alarming to me as well. I'm glad one of the presidential candidates is looking at listening to someone who understands that the West's conflict with radical Islam is a serious one but I favor more of a defensive, Byzantine approach to this problem then a Templar crusade strategy.

The Republican establishment is also furious about Trump potentially ignoring the "need for party unity" and choosing a(nother) lifelong Democrat to run by his side.

Consequently they (and many liberal pundits as well) are making a big case out of Flynn's pro-choice positions and ambivalence towards protecting traditional marriage.

Here are the two big factors conservative pundits are missing here.

1. Social conservatives don't really have much of a choice in this election.

Hillary Clinton will make several liberal appointments to the Supreme Court and push through any socially liberal legislation that gets through congress if she's elected president. There are no doubts here, a Clinton presidency would be a disaster for the conservative cause and likely lead to a long-standing super majority of liberals on the Supreme Court.

Libertarian Gary Johnson would likely be a disaster for social conservatives here as well, besides the consideration that he has a zero percent chance of winning an election.

Trump has at least promised to make conservative judicial appointments and even released a list of names he was considering to help give evangelicals some peace about electing him. Could he betray them? Possibly. Is the selection of socially moderate/liberal/ambivalent General Flynn an indication he would betray social conservatives? Probably not, Flynn's focus on the ticket would be military and defense reform and honestly I don't think Flynn cares about much else.

There aren't any real options here for social conservatives other than to make some kind of hopeless protest vote or else ride with Trump and hope for the best. Staying home or switching their vote to Hillary would be to deal themselves a defeat in the culture wars that would take at least a decade to overcome.

2. The 2016 election is about tribal identity and identity is much stronger than any other issue on the table.

Trump's play overall has been about nationalism and the conservation of Western civilization itself. The Orlando attacks and the way he sought to rally the LGBT community with the evangelicals already in his fold was indicative of how Trump is looking to move beyond the "conservative vs liberal" battle for supremacy over American politics and instead assert the need for first maintaining America as a traditional Western nation.

Conservative pundits think that conservative voters care first and foremost about being told what they want to hear on social issues because that's been the tactic of most every major Republican candidate for the last several elections. In fact, tribal identity as Americans in a Western nation is a much, much stronger motivator and the major reason why Trump won the primary despite being shaky on several traditional Republican issues.

Many typical American voters are concerned that their country is going away. There's no point in squabbling with liberals over everyday politics if globalization turns America into a true multicultural state that isn't primarily defined by Anglo-American values. In that event, ultimate victory in the culture wars is completely hopeless. What's more, if conservative leaders aren't going to protect them from seeing their communities flooded by potentially radicalized immigrants as they've seen happen in Europe then self-preservation kicks in.

In terms of politics and building an appealing "America first" identity brand for the election, I think Flynn would be a remarkably effective VP choice for Trump. The GOP establishment knows it and are desperate that Trump not be successful in rebuilding the party into something where they are marginalized. His victory in the 2016 election would be the worst kind of disaster for Paul Ryan and the establishment wing, worse than Clinton winning. The Democrats know Flynn would be effective as well for his ability to elucidate their failures in combating radical Islam and are just as desperate to see this stopped.

Meanwhile the Doomsday scenario is becoming increasingly likely with every emerging national trend.