The problem with political punditry is insularity. You can cliche that to read “beltway”, and perhaps rationalize your favorite pundit’s continuing integrity because his or her show broadcasts from somewhere outside Washington DC. Instead, there is a lockstep between the larger a pundit’s voice gets and their degree of access to sitting politicians and political professionals. A natural, symbiotic relationship. Flipside is that political pros begin to rely more on pundits for feedback as the relationships grow closer.
Take a second and digest that, because it’s the kernel of the rise of Donald Trump in 2016.
There are three kinds of US citizens. One part of the citizenry votes. One part of the citizenry could, but does not vote. And the third portion is people who can’t, or wouldn’t if they could. Some sociologist might quantify the divisions listed here in percentages or octiles, but i’m not smart enough to do that, and not dumb enough to try.
The problem with pundits is that the better they get, the more time they spend with people in the first group. If you surround yourself with habitual voters, then eventually, you start to think that people who don’t vote don’t matter. Not a right-wing or left-wing issue, simply a natural tendency of tweeters who are interested in the same thing to flock together, even if they disagree on that thing.
The failure of this organic gaggle to foresee Trump’s resiliency is thus very explainable and totally understandable. Predictable, even. Neither half of the pundit class “saw him coming”, because the more you think about politics, the more you think about politics. Ground games with turnout machines can mobilize occasional voters, but the more politically active a person is, the less they think about habitual non-voters.
Being no pundit nor donor, i’ve had innumerable chats with people who work hard every day. Once in a while someone will express a political viewpoint, and about 2 in 10 say they vote. But the one viewpoint most common is that same refrain: “Politicians are all the same, so I don’t bother.” This has been going on for 40 years, to my ears. Four decades of people disengaged from politics because both parties agree on only one thing: a stable 2-party system where they are guaranteed to be those two parties, forever.
Ask any polling company. They all have heard it a (literal) million times. People who could vote but don’t all say the same thing: Politicians are all the same so why bother? The amazing thing is not Trump’s rise, but that no pollster nor strategist nor pundit came up with a way to qualify and enroll this widespread political meme before 2015. Both political establishments have been swinging with their eyes closed for 40 years.
It was the None Of The Above movement of the 1970’s. It was the Perot candidacies in the 1990’s. And now it’s Trump. It keeps coming back, and one effect of the internet on political discourse is that it grows the size of the pundit class, but the increase is only among the people who were already in the world of habitual voters. They kept telling themselves that it couldn’t happen, that normal people would know better in the end. Trump must eventually fail, they thought, because all the people they know are smarter than that.
And that’s the point, there’s the kernel of Donald Trump’s rise. All the people who converse back and forth about politics and vote regularly, are on the same migratory path over the political landscape, just in different directions. The dry land they fly over sprouts green every 20 years it seems, an interval just long enough for politicos focused on the future, to forget the present.
Since wonks and bloggers didn’t take Trump seriously last Summer, neither did the GOP establishment. They’re the only ones who could have tackled him early on. It was a false sense of security, because everyone the pundits talk to are party people, and the party people only talk to pundits. And reporters, but only when they have to. Insularity is fatal in politics.
If anyone in either the Democratic party or Republican party tried to truly remake their wing into a populist organization over the last 40 years, they have been squelched, absorbed or squandered. The people who have watched this happen are the habitual “it doesn’t matter” non-voters. Perot voters were “it might matter” voters. They ended up with Bill Clinton. Reagan voters were “it matters” voters, but they ended up with his crazy-quilt cabinet of bickering hardliners.
Trump voters are “this is the last time it might ever matter” voters. The central idea is that both national parties have left this segment uncatered, by dragging down campaign finance reform, delaying ethics investigations, and refusing term limits. And now the bickering. For six years now, the bickering. The Trump voter sees the bickering and 6 years of constant crisis mode in Congress, and sees what he/she always saw, only now it’s come to the point of paralyzing the whole country.
Hahah, and now magically, as if it wasn’t the standard 20 years since Perot’s time, there appears a candidate who claims to know how to put everything back together again. Perot had substance but not much style. Trump comes at it from another way. But they both tapped into the same group of “it doesn’t matter” people, the could-but-don’t voters. Perot got 30% of the total vote. The difference between Perot and Trump is that Perot poached 30% fair and square, and Trump will start out with a dedicated 30% who just hate Hillary’ guts, no matter what color the sky is.
A person might define politics as not the study of actions, but the timing of reactions. A confluence of factors has paralyzed Congress, making Trump’s rise all but inevitable. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. And if it was someone else, the parade of political punditry would have missed him or her as well.