2016 Election Lessons Learned: The Campaign

The 2016 presidential campaign became a spectacle unlike any other US political campaign in memory.  It went to places that shocked most, and unleashed fear, hate, and divisiveness that has not been seen in this country in decades.  There will be no recollection of the specific shameful behavior here.  To call attention to it, only amplifies it, and it is already a matter of public record that is widely known to all.  We do however need to understand the fear, hate, and divisiveness that was created during this spectacle and how these things are still tearing through the fabric of this nation as these election results transition into this very new and potentially dangerous next phase of actual governance. 

How Anger Shaped the Campaign

The anger in the electorate both the righteous and especially the nefarious set a tone in the primaries that prevailed all through the rest of the campaign.  Trump and Sanders both benefited from the righteous anger directed toward the party establishments and their favored candidates.  They both reveled before an electorate righteously angry about a disparity in government that obviously favored the rich.  Trump, however, also made the decision to court the nefarious anger of the racists and xenophobes creating a witch’s brew of campaign turbulence that has left a very bad taste.

Instead of a campaign that focused on issues and qualification with occasional sideshows of mudslinging and character assassination, the sideshows of mudslinging and character assassination took center stage.  The only issues and qualification reviewed in this election were ultimately reduced to the two candidate credentials of 1) not being beholding to any particular billionaire (being a billionaire seemed to not be a problem) and 2) being as loosely affiliated with a political party establishment as possible.  Any further discussion of qualifications became a non-issue.  Everything was reduced to this very personal context.

Mudslinging and character assassination are a messy business, and this messiness was quite obviously reflected in all the candidate’s demeanor and decorum during this campaign, but it was especially obvious in the demeanor and decorum of one candidate in particular, the Trump campaign.  The Trump campaign rallies appeared to be modeled after the Jerry Springer tabloid talk show.  The audiences were stirred with such frenzy that they frequently resulted in mindlessly chanting of hateful things, aggressive shouting directed at anyone thought to be against them, and even physical confrontation. On some occasionally, this hostile frenzy was racially directed at dark skinned attendees who in some few cases were actually at the rally in support of Trump.

Candidate Qualifications

There are two important perspectives voters must consider in assessing a candidate's ability to accurately represent their intent into important government decisions that establish the rules of governance.  There are the personal issues that traditionally center on the matters of moral fiber and likeability, and the more technical issues of knowledge and experience. 

Personal traits are evaluated in a more subjective manner as a gut feel primarily fueled by emotion.  The technical issues of knowledge and experience can be very objectively determined by those voter who have some rudimentary understanding of the issues and the background of the candidate. As already discussed above, the voter access to this rudimentary understanding of the issues and the background of the candidate has been compromised by weakness in the education and commercial news services.  Good voting is the result of a balanced blend of both these types of evaluation.

In recent years, there has been a very strong tendency with candidates to focus their campaigns much more heavily on these personal matters instead of current pressing issues. As a results, our elections have denigrated into character assassination and general mudslinging.  The benefit in this approach is character assassination and general mudslinging can be very effective even if it is only loosely based in reality, and in this most recent election, any basis in reality seems to no longer be a requirement.   

This strong reliance on emotional gut feelings about personal traits creates the potential for two types of problems.  The first and most obvious of these is that the voters are unable to perform a complete review of the candidate.  The other potential problem stems from the fact that emotional gut feelings review of personal traits creates a glitch in the electorate that makes it much easier to manipulate election results. 

Democrats don’t typically do as well with this type of campaigning.  That is not to say, they won’t take advantage of a scandal if it comes up.  They are not even above looking for possible scandals to expose, but they are much less inclined to simply make things up.  The Republicans on the other hand are very adept at this campaign style and are not in any way constrained by the truth.  As such, it has become their campaign style of choice.  They have perfected these techniques and are not even afraid to use them on their opposing Republican candidates in the primaries. 

Take for example a ploy from the 2000 Republican presidential primaries.  John McCain was favored to win the South Carolina presidential republican primary until Bush strategist Karl Rove invented a story that his operatives would circulate via a phony poll. The poll asked voters if they "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"  This question generated a whisper campaign by introducing a completely false premise for voters to build their own racist backstory about McCain’s dark-skinned daughter who had actually been adopted from Bangladesh. The ploy generated the intended sway on the voters and enabled Bush to win South Carolina and secure the Republican 2000 presidential nomination. 

Democrats tend to favor campaigning on issues and policy, but campaigns that are waged largely on the matter of issues are a much more risky venture.  For one thing, such campaigns require more of a technical review from the voters that most voters do not have the time, patience, and sometime understanding to perform.  Today’s voters are much more attuned to campaigns that are based on the play of subtle innuendo and emotional manipulation.  That was the case in spades with the 2016 election.

We already know the issue and policy positions of the Republican Party.  They want to reduce taxes and eliminate regulations (for their rich wing), oppose gay rights, abortion, and religious freedom for non-Christians (for their religious right wing), and obstruct immigration reform and defend discrimination and intolerance (for their racism/xenophobia wing).  All of these positions are known to fail (e.g. the 2008 Great Recession), and none of these positions have majority support in the electorate.  Republicans don't want to discuss their already well know positions.

Political Moral-Low-Ground

A tradition that is perhaps as old as politics itself has become a major element in current day US politics.  It evolves from the realization that there are only two ways to attack a political opponent.  The moral-high-ground approach is to display superior knowledge of the issues and exhibit a keen understanding of ways to address these issues for the voters.  The moral-low-ground approach is to resort to mudslinging and character assassination of one’s opponent.  

A now classical example of the moral-low-ground approach occurred during the 2004 presidential election campaign from the politically motivated Swift Vets and POWs for Truth group of Vietnam War veterans and POWs.  It was formed to oppose John Kerry's presidential candidacy.  Their contention was that Kerry was unfit to serve as President based on their members (all of whom were politically motivated) recollection and understanding about Kerry's own conduct during that war.  They also challenged the legitimacy of his combat medals and the disposition of his discharge.  

All these claims were later called into question because the accusers had not been in places with direct access to Kerry and most of the Vietnam veterans who had served with him supported Kerry's version of events. They contention with Kerry was more driven by the anti-war stance that he assumed after returning from is distinguished military service.  These swiftboat allegations were actually in conflict with the facts in his actual military records which supported his version. The political pejorative "swiftboating" to describe an unfair or untrue political attack comes from this political attack. 

In the 2016 campaign, Trump embellished the delivery mechanism of the half-truth (in many cases no truth) and innuendo.  He didn’t wait to have these message delivered on his behalf by PACs.  He developed his on system for delivering them during his live presentations to his followers.  He simply prefaced these innuendo with phrases like 'People are saying' and 'I've been hearing' after which he would tell all manner of half/no truth statements.  He seemed to not be concern about getting his hands dirty.

Two weeks before the election, the Clinton campaign was blind-sided by communication from FBI Director James Comey to the RepublicanHouse  leadership about reopening the Clinton email case after new emails had been discovered in an evolving investigation into an ‘online sex with minors’ case of one Anthony Weiner.   Clinton’s double digit lead instantly shrank to low single digits.   

Whether intended or not, this Comey communication tanked her campaign was deliberately done or not is still a matter of debate.  .  If it was not deliberate, it was perfectly delivered at a critical time from which it could not recover and contained by coincident restatement of the Clinton email investigation and a mention of the political scourge of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner. 

In parallel with these Clinton email revelations, the FBI was also investigating accusations that Trump had been compromised by the Russians and that was the reason they were helping to get him elected.  No mention of this ongoing investigation was ever made public until after the election.

Shortly after the election, Comey announced that nothing new had been found and the FBI would not be pursuing the investigation any further.  Why should they.  The mission was complete.

Foreign Interventions

During the campaign, there was considerable fretting about the possibility of the Russians actually trying to hack our election hardware and software apparatus.  Why would anyone bother with all this technical hassle when the US electorate is already so primed and vulnerable to external manipulation?  

The US electorate has been trained to knee-jerk react to all manner of whisper campaign and subtle innuendo.  These techniques have been used by campaigns for some time to significant positive advantage for their candidates.  A primary function of Political Action Committees is to conduct these dirty little campaigns so as to not smudge the hands of the actual candidate with this kind of behavior.  Unfortunately, this dynamic creates an opportunity for unwanted others to also participate.

Russia who clearly has an interested in affecting the outcomes of our elections was harvesting fuel to feed this mudslinging fest by progressively disclosing at very strategic times in the election process.  Apparently, they and all the rest of the world are onto the times in our election process when the most damage can be done (e.g. October surprise) and the targeted candidate is least able to ward off the attack.  

It is certainly easy enough to say shame on Russia for fueling our mudslinging process, but the mechanism used to ultimately disseminate these data into our political process were ones that we created and routinely use ourselves.  The Super PACs whose job it is to spread this type of trash had no qualms about taking the material in these hacked emails even though there was strong suspicion of Russian involvement.  

The Super PACs did not care that these materials were likely supplied by Russia for some advantage to Russia.  They were hungry for their red meat and took it without hesitation or any concern about the possible long term implications.  They were even visibly disappointed on October when WikiLeak's Assange failed to deliver a promised release of this information.  The Russian ploy would have been useless without them. 

But even more disturbing, is the creation of fake news by simple citizens of other countries who have no real interest in the political outcome.  Impoverished, unemployed youth in the places like Macedonia were generating Internet pay per click advertising money from interest they created with fake news stories.  They had no interest in the election results.  They just wanted to get paid.  They actually made fake stories about both Clinton and Trump, but they found that Clinton fake stories made more money because the Trump supporters were much more inclined to frenzy click.

BuzzFeed and the Guardian traced more than 100 fake news domain names to Veles, Macedonia.  Almost a quarter of Macedonians are currently unemployed and  word quickly spread when some of the local young people discovered how to make money creating fake news using among others. Online advertising services such as Google AdSense that allows websites to make money were exploited by these unemployed youths.

Their fake news posts were made to originate from other websites or content taken from mainstream media organizations inserted with invented details and are published on websites that look like NBC News, Fox News, the Huffington Post and others. with the only clue that it is fake being the URL that goes unnoticed by most making internet hits. One particular story describing these fake news sources was posted by NBC News. 

It is hard enough to just understand the issues and make good personal assessments of the candidates, but the process is further complicated by all the information that flooded people who want to fool us.

These stories though complete fabrications had considerable impact on the US presidential election particularly in the waning days of the election.

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2016 Election Lessons Learned:  The Electorate